Avatar

You know that a movie has struck a chord in the human soul when newspapers begin reporting a huge spike in depression numbers all over the world after it has been screened.

And I was right to avoid watching that movie in 3D when it was the top dog in the theater. And I somehow managed to find the willpower to resist it in on 4 plane rides over a period of 4 months. But all walls broke down on a bus ride back to Singapore for Kuala Lumpur. I decided that the psychological effect would be lesser with a sub-par sound system and a lousy screen, in addition to the expected stomach-churning bumpy ride.

I underestimated the power of my own imagination to bring 2D to life.



It didn't take much to push myself right to the brink of psychological breakdown in order to understand this phenomenon. Avatar was simply a reminder to people of a longing human beings were divinely created with.

That we belong to a home far more beautiful than our world will ever be, technology, human imagination and all.

That our freedom lies in a body and a name that we are yet to receive, and that our present condition is nothing but a weak prototype of the real deal.

That we were created to give our allegiance and fight for something grander than ourselves, namely a future.

That each one of us was born to be a hero, to be acknowledge as a prince/princess, and to be given a esteemed position destined for, yet fought for at the same time.

The beauty of the movie, really, is the fact that as a viewer you know deep down in your heart that the Navines were going to win. It would have been an extremely depressing movie should the humans have won. Viewers would have walked away feeling cheated of their feelings, and the ratings would have remained below the seabed. But as all good movies, the bad guys received their just desserts and the good guys became glorious victors.


It so happened that by divine arrangement I had a thorough read-through of the first three-quarters of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity at my grandmother's place a day before watching the movie. Succinctly, he summarized the beauty of everything Christianity was about. Let me re-frame it in the context of this post.

That eventually, the good guys are going to win. That their King is coming back one day to destroy this fallen world and resurrect the Tree of Life which belongs at the center of the planet. That they will have new bodies with abilities beyond the human imagination, with special names given only to members of the Royal Family. That they will be crowned as heroes, predestined from the beginning yet having fought for their right without that knowledge. That forever will be spent gazing towards a Central Destination where their energies are focused without obstruction and love will abound in the air and in the core of every relationship. Death and destruction will be stories of the past, exploration and adventure in the environment will be a hobby without limits, and time will be a dimension left on paper.

You really can't blame people for wishing they were in Pandora to the point depression overcomes their sensibilities. Christians have every right to have their heads in the clouds with their absurd levels of faith in such dreams.

The irony however, is that the most devout Christians were also the biggest contributors to the world. Their rhetoric was clearly embedded in other-worldly fantasies, their actions based on a credit-accumulation system with an interest rate that was out of this world, their time spent on pleasing a Spiritual Being that cannot be scientifically proven and seen, and their bodies worked to death as if it was nothing more than an avatar.

It is with such a level of absurdity that I'm hoping my life would undertake.

To know and live out the fact that I am created to be nothing less than a hero fighting under the flag of a King whose victory has already been predestined.





If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. -C.S Lewis