Descending of the savior, the hero, the fighter for justice. It is justice that matters and not the latest technologies and war machines that decide the battle. ‘Raamavatar’ had justice on his side but not a great army. All he had was ape-like creatures as soldiers. Jake Sully had no mean machines, but he too stood up for a just cause. His army was of the various tribal clans, the wild and flying beasts of Pandora and of course the courage to fight against his own people when they took to destruction of the innocent and the weak.
Avatar shows the disrespect humans would have developed towards diversity. To any species that does not look like us, behave like us, think like us or follow the mass world culture that is developing today and which kills all other diverse cultures of the peoples of the world. The disrespect to the beliefs and sentiments of the native Navi beings on Pandora leads to the forced evacuation and bombing of the Navis’ sacred Tree of Voices. This unjust hegemony of the powerful over the weak, makes Jake Sully take a U turn against his own kind. Do we the people of the 21st century have a strong lesson to learn from there? May be we do. It is now so much more necessary to maintain the balance of power of the world that it ever was since the end of the cold war.
The hunger for power and energy sources has done more destruction to the planet and its environment in a span of two centuries than our ancestors could ever do since the beginning of humanity. Avatar just fast forwarded a few decades to show what humans could do in search of energy sources. By then, we would have exhausted all our oil and gas; the earth would have been an inhospitable planet; the globe would have warmed enough to force us to find a new planet. Even then we would not have learnt to respect the fine balance between nature and all the life forms it supports. As a line in the movie says: A network of energy flows through all living things. All energy is borrowed. And one day you have to give it back’. May be the movie should have come out before the
Avatar upholds the values that humans should live on or at least start to learn now. Respect for diversity of world cultures, judicious use of energy, integration with nature than trying to control it, and the most important being justice-never to use one’s might over the weak unjustly.
In short, Avatar is “Justice with courage always triumphs”
