I went to see Avatar on Sunday evening, and found myself generally in agreement with Ed Morrissey’s review. Although many reviewers have complained the film takes too long to reach its climax, I thought the early and middle sections were the most enjoyable parts. The visual achievement is dazzling, in both design and execution, making the exploration of both the human and alien portions of Avatar’s beautiful world very entertaining.
Right after our hero consummates his relationship with his alien love, the whole thing goes very sour. I couldn’t quite put a name to its disagreeable flavor at first – it’s preachy and predictable, to be sure, but that isn’t what makes its gorgeous rainbow soup curdle during the grand finale. I figured it out later that night, while reading a seemingly unrelated post from Mark Steyn on National Review Online, discussing angry global warming fanatics reacting to their disappointment over the pointless farce at Copenhagen.
As quoted by Steyn, George Monbiot snarls, “Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest. It was nice knowing you. Not that we really cared.” Meanwhile, Polly Toynbee shrieks, “What would it take? A tidal wave destroying New York maybe – New Orleans was the wrong people – with London, St. Petersburg, and Shanghai wiped out all at once.”
Avatar is the CGI-enhanced, $400 million version of the dark dreams peddled by Monbiot and Toynbee. It’s a suicide fantasy, the Hollywood blockbuster equivalent of a troubled teenager’s notebook sketches, scribbled by someone who hates himself only marginally less than he hates the rest of the world. To elaborate further, I must include some mild spoilers from the movie’s plot – although, really, if you’re more than twelve years old, you already know exactly what happens in this film. The only element of mystery awaiting you is finding out who kills the bad guy. I promise not to ruin that.
Science fiction and fantasy provide a storyteller with the fantastic power of an infinite blank canvas, upon which any setting can be created, to sustain any sort of plot. In Avatar, James Cameron has created a world that justifies the smug arrogance and bitter alienation of the radical environmentalist. The alien world of Pandora really is a maternal Gaia spirit, with every bit of the flora and fauna connected in a mystical web that capitalists and soldiers are too blind and stupid to see. The alien Na’vi really are what infantile liberal mythology has made of the American Indian: innocent, peace-loving, simple, and so harmonious with nature that they can literally plug it into their pony tails. Lacking the conflict and flaws that make the Indians so fascinating and tragic, the Na’vi are utterly boring, aside from the heroine brought vividly to life by a remarkable performance from Zoe Saldana. The childlike environmentalist daydream of a “perfect” society, sustainably at peace with Mother Nature, is captured in the image of the Na’vi tribe snuggled in hammock-like leaves, embraced by the vast branches of their goddess tree. No ambitions, no failures, no questions, no achievement, no future. These giant blue aliens leave absolutely no carbon footprint.
What happens to this wish-fulfillment watercolor of eco-paradise? Why, greedy idiots with guns and bulldozers show up to mow it down, of course. Humans suck, man. They deserve to die… and die they do, in a hail of arrows, fangs, teeth, and lots of screaming plummets from great heights. All those military toys beloved by the right-wing warmongers of the military-industrial complex prove to be useless against the righteous fury of an aroused Gaia and her chosen champion, a redeemed soldier who has seen the error of his ways. Take that, Marine killbot slaves of Big Business.
During the big battle scene, as dinosaurs were chowing down on soldiers, the middle-aged couple seated next to me were grinning happily… delighted by the defeat and destruction of their own miserable species. The dialogue in Avatar makes it clear that humanity’s future depended on the success of the Pandora mission. “We sent the aliens back to their dying world,” intones the hero, narrating scenes of the defeated humans as they’re perp-walked off the planet, just the way environmentalist radicals have dreamed of handling the executives of Exxon-Mobil. Earlier, the hero tells Pandora’s nature spirit about the evil of his fellow man: “They killed their mother, and they’ll kill you.” Good thing for the universe we’re doomed!
