Having boycotted for several weeks what could be called the most anticipated movie of the year, I entered the theatre with more than a little hostility. Avatar, James Cameron’s latest budget breaking epic, has received a flurry of accolades, pegging it as a film which will forever change the way movie making is done. Critics from throughout the industry seem to have bowed to Cameron’s cinematic prowess even before the emulsion has fully cured. The setting for the film is a distant planet, Pandora, where, presumably, our military industrial complex, has setup shop to extract a rare mineral appropriately dubbed, un-obtainium.

This sets into motion an epic battle between the native people, the Na’vi, who are homogeneously connected to each other and the forest they inhabit, and the mechanized monster of a foreign military propelled by greed and assimilation. Though Cameron makes no effort to hide the overtness of it’s apocalyptic genocidal message, Avatar manages to engage the audience throughout its nearly three hour running time by creating a remarkably well paced and dynamically balanced plot.

Hailed primarily for its technological advancements of the medium, Avatar and James Cameron respectfully, have expanded the cinematic into a pseudo third dimension through the exploitation of stereoscopic vision, and the tightened articulation of a digital character’s empathetic qualities through the use of “Performance Capture”, a technology which began its development during “Polar Express” by Robert Zemeckis. Though, other recent films have employed the technology, Cameron’s drive for a new cinematic experience as well as a good portion of his own money were responsible for the development of the camera rigs and software which have made it possible.

The enjoyability of a film, for me, is based on many factors, one of which is the synchronicity between its theme and its execution. Avatar, which tells the tale of a planet stricken with the burden of foreign technology and the consumption of its natural resources, begs me to ask, “What was the impact on this planet during the making of this film”. Though, being released for the mass public does relieve Cameron from some ecological accountability, it does not sponge the mirror clean. To calculate fully, the environmental impact of any Hollywood production is beyond the measure of this article, but the cost-benefit ratio in green terms should not be overlooked and would require several levels of investigation, some of which include: the development of props and sets, the energy expended during production (filming: including camera rigs, lights and other equipment), the energy needed for post production ( cg effects, color correction, telecine etc. ), the mass technological retrofit necessary to view the film in thousands of theaters throughout the world, and the production of  any products or services created by the brand marketing of the film and its assets, just to name a few.

Cameron has never been a man to shy from controversy, and although he has continuously garnered praise and success throughout his career as an epic filmmaker, Avatar, because of its moral overtones, begs one to address the distance between his message and his execution.