Everything We Know About James Cameron’s Avatar
The details aboutJames Cameron’sAvatarhave been closely guarded, to say the least. When I sat down in UbiSoft’s tinyAvatartheater on the E3 show floor, I was treated to far more information about the movie than I expected to get. As Peter mentioned recently, producerJon Landauwas on hand to discuss how the film went from a story written fourteen years ago by Cameron to the cutting edge movie being edited now. But Landau actually explained (more or less) the whole movie to us. That was a surprise, especially since Cameron had just made two public appearances (at the UbiSoft press conference and at a screening ofAliensandThe Abyss) and revealed no specifics aboutAvatar. Want to know more?
Read on after the jump, but beware: there are many potential spoilers within.
The story begins on Earth. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a soldier who hasn’t found anything worth fighting for. Adding injury to insult, he’s lost the use of his legs. So when the opportunity comes to travel to the planet Pandora and work with a mining operation there, Jake accepts.
What’s on Pandora that is so important? A mineral, found nowhere else, that is a game-changer with respect to energy production. Befitting the mineral’s status as a MacGuffin, Landau jokingly called it ‘unobtanium’. Pandora is a lush but harsh planet. The air is poisonous to humans. Plants and creatures alike are predatory and very dangerous. And the natives, ten-foot tall blue humanoids called Na’vi, aren’t exactly pleased about the men and machinery that are scarring the surface and digging to find the unobtanium.
Because the planet is so harsh, traditional armor and envirosuit solutions have been insufficient to protect miners. A sort of clone program has developed in which DNA from humans and Na’vi are combined. The result is essentially a cloned Na’vi that can house the consciousness of an individual with human DNA that matches the original clone material. Jake Sully’s brother had been the original donor and controller for one such avatar. But he’s been killed, so the corporation has asked Jake to come to Pandora to pilot the (very expensive) body, as he’s got matching DNA. The upshot for Jake: he’ll be able to walk again.
So the story flashes forward a few years to the point where Jake has arrived on Pandora. He finds a place of indescribable beauty, where the forests are dense with wild colors and forms, and the flora and fauna bioluminesce at night, creating a dreamlike garden of wonders. Floating mountains dot the sky above 900 foot tall trees. As Jake is working for the mining corporation he has an encounter with a ViperWolf, one of Pandora’s many dangers. Before he can be savaged, an arrow pierces the animal, saving him. It’s been fired by a female Na’vi (Zoe Saldana), though whom Jake begins to learn about the real workings of Pandora.
The Na’vi live in an idealistic harmony with Pandora’s dangers. Through his savior, Jake begins to see the human mining efforts in a new light. He realizes that he’s found something worth fighting for. But joining the Na’vi in a battle against the human invaders comes with a terrible price: he can’t stay within his avatar forever. When the avatar sleeps, Jake wakes up in his human body, and must use an interface to rejoin his consciousness and the avatar. If he joins the Na’vi at war with the humans, he’ll lose the option to rejoin his avatar, and therefore be stuck as an immobile human without that Na’vi he’s grown to love.
So where does this take me? To several conclusions and assumptions:
E3 photo thanks toDMatias
