Human Flower Project
Miami, Florida USA
Denver, Colorado USA
Hollywood, California USA
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
The Plants of Avatar
Following through on a filmmaker’s vision, a botanist hypothesizes plants with darts of poison and roots that grow upward—the flora of Pandora.
Exploring the plant and animal and ?? life on Pandora, in James Cameron’s movie Avatar
Image: via Scifi Scoop
By James H. Wandersee and Renee M. Clary
EarthScholars™ Research Group
Avatar, the current 3-D blockbuster film written and directed by James Cameron, is the first movie ever to gross $2 billion globally. You’ve probably seen it, or at least talked to someone who has. Considered a rare breakthrough in cinematic technology for its advances in 3-D viewing and stereoscopic filmmaking, Avatar was made with cameras specially designed for the film’s production.
This science fiction film takes place in the year 2154, on Pandora, a moon of Polyphemus, a giant gas planet orbiting a star beyond Earth’s neighborhood, Alpha Centauri. Pandora is inhabited by the Na’vi, a ten-foot-tall, blue-skinned species of wise humanoids, who are linked in equilibrium with all of the moon’s nature, worshiping an ecological goddess called Eywa—the tree-nexus of the moon’s wireless “biological internet.” The film’s title points to the genetically engineered Na’vi bodies used by several of the story’s human characters to interact with the natives of Pandora. In Cameron’s future vision, technology can inject human intelligence into a remote biological body and activate it.