The newest trailer for James Cameron’s epic—Avatar—was recently released on Yahoo! Movies. Avatar looks intriguing, because it’s packed with environmental and social themes amongst an elaborate and ornate alien wilderness. The basic plot surrounds humanity’s quest to commodify natural resources. However, humanity’s insatiable need for natural resources have led them to Pandora—a moon with a lush alien environment that also contains a highly valuable mineral. In order to gain access into Pandora’s environment (the air isn’t breathable to humans) and gain the trust of the Na’vi—an indigenous humanoid race—the humans employ avatars. These avatars look like the Na’vi, but humans are able to occupy their minds, therefore, humans can walk Pandora within a Na’vi shell. Of course, once inside the Na’vi’s environment, humans begin to question their motives or pursuits to exploit the Na’vi’s home world for minerals. The movie is due in theaters on December 18, 2009. More from Variety:

“Avatar” tells the story of an extreme rehabilitation program: In an attempt to walk again, a paraplegic former Marine named Jake travels to the jungles of the extraterrestrial realm called Pandora, home of the Na’vi, a technologically primitive but physically superior race.

To picture Pandora, Carter created what he calls a “lush homegrown forest that’s way overscale for anything we’ve ever experienced, but also has enough alien qualities that you realize what you’re seeing is not just a few flowers poked into the midst of an otherwise normal environment. The essence of it is very different.”

At night, the forests of Pandora light up like a psychedelic black-light poster. Cameron’s inspiration for that, Carter believes, came from his deep-sea diving experiences.

“The whole idea of (that) bioluminescent world at night is something he’d actually witnessed when he was down at the bottom of the ocean during his ‘Titanic’ time,” Carter says. “That bioluminescence is almost like a nervous system of the planet, and that’s what’s at stake in the movie, as you start to get past the initial foray into the Na’vi culture and seeing the drama start to emerge between the military-industrial complex that wants to exploit the world.”

In order to breathe on Pandora, humans have created human-alien hybrids (the eponymous avatars), and it’s through one of these creatures that Jake is able to walk again. But will he remain human or go native after he falls in love with one of the locals, a girl named Neytiri? Intergalactic peace depends on it.

Update (2 Nov. 09): James Cameron’s Vision Featurette:

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