Avatar to Follow a Pocahontas Narrative
Posted 06.08.09 by reelz
Up until quite recently, all the secrets of James Cameron's Avatar had been sealed up tight, but now the floodgate really have begun to open. Most of the news has focused on the highly anticipated new type of 3-D experience the movie is expected to deliver. Now, on top off all this, /Film got a chance to talk to filmmakers at length at the recent E3 gaming conference and has come up with what appears to be, more or less, the complete story line for the movie. Here's a short version.
Whereas Cameron's Titanic was built around a kind of Romeo and Juliet narrative, Avatar is a bit more Pocahontas with the alien Na'vi standing in for Native Americans, according to producer Jon Landau. One key difference, of course, is that Avatar is set on the distant moon Pandora, a place so alien and poisonous to human life that people can only enter and exploit the environment vicariously by linking their consciousness to a human-alien hybrid called an avatar.
In avatar form, the movie's protagonist Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) manages to survive in the hostile environment and overcome the species barrier with the aid of a female Na'vi (Zoe Saldana) who saves him from one of the moon's native predators. She then teaches him to appreciate the alien world and its native people.
This sets up a major conflict for Sully, who is dependent on his human colleagues for access to his avatar hybrid. Since he is controlling the avatar remotely, he can't stay connected with it forever. Thus joining the natives in their attempt to repel the invaders means that he has no way to return to Pandora or to the Na'vi he has come to love.