Just as Cameron brings the primitive superstitions of radical environmentalism to life on Pandora, his portrayal of the human invaders matches the stereotypes held by campus crusaders of Big Business and its blood-for-oil military stooges. The corporate and Marine villains of Avatar are incredibly stupid. For one thing, if the fate of humanity rests on the Pandora mission, you’d think the governments of Earth could find someone other than a backstabbing middle-management weasel and a blatantly psychotic colonel to run the show. Even if you can accept their moral bankruptcy, their incompetence is shocking. It never occurs to them to solve their Na’vi problem with a missile from orbit – and they’re explicitly shown watching orbital surveillance of the gathering alien armies. For that matter, they could have nuked the troublesome Na’vi goddess tree from orbit, then arrived at the blast site with medical supplies and tearful condolences for the horrible cosmic tragedy of a “meteor” they just couldn’t stop.
The villains are also as willfully blind as the Left imagines its capitalist boogeymen to be. They laugh down the report of a scientist who obviously knows what she’s talking about, and has hard evidence to back up her position. They also clearly never bothered to read the best-selling book on Na’vi culture written by said scientist, because if they had, they could have used their miraculous cloning technology to whip up a swarm of sacred milkweed pods and a big red dragon, and flown into their negotiations with the aliens as epic heroes of legend. They also could have made those negotiations, and violent conflict, completely unnecessary by simply tunneling horizontally into the huge deposit of vital minerals beneath the Na’vi tree city. But, you know, capitalists prefer genocide to creative thinking. Bullets are so much cheaper than drilling equipment.
The key to understanding the intentions behind Avatar, and the response of its audience, is to remember that the tale is set in the far future, and we are never shown the suffering billions dying on a ruined Earth. This is a suicide fantasy, exactly like those many of us indulge as teenagers: we’re so much wiser, smarter, and empathic than the bummer adults running the world around us. They don’t understand the mystic truth burning in our young hearts. They’ll be sad when we’re gone, and they’ll finally realize how righteous we were. They’ll finally understand their grim obsession with money and material goods is soul-crushing, because they’ll be standing over the pulverized dust of our radiant souls. Death and tragedy will tear the scales from their eyes.
The can of holistic whup-ass opened by the magical world of Pandora at the end of Avatar comes from the same grocery of doom that supplies George Monbiot and Polly Toynbee with their nightmares. Read their words again, and understand they don’t really believe those things will happen – no one is stupid enough to believe the twaddle about submerged cities dispensed by the global-warming cult. They want those things to happen. They daydream about glaciers melting and creating tidal waves that deposit soggy clumps of coral reef and rainforest in the middle of London. They shudder with orgasmic delight as they imagine drowning capitalists and politicians coughing out a spray of ice water, dodging the enraged polar bears swept into Fleet Street by the morning tide, and crying “George! Polly! You were right! You were right all along, and we were so blind… Save us!” But it will be too late, and George and Polly will only be able to fold their arms and blaze with smug satisfaction, glowing bright enough to remain clearly visible as they sink into the frigid depths.
Avatar was written by a man who thinks those who disagree with his environmentalist obsessions are so blind that, in the future they will create, the last decent man in the universe will lead a far more noble alien race to victory over us, and literally renounce his humanity as part of his reward. James Cameron invites you to join him in the most beautifully rendered adolescent daydream of suicide ever created, and share his sense of righteous superiority over those who refuse to applaud at the end. I’m a sucker for good-looking dragons, so I gave him a golf clap for those.
“All those military toys beloved by the right-wing warmongers of the military-industrial complex prove to be useless against the righteous fury of an aroused Gaia and her chosen champion, a redeemed soldier who has seen the error of his ways.”
Except that her chosen champion only wins because he has a couple of grenades…
I long for the old days, when Americans were the good guys. Heck, when ordinary people were the good guys. I suppose I’m just not sophisticated enough to wish for the destruction of my race. And I never will be.
