Summary
The film begins with a shot of the lush rainforest of Pandora. We hear a voiceover of Jake Sully, a former Marine and war veteran who is now a paraplegic, and who has been having dreams of flying. He wakes up on a spaceship that is heading towards Pandora. Pandora is a moon of a planet called Polyphemus. When Jake wakes up, he has been asleep for almost 6 years, in a process called cryosleep. He opens his locker and we learn more about his backstory, including the fact that he had a twin brother, Tom, who is now dead—shot by someone who mugged him. Tom was a scientist and was slated to participate in a study and exploration of Pandora as part of a corporate and military agenda.
Because Jake has the exact same genetics as his brother, he has been given the opportunity to take Tom's place, for good pay. Pandora is 4.3 light-years from Earth, and the ship is just now about to touch down. Outside the landing site, various industrial machines begin mining projects, extracting resources from the nutrient-rich landscape of Pandora. Jake, along with his fellow participants in the mission, are briefed on the planet. They learn that the atmosphere on Pandora does not support human life and will render a human unconscious after 20 seconds of exposure and kill them after 4 minutes.
As the participants approach the base, nicknamed "Hell's Gate," Jake uses a wheelchair and is teased by some of the other Marines, who disparagingly refer to him as "Meals on wheels." In voiceover, he narrates that he became disabled during a war on Earth and does not have the money to get the spinal surgery required to recover.
In the base, Colonel Miles Quaritch, the head of the operation, gives a speech to the soldiers who have agreed to embark on the mission to Pandora, priming them on what to expect on Pandora and describing the native population, known as the Na'vi. Quaritch is an old military veteran and warns that it will be difficult to stay alive on Pandora, and that they must try and kill Na'vi however they can, even though they are "very hard to kill." He suggests that in order to survive, the Marines need to play by the rules.
In the hall, Jake meets a biologist named Norm Spellman, an old friend of his brother's, who brings him to a lab where he meets Max Patel. Norm and Max are part of the Avatar Program. In the Avatar Program, humans are linked to an avatar, which is a composite of a human and a Na'vi, and then able to roam around Pandora as a native. Jake will be able to walk around Pandora and breathe the atmosphere embodied as a Na'vi that looks similar to his human form. Jake thinks his avatar looks like his late brother, and prepares to embark on the mission.
Jake makes a video log, a requirement for the mission, so that participants can get in the habit of documenting everything. "It's all part of the science," says Norm.
Dr. Grace Augustine, the program's science lead and a famed botanist, comes out of her pod that has been linking her to her avatar. She is a rather impatient woman, and asks for a cigarette upon emerging. She has learned the Na'vi language and converses with Norm in Na'vi in order to assess whether he has proper command of it. When she meets Jake, she tells him that she has no use for him, since he has never had any experience with lab work, unlike his brother, who had a Ph.D. and trained for the mission for three years. "I dissected a frog once," he says, jokingly, but Grace doesn't crack a smile. She goes off to talk to Parker Selfridge, the base commander, and a representative of the RDA (Resources Development Administration), which is in charge of everyone on Pandora. She finds Selfridge putting golf balls into a jar, and kicks it out of the way when he doesn't pay enough attention to her.
Grace tells Selfridge that she is not impressed with Jake, even though Parker insists that he is perfect for the mission, given his identical genetics to Tom and his military experience. Parker argues that they need military personnel who can infiltrate the Na'vi community and help the military mission on the planet, which is about extracting a mineral called "unobtanium." Unobtanium is being harvested for capitalistic gain—it can be sold for high prices ($20 million per kilogram), while also bringing energy to Earth, which is in an environmental crisis. Grace remains unconvinced that Jake will be helpful in terms of her botanical research, and also expresses disapproval about the fact that military personnel have killed many Na'vi individuals under Selfridge's leadership. Selfridge thinks that military representatives will help relations with the Na'vi, but Grace insists that the opposite is true.
The next morning, Jake arrives in the lab, where he and Norm are linked up with their avatars. When he is linked, Jake, embodied in his avatar, becomes very excited, as he has not been able to walk for years, and begins moving very quickly, knocking things over in the lab and causing some chaos. He is ecstatic and goes out to a recreation area outside, where avatars are playing sports and preparing for their mission. Norm follows him, telling him that they aren't supposed to be running. Outside, Jake finds Grace's avatar, who is much nicer than the actual Grace. She tosses him a piece of fruit, which he bites into, and then takes him to the barracks, where he looks at his Na'vi body more closely. He finds that he has a long braid-like appendage on his head, which is a neural queue, with tendrils on the end. When his avatar sleeps, Jake awakens in the human world, emerging from his pod.
