Whether or not one loves Avatar, its impact on audiences is unmistakable. Its rampant success stems from Cameron's insistent visual experimentation in an ultra-expensive sub-medium, entirely designed CGI with motion capture, one that audiences have found usually poorly directed, managed, leaden and stiff, propelled by the type of imagery that seems to affect only little boys and little men (the mechanics of Transformers as a CGI glass ceiling). Animal and human-form movement have always suffered CGI eyewitnesses the gnawing realization that what we are seeing can't possibly be real, but by slicing the film into it's revealing and not so revealing (he makes it about focal length) 3-D realms photographically, he restates the purpose of colonial war in future terms with a sense of movement and motion (camera view included) that gets us close enough to filmic reality to let us lose ourselves in it. If the visuals can fool us the emotions can be effectively transforming, hence the steady flow of couples and families to the multiplex. Of course visual effects revolutions are not enough, critical becomes Cameron's ability to state the case of the film as a mysterium (something that must be reseen to increase one's comprehension) utilizing a 'glyph' that organizes every forward activity of the film into a single shot, which just so happens to be his second image of the film (eg: Star Wars' key glyph is the realization by the occupants of the Millenium Falcon that the Death Star is 'no moon'). Sully's first view (staring also at us in the audience) upon entering Pandoran space is of two water droplets, ostensibly from his own respiration, merging at an angle under purple light (dawn). The brilliance of this glyph is that it easily summarizes key themes of the film without ever calling excessive attention to it (ecology, biology, transformation, motion). Every gesture (whether destructive or constructive) that follows in the film stems from this basic, elemental merging of micro-spheres. His transferring with each sleeping-awakening into his avatar, the Na'vi's merging with their flying horses, his merging with 'the last-shadow' and the tree of souls to call for help. And since it is the first of only a few motion-action images pushed deeply into our side of the 3-D screen, the audience has filed this as a memory, a clever, first-stages splinter of the mind's eye. As the film ends with Sully's Na'vi eyes staring back at us, these water droplets from his first shot are now gone, transformed by his movement into Na'vi throughout the film and now are subtly connected to us as a memory to this first shot. An ingenious transference, somewhere structurally we are unconsciously recalling those droplets.
Beyond this basic glyph, Cameron has also staged his Pandoran cosmologies simply: through a bi-level conquest of the air. Humans and Na'vi, both flightless bipeds, are shown as requiring flight for communal growth and effective biome dominance. The difference is clear though, humans duplicate flight mechanically, their extensions (fingers) and eye-movements are augmented by on-board computers that compensate for the vagaries of flight-thinking. The Na'vi use their Matrix-like dredlock tail to interface with their flying biogenetic cousins, they leap from tree-branch or mountain overlook into flight, and on some level, the Na'vi are hardwired into the flight plan in a manner humans aren't. These are the ingrained consciousness 'plateaus' of these two species, humans jump from solid ground aboard stable floors that fly (he shows you Quaritch on his flightdeck amblin' around). Cameron cleverly uses Sully's disability as a doorway to his conquest of the Na'vi's own plateau (untethered, bypassing his own easily), what Sully conquers is leaping from in motion to moving creature, a leap not unlike Neo's (but without the almost unbearable parody stiffness of Neo), a hero's conquest he achieves while being both human and Na'vi: he conquers the upper realm by leaping onto the sky's alpha dragon (with its red-flames as corollary).
'Racism' vs. enthnicism. The backlash stirs a question. A great many reactionaries have labelled the film 'racist' as a reaction to the film's allegories with our own adventures in colonialism here on planet earth. Wildly, and Lucas is accused of this as well, Avatar (as well as District 9) are sly paradox-parodies of our ethnic struggles finally mapped onto actual racism, since the definition of our skin color and tribal groupings here is technically ethnicism. Racism is a holdover from the likes of Kant and Gobineau, instigators of 'racial science' that has long been discredited. Cameron (strangely) is making a film about what we've been mislabelling all along. Race technically means species and as far as genetics are concerned we are all part of the same strata; the terms application onto skin-tone was a bizzare post-enlightenment attempt by the west to change the stakes for world dominance: scientific devolution employing dogma that outweighed proof. What we practice here on earth is ethnic warfare and is a phenomena we will no doubt map onto any sentient race we do encounter. (Anybody remember calling Planet of the Apes racist?)
Pandora's dueling tale-in-one:
"Woman was not yet made. The story is that Jupiter made her, and sent her to Prometheus and his brother, to punish them for their presumption in stealing fire from heaven; and man, for accepting that gift. The first woman was named Pandora. She was made heaven, every god giving something to perfect her...in the alternate tale Pandora was sent in good faith to bless man; that she was furnished with a box, containing her marriage presents, into which every god had put some blessing. She opened the box incautiously, and the blessings all escaped, hope only excepted...the first age was an age of innocence and happiness called The Golden Age"
-The Age of Fable Bulfinch