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AVATAR Scriptment byJames CameronWelcome to JOSH SULLYS world.It is a century from now, and the population of our tiredplanet has tripled. Finally, drowning in its own toxicwaste, starvation and poverty, the population has toppedout at a nice even 20 billion.The Earth is dying, covered with
AVATAR
Scriptment
by
James Cameron
Welcome to JOSH SULLY'S world.
It is a century from now, and the population of our tired
planet has tripled. Finally, drowning in its own toxic
waste, starvation and poverty, the population has topped
out at a nice even 20 billion.
The Earth is dying, covered with a gray mold of human
civilization. Even the moon is spiderwebbed with city
lights on its dark side. Overpopulation, over-
development, nuclear terrorism, environmental warfare
tactics, radiation leakage from power plants and waste
dumps, toxic waste, air pollution, deforestation,
pollution and overfishing of the oceans, global warming,
ozone depletion, loss of biodiversity through
extinction... all of these have combined to make the once
green and beautiful planet a terminal cess-pool.
Josh lives in the urban sprawl which has grown like kudzu
over the whole eastern US.
His particular part of this undifferentiated concrete rat-
warren is Charlotte, NC, but you could be anywhere. Its
the same crowded, gray, trash-strewn high-tech squalor.
The walls are gray, the sky is gray... the people are
gray.
They shuffle past each other in dense crowds, shoulder to
shoulder, unwashed because of the water shortages, and
sickly looking from the bankrupt diet of cheap
carbohydrates and synthetic proteins. It looks like a
cross between THX-1138 and a Calcutta train station.
Josh has it a little worse than most because of his
involvement in a stupid little war people barely remember.
He is paralyzed from the waist down, and his useless legs
hang twisted and shrunken down the front of his
wheelchair. Josh still wears his army jacket, and with
his unkempt beard and hair, and surly eyes, he is pretty
much ignored by the crowds which buffet him like surf.
Just another angry vet, a piece of discarded human trash.
Josh fights his way to work every day on the crowded
subway. And every night he goes home to a tiny cubicle of
an apartment in a vast government housing project. The
room is reminiscent of a cell at a federal prison, which
is pretty much what it is. The amenities look like they
are from a 747, which is to say they are efficient, space
conscious, and are about a hundred years old.
There is a single fluorescent fixture, which casts a
sterile light over the grimy walls. It flickers
constantly.
One entire wall (all seven feet of it) is a TV screen. On
it we get a wider view of the world, and it's nothing to
write home about. There is a breaking story about a fire
in a Boston subway which asphyxiated over a hundred
people. Not unusual these days. This is followed by a
feature about the death, in Kenya, of the last lion living
outside captivity. This leads to a recap of the state of
the environment overall, and it's grim.
The oceans are overfished and barren, poisoned by toxic
runoff. All whales and at least half the Earth's fish
species are extinct. On land over half the species extant
at the beginning of the century are now gone forever, with
most of the remaining endangered.
The human race, using its technical ingenuity, has learned
to keep itself alive, but it has lost almost all contact
with the natural world, which it has strangled and crushed
out of existence. There are no national parks left, only
housing projects and protein farms. Yosemite is an
upscale condo development. Most ocean-front property is
used for mari-culture, since the only food source
efficient enough to feed everyone these days is spirulina.
It's amazing the things you can do with algal protein
concentrate if you know your spices.
Josh Sully is a hopeless guy in a hopeless world, a little
guy whom the big machine has ground up and spit out.
Josh gets a call from a computer at the municipal admin
complex. The automated voice tells him politely that his
brother, Thomas Sully, has been killed in a transit system
accident in Boston, and he is required to claim the body
by 1200 tomorrow. His brother died choking in the smoke
of the subway fire which Sully had seen on the news.
CUT TO SULLY at the Boston municipal crematorium. He sits
next to a large cardboard box, about seven feet long,
sitting on the rollers waiting to go into the furnace. In
the box is his brother's body.
We see that they are identical twins.
