James Cameron
Avatar

When in the late 1800s the Lumiere brothers opened the first film screening to the public, viewers, seeing a train come at them, began to scream, flee, and curse at the prospect of sudden death. After the "storm," peace followed. Silence, tranquility, and awe. Man, aware of what had happened, allowed himself to be lulled by the sweet cinematic wonder. Griffith and Chaplin first, then Kubrick and Lucas, took the audience into the deepest reaches of the universe. Kubrick, especially, predicting man's landing on the moon by two years with 2001.

In the second half of the '90s, Cameron had a brilliant idea (all his own?) but too advanced for the technologies of the time, and therefore impractical. It is said that the producers rejected the idea not so much for the large sum of money but also for the lack of reliability of the director who was working on a project of such scale for the first time. He had to "settle" for producing a less expensive film (still pharaonic), shooting it, smashing the box office, and winning 7 Oscars with Titanic, the highest-grossing film in the history of cinema. But the film we all were waiting for has come out, the 2010 film, the most expensive, the most talked-about, and some say the most beautiful ever. "Avatar". Cameron's latest colossal has left everyone, including myself, speechless; the new technologies at play merely anticipate the new cinema of the future, which will interact with the viewer not only emotionally but also physically. A journey into the beautiful planet of Pandora, an untouched planet very similar to Earth before the arrival of man, among vast forests and splendid mountains suspended in the void, a planet colored by a continuously evolving fauna and inhabited by the indigenous population, blue-colored humanoids.

The charm of the film, however, does not lie solely in the special effects and the phantasmagoric final war, perfect and terrible; but in Cameron's skill in digging into human morals and analyzing a society in crisis, now completely addicted to capitalism and dependent on the exploitation of both natural and artificial resources to the point of not realizing it has discovered a much more important deposit than the mineral one but the deposit of the living being, the deposit of life. A process described by the director as analogous to the American colonization (religious motives), and the division of Africa and Oceania among European countries (economic motives), not to forget the current deforestation of the rainforest. The collapse of the immense "tree-village" symbolizes the lowest point reached by human ethics, a human being capable of killing thousands of innocent victims with the same ease as when having a picnic in the countryside. The director has already accustomed us in the past to such analyses with similar scenes; after the sinking of the Titanic, the noble lifeboats refuse to go back to the stranded to avoid getting their shoes wet.

But paradoxically, Cameron shot a film by asking for a loan of a few hundred million from banks on the west coast to describe the terrible colonial situation and to give ecological teachings that the big Hollywood multinationals foremost forget and willingly overlook. One of the most discussed directors of these years that marked the end of the old millennium and the beginning of the new presents himself as a nonconformist pacifist; the director has used several occasions to highlight how war is a consequence of hate and ignorance. The protagonist Jake Sully himself, presented as stupid and ignorant, learns to know the alien race, and by opening his heart, also opens his mind, leaving ignorance behind and learning to be objective, a cosmopolitan who at the beginning of the film starts with: "I hoped to bring peace with weapons, and to teach it with war, but I was wrong..."

A film of this kind has never been seen before; it is the dawn of a new era, an era that forces us to shift our gaze from the 2 dimensions to immerse ourselves in space.