In Between Sermons, Avatar a Stunning Experience
Director James Cameron set himself up to fail with Avatar, his first feature film since 1997’s Oscar-winning Titanic.
Cameron all but promised Avatar would reinvent the way we look at 3-D movies. And darn if he didn’t live up to his own hype.
Avatar is a thing of beauty, a 3-D movie of clarity and power. And, at a time when the special effects bar is raised with every new blockbuster, Cameron’s film sends that bar rising through the rafters.
So why did he retrofit his film with an immature Iraq war meme and, much worse, politically loaded dialogue that rips you right out of the movie time and time again?
The futuristic film stars Sam Worthington as Jake, a partially paralyzed Marine who agrees to go back onto the battlefield in order to glean information about the Na’Vi, a blue-skinned race living on the planet Pandora.
Their planet is loaded with a mineral called unobtainium that doubles as a energy source. The military — and its corporate tag team partners — need to retrieve the mineral because the Earth’s resources are depleted.
You’d think by the year 2154 we’d have solved those pesky green solutions like solar power, hydrogen cells, and wind-driven turbines.
But before you can say “no blood for unobtanium,” Jake starts to identify with the tall, elegant creatures who agree to teach him their culture for less than clear reasons. He’s particularly fond of Neytiri (voiced by Zoe Saldana of Star Trek), a beautiful 10-foot-tall humanoid whose gruff exterior quickly melts away.
Suffice it to say, the creatures respect nature to a fault, going so far as to apologize after killing a creature for sustenance or survival. That probably means little to the slain creature, but it makes the Na’vi feel so much better.
Jake is a Marine on a mission, but after becoming enmeshed in the alien culture he starts to question the military’s plan for Pandora.
The film echoes the war in Vietnam when the military starts strafing innocent Na’vi from above, but the biggest ideological sights are set on this country’s adventures in the Middle East.
Phrases like “shock and awe” pour out of the actors’ mouths, instantly ripping us out of the story and back into the last op-ed column we’ve read.
Why a filmmaker as smart and gifted as Cameron would use reportedly $300 million to immerse us in a unique fantasy only to yank us out of it is a mystery for the ages.
Then again, in Hollywood, ideology too often trumps all.
So would you compare this movie more to “Birth of a Nation” and “Triumph of the Will” that advanced the techniques of film making while advocating a point of view that future generations of film students will try to overlook or is it just more popular dreck like “Dances With Wolves”?
Support more leftist propaganda? Nope. . I am voting with my wallet, and keeping my money.
I saw the movie twice, and I did not see it as trying to portray the Iraq war at all. Remember, the script for this thing was written almost twenty years ago. Cameron was not able to make the film until now because he had to wait until the 3-D technology came up.
Now he certainly had the military in the film use military phrases like “shock and awe” and “terror” but I don’t think it was political commentary. As the author points out, there is no analogy between Iraq and the film. Plus, they were not solider, they were ex-soldier, mercenaries. Plus the main character says something like “these guys used to be marines, defenders of freedom and democracy, now they are just hired guns.” So Cameron, if he is taking a shot at anyone, is taking at businesses that hire mercenaries.
You are so easily pleased, young man.
I guess I couldn’t agree more. 300 million dollar film with a 50 cent script. You come out stunned in both ways you mention. However, even though this might qualify as Soviet art it’s a great movie experience, nonetheless. The previews for Johnny Depp in Wonderland look fantastic. I’m looking forward to that one.
Only 74 million domestic opening.
I, for one, will not spend any thing on advancing Cameron’s agenda no matter if it transported me to theatrical Heaven.
Just so no. Paying money to them is the same as giving a Jihadist a sword.
Gee, the parallels are far closer to Roman conquest of Britain.
http://resourcesforhistory.com/celtic_druids.htm
(sacred grove being the key point that broke the British Resolve; the tactics and thoughts, and for that matter BLUE BODY PAINT, female warriors, etc. etc.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudica
certainly on his interview on studio 360, Mr. Cameron specifically mentioned this example first (he did not like Vietnam nor Iraq conflicts, but was not far left on the interview).
I think the original author has deep misgivings and guilts about Iraq which are coloring perceptions.
Actually, I saw less Gulf War in this movie than than did Mr. Toto. I thought it was more of an old-fashioned cowboys & indians western, with an overarching ecological theme.
I saw it yesterday. i will say that the politics is definitely there. for like 5 minutes. then it goes back to its dances with wolves in space theme.