[...] AVATAR as suicide fantasy. [...]
Mother Goose Marxism at its best.
Avatar’s dumb plot tanked … beaten in week 3 by … wait for it … Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Cameron will lose hundreds of millions of dollars.
LOLOLOLO
All-in-all I’d rather think of this as a post-Kelo attack on left-wing eminent domain practices in which the earth Government tries to steal land from religious fundamentalists (the naavi) for commerical government advantage. Although the villains are poirtrayed as employees of a private corporation the military hardware they have and the military forces at their disposal suggest that this is a government sanctioned and government-supported operation. Now, which political faction believes in sezizing private proerty for public purposes? O yeah.
And the evidence that Cameron believes in anything but his money and his box office is …
He’s punishing us with boring, soulless, braindead visual wonder — it’s the nonbrain dead viewers who want to commit suicide.
Michael Moorcock already did this one in his Eternal Champions books, of course, his hero spent eternity cursed because of his betrayal of his own people.
Since I very much doubt Cameron did half as good a job, I am waiting for the DVD version of this one.
Thanks for the review Doc. Now I know not to waste my time on seeing the flick in the theater.
Nice call Gary Greenberg above.
I saw Avatar on IMAX 3-D and loved it despite the bad plot. Yes, it was extremely predictable and preachy, but the visual effects were awesome.
Movies are so lame these days that I prefer reading the reviews more than actually watching them. I give this review 3 Pulitzers out of a possible 5. If you hadn’t been so faint of heart and given up who kills the bad guy, you might have scored higher.
I haven’t seen Avatar and don’t intend to, but it seems to be another expression of the anti-technology spirit seen in Titanic. The great passenger liner, the finest maritime achievement of its time, goes to the bottom as the result of arrogance and folly.
The idea of moral superiority for The Chosen Few goes back a long ways in pop culture. Take old 50′s era sci-fi, where typically The Chosen Few would tell their unheeding and unworthy overlords not to [fill in the blank]. But of course, those in charge brushed off the advice, and catastrophe ensued.
The formula gets resurrected from time to time. In Jurassic Park, for instance, the Monied Owners ignored Jeff Goldblum’s ‘don’t mess with nature’ advice.
Once in a while, though, a more meaningful theme somehow breaks through. ‘Forbidden Planet’, like Shakespeare and Pogo before it, realized that we have met the enemy and he is us. ALL of us, that is – not just that guy over there we don’t like.
If that’s not a message appropriate for Christmas, I don’t know what is.
Well, that has to be oneof the best essays and analyses I have EVER read.
Just excellent.
Avatar is just another movie glorifying treason a la Dances with wolves. Only in this case they had to make it a cartoon because there aren’t any more “natives” stupid enough to fall for it again…
Lighten up. This is the classic American movie of the little guys prevailing over the big bad guys. Half of all the John Wayne westerns have exactly the same theme, greedy cattle baron tries to drive out poor hardworking ranchers. Yes, the story was juvenile, but you just had to enjoy the graphics, they were fantastic.
Avatar’s story is so stupid I think this was intentional. After all, the whole point of the film is its beautiful visual part, thanks to computer vision achievements of last decade. The people who made this possible are computer scientists and the eeevil companies creating the computer effects. The pictures are the main point. Plot is nothing.
It is the main problem of the Hollywood: they do not have interesting content, only form. But computer games have even the better form: they are interactive. So Modern warfare 2 gets more money in first five days than Avatar. This will lead to decrease in investments etc.
Nice piece. You keep suggesting these are the fantasies of young people, but the examples you give of gullible people who believe it all (including the middle-aged couple in the theatre) are all boomers–Monbiot the youngest, born 1963.
It seems you can get the boomers to believe anything if you start by saying they are smarter and more sophisticated than anyone who’s ever lived, and if you reinforce cliches like: nature good, human beings bad; capitalism is going to kill us somehow.
