Some Thoughts About the Movie Avatar

It is difficult to summarize the movie Avatar. One way would be to say that it is a spectacular, amazing piece of propaganda. Or it can be called a special effects mastery of anti-American proportions. The difficulty in summarizing Avatar is that, as a visual medium, it is one the best movies ever, yet the story is so thoroughly permeated with nativism and pantheistic elements, that if every detail stained with these pagan ideas were eliminated, there would be about 2 minutes of movie left.

The story of Avatar can be summed up simply: an American mining corporation on the distant planet Pandora is running into trouble with the Pandoran natives, the Na’vi. Being greedy, ruthless, and strong, the humans decide that they will simply take the ore they came for, eliminating the natives if necessary. However, a human with a Na’vi avatar (an avatar is an artificially created body that can be controlled remotely) befriends the Na’vi and rises up to defended them against the rampaging forces of the humans. Much of this general story is familiar. The humans are greedy and only care about profit. The natives are peaceful and live harmoniously with the land. When push comes to shove, the natives defend themselves and the humans then label them as “terrorists,” “aborigines,” one of many things on the forsaken planet Pandora that is out to kill humans. They then feel justified in exterminating the natives. As I watched the movie, I wondered how much of the story was influenced by the liberal explanation of what happened when Europeans colonized America and ran into conflicts with the Native Americans.

Similar to many native cultures, the Na’vi have a pantheistic belief. When they kill an animal, they go through a routine of apologizing to it for having to kill it. The death of anything, even a predator that was attempting to kill you a few moments ago, is a bad thing, for it throws things out of balance. Lost on the makers of Avatar is the conclusion that if ultimate goodness is having all things in nature balanced, then humans, or any other fictitious intelligent being, take a back seat in importance to nature as a whole. Indeed, native human cultures are not happy places where man lives in harmony with each other and nature. Rather, death and destruction are the way of life, due to things like human sacrifice, constant war between opposing tribes, and squalid lifestyles where diseases run rampant. These things were notably absent from the world of Pandora.

There is another thing that sets Pandora apart from our world. On Pandora, everything in nature is literally connected to each other. On our world, pantheistic ideas abound with things like the circle of live, unity of all living things, or some mysterious force that binds all things together. These ideas are rubbish on earth: the only thing that circulates among living ecosystems are chemicals, life is unified only in the sense that all living things share common characteristics, and the only force that binds us together is gravity. However, things are very different on Pandora. On that planet, when a Na’vi wants to ride a mount (they have horse-like and pterodactyl-like creatures that they often ride), they do not use bridles or reigns. Rather, they link up with these creatures. All Na’vi have a long, braided pony tail, and coming out of the end of it is a bundle of long filaments. All of the creatures on Pandora have a pair of tentacles coming from the back of their head. Each tentacle ends in a little bulb that has a bundle of long filaments in it. So when a Na’vi rides one of its mounts, it connects the end of its ponytail with a tentacle on the beast, the filaments join, and the two creatures minds’ are connected. The Na’vi is them able to control the beast simply by thinking.

As impressive as that is, apparently a similar system exists throughout the world of Pandora. Trees also have some sort of communication system that involves the transfer of electrical impulses. This phenomena fascinated one of the human scientists (who, because of her appreciation for the planet itself, and not just the ore that could be sent back to earth, was actually a good guy), and in describing her findings to another person, she stated that all of the plant life was connected to each other with more complexly than the human brain. She didn’t go so far as to say that the whole planet with a single, living organism, but her description came awfully close. To close the gap, the Na’vi could also connect with the trees of Pandora. This was their way of communicating with their ancestors (the human scientist explained this as linking up with memories of past Na’vi that have been stored in the trees).

Finally, the Na’vi have a god. Her name is Eywa. While they never really get into exactly what Eywa is, it isn’t too hard to figure out that Eywa is the planet itself. With the stored memories of all of the dead Na’vi in the trees, and with the plants having more neural connections that the human brain, Eywa couldn’t be anything but a characterization of the collective intelligence and action of the planet as a whole. The movie make it abundantly clear that Eywa is real, for the climactic scene of the movie comes when the Na’vi, defeated and fleeing from their human attackers, are rescued by herds and flocks of wild animals that storm onto the battlefield and decimate the human army. This was in response to the avatar praying to Eywa.

The conclusion of the whole matter is that Pandora is fictitious. Not only does the planet Pandora not exist anywhere in our universe, it can not. I should confess that I lied earlier. In response to the connectedness of Pandoran life, I said that earth is not the same, for nothing binds earth but the cycling of chemicals and gravity. This is not true, for like Pandora, we have a God. But the God of earth, the God of the universe, is so awesome, He puts Eywa to shame. The true God is not the collective of all life on earth, He exists apart from earth, in a spiritual realm outside of nature, physics, and time itself, for He created them all. Despite this grandeur, God cares about the earth and sustains it. The universe does not exist because the laws of physics work and keep things in order, it exists because God caused it to exist and he continues to sustain it. Finally, the crown of God’s creation is not the planet earth, it is Man. Earth is but our home, a home God gave to us as caretakers, but still just a home. This, then, is the error of Avatar. In rejecting man as the chief of God’s creation, the makers of Avatar created a world, literally from the roots up, where a pantheistic god of nature was real. The danger of Avatar is that the spectacular colors, images, and detail of the movie are a siren song for a pagan religion that is at total odds with the reality of the universe in which we live.