January 12, 2010
Posted by Danny
Pandoran Blues…
As James Cameron’s Avatar progressively rumbles towards beating Titanic’s worldwide box-office record of $1.8 billion, CNN writes of a slightly disturbing side-effect of the film’s globe-gobbling success.
Apparently, Cameron’s beautifully-realised alien world of Pandora was so well realised, that some viewers are complaining of depression emerging from the realisation that it doesn’t exist. On the fan site Avatar Forums, a thread entitled “Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible” filled up with stories from affected fans – so much so that another thread had to be created. People like Ivar Hill summed up the profound sense of melancholy that Avatar prompted:
“When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed … gray. It was like my whole life, everything I’ve done and worked for, lost its meaning,” Hill wrote on the forum. “It just seems so … meaningless. I still don’t really see any reason to keep … doing things at all. I live in a dying world.”
(Possibly pertinent circumstantial information: Ivar Hill is a) 17 and b) Swedish)
More astounding, though, were comments like this:
“Ever since I went to see ‘Avatar’ I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na’vi made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it,” Mike posted. “I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and then everything is the same as in ‘Avatar.’ “
Jesus. Really…?
It’s genuinely intriguing to see such a potent reaction to a cinematic fantasy world. I certainly don’t recall such a fervent yearning for a similarly lush (fictional) natural environment like, say, the forest moon of Endor in Return of The Jedi. I must confess that, while watching Avatar at the IMAX in 3-D (the best way to see it), I was certainly stunned by Pandora’s gorgeous vistas and entranced by such visions as a floating mountain range, but any idle desire to relocate to Pandoran climes was tempered by a crucial observation:
Pandora looked pretty goddamned dangerous to me.
Well, it’s the truth, isn’t it? Even in the guise of an agile Pandoran native, a Na’vi, not only would you routinely risk falling hundreds of feet to your death from the branches one of the planet’s super-massive trees – no safety barriers, tut-tut – but you’d also have to habitually face getting your Na’vi nuts ripped off by one of Pandora’s teeming legions of fanged beasties. And, then, there would be the heavily-armed human beings on the hunt for a poorly-named mineral whose primary aim is to turn you in to a Makeshift Lead Repository.
Then again, I was never an outdoors-y type…
1 Comment
People who get depressed at leaving Pandora are…
a) Mental
b) Depressed because they had wished they had not drunk the kool aid on how great and innovative Avatar was going to be and paid for a ticket to see Dances with Wolves 2: The Endor Connection
I’m a category B person