We can all hope the actual young people of today are getting used to the realization that boomers are generally wrong about everything, so that they can do better in the future.
“The dialogue in Avatar makes it clear that humanity’s future depended on the success of the Pandora mission.”
Huh? Did you watch the same movie?
There was nothing in the movie that implied that the Pandora mission was some kind of last ditch effort to save Earth. It was a private enterprise looking for some minerals.
To quote another James Cameron movie:
“I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
He knows better, he chose to make the humans stupid.
Misanthropy.
Does anyone remember the John Carter Mars novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs? Avatar is the movie version – too bad Cameron didn’t stick that storyline. But unfortunately, in the Mars novels, the Earthman was a heroic good guy who joined up with the good guys on Mars to defeat the bad guys on Mars. That is contrary to the modern ethos that has to be the bad guys.
But the rest of the story is there – transmission into body on another planet, romance with princess, exotic beasts much fiercer than ordinary earth beasts.
And Royalty. Note how Avatar has royalty & subjects. Hereditary, yet. The Greens are romantics, and must have their Noblemen. Of course, each Green knows, in his heart, that HE is one of the nobility. The rest of us are really just around to worship them.
I’d love to see the 3D used for peaceful purposes, though. Imagine 3D sports, or opera!
“That is contrary to the modern ethos that has to be the bad guys” should have been “That is contrary to the modern ethos that – insert our side – has to be the bad guys.”
You know, I was going to see this in spite of the stupid plot but after reading this, fvck Cameron and the Sarah Jessica Parker he rode in on.
As a White Male Christian, I am sick and tired of being made the butt of the wolds problems. I am sick of giving my money to a morally bankrupt enterprise like Hollywood. Let the place burn to the ground for all I care. My money made you and it can break you too.
Gotham didn’t need a Joker but Hollywood damn sure could use one.
The movie was a brilliant repudiation of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Rove, and Palin. I loved it and saw it twice. If we ever elect Republicans again, we’ll see Earth destroyed long before 2154.
Here’s the most obvious one – they have advanced technology to create these “avatars,” but they can’t make the hero physically walk again? Yeah. Sure.
Hey Brian,
Don’t worry, you probably won’t see another Republican in the WH. Here is what you Will see 1) Rapture 2) Tribulation 3) 1000 years of peace 4) Satan’s return only to completely destroyed taking along all of his liberal followers 5) Jesus running things forever. Please keep in that during the Tribulation you will see Global Warming like no human can image and war like man has ever seen. That will be the price people will pay for being a liberal. That is why today exist, Christmas, so man won’t have to experience such a fate. The choice is yours. The outcome will decided by Jesus. That is what justice is all about.
Dances With Wolves…In Space …not to mention that the plot is based on a 50 yr old SF short story.
Putting aside all the pertinent facts that have been pointed out what truly disturbs me is that hack Cameron supposedly has options on “Forbidden Planet” and will someday destroy that 50′s classic.
Shakespeare’s plays were performed at the Old Globe theatre;
Both the plays and the theatre had multiple levels.
Groundlings see only the 3D CGI of Avatar.
Left and Right see black and white.
I see a warning, and a promise;
Grow like a cancer, and you will kill your host.
Master yourselves, and become as gods.
The Terrans have nothing the Na’Vi want, and
the Na’Vi have everything the Terrans need.
Brian G. and “hiscross”,
Are either of y’all for real?
Tom R.: The paraplegia was explained as available, but too expensive for those in the equivalent of the VA system… Which plainly read to me as a slap at the current health care system. The mobie had quite a few little snippets of heavy-handed didactic lines like that peppered throughout.
The Dr. Zero analysis is spot on.
“The movie was a brilliant repudiation of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Rove, and Palin. I loved it and saw it twice. If we ever elect Republicans again, we’ll see Earth destroyed long before 2154.”
Well, you just keep doing Hollywood’s heavy lifting Sparky because me and my wallet are shruging.
