Avatar is a 2009 American-British epic 3-D science fiction film written and directed by James Cameron, starring Sam Worthington, Zoë Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang. The film was produced by Lightstorm Entertainment and distributed by 20th Century Fox. It premiered in London on December 10, 2009, and was released in the United Kingdom on December 17, 2009, one day prior to its theatrical release in the United States.
The film focuses on an epic conflict on Pandora, an inhabited Earth-sized moon of Polyphemus, one of three fictional gas giants orbiting Alpha Centauri A. On Pandora, human colonists and the sapient humanoid indigenous inhabitants of Pandora, the Na'vi, engage in a war over the planet's resources and the latter's continued existence. The film's title refers to the remotely controlled, genetically engineered human-Na'vi bodies used by the film's human characters to interact with the natives.
Avatar had been in development since 1994 by Cameron, who wrote a 114-page scriptment for the film. Filming was supposed to take place after the completion of Titanic, and the film would have been released in 1999, but according to Cameron, "technology needed to catch up" with his vision of the film. In early 2006, Cameron developed the script, the language, and the culture of Pandora. He has stated that if Avatar is successful, two sequels to the film are planned.
The film was released in traditional 2D and 3D formats, along with an IMAX 3D release in selected theaters. Avatar is officially budgeted at $237 million; some estimates put the cost at $310 – $430 million to produce and an estimated $150 million for marketing, with a further $50 million buffer inserted to cover further costs. The film is being touted as a breakthrough in terms of filmmaking technology, for its development of 3D viewing and stereoscopic filmmaking with cameras that were specially designed for the film's production. Opening to critical acclaim, it earned an estimated $27 million on its opening day and an estimated $73 million domestically after three days. Worldwide, the film earned an estimated $232,180,000 in its opening weekend, the ninth largest opening-weekend gross of all time, and the largest for a non-franchise, non-sequel and original film.
Avatar is centered around the themes of imperialism and biodiversity. Cameron has said that Avatar shares themes with At Play in the Fields of the Lord, and The Emerald Forest, which feature clashes between cultures and civilizations, and acknowledged the film's connection with Dances With Wolves, where a battered soldier finds himself drawn to the tribal culture he was initially fighting against.
At Comic Con 2009, Cameron told attendees that he wanted to make "something that has this spoonful of sugar of all the action and the adventure and all that, which thrills me anyway as a fan, but also wanting to do something that has a conscience, that maybe in the enjoying of it makes you think a little bit about the way you interact with nature and your fellow man." He added that "the Na'vi represent something that is our higher selves, or our aspirational selves, what we would like to think we are," and "the humans in the film, even though there are some good ones salted in, represent what we know to be the parts of ourselves that are trashing our world and maybe condemning ourselves to a grim future."
In a 2007 interview with Time magazine, Cameron addressed the meaning of the film's title, answering the question "What is an avatar, anyway?" with "It's an incarnation of one of the Hindu Gods taking a flesh form. In this film what that means is that the human technology in the future is capable of injecting a human's intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body. It's not an avatar in the sense of just existing as ones and zeroes in cyberspace. It's actually a physical body."
Pandora, the lush jungle planet with incredible life-forms and non-technological native population, is featuring prominently in several of the famous Russian Sci-Fi authors the Strugatsky brothers works, with one of them, the late 1960-s "Snail on the Slope", specifically featuring a downed human helicopter pilot whose severed head was fastened on a native's body; he becomes integrated into their society – having his conscience in effect implanted into an alien body – and becomes a warrior on their behalf in the end.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_%282009_film%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cameron
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