On Avatar

I have a thing now about writing about the good movies that i see.
Here's my latest collection of thoughts.
Uhm, spoiler alert.

Just got back from seeing Avatar in 3d.
James Cameron did an excellent job. It was the most immersive film i've seen since in a long time. When they say that he was after Star Wars, that's got to be what they're referring to. Immersion. Its most definitely not the 3d. It's the movie's ridiculously powerful ability to take your mind, your body, and your emotions and transport them into a compelling universe where James Cameron's imagination is king.

The faces. That's what I think made the film. The faces on the aliens. You know that they aren't supposed to be human. But at the same time you know that Cameron wanted us to mistake them for ourselves.

There is something unmistakably powerful about "waking up".
The Matrix did it. Avatar does it in completely the same way.
We do the same thing with video games- this movie ties in to what i was thinking about here.
There are no references to video games in the movie at all except when the researchers are talking about how much time they'd logged on their Avatars. But what makes Avatar so much cooler than the Matrix is that when they "plug in" to their avatars, they're still in reality. They're just in a different part of it. They become something that they could never in human form be, become part of a society that would never allow them in.

Honestly, whether James Cameron intended it or not, Avatar is self-referencing. Sure, its a great movie and delivers nicely for entertainment. But that's exactly it.
We've gotten to a point where we put on 3d glasses and plug ourselves into made up worlds where we have legs and can jump around in trees and interface our neurological system with giant awesome lizard bird things.
And unlike the lame ending of the movie, we can't just transfer our bodies into that falseness.
Time after time, we have to face the reality that we need oxygen to breathe. That all around our movie theater, while we're vegetating there staring at a 75 foot wide glowing screen, people are returning to their lives in the giant parking lot outside, sitting in traffic, inhaling cigarette smoke.

I have a lot of respect for Amish people. Someone 150 years ago realized that innovations in technology were making us schizophrenic, and decided to keep life as simple as possible. As a result of ourselves, a really scary amount of people in our world are simply unable to keep Reality straight. They don't like what's going on in their lives, so they turn to all the wonderfully convincing escape routes that we've spent the last 100 years spending all our money creating. And all the while that they're learning the language of some tribe of humanoids, their actual body, their actual mind, their actual spirit is sitting in a metaphorical bed link device, atrophying into nothingness.

On the way back from the movie, Chris Pike mentioned something about a guy feeling called by God to go to africa. He had no way of getting there, but went to an airport on faith thinking that maybe someone would give him a ticket or something would come up. He went to the bathroom, and when he came back out, he was in Africa.

I always come out of really good movies really pumped up.
If our population will buy into James Cameron's imagination, think about what they'll do when they figure out reality- that Jesus Christ fixed the world and everything else is a bonus.