James’s Cameroon’s “Avatar” is not what you think it is.

It is quite deep.

I took a much needed small break from my coding life and went down the memory lane for a while. I got out for cycle rides, revisited old friends,and sat down with popcorn, re-watching random movies. Then, among the digital slush pile of all the things I have lived through, came up James Cameroon’s Avatar. After watching it once, I felt something strange. I felt the urge to write. After a long while. This time, it won’t be Tech or engineering. This time it’s going to be so much relaxing.

It’s an epic movie. I don’t think the premise is that thin and narrow as people think it is. But yeah, it’s all a matter of perspective.

Let me explain.

The mirror.

Avatar is a re-iteration of how failed are we as a species. But it also somehow pulls out the idea that there is some goodness among us, so the movie splits these two extremities as The military and the scientists, all funded by the same greedy CEOs for unobtanium.

The plot acts like a mirror, reflecting back to the events unfolding on our planet now. Beautiful forests are being torn down to make way for opencast mines; a large corporation employs its own private army to crush opposition from the local population. The world of Avatar is a large, The indigenous people are living with a deep spiritual connection to the forest-world they are part of. The Navi represents the good part in us, the part that feels sad when each tree in Amazon is cut down, the terrible feeling of loss, a revelation that how precious this earth is, and it’s ecosystem.

Eywa

Their Deity, the Eyva is a bio-botanical neural network. The Pandoran Neural Network is a complex arrangement where all the flora and fauna of Pandora communicate. They uploads and downloads.

On the moon of Pandora, all living organisms — both flora and fauna — are connected by a neural network. This network can be accessed by animals and the Na’vi by using their queues. This network is a result of high electro-magnetic forces from the local stars and the close proximity to the gas giant Polyphemus. The neural network is a collection of electro-chemical connections between the trees on Pandora; there are 10⁴ connections between each tree and there are 10¹² trees on Pandora. This results in an organic “super brain” called Eywa that has 10¹⁶ connections, or approximately 20–100 times as many as the human brain, which can have between 10¹⁴ and 5x10¹⁴ connections between neurons.

This network is used by the Na’vi to domesticate species that would have taken years to do so by conventional human means. The network can be accessed at several different known hubs (e.g. the Tree of Souls, the Tree of Voices), at which the Na’vi can access memories, experiences, and possibly even the consciousnesses of their ancestors, giving them an irrevocable link to their past.

This is breathtaking. All the human experiences, the lives of billions of people born and died , their dreams, their memories, their lessons, their collective intelligence all returning to the same network for others to listen to, learn and adapt.

This is in all way, the most modern and most feasible explanation of god ever. Millions of people have died in the name of religion and there are hundreds of religions on earth and we are all searching for our own versions of god, UP THERE, while it’s all around us.

There is a depth there. You need to look at it to see it. It’s not just a plot device. The scientific concepts of consciousness, past lives, spirits and law of conservation of energy are embedded within the design of Pandora.

Just look at the image of Neytiri drinking water from that purple leaf inside a dark, cold rain forest. Did you feel anything? This scene struck me in the feels. Well, while I walked out of theater, after watching the epic, i kept on thinking.

13 Billions years ago, the Big bang happened. Pre-cursor Universe, filled with Quark-gluon went through highly-tuned changes for millions of years. Stars formed. Black holes formed for billions of years. Stars exploded as supernovas, and all the elements were created in the core of a star. Millions of years passed, and planetary systems began to evolve. Life happened. 3 billion years of organic evolution started and culminated in putting us here on this little blue planet, with a moon rocking our oceans.

As mighty as we think about ourselves, we need water to survive. Hydrogen and oxygen, formed coincidentally at the heart of a star, combined coincidentally to form water, and it is our lifeline, and it’s all around us, but we pollute our water sources with industrial garbage and oil pipelines and electronic waste. We emit tonnes of poison into our air and destroy it.

As a mirror representation of ourselves, Neytiri closes her eyes while drinking and there is a feeling of complete spiritual bliss there. She realizes how important it is for that droplet of water to be in the purple leaf provided to her. It’s the culmination of a million year old process, that began in the heart of a star. It’s not a coincidence, but the process of an intelligent system. For her, the droplets are herself, provided by Eywa. She tastes water like it’s sweet as honey. She smiles after drinking, with a content, thankful note.

Try doing this when you drink a glass of water next time. As mighty as human species is, that glass of water saved your life. In places like Africa, water is a very rare commodity and people die from the lack of it.

The grief.

When each tree is cut, we can see the Na’vi expressing immense grief and sadness. It’s the grief you also would feel when you realize that mother earth is all we have and she provides for us and the we choose to kill her.

This is the Amazon rain forest, world’s biggest forest, dubbed as, the “Final frontier on earth”. It’s a world of it’s own with 80 percent of world’s diverse flora and fauna.

And now, it’s been cut down like this, and at this rate, our world will be a garbage ground within a few years, with all our stupid gadgets and E-wastes, scorched by the sun and the greenhouse gases we are emitting now, like shown in Wall-E.

And we should be like:

But we are like

When we say nature is more important and we need to save trees and we need to love mother earth than our gadgets, we are met with raised eyebrows and questions like:

Jake’s second chance.

For the military, he is just a traitor. Like spies defaulted to other countries. But in Pandora, he has seen the suicidal nature of humans and even if he defects his people, he feel the urge to protect the Pandoran world. He was on earth first, but humans destroyed it. Now he is given a second chance and it’s his turn to make things right. The struggle is real. He is being asked “How does it feels to betray your own race”. It’s not just a fancy question. It’s a question that can shake the very foundations of someone’s existence. He is betraying his own race. For something greater. It’s a decision of a lifetime.

In the avatar body, Jake gets his legs back. Earth is destroyed by greedy corporate. When he runs out of the lab and plays with the soil, it symbolizes a second chance.

A second chance with his legs.

A second chance for redemption by saving Pandora, thereby avenging the people who destroyed earth.

This scene, for me, symbolizes the way he connects with his new world, in his new body, to avenge our earth by fighting for Pandora, even if it means betraying his own race.

The “Eye opening” and “dragging out”

Jack is pulled out of the remote avatar controller by military guys. This is symbolic of today’s society that drags everyone back into a same mould, each and every time we go off the fringes to question the motives of the society. When each of us as born different, unique and original, society drags everyone back to be the same copies as everyone is. Once someone develops a deep insight, he is anti-developmental, tribal and retarded.

The scene is symbolic of the society that drags us back always to die as copies. The society that force feeds us that “Development” is measured in terms of number of skyscrapers built and trees cut. Anyone that goes again this idea of “Development” is in deep sleep, and needs to be pulled back to life.

The military guy, being a representative of today's society, is pointing his fingers at us, the audience, and he says we need to wake up from the realities Avatar has shown us.

And they pull us out, to the sane society like

And now try re-watching the movie. It’s a philosophical-scientific question presented as a cinematic experience. It’s a reaffirmation that there is inherent goodness in everyone of us, but we just need to “switch sides” or “look deeper into ourselves”. It predicts that a war is coming. For earth. It maybe either a moral one, a spiritual one, or a physical one.

The film is a masterpiece with a depth. Whoever choose to dive into the depths gets the bliss. There was post-avatar depression, Moviegoers have admitted being plagued by depression and suicidal thoughts at not being able to visit and protect the planet Pandora.