Why I Love Avatar

In addition to being a brony, singer, and writer, I am also a VERY passionate fan of James Cameron's Avatar. I have attended 3 large meet ups (2 last year and 1, the largest yet, this July.) of passionate Avatar fans in Seattle, WA. I have also met the producer Jon Landau and Dr. Paul Frommer, creator of the Na'vi language. Speaking of the Na'vi language, I am so much of an Avatar fan that I have actually learned to speak Na'vi over the past 2 years. Allow me to demonstrate: Lì'fyari leNa'vi perlltxe, oeru sunu fìtxan Uniltìrantokx a mezìsìto aftawnem nolume oel fya'ot a plltxe nìNa'vi. That's a translation of the sentence beginning with "Speaking of the Na'vi language...". I would like to share with you all the essay I wrote when I was applying to the University of Redlands last year about why I love Avatar. Avatar is also the reason that I heard about U of R and started going there. I have a friend there who I met through the Avatar fan community. Anyway, here it is, enjoy :)

March 23, 2010 was indeed an interesting day in my life. I had heard very few things about a movie called Avatar but knew that I wanted to see it. I hadn’t planned anything for the March 23^rd, so I set out for the theater and my bus arrived 15 minutes before a showing was going to start. The movie began at 4:15pm. When it was done, I had no idea what had just hit me. I literally had to catch my breath because it felt like I had been holding it through the entire movie. I was so dazed I could barely walk. It was on that day that my life took a very sharp turn. I entered the world of Pandora.

Avatar gave me a chance to leave Earth and enter this world where everything is pure and pristine, world where everything is literally connected to each other. Seeing the way the Na’vi lived; closely connected, respecting their land, and taking only that which they need from it; really made me think about how humans are living currently. Avatar really shed a light on this, a light that is brighter than some would like it to be. Whether we want to face it or not, we are killing our planet. With our constant pollution, exploiting of Earth’s natural resources, and our land development, it’s no wonder the planet is almost dead in 2154. One of my favorite lines from the movie is “All energy is only borrowed, and one day you have to give it back.” –Neytiri <3 If we don’t give back to our planet that which we take, one day, there will be nothing left.

The thing I love most about the Na’vi is the fact they are able to literally connect to each other and their world through direct neural interface, something that humans can never achieve. At least not without the aid of some kind of technology. This is evidenced in the final battle scene between Neytiri and Quaritch. While Neytiri is able to fight freely from the back of her thanator, Quaritch must remain ensheathed in his giant metal AMP suit without which he wouldn’t stand a chance. He wouldn’t even be able to breathe the air of Pandora. Even with the technological advances we’ve made 150 years in the future, we are still only able to interact with the outside world through physical manipulation.

The thing I love most about the movie as a whole is the concept of the Avatar Program. Writer Nicholas T. Cox sums this up perfectly in his essay If I Could Just Leave My Body For a Night. He writes, “That line [‘If I could just leave my body for a night’] expresses in the simplest terms possible what may well be the deepest, strongest, most tragically impossible desire a human being can have, and Avatar dares to let us see that desire gratified. That, above all else, is perhaps the secret of the movie's appeal: it shows us a world in which technology has made it possible, at least to an extent, for human beings to leave their bodies and enter into an existence that, unlike ours, is truly worthy of its bearers. Beneath all our idealistic fantasies of a perfect world, it is ultimately the inescapable limitations of our own bodies, our hated corporeal frailty—signified just as much by Dr. Grace's smoking habit as by Jake's disability—that is the source of our pain, and from that pain we will never be free.  Avatar, though, lets us almost believe, if only for a few hours, that someday we might be.”

         I think the thing that has affected me the most from seeing Avatar isn’t something in the movie, but what happened after the movie. As I said earlier, at the end of the movie, I literally had to catch my breath because it felt like I had been holding it through the entire movie. No movie has ever had that effect on me. I saw it for a 2^nd time in less than 24 hours and it had the same effect, which still hasn’t worn off. After seeing Avatar (a few times), I immediately visited the movie’s website and found out that there was a whole language involved with the movie. Being as enamored as I was, I had to learn it. Shortly after I began studying, I began meeting people online who had been studying since December ’09 who helped me with it. They quickly became good friends of mine and I am still in regular contact with them. We are planning to meet in spring and summer. I think this is the greatest thing Avatar has done for me is brought me these new, amazing friends. I never thought that so much could come out of just seeing a movie. Avatar will forever be a part of who I am.