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“Whenever righteousness wanes and unrighteousness increases, I send myself forth.

In order to protect the good and punish the wicked,

In order to make a firm foundation for righteousness,

I come into being, age after age.”  -The Bhagavad Gita (4.7-8)

In Hinduism, the word avatar refers to a god incarnated into man for the purpose of dharma – to restore order in the Universe. Though this has a different meaning at the beginning of James Cameron’s film by the same name, it is clear that this is what the writer-director intended for Jake Scully (Sam Worthington), the hero of the story.

With Avatar, the legendary creator of films like Alien, The Abyss, Terminator, and Titanic said he wanted to “create a familiar type of adventure in an unfamiliar environment.” And that is exactly what he did.

The story is one you may have heard under different names: We completely consume our resources and invade foreign lands for theirs. The Resources Development Administration and its military are the bad guys who land on Pandora, the Earth-like moon of a gaseous planet 4.4 light years away from ours, in order to mine a precious mineral that an energy-depleted Earth needs. There’s money-driven Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), the administrator of the operation, and his enforcer, Colonel Miles Quatrich (Stephen Lang), who cares about nothing but getting his job done at any cost. There’s the good guys, in the form of the strong scientist Grace Augustine, aptly played by “Alien” darling Sigourney Weaver, and her team, who run the Avatar Program. Our unlikely hero, Sully, is a simple-minded, big-hearted ex-marine who is asked to live within the natives of the land, the Na’Vi, in an avatar body – a remotely controlled hybrid of human and Na’Vi DNA – in order to gain their trust and clear the way for the takeover of their resources.

The environment, however, is like nothing you can imagine.  Witnessing the world of Pandora brings about vague recollections of sea aquarium exhibits, except you are inside the tanks, surrounded by luminous flora and fauna, both ethereal and lethal.  The backdrop is a combination of rain forest, highlands, and light. The creatures are like nothing you’ve ever seen before – or have you?  It’s as if Cameron – who painstakingly oversaw every single detail of the design process on this movie, “reporting” to the designers what things should look like down to the last blade of grass – had taken horses, dinosaurs, deer, hammerhead sharks and jellyfish, and morphed them into what these animals might look like in a parallel dimension close to ours – and even blended some of their features into the landscape and vice versa. Yet the world of Pandora is completely believable – largely due to technology that took years to develop specifically for this film – a place we might imagine could exist in a close-by star like Alpha Centauri.

The unparalleled beauty of Pandora is juxtaposed to the hostility of the environment, where fierce creatures both hunt and are hunted.  Even so, the underlying message of Avatar is one of harmony with Nature, as the Na’Vi are literally connected to their entire ecosystem through what seems like a central nervous system, and they communicate with both plant and animal by connecting their “nerves” those of the trees and creatures.  The Na’Vi, like many natives on Earth, live in equilibrium with the Motherland.  To them, flora and fauna all have an energy flow that must be listened to, respected, felt – and seen.  With Avatar, Cameron clearly shows – perhaps for the first time within a major motion picture – the intrinsic value of Mother Nature, the power of this mystical but very real energy, and its role in destiny and in our own lives.  Neither Scully nor anyone who meets him knows the fate of this world is in his hands. But Mother Nature knows, and it is through signs that only one who is aware and connected can interpret that this fact is brought to light.

Within all this, Scully’s task is very similar to our own: He must decide what he values most – his loyalty to the military and stockbrokers that may help him (restore his paralyzed legs), or the need to do the right thing, sacrifice himself, and save a world he was supposed to destroy.

But Scully is a simple guy. He’s not a brilliant scientist like his twin brother was, the guy for whom the avatar body was originally built but who was shot before he could travel to Pandora. He sees himself as what Augustine initially sees: muscle, without much upstairs. Fortunately, he meets Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a Na’Vi that saves his life, and, though at first reluctantly, teaches Scully to really “see” everything for what it truly is inside.

And perhaps, beyond the fantastic special effects and the incredible landscapes and entities, this is the true value of Avatar: The reminder that despite our different appearances, we are all much more than what we seem, more than intellect, more than muscles, more than money, more than what others want or expect us to be.  We are, just like Scully, a hero waiting to wake up to our real journey, one in which we are aware of our connection to each other, to Nature, and to something much greater that gives us life, drives us to protect it, and to do what we came to do: restore order in the Universe.