Jake Sully in his Avatar body with another Avatar
In the movie ‘Avatar’ the plot shows us many encounters of different cultures and species with many different thoughts and outcomes when the meet. Jake Sully goes into the land of the Avatars and begins to experience their culture to bring back information to his own people. When he is there, they welcome him, but hesitantly because he is an outsider, and they fear what he might do to them. This is something that we have reviewed many times throughout this semester of people with cultural difference taking time and struggling to accept each other. The idea of Jake going into the Avatar world is for his people to be able to gain power over them and eventually overthrow them. While working on getting information about their people, he begins to fall in love with their culture and ideas and has a very difficult time relaying the information back to his own world. This internal struggle is something that can be viewed within many different cultures in the real world today because chances are if people who discriminate against others gave them a chance, they would have the same reaction that Jake Sully experiences in this movie. When his own people realize that he is beginning to like the Avatar’s and not want to take them over anymore; his own people begin to turn against him. His own people take greed and power over the actual feelings of the culture that they are attempting to destroy, which is something that many conquerors in history have also had in common. He decided to abandon his own people and fight for what he believed was right, which is something that I think this author wanted us to learn from by showing us how beautiful the culture was and wanting us to fight for it as well. Overall this movie left many feelings and I think it had many important messages for fighting against discrimination and differences and fits many of the things we learned in class very well. The author raised many thoughts and questions on ideas such as is conquering another civilization for your own benefit really worth what you’re destroying? and if everyone went into the Avatar world and lived with them for a while would they still want to take them over and destroy their land?