And i might add there is a big hole in the plot. they never explain why the humans just don’t take Weaver’s advice in Aliens: “nuke it from orbit.” I mean, i am sure cameron can come up with an answer to that question, but i wanted to hear it.
that being said, while the story is predictable, i think in a weird way it is not the point. the point is the amazing creation of this world.
In that area, i suspect a strong influence of a source most people are not mentioning: orson scott card. card loves to replay the clash of cultures with native americans, sometimes even in space, and to find ways to make what is normally pagan BS into literal truth. But bluntly, Card was much better at this and less predictable. for instance, speaker for the dead was as much about a human’s dirty secrets as a rerun of the native american thing. and while he likes to turn some of that pagan BS into literal truth, he still recognizes the value of modernity, and would expect those creatures to want to use human tech. and his explanation of the clashes of cultures are frankly better. he presumes humans won’t nakedly kill for land alone, and comes up with other issues. so for instance, in the beginning of “Speaker” a human is killed by the aliens in a truly horrific way and without provocation. That’s a real issue that the character has to really diffuse.
And it is very likely Cameron has read what card has written. Card did write the novelization of the abyss, if memory serves. they really have very similar sensibilities, only Cameron is a more classic liberal and card is more of a joe lieberman liberal. I won’t call it a rip off exactly, but it certainly has alot of Cardian notes in it.
So, is this a movie where we’re supposed to cheer for the aliens to win over humanity?
That’s it. I knew it had a western feel.
Dances With Wolves In Space.
Why didn’t they nuke the tree(s) from orbit?
If you dynamite your own mine shaft, then it’s much harder to mine the gold.
I don’t understand.
If Vice President Cheney used the words “Shock and Awe”, and Cameron wrote the movie script 10 years ago – why did not Cameron say something then about Cheney using his verbiage.
Or – is Cameron pulling somebodys leg about how long ago he wrote the script?
So why did he retrofit his film with an immature Iraq war meme and, much worse, politically loaded dialogue that rips you right out of the movie time and time again?
I went to see this film in a fairly middle american mall, and I heard no one make this complaint. Nearly everyone loved it from top to bottom. And I don’t think anyone saw a connection specifically with Iraq, though some people probably thought twice about the excuses made to get the public to back what would obviously be resource driven wars. And certainly it was a refreshingly realistic portrayal of what military service in other countries does to people’s value for life. And before you start, my son’s in the Marines, so I don’t want to hear it; he’s complained of the same mentality the jarheads in that film have, the arrogance and hubris of their supremacy simply because they’re armed when no one else is.
Those were themes that was quite salient throughout the film, but it was obviously, to anyone with a modicum of intelligence, not a metaphor for Iraq. You have to be the stupidest critic out there. I was wondering how you’d handle this, and I have to say, i didn’t think it would be this badly.
Mark, do you understand what Triumph of the Will and Birth of a Nation are about? It seems unlikely. To say something like that, you’d have to have no idea of what bigotry is.
During the final battle (on the ground)…
When one of the grunts looks at his equipment, and says he’s got movement…
I just wish another grunt would have said, You’re not readin’ it right!
A couple of other things that I wish had made it into the script:
The Company is revealed to be the forerunner to the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and they have plans to deploy a new terraforming 1.0 technology, but it’s not working well on Pandora. They need the unobtainium in order to drive the terraforming equipment on this and other planets or moons.
The company try to utilize an “artificial person” who does not need to breathe, but the hostile denizens of Pandora quickly destroy the android. Maybe Michelle Rodriguez’s character (the attack helicopter pilot) could have been the artificial person in this role.
Grace Augustine (played by Sigorney Weaver) is Ellen Ripley’s greatgreatgreat grandmother.
The alien Na’vi are the same species as to be the fossilized remains seen in Alien, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Jockey_%28Alien%29 , although I don’t know how this could be done. Maybe showing that the Na’vi take to the stars after the events shown in the film.
As usual, the bad guys are white males, slaughtering the peaceful natives for their land. Ho hum- another Liberal agenda film. Why are none of the bad guys black? or Asian? or any other color?
In Between Sermons, Avatar a Stunning Experience
Not knowing he said it, he said it:
The 3D effects increase the intensity of the
visual _experience_, but the reason Cameron
waited 20 years was for the CGI to arrive;
Anyone whose suspension of disbelief is in
working order was instantly transported
to Pandora.
As to the tender-hearted, peaceful natives;
Musashi would have assumed a defensive stance
on seeing the Na’Vi for the first time;
They are that realistically lethal;
Controlled, sublimated by a saner society
than the tapped-out Terrans, still lethal.