I took my Avatar money and bought the Smokey and the Bandit Pursuit pack instead. At least they don’t piss down my back and tell me its raining.
In the first incarnation of 3-D movies, back in the 1950s, Hollywood wasted the medium on cheezy side-show horror flicks. I was looking forward to seeing AVATAR, but it sounds like this effort, while an a technical advance in stereo photography, is still stuck in the shallow end of the pool as far as story is concerned.
Ross Douthat for the NY Times had a great article recently describing Avatar as a defense of the religion known as Pantheism.
In my words its a 400 million dollar commercial for Pantheism.
<> Ross Douthatt
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/opinion/21douthat1.html?_r=2&em
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Melissa Clouthier, Michael Mealling and topsy_top20k, topsy_top20k_en. topsy_top20k_en said: #avatar as suicide fantasy: http://bit.ly/8VaAiF (could someone please take Cameron's tech and make a _real_ movie?) [...]
I’ll echo Anachronda’s comment: the aliens won because they adopted Earth technology and tactics, so anyone who thought they needed nothing we had was wrong.
And if the humans had been able to adopt the biotechnology of Pandora, they’d have been unstoppable.
I saw Avatar on 3-D Imax with my 18 year old son. The special effects were awesome. I told my film-buff son on the way out that he could have spent 20 minutes witht the script and made it the highest grossing film of all time with a couple easy switches. Have mankind and the Na’vi fighting an enemy that we could all root against. In the final fight scene you could feel the energy leave the sold out cinema. “Okay we suck and now we die . . . but it is pretty cool in 3-D!”. Cameron is either a total kill-joy or he knew what he was doing. No . . . he’s an idiot. He still could have the environmental theme and had humans and Na’vi’s as heros fighting someone else. Upon further reflection it is a total self-loathing suicide fantasy.
Some other scriptwriting points that bothered me: The defection of the female pilot was totally sexist. All male military bad . . . female not so much.
And why not give us something to make us hate the lead marine guy other than he’s a marine? Is Cameron so secluded that he assumes everyone will root against him just because he’s a former marine? Have him do a Darth Vader and kill one of his own subordinates or something.
And if you’re setting up sides to root for make it fair. So most humans are not in tune with nature as the Na’vi? Well maybe it’s because they don’t have a frigging tale that hooks up to nature like a friggin network cable!
Half way through I thought it was going to be the best movie I had ever seen. By the end I felt like I had watched a bunch of school children singing praise to Al Gore
Wow…..I just watched the movie and thought it was cool.
Yeah, “adolescent” about sums it up. And yes, we’re talking about middle-aged adolescents. It’s a state of mind, not a sum of years. Some Boomers are okay, but taken as a whole, they’ve never bothered to grow up. Nobody ever made them, so we’ve got a world lead by people with the mental outlook of a 16 year old. Any wonder the world is screwed up right now?
Avatar was a breakthrough CGI movie. The days of being forced to glue pointy ears on an actor, give him a bad hair cut, maybe paint him blue, and call him an alien, were over. Finally the director could have any kind of alien he wanted. And he chooses to make them 10 foot tall, blue-skinned Amerindians with tails. And pointy ears. Argh. Jar Jar Binks was a more interesting character. Seriously.
Failure of imagination. Same with the plot. Cardboard good guys, cardboard bad guys, cardboard plot, cardboard dialog. A dozen monkeys randomly pasting together movie cliches would have produced a more compelling script.
But Doc Zero really nails the gist of it. This isn’t a movie about humanity in all our complicated imperfection stumbling forward and learning, striving to survive and be better creatures. This is about us being irredeemably evil. And stupid.
I’d call it a childish movie, but frankly Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh are better written and more complex. Avatar’s plot maybe reaches the level of Wow Wow Wubzee or Dora the Explorer. I think you have to sink down to Teletubbies to find a less developed plot.
