Avatar is a 2009 American science fiction film written and directed by James Cameron, and starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez and Stephen Lang. The epic is set in the year 2154 on Pandora, a fictional world in a distant planetary system. Humans are engaged in mining Pandora's reserves of a precious mineral, while the Na'vi-a race of indigenous humanoids-resist the colonists' expansion, which threatens the continued existence of the Na'vi and the Earth-like Pandoran ecosystem. The film's title refers to the remotely controlled, genetically engineered human-Na'vi bodies used by the film's human characters to interact with the natives.