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Avatar Essay

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This paper is a brief analysis of James Cameron's Avatar, a massively successful film that has managed to gross, so far, a half billion in revenue. With its popularity and mass appeal, it has also incurred a considerable amount of criticism from a variety of sources, targeting a variety of topics of the film, from its presentation of alien natives and a colonial corporate military, to race issues and a depiction of cigarette use. This essay attempts to explore main threads of the film, analyzing criticism, and offering its own critique and deconstruction. It will employ diagnostic critique, as well, in order to analyze how Avatar is equally a reflection of and an active influence on contemporary culture.
Avatar takes place in the virtual world of Pandora, created by Cameron with digital technology and colonized with fantastic creatures and an indigenous race of tall blue aliens called the Na'vi. The film is presented in three-dimensions, a technology that has been around for some time but this is the first time it seems to be used without reference to novelty. In this way Cameron and Twentieth Century Fox made a film, or rather an experience that cannot be pirated; a considerable amount of its revenue is from viewers paying extra to watch it in three dimensions, undoubtedly multiple times, on a monolithic IMAX screen.
The virtual world within Avatar is closely reminiscent of virtual spaces like Second Life; in both environments, individuals use avatars to plug into the space, roam around, and act in pure virturality. Cameron's avatar takes a step further, and is able to fully transfer his consciousness into his secondary being, getting rid of his fragile and disabled body in the last moments of the film. This nexus between body and avatar, real and virtual spaces, is present in Avatar despite the fact avatars and humans, the fantastic and the technological, occupy

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