Later, Jake meets Trudy, a Marine pilot who he's going to be working with. She will be flying him around Pandora and needs him to operate the door gun, since she's down a man. Jake then goes to meet with Colonel Quaritch. In the middle of lifting weights, Quaritch tells Jake that he is impressed by his record and all the things he accomplished on his tours, one of which was in Venezuela, before telling him that Pandora is exceptionally dangerous.
Quaritch tells Jake that he thinks the Avatar Program is not worthwhile, but that he wants to use Jake specifically to help the military aims of extracting more unobtanium. He tells Jake that if he keeps the Na'vi away from the ore deposits (and kills them if they refuse), Quaritch will help finance the surgery that will allow Jake to walk again. On paper, he is still in Grace's charge, but Quaritch is Jake's real boss. After their talk, Quaritch gets in an AMP suit, a specific exoskeletal vehicle, and goes out onto Pandora.
On his next linking with his avatar, Jake flies with Trudy on her gunship. Grace and Norm are also present, and the group lands in a forest.
In the forest, Jake looks around, curious about the wildlife. Grace points out a prolemuris, a monkey-like creature swinging from the trees, which is not aggressive. She tells him to put down his gun. While Grace and Norm do research, Jake wanders towards a patch of helicoradian flowers—large beautiful coral-colored flowers that shrink at his touch. After observing the flowers, he faces a titanothere, a kind of hammer-head creature with a violent streak. Grace advises Jake to stand his ground and not shoot, as violence is useless and will only lead the titanothere to charge and kill them. Jake heeds her advice, but heckles the animal as he does so.
The titanothere retreats when it sees another jungle creature, a thanator, standing behind Jake. The thanator snarls and roars, before leaping over Jake. He turns to Grace and Norm asking what to do, and Grace advises him to "Definitely run!" The thanator chases him, but he manages to hide under a tree, before shooting his machine gun at the animal. This has no effect, and the thanator snatches away his gun, so he must run yet again. When the thanator gets ahold of Jake's backpack, he wriggles free and jumps off a cliff into a lagoon, losing the thanator and his companions.
Analysis
The protagonist of the film, Jake Sully, has already endured a number of trials before the plot of the film even begins. For one, he is a paraplegic, having lost the use of his legs on a mission years ago. Now, he is unable to pay for surgery, but has been given the option to embark on a mission to Pandora nonetheless. Additionally, he recently lost his brother, Tom, and is basically alone in the world. Before the conflict of the film has even begun, we see that Jake has faced many obstacles in his life, and has little left to lose.
The world of the film is an entirely foreign one, taking place on the fictional moon of Pandora. While Pandora looks somewhat recognizable, filled with rainforests and earthly features, there are key differences. The moon is populated by the Na'vi, a species unlike anything humans have ever seen, and the atmosphere is not welcoming to human life. The science-fiction premise of the film transports the viewer into an entirely different realm, one in which the recognizable trappings of human life are thrown into relief.
Jake's disability would seem to make him an unlikely candidate for the mission on Pandora—which is where the title comes into play. Not only is the military operation sending people to the planet in person, but it is also using an "Avatar" program, in which humans can "link" to an avatar of a human/Na'vi composite being that they can then use to navigate the planet. Jake and others are able to assume other identities in order to experience the world of Pandora. This has many implications for identity, in that it not only enables a disabled veteran to walk, but it enables a human to experience life as another species, an assumption of a completely different way of being.
Through the character of Grace, we see that there is a division between the scientists and researchers working on Pandora and the military personnel who are there to help carry out a commercial project. The military is on Pandora in order to extract a natural resource to bring back to Earth to sell as an energy source, while the scientists are there to learn more about the environment of Pandora and the Na'vi people. Because of their differing aims, they also have a different approach to the world that already exists on Pandora. While military participants are willing to kill Na'vi in order to fulfill their military duties, the scientists working on the planet have a more peaceful project, one that resorts to research rather than violence or extraction.
This moral quandary between science and the military puts Jake directly in the middle when Quaritch makes his special offer to pay for Jake's surgery if he helps to extract more unobtanium. Jake is working for Grace, who has a peaceful agenda on the planet, while also taking orders from the pro-violence colonel. The fact that Quaritch is willing to help him with a crucial medical procedure should he conform to his requests puts Jake in a complex ethical position; of course he would like to be given the gift of mobility again, but at what price?
