Max was around the same age as Neo is now. It was just Max and I in the midst of the best times of our lives. I saw the first part of Avatar during those times.
James Cameron movies are chick flicks wrapped around a unique brand of education and entertainment. This time empowered with 13 years of ecological knowledge, he sets a new benchmark for himself.
Avatar : The Way Of The Water - Yes, the movie is long, the story is ordinary (because it reality) and VFX is beautiful.
Behind those mundane things if one knows the science behind each scene, there will be no surprises but yet one will appreciate Cameron's innate gift to educate the people through his movies.
1. Beauty of known and mostly unknown ocean life.
2. Beyond beauty and importance of preserving the coral reefs.
3. Cetacean intelligence. In the past decade, there has been so much humbling understanding of intelligence of Whales and Dolphins, Cameron played an important part with his documentary Secrets of the Whales. This movie brings this knowledge to life for the masses.
4. Of course, the villains are humans. It's true on Earth and in Pandora - a metaphor for Earth
5. And much more on the importance of the symbiotic relationship between human animal and all other non-human animals.
Please don't watch this movie passively. Learn from it and follow it in our everyday life.
For starters:
- Quit eating seafood. There are startups such as Blue Nalu, Aqua Cultured Foods and Good Catch Foods are working on Mycelium (Mushroom) based Seafood.
- Stop using plastics. Free The Ocean has great products I have started buying since Max passed away. It's not only good for ocean but also for you - the self centered human. Read this paper - The potential effects of microplastics on human health: What is known and what is unknown
- And learn from the ocean creatures who we are. After all once upon a time we lived in the ocean before crawling into land to become the current humans. Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin and What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins by Jonathan Balcombe are great books to gain rudimentary knowledge.
James Cameron's interview with National Geography:
We live in a shifting baseline, where the ocean as we see it today is not what it once was. The film was also an opportunity to show us what our oceans might have looked like 300, 400, 500 years ago, before we really got busy toward an industrial civilization. If people see this film, and aside from the drama of the Sully family [the film’s protagonists] and the relationships and all these big, dramatic conflicts, if they just love the underwater experience—and they love that sense of the profusion of life and the magic and mystery—then maybe it will reconnect them with what we are presently losing here on this planet.
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They also have a symbiotic culture with an intelligent species of ocean air-breathers: big animals that we would probably take a glance at and say, Oh, that’s a whale. But, of course, it’s not a whale—it’s the Pandora version, which is called a tulkun. The tulkun are actually a very advanced society, even though their advancements are all mental. They have no technology because they have no manipulating hands as we do. They rely on the Na’vi for anything that requires that kind of physical manipulation, but they’re quite advanced mentally: They have complex language, they have mathematics, they have music, and so on.
It was an interesting journey for me to do the National Geographic limited series Secrets of the Whales because that showed that the cetaceans that live here on planet Earth—the real ones—actually have a more advanced culture than we had previously thought, in terms of passing down very structured information from generation to generation. They have complex music that’s adopted by other members of the population of that species, and it travels around the world like a kind of greatest-hits album.
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The reason that I went down the path of making a series of films in the same universe is because I thought that what I needed to say artistically—to communicate with people—I could do within that framework. Obviously, shifting from the rainforest, which was the focus of the first film, to the ocean, [there] is, between the lines, a plea for the protection and conservation and celebration of our oceans. Hopefully we can turn back from a path that is putting the oceans under stress. I don’t even like to use the term “stress”: It’s used a lot in conservation, [but] if you consider fourth-stage cancer “stress,” yeah, it’s “stress.”
The coral reefs will be a thing that exists only in films in 50 to 75 years, in most places around the planet. That’s not okay. When I was a kid, I aspired to become a diver, so I could go and see this wonder and this beauty myself. And then I spent decades exploring and enjoying that world. My kids and my grandchildren won’t be able to do that. And so, it’s kind of a cri de cœur, if you want to put it that way: to remember, to celebrate and fall in love with again, and therefore remember to protect that which we’re losing.
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