Well talk about a fail for the month of January. It’s been a good while since I’ve posted anything here. It’s been an awfully busy start to a very busy semester for me. But I’ll jump right in.

Avatar Movie Review

I’m going to say right off I really enjoyed this movie a lot. But I felt that the plot was a direct pull from Disney’s Pocahontas. White man meets native girl, natives teach him their ways, white man and “savage” fall in love and try to bring the fighting between their people to a stop, etc. But I felt that it was a different enough twist with aliens, new planet, outer space, futuristic time period that it was well worth the watch.

I also feel that it had very strong themes on community, nature, and protecting your environment. You get emotionally invested in the storyline and want things to workout. This movie in fact reminds me a lot of the Disney movies I watched growing up as a kid and made me think of the impact those still have on me now. For example, with The Lion King, every little girl (and some boys) between the ages or 4 and 8 became obsessed with lions around the time this movie came out. We all wanted to play with Simba and Nala and Zazu, the nice African animals. We grew a sympathy for lions, and now I think my generation is more conscious and sympathetic towards African wildlife because it subconsciously reminds us of our animal friends from The Lion King, that we watched and played with as kids.

There is similar effect that the Discovery Channel has created with Shark Week on television. People love Shark Week! I hear about it non-stop when it’s airing. People talk about sharks and how awesome they are instead of how many people they bite a year. The few people who do bring up how they bite people, someone pulls out a statistic (learned on Shark Week) about how more people die of bee stings a year than who get bitten by sharks. You have a better chance of dying from a lightning strike than a shark bite.

My point is, that I see this movie getting into people’s subconscious and making them more sympathetic to environmental issues and difference among people. Who cares if you’re tall, blue, and you have a tail; we can still get along! Media effects people, our opinions, what we think, our morals and so on. This movie will impact younger generations most specifically. And from what I see, it will be a good impact. I give Avatar two thumbs up, and I will probably be buying the DVD.

<Dork Alert> P.S. - One other relationship… you know how in Pocahontas when she’s singing “Colors of the Wind” and she touches the tree and the rock right before you see the bears and the ground glowed… I wonder if Avatar took that from Pocahontas? Hehe. I always wanted to be able to do that… </dork>