Avatar (2009 film) Avatar (2009 film) Avatar, marketed as James Cameron's Avatar, is a 2009 American epic science fiction film directed, written, produced, and co-edited by James Cameron, and stars Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, and Sigourney Weaver. The film is set in the mid-22nd century, when humans are colonizing Pandora, a lush habitable moon of a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri star system, in order to mine the mineral unobtanium, a room-temperature superconductor. The expansion of the mining colony threatens the continued existence of a local tribe of Na'vi – a humanoid species indigenous to Pandora. The film's
Avatar (2009 film) New York Times" opined that the film is "Cameron's long apologia for pantheism [...] Hollywood's religion of choice for a generation now", while Saritha Prabhu of "The Tennessean" called the film a "misportrayal of pantheism and Eastern spirituality in general", and Maxim Osipov of "The Hindustan Times", on the contrary, commended the film's message for its overall consistency with the teachings of Hinduism in the "Bhagavad Gita". Annalee Newitz of io9 concluded that "Avatar" is another film that has the recurring "fantasy about race" whereby "some white guy" becomes the "most awesome" member of a non-white culture. Michael Phillips of