As suffused with intimations of the divine as a Hudson River School landscape, and very much a product of that pictorial tradition,
Avatar offers you nothing less than transcendence, in both the Lisztian meaning of the word, as virtuosic execution, and in the commonly accepted religious sense. Whether the film makes good on these twin promises (I'll plunge in and say it does) is perhaps less interesting than its having explicitly united them.
Avatar proposes that the Great Chain of Being really exists and is accessible simultaneously to the characters on the screen and the audience in the seats by means of a neuromotor plug-in.
By now, even if you have not seen
Avatar, you will know that the excuse for this connection--the plot--is familiar cowboys-and-Indians fare, remarkable only for having combined titanic marketing power with a worldview congenial to readers of
The Nation. Well, worse things could come along than an anti-imperialist, pro-Gaea sci-fi blockbuster, which pits the nature-loving wisdom of an indigenous people against a mining company's clanking, murderous machinery. That Cameron has sided with the tree huggers (literally) but used sophisticated technology to do so is a readily spotted irony and may be readily dismissed as a criticism, if you consider that his own factory does nothing worse than keep hundreds of people peacefully employed making pictures. Besides,
Avatar insists that spiritual truths are not only compatible with science but are demonstrably rooted in biophysics--a position that becomes all but irrefutable when asserted by a ten-foot-tall, blue, tiger-striped Sigourney Weaver.
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