Milt Reynolds: Thinking Out Loud

A Beautiful Mind I've watched this movie only twice . Both times I've cried, stricken by the conflict and emotions portrayed by the actors playing John Nash and his wife, Alicia. I'm writing this article less as a review or recommendation and more as a personal, cathartic exercise . What about this film hurts me? Why do I cry? Why does it affect me so? John F. Nash, Jr. was a mathematician, brilliant even during high school. His genius, however, came at a cost to his relationships with friends, family and colleagues, ultimately climaxing with a spiraling fall into mental illness . Only one person was willing, and able, to support, protect, and eventually, bring him back to reality: his wife, Alicia Larde. During and after the cycles of schizophrenia, hospitalization, treatment and recovery, Nash contributed many original discoveries in the field of mathematics, culminating with the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economic Science. ( http://www-history.mcs ) The movie is extre...

Jake Sully is a marine, wounded and confined to a wheelchair, who joins a research group as an "avatar driver", on the planet "Pandora". The group is attempting to befriend the hostile native people , the "Na'vi", in order to gain mining rights to "unobtanium", a rare and valuable mineral. An avatar is a body cloned from DNA derived from a human and an alien . The human becomes a "driver", remotely controlling the avatar's body through sophisticated computer-to-brain connections. Sully begins the project fully intending to gain the natives' trust, learning their secrets, in order to persuade them to relinguish the mining rights, or to break their defenses and overwhelm them militarily . But a strong emotional attachment to one of the Na'vi begins to change his desire from one of conquest to that of love and respect for their culture. The climax of the story comes as the military machine of the humans collides...