Avatar - The Experience

There are a lot of people who have expressed a wish that they could live on Pandora. I don't share their sentiment. You have to look past the pretty fauna, the breathtaking, okay..awe inspiring and impossible vistas of floating mountains (how exactly could they have waterfalls, and yet no rivers???), the bioluninescent qualities of the landscape.

More urgent, and unequivically important is that little matter of survival. Humans, especially us from the Western civilizations, wouldn't last one micro-minute in that environment. How exactly would our well fed, flabby butts exist in a world of eat or be eaten, where your body needs to react faster than your brain can compute, and endless government/pest control complaint departments aren't at our beck and call to whisk away the unpleasantness. Imagine feeling like a mouse every day, in wildcat country.

Do you know what it would take to survive on Pandora? An attitude of resignation. When you've passed the point of realizing that you've failed in some big way, your life is pointless, and you're willing to give it all up for the sake of the general good. And then you get a little spark of hope. A pin-point of matter at the farthest distance your eye can see. An idea is massaging its way into your sub-conscience that something bigger than you've ever experienced before is bursting to be known. Do you grab at it with all your being, or do you lose the will?

Do you have what it takes to tough it out? Probably not me. There was a time when I thought I was invicible and would have relished the idea of the challenge. Now I'm as complacent, harried, and flabby as the next gal. I need my weekly fix of cute puppy antics off the internet. A soldier might though. They've left behind the notion of soft living and the conveniences they knew at home, to embark on adventures though they know they may be terrified, starved, having to make split-second decisions that affect whether they will get to see another day. Maybe the same way residents of Kabul feel.

So don't fool yourself with your grandiouse ideas of conjuring out of thin air your ability to survive in a place like Pandora. With the yin, there is the yang. Only the fittest, and toughest could stand a chance. And us, my friends, would be the chicken nuggets. See you at the Bob Evans.

Side note: Avatar only gets 8 out of 10 stars from me, if only because of the waterfalls on the floating mountains and the disappointment I felt that Gen. Quaritch in the spirit of the stereotypical, and one-dimensional bad guy that he was, did not have a black stetson and say "Wha-ha-ha" at all. I mean, if you're going to make his dialogue so predictable, why not go all out? In fairness, I really liked his character at the beginning of the movie, but he just..got..worse.