Over the years, there have been many arguments about whether Avatar is science fiction or fantasy.
My first thought would be that Avatar is both science fiction and fantasy. The movie starts with pure science fiction, as the human’s space traveling many light years to the moon Pandora to mine the very unusual and valuable ore called Unobtainium (Evans, 2009). This seems to me plausible, which agrees with the idea that science fiction is mostly about possibilities, partly based on science and relying on imagination to take us from the present into the future (Unknown, 2009).
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The beings on Pandora, live in harmony with their planet and represent what many of us would like to be. Pandora, with its creatures and plants, is simply unbelievable in every way when we compare it to Earth. We don't have any real idea as to the types of life forms we might find in space (University, 2016), and most moviegoers, can’t make any sense out of this crazy moon. Fantasy is the way that Direhorses and the Ikron bond physically rather than emotionally so that the Navi can ride them. The way in which Eywa to change people from one body to another in their rituals cannot be explained by what we know or even think is possible.
During the movie, science fiction and fantasy are linked by the scientists who created Avatars, with the task of linking the Sky people and the Navi. Major events such as the manner in which Jake is accepted by the Navi and joins them in defeating the Sky people is for me fantasy. The chance of it happening in life seems impossible.
There is a very interesting statement by the producer of Avatar who said, 'Director James Cameron, does not write science fiction, he writes science fact' (Sappenfield, 2009). The article goes on to explain that the 380-page Pandorapedia defines the moon based on scientific principles and that the floating mountains are for instance held up by the Unobtainium magnetic field generated by the ore which is an incredibly powerful superconductor (Twentieth Century Fox Corporation, 2009). Jodi Holt of the University of California was consulted to ensure that the plants and scientific equipment of the lab made scientific sense (Kozlowski, 2010).
Having seen some of the explanations as to how Pandora works, I have to conclude that the movie is science fiction, which when unexplained looks a lot like fantasy. Avatar describes a world that might exist, as it is predicted by combining various scientific principles. For now, it can't be visited.
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