Avatar 4-24-10

My wife bought a Sony DVD player that will play Blue Ray and regular DVDs so I connected it up last night. I watched a little of it but then my wife wanted to watch instead last night a blue ray copy of "Independence Day". But this morning my daughter got up early and wanted to watch "Avatar" once again and for the first time on our 52 inch flatscreen in Blue Ray. As I watched it my wife and I picked up things we hadn't noticed before like Natiri's 4 fingers instead of 5. I guess all the Na'vi only have four fingers like cartoons have had since the 1930s or before. And my wife hadn't noticed that the horse type of creatures have 6 legs instead of 4 and breathe through their gills in their chest. So, as you watch these kinds of things more you pick up new things. Also, when speaking about the Lemurs it was said something like "they are relatively harmless" or something like that. I found it funny because of the connection between the name Lemurs and possibly Lemuria.


The movie is very archetypal which is why, I believe it has already made 2.7 Billion dollars worldwide and now sure to make even more through DVD and TV and net streaming worldwide.


I was thinking about the primal conflict between the old ways of Earth(or Pandora) and their ongoing conflict with the new (corporate and business ways) which in the end only have to do with money and power and not really long term survival ever. There has to be a way for mankind to go back to the old ways to keep the human race alive while still increasing the quality of life for everyone possible. Though eventually population control of some sort would have to be managed in a useful way to make this all work so we could move out of the sort of chaotic "law of the jungle" that humans in reality still live in with "pockets" of actual survivable "civilization" here and there on earth.


How can mankind benefit the most from a movie like this? They can benefit by seeing what we have lost as a species and what we have gained. But in watching this movie we have presently lost more than we have gained if anyone looks carefully. So, one potential future would be to find a way to keep our wildness alive like the Na'vi have in the movie while encouraging non-invasive technology like solar wind and water power. In other words finding a way to not cut down as many trees or bulldozing everything. Because like it or not all of us are interdependent upon all life on earth just as much as we ever were. Whenever we cut down a tree for no good reason and drive a species extinct we might as well be cutting off one or more fingers off of the hands of all future generations. So Eywa is alive on earth as Mother Earth and until we learn to better respect the Earth as our mother we will continue to suffer more as the climate and life on earth degrades. We came out of the trees originally and we are still connected to them still. Without them we cease to be humans and become something else entirely.


Without trees and animals we may become cyborgs(human and machine) but we also cease in being entirely human, at least as human as our ancestors were.