Astounding that so many adults of Cameron’s generation are so immature. But once you realize that, the rest of our problems make a whole lot more sense.
Oh, I should say “10 foot tall, blue-skinned caricatures of Amerindians. Real Indian tribes would have been way more interesting.
Haha — I guess we “liberals” are even dumber than the blockheads portrayed in the film. Problem is, if this is a liberal “fantasy,” let us have it. Because as simplistic as the bad guys were allegedly portrayed, greeting the natives with calvary, troops armed with machine guns, and forced relocation is pretty much ACTUALLY what went down in American history.
So what about this movie is so unrealistic again? Or how were the bad guys — we humans — overdone? The Pequot Massacre, King Philip’s War, Trail of Tears, Sand Creek Massacre, and the end of the “Indian Wars” at Wounded Knee in 1890? Are these examples too much?
Hello?
From: http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/2009/12/avatar-a-suicide-fantasy-1.html
Question to “Realist” (sic):
Do the people (like him) worrying about the “shabby treatment of the native Americans” refer to such events as, say, the near-total wiping out of the Huron nation — warriors, squaws, and children — and the theft of the land of the Apaches? Well, then it might interest them that the people who wiped out the Hurons were the Iroquois and that those who stole the land of the Apaches — and who did their utmost to wipe out the people of Geronimo — were the Comanches…
What is really galling about modern-day political correctness is that the revision is NOT a search for deeper truth; it is trying to bring across — what can at worst be termed a lie and what can at best be termed a fairy tale — the (false and rather ridiculous) idea that the Indians were almost akin to peaceful Tibetan Buddhists, stating that any other judgment is not “appropriate” and little short of scandalous.
It is/was not appropriate to treat the Indians as savages? Not in today’s times of political correctness, perhaps, which, again, is the effort to pass along the fairy tale that Indians were this super-race of peaceful and ecological beings in tune with the Earth. In fact, never in the history of the planet, perhaps, have there been peoples who fought as savagely as North America’s Indians. After conquering the Aztecs, the Mayas, and much of Latin America, Spanish conquistadors were basically stumped on their move up through Northern America past Mexico. And many years later, European colonists had much less trouble conquering Africa than they did North America.
Indian warfare was anything but even close to civilized. Often, the entire enemy tribe was wiped out, men, women, and children (except for the prisoners necessary to replenish the tribe’s losses) and more than once, deaths came as a result of the most horrifying torture. Perhaps some will claim that this was payback, that the Whites brought this onto themselves, or that it was a “struggle for survival”.
Two remarks: first, it is remarkable that so-called human rights defenders who go berserk excoriating the Whites’ “theft of land” (not to mention slavery, bombing during World War II, and the atrocities, alleged or otherwise, of modern-day American troops in Iraq, in Vietnam, etc etc etc etc etc) should suddenly find torture, baby-killing, genocide, and land appropriation OK when performed by a foreign “culture” (here, suddenly, judgment is inappropriate).
Second, as stated with the Hurons above, this has nothing to do with Whites per se (and thus an alleged struggle for survival), as this was the way of war among tribes themselves! (See the Iroquois and Comanche treatment of, respectively, the Hurons and Apaches above.) Then again, modern anti-Americanism (and rants about “terrifying allegories of modern America”) usually has to do with constructing simplistic fairy tales in which America’s enemies or adversaries are depicted as nothing less than wholesome, peace-loving saints and strong American reactions to them are depicted as nothing but entirely GRATUITOUS and inappropriate.
As far as land theft is concerned, references to “Dancing with Wolves” ain’t all bad. In the beginning of Lt. Dunbar’s trek west, we see Kevin Costner and his (disgusting) companion traveling with their wagon mile after mile over unclaimed and unsettled land. Surely, it should not be totally incomprehensible that a family fleeing over-populated Europe should not find it abnormal to settle down on a piece of land and find it exaggerated that after months of work and planting and seeing no strangers, a band of warriors should ride up and claim the family was staying on the Indians’ land? (As, indeed, happens with the family of the little white girl who grows up to become Stands With a Fist.)
