Avatar

James Cameron’s first movie, since Titanic, has caused a bit of commotion. Those blue natives in Rasta braids and thongs, running around with bows, even managed to bring Apple’s servers to its knees, when they released the trailer on their site other day. I guess it’s fair to say that Avatar is a highly anticipated movie.

My first impression, of Cameron’s blue shaded world Pandora, was that here is where Lord of the Rings meets Aliens, wrapped inside a stunningly beautiful iconography.

I can only imagine, how it would be to experience Avatar in IMAX 3D, and how everything else, after that, would look sadly pale.

However, there is more to Avatar than just some remarkable and innovative special effects. It happens that underneath all that impressive CGI, Cameron has a story to tell, as well.

The story revolves around the former marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), now paralyzed from the waist down, after a war injury.  Jake gets selected to participate in an experiment, which will take place on the distant planet, Pandora, the home of the humanoid race, Na’vi.

Since Pandora, is uninhabitable for humans, we have created Avatars, consisting of genetically bred human-Na’vi hybrids. Through a new technology, they hook up Jake’s mind, to one of those hybrids, which makes him able to walk the surface of Pandora and explore it, like one of its natives.

On Pandora Jake encounters many of its dangers, but also its beauties, like the young Na’vi female, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). Of course, Jake falls in love with Neytiri and finds himself caught between two worlds and soon he must decide where his loyalty is, with the humans or with the Na’vis.

I hope that Cameron has taken his time and made the movie a bit over two hours, so that we have the chance to explore this new world up-close, on December 18.

I think that the trailer mainly shows off the special effects and not that much of the story itself. Nevertheless, it is bombastic, strikingly good-looking and teases us with some heroic action scenes, all wrapped up to some soft music.