Faith In Movies: Avatar

Minor spoiler alert!

I finally got around to seeing Avatar. Aside from the Pocahontas / Gaian environmental theme I notice they switched themes mid-stream on faith versus science. During the middle of the movie they were describing the communicative bonding between Pandora's life forms as a planet-wide network for sharing and storing thoughts and memorie. Later they seemed to decide that inside the network lived Gaia a sentient god "Eywa" who actively "maintains balance" in nature. Apparently she does this by giving quite specific instructions to previously dumb animals.

I could've gone with the Pocahontas-like "live in harmony with nature" theme. The planet-wide bio-network idea was a pretty damn cool idea worth exploring more, and it could lead to some cool sequels and video games. But the deus ex machina of validating their religion at the climax was pretty lame.

Even during the mass ritual where they were sitting and swaying in concentric circles I was imagining that they were either consciously or subconciously manipulating the bio-network rather than simply ritualizing faith. Oh well.

See also: Faith Themes in Movies, although I now think I was trying to hard to include Kung Fu Panda in this topic.