Surely, it should hardly be incomprehensible that when that family rode up to their neighbors’ home (scores of miles away), they should deem it “savage” to find the house burning down, the wife and son dead and scalped, the baby with its head bashed in, and the husband tied to four posts in the ground with gashes all over his body and his privates cut off and stuffed into his mouth…
Smurfahontas.
Perhaps I didn’t spend so much time reading political allegory into it but I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. The CGI was terrific, the ways in which the Na’vi integrated the hero into their culture was charming and well done, and the battle scenes were pretty epic. You really had to ignore the preachiness, the obvious irony of the Na’vi being a warrior culture while experiencing no real war amongst themselves, and the cardboard cutout of Capitalism (or Mercantilism, really, since the miners are sponsored and supported by the gov’t). Truly, everyone that I saw the movie with had no trouble at all ignoring these things and just enjoying themselves.
Now, there *is* a deeper issue here and you are sort of getting at it. But I think you overestimate the power and influense of the Monbiots and Toynbees: there really is very little appetite for suicide amongst the general citizenry (witness the failure of Copenhagen). And you underestimate the degree to which people will resist being reduced to their economic appetites. No one wants to be identified with the miners in this movie – they are a$$holes of the highest order. But I doubt very many want to be identified with a desire to exploit resources for profit at any *cultural* cost, either. And this is particularly true of cultural conservatives.
Do you have to support strip-mining a nature preserve to be a conservative? No – of course not. And wouldn’t a libertarian oppose the use of force to displace the original owners of the land? Yes, they would. So I would really disagree with your underlying thesis that the movie is a kind of “conservative versus liberal” matchup with the caveat that both are just taken to the extreme.
So, whose economic theory is really being criticized here? Wouldn’t it be fair to say that it is really an indictment of mercantilism – that nasty mix of government sponsorship and private profit that proved instrumental in the age of exploration and that – *gasp* – the Democratic party is trying to bring back to the modern world with its “intelligent” management of the economy?
Being more of a small-l libertarian and a Christian, I obviously didn’t identity with the miners and it was pretty clear that the Na’vi were a kind of adolescent fantasy. In the end, I was pretty happy to see the Na’vi chase the greedy, rootless, state-sponsored, irreligious assholes off of their land.
Plus, did I mention how good the CGI was?
I found Avatar visually stunning, yet rather boring and unengaging.
Cameron has the same problem that George Lucas has, an emotional detachment that makes it difficult to write characters that we really care about. As I sat and watched the awesome visual display, I kept wishing this was The Lord of the Rings instead of Dances With Wolves.
I explored this idea more at my blog – http://edbrenegar.typepad.com/leading_questions/2009/12/whats-at-stake.html
[...] Posted on December 26, 2009 by bkingr this is a great read and a fun take on the new smurf native movie. Takes down radical earth loving environmentalists [...]
so,after reading the review—
this is “Dances with Wolves” except the natives win???
“The Indians Won” has been done;
In the book, Amerindians back from
the Civil War teach the tribes to fight
like a White Man.
Funny how we were worng to move into a foreign land (white into North America or Africa) but it is wrong to deny anyone from maintaining their old culture 100% when they come to ours (various ethnic ghettos within most major Western cities)
I have not seen Avatar and will not our of sheer disgust from what I have heard.
If you want to see an actual good movie, go see Planet 51. It has the strangers arriving theme, lessons of tolerance and everything but it does it well and within the story and not some hamfisted slam over the head
what confuses me more than anything else is the way this fairly nonsensical diatribe against environmentalism, which, conveniently, is currently unprovable, turns into a vigorous rebuttal of your alleged anti-anti-colonialist diatribe on the Scribblings of the Metropolitician…. that is some big ass leap of faith, right there.