Franchise · Tertiary · since 2009
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Pandora at 48 frames a second is still the closest cinema has come to a place. Three films, one moon that glows at night, and the clans living on it.
Oel ngati kameie.
I see you (Na’vi)
Not “I see you standing there”. It means I see into you: I see what you are. It is the whole film in three words, and the reason the ending works: the last thing that happens is somebody finally saying it to a man in a body he was not born in.
Pandora at forty-eight frames a second is still the closest cinema has come to a place rather than a set. Whatever you think of the story (and it is not a complicated one), nobody has matched the sensation of standing in that forest.
The forest lights up where you step
Almost everything on Pandora is bioluminescent, and it reacts to touch. It is the single best image in the film: Jake walking through the dark and the ground answering him, one footfall at a time. Move your cursor across the floor below, or drag a finger over it.
Waiting for something to walk past.
Amnio tank · avatar body · driver unlinked
The link
The body is grown from a mix of human and Na’vi DNA, keyed to one driver, and it is useless to anybody else. That is why Jake gets his brother’s: they were twins, so the genome still matched.
Lie down in the bed, the body wakes up nine feet tall on a moon with air that kills you in four minutes, and you can run again. The film spends its whole first act on how much that matters before it spends anything on the plot.