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Avatar – Individual Acting Performance – Jake Sully

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.

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Avatar – post 2 – Jake Sully

Avatar’s Jake Sully

Jake Sully, the main character, is something of a lost person when he arrives at Pandora. He had lost his twin brother, and he talks like he’s open to anything new that might give his life meaning. Of course, the prospect of having a new body, even if only virtual, is attractive to a marine who has lost the use of his legs. Jake doesn’t know his purpose, so at the same time he’s helping the anthropologist understand and befriend the Pandorans, he’s also giving intel to the colonel for him to know when and how to strike the enemy. Jake is the ultimate double agent, although there is no attempt to fool the Pandorans who call Jake and the other virtual Pandorans “sleep-walkers.” Often our lives take odd, unnerving and faith-challenging turns, and we wonder what purpose we were intended for. In that sense, we’re like Jake who had to wait to see the purpose for the crippling he’d experienced. He had to go low before he could go high. Obviously, the “divine” dandelions that light upon Jake while he’s following the Pandoran woman through the jungle are the sign of some sort of calling upon Jake; the Pandoran woman recognizes that.

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The Matrix – Post 5

The Matrix – Neo

Even though Neo begins like someone having his eyes opened to the reality that the world is, like a Christian being born again, the movie portrays Neo becoming an obvious Christ figure. To simplify, he dies, rises again, and thereby lives in total control of the Matrix, unable to be defeated by the Agents of the Machine but able to decode and devour them from the inside out. But if it were that simple, the movie would not be genius, and it is genius.

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Interstellar

Interstellar

Download the pdf of this analysis:  Interstellar

Cooper, the Father, promising his daughter he’ll return

“Interstellar” came out in 2014. It’s about time and family, but it contains a theological explanation of covenant family and dominion also. Long before seeing it and while sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, I picked up a magazine and noticed an article about the movie. It explained that the makers went to an actual theoretical physicist to learn how to represent a black hole and a worm hole in the movie’s special effects. The scientist allegedly took the equations governing the theoretical operations of these phenomena and matched it with special effects software for a video representation. But when they actually saw the image the equations created, they had made an entirely new scientific discovery as to the operation of the phenomena. Perhaps the first time that a scientific discovery occurred within the special effects process in the making of a movie. Continue reading “Interstellar”