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Aatar – Individual Acting Performance – Jake Sully
Sam Worthington, who has come to be typecast as half human/half whatever, plays Jake. In the latest Terminator, he’s half robot, half human. In Clash of the Titans, he’s half human, half god. And in Avatar, he’s half human, half Pandoran, or at least half the time.
Worthington plays the regular guy, but not just any regular guy, the regular guy with the desire for more. In the Collector’s edition of the movie, not the original theatrical release, he is shown on earth, living the wheel-chair life. He says he can’t stand being told what he cannot do. In a bar scene, after seeing a guy slap his own girlfriend, Jake wheels up to him, pulls one of his bar stools sending the guy to the floor, and he jumps out of his wheelchair and begins pummeling the guy. He says he guesses he never found anything worth fighting for. As he’s about to beat up this guy, he says, “The strong prey on the weak, nobody does a d___ thing about it.” Obviously, this desire to protect the weak comes out later when dealing with the humans and their attitude toward the “blue monkeys” on Pandora.
Does the modern American life give the type of challenge that a person needs to stand for something? There is freedom to fight for just about any political or cultural cause, but are they worth fighting for? The Kingdom of God is that transcendent, limitless cause that the Christian fights for. And His Commander in Chief is none other than Christ, the one who stood up to overwhelming religious and political power and even conquered death itself. That is worth fighting for; He is worth following.
Watching Worthington get the hang of his new Pandoran body gives you the feel for what a paralyzed person might do if they suddenly had the ability to run again. You also see that Jake is a fighter; he’s not one to give up, and his humor in the face of danger and challenge demonstrate that when he’s learning to face death as a Pandoran and the sarcastic and hostile jabs by Tsu-Tey. The difficult job is showing how he can so easily leave off being human and become Pandoran. It involves more than just joining a tribe as in Dances with Wolves; it involves becoming a part of another form of humanoid and calling humans “aliens.” But that is a failure by the Director, not the actor in this case. Otherwise, Worthington portrays Jake as an unassuming, even humble person, who will not back down from a fight. In other words, you identify with Jake well, for the most part. The questions arise from the ease of his conversion, but that transition is better portrayed when you see the deleted scenes that the DVD version allows you to view. You see the harshness of the humans and the further incorporation of Jake into their religious system, like the scene he takes some peyote type drug that allows him to have an out-of-body experience like a scene out of a Carlos Castaneda book. He has accomplished the mission that the humans gave him, but it, of course, backfires because he is one of them, the enemy.
In that scene, Neytyri tells Jake that Eywa does not take sides; she only defends the balance of nature. He responds with: “It was worth a try.” That’s a combination of prayer and respect for the sovereignty of God, something like the Christian prayer ending, “if it by your will, Lord.” Thus, Cameron puts the Pandoran view in the perspective of Yahweh who does not respect persons, but only defends His truth, His kingdom, and those who trust in Him. The Humans believe in nothing but power; the sovereignty of God seems irrelevant to them. Again, the Pandorans, even in their paganism, are not as far from the true God as the Humans are.
When he is found to have too much sympathy with the Pandorans, the humans have him arrested. At the same time, the Pandorans, even Neytyri, have rejected him as a traitor. In this rejected state, he is like unto Christ, rejected by all men the night He was betrayed, only to be then rejected the next day by His own Father. When he attempts to then go back into his Avatar body to try to help the Pandorans, Jake comments on his status, “Outcast, betrayer, alien, I was in the place the eye does not see.”