James Cameron’s Avatar asks a lot of its audience up front. A paraplegic Marine named Jake Sully ships out to Pandora, a habitable moon in the Alpha Centauri system, and spends most of the film inside a body that is not his. The film runs 162 minutes. It earns them.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
Jake Sully Takes His Brother’s Place
The setup is clean. Earth is exhausted, the Resources Development Administration mines unobtanium on Pandora, and the Na’vi — 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned, sapient — live on top of the richest deposit. Jake, a veteran, gets recruited into the Avatar Program only because his identical twin died. Dr. Grace Augustine, who runs the program, lets him take his brother’s place and thinks he is a poor substitute.
Sam Worthington plays Jake with toughness and vulnerability. It works. Sigourney Weaver gives Grace a scientist’s impatience and a conscience underneath it.
Pandora Is the Argument
The Na’vi are not decoration. Neytiri, played by Zoe Saldaña, rescues Jake in the forest and drags him to the Omaticaya clan. Her mother Mo’at orders her to initiate him. Jake learns the language, the hunting, the bond with the animals. He and Neytiri fall in love and choose each other as mates.
Cameron built this world with Weta Digital at a budget of $237 million — some estimates put production between $280 million and $310 million, with $150 million more for promotion. The 3D computer graphics were the selling point in 2009. They are not the reason the film holds.
| Key dates | |
|---|---|
| Treatment written | 1994 |
| Titanic released | 1997 |
| Planned Avatar release | 1999 |
| Na’vi language work begins | 2005 |
| Screenplay and universe development | early 2006 |
| Avatar released | 2009 |
Quaritch Wants the Hometree
Stephen Lang’s Colonel Miles Quaritch runs the RDA security force and offers Jake a deal: information about the Na’vi and their gathering place, the giant Hometree, in exchange for the company restoring his legs. Giovanni Ribisi’s Parker Selfridge is the corporate administrator who signs off. Michelle Rodriguez plays Trudy Chacón, a combat pilot sympathetic to the Na’vi.
When Jake tries to disable a bulldozer threatening a sacred site, Selfridge orders Hometree destroyed. Grace tells him that would damage the biological neural network connecting all of Pandora. He does not listen. That refusal is the whole film in one scene.
The Cast Around the Edges
The supporting roster is deep. CCH Pounder plays Mo’at, Wes Studi plays chief Eytukan, and Laz Alonso plays the Omaticaya’s finest warrior, heir to the chieftainship. Joel David Moore is Norm Spellman, the xenoanthropologist. Dileep Rao is Dr. Max Patel, who backs Jake’s rebellion. Matt Gerald is Corporal Lyle Wainfleet, Quaritch’s right-hand man.
Cameron wrote and directed. He had an 80-page treatment in 1994, and filming was due after Titanic for a planned 1999 release, but the necessary technology was not yet available to achieve his vision. Work on the Na’vi language began in 2005.
What Avatar Gets Right
The middle stretch is the best part. Jake’s initiation, the flying, the slow turn from operative to defector — that is where the film does something no other blockbuster of its era attempted at this scale.
The weaknesses are real. Quaritch is a function, not a person. The unobtanium name is a joke that nobody in the film seems to notice. And the film’s final act trades the wonder of Pandora for a straight battle, which is a smaller movie than the one that came before it.
What matters is that Cameron made the audience want the Na’vi to win, and then made winning cost something. The 3D was the pitch. The world was the product. Seventeen years on, the world is what stayed.
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