“Avatar” a big hit at Bethel and in the­aters

A planet far, far away; a tribe of giant blue aliens; a battle between good and evil; and the relevance of right and wrong − all packed into one film. In case you still have not realized what this is all about, I shall explain with just one word: “Avatar.”

This movie de­picts the jour­ney of ex-ma­rine Jake Sully as he trav­els to the beau­ti­ful, ex­otic planet of Pan­dora. His pri­mary mis­sion is to help with the stud­ies of the na­tives’ cul­ture and lan­guage, ul­ti­mately in search of “un­ob­tainium,” a valu­able source of en­ergy for Earth. Even though the movie de­picts life on a fic­tional planet, the aliens pos­sess deeply hu­man emo­tions and be­liefs, which lead view­ers to re­late to their strug­gles, even tak­ing the alien side of a hu­man vs. ex­trater­res­trial war.

James Cameron, writer and di­rec­tor of “Avatar,” is fi­nally see­ing his work pay off af­ter al­most 15 years of wait­ing for tech­nol­ogy to de­velop enough to ac­cu­rately pre­sent his vi­sion for the film. Cameron him­self as­serted that “Avatar” is not an an­i­mated movie, since even the an­i­mated char­ac­ters’ move­ments are a di­rect trans­la­tion of the ac­tors’ per­for­mances, de­vel­oped with Com­puter-Gen­er­ated Im­agery (CGI).

Apart from the as­ton­ish­ing graph­ics and cin­e­matog­ra­phy, this movie touches many eth­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal is­sues, and it con­tains a spir­i­tual plot that cap­ti­vates au­di­ences. How­ever, many ar­gue that the re­li­gion pre­sented in the film con­tains New Age ide­ol­ogy.

Fresh­man Kyle Swope did not like the is­sues with spir­i­tu­al­ity dis­played in the film.

“It looks like a very weird cult, which as a Chris­t­ian, I do not ap­prove of,” he said. “There were no re­deem­ing qual­i­ties other than the fact that he tried to save the na­tives.”

Al­though some stu­dents found the film con­tro­ver­sial, they did not let that ef­fect their view of the movie as a whole.

“I thought it pre­sented a very ide­al­is­tic view of the na­tive cul­ture, and some in­ter­est­ing phi­los­o­phy on mother na­ture and the af­ter­life,” said sopho­more Josh Mann. “How­ever, I en­joyed the movie im­mensely over­all.”

“It was an awe­some com­bi­na­tion of Poc­a­hon­tas and Glad­i­a­tor,” said sopho­more Alysha Miles. “I want to be an Avatar when I grow up!”

De­spite the con­tro­ver­sial is­sues that ac­com­pany “Avatar,” there is no doubt that James Cameron has man­aged to cap­ture the world of re­al­ism and fan­tasy and has brought them to­gether into a mas­ter­piece that cap­tures the imag­i­na­tion.