There is something about the flick Avatar that seemed really familiar.
Supermodel-like, 10-feet tall, blue-skinned, golden-eyed Na’vi aliens with tails? "NO!"
Kaleidoscopic and bioluminescent flora and fauna? "NO!"
A 3-D IMAX experience that closes the space between you and the alien world to render it up close and personal. "THAT’S IT!" Avatar makes the computer-generated sci-fi world of Pandora (aka Na’vi-land) seem real.
It’s almost like being in your classroom with your Net Gener students—YOU in your professorial-Gen X (born 1961–1981) or Boomer (born 1943–1960) world AND your STUDENTS (born 1982–2003) in their high-tech, twitch-speed, remixed, digital, mobile, always-on media world. Their world may be perceived as a bit alien by many professors. It’s a close encounter of the Net Gener kind!
However, Avatar-the-flick is much more than that. It’s a journey into eye-popping visuals with sensory overload of imaginative vistas, creatures, and characters of titanic proportions. It uses state-of-the-art technologies to create avatars— genetically engineered hybrids of human DNA mixed with Na’vi DNA from the distant planet of Pandora. These scientifically-grown Na’vi lookalikes permit mere-mortal, ex-military mercenaries and scientists to be transformed into avatars.
Why? What’s the point of creating avatars? To make buckets of moola. Yes, but there’s another plot-related reason: They see, fear, taste, and feel like the natives and have all of the same physical characteristics and adeptness. The avatar versions of our hero ex-Marine Jake Sully and Dr. Grace Augustine, an exobiologist and head of the Avatar Program, permitted them to infiltrate the Na’vi culture and gather intelligence (aka intel) about the natives to convince them to leave their home turf.
Colonel Miles Quaritch, head of security and psycho-warrior, who had a profound disregard for Pandora’s inhabitants, ordered Sully: “I want you to learn from inside, to gain their trust.” The avatars were supposed to set up schools and teach them English (Is there any other language?). This was a computer-generated, undercover covert operation. If the natives didn’t leave of their own free will, Quaritch would blow them to kingdom come, digitally-speaking, of course.
Notwithstanding a romantic subplot between Sully and Neytiri, the violence designed to wipe out the Na’vi humanoids, and loads of political-social-economic connotations, Avatar suggested to me one key educational message, which, due to space limitations here, will be described tomorrow. You don’t want to miss it.
COPYRIGHT © 2010 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
No comments:
Post a Comment