The ‘sermons’, more accurately propaganda,
are there to please the overseas audience,
who like some america-bashing with their
popcorn (roast rat on a stick, whatever).
As for Dances with Wolves; Any resemblance
between actual Amerinds, the ones in DwW,
and the Na’Vi is due to lack of learning.
The Na’Vi are not supersized human primitives
with tails; Their society, and their technology,
are _superior_ to those of the Terrans.
Examples:
They do not run around brandishing BFGs and
blowing up everything in sight, yet still manage
to win the war through coincidence control.
Anyone who thinks those floating mountains are
natural has not read enough SF; They are relics
of a less sophisticated (hard-tech) past.
The Queen of the Na’Vi also likes to take samples
and she don’t need no steenking Bio-Lab to do
the analysis; She simply tastes the DNA.
Terran biology does not have the neural networking
of the Pandorans; Bio-electronic avatars are a 2nd
rate add-on upgrade, a poor substitute for the
real deal.
The Jarhead was right: The Terrans have nothing
the Na’Vi want, and the Na’Vi have everything
the Terrans need.
Well, I tell a lie: If the Na’Vi had been opposed
by the Borg, the Berserkers, or any of the xeno-
phobic planet-killers found in the SF universes,
they would have lost, unless, of course, their
ancestors left a protective Halo around Pandora,
for use only as a last resort.
Jake Sulley as Quannah Parker in “Comanches in Space”? i got the native American thing right away, dream walkers… but the scenery was cool. Ecology vs Technology, and the corporate greed vs what?, carbon credits? mercenaries are known for morals? it was more like Blackwater in space. still it was a good movie.
Dances with Smurfs…
The CGI characters are the best ever done. The CGI Scenery is the best ever done. We’re still not to the point where digital actors can replace actual humans, but we’re much closer.
The one premis that was completely ridiculous: that the U.S. Marine corps would do anything like was done vs the Na’Vi. We’re reading Miranda Rights to Terrorists AS WE LIVE AND BREATH NOW!
The premis of the movie was pretty baseless.
Other than that: it was a visual delight.
I was thinkin’ back how amazin’ it was that I was one of those kids who saw “Star Wars” over 100 times in the theaters in Upstate NY….How, back in the 70′s, where I lived, (in the Capital District), there weren’t many, many movie theaters and the movie going “experience” wasn’t as essential as it is today…Maybe that was because the U.S. had lost a good part of a generation with the Vietnam War, (those kids who grew up on Elvis and James Dean movies) and was still trying to find the appeal of the next generation …Can’ say for sure…I was a kid…But the few movie theaters that did exist were just “one big screen” and those theaters would book one film for 2- 3 weeks regardless if it was a stinker (“kids” films were just a part of a rotation)….Movies were maybe a $2-3 ticket and Drive-Ins were still an actual authentic family tradition…Television was only 3 or 4 channels that signed off at midnight..So there wasn’t as much hype about a movie in a theater involved as today…Because there were only three channels on TV, a great portion of the day was filled with programming that was unappealing to young kids, so you didn’t have the dependency on the TV set (or technology for that matter) to look after your kids…No Video..No Internet…No Home Video Games…Box-Office receipts were not a widely publicized “event”…Into this milieu came “Star Wars”…And I can only guess it was perfect for my grandparents and parents back then…Finally there was something in the theaters that had staying power for kids…You could sit a young adolescent boy down for at least 2 hours every week-end…and relax..It’s pretty amazing that I saw it as many times as I did because it took such coordination and organization to get to the movie theaters back then (piling into the Pinto and gassin’ up for the 40 min ride to the movies)..Theaters weren’t parts of malls…You couldn’t drop kids off for the day… I think today it’s more of a glut these days with multiplexes…Every week-end is the next big flick amongst 3-4 releases and it is more routine then “event” to see a movie on the week-end for young people..It more an “essential” part of a young person’s life these days, I’d say…Almost automatic, and I think young people are more acutely aware of the effect of marketing and the cynicism involved into the next “phenomenon”…So “Avatar” is not ridin’ the same wave that “Star Wars” did…definitely not in the U.S….The 3-D does give it a little isolation….but does it have staying power?…I don’t think the market could support it these days.
As far as the politics, from what I read about “Avatar”:
When I was in film school I remember one of my professors had us all read a radical interpretation of “Star Wars” in terms of it’s political psychology…Remember “Star Wars” was an icon for me…But I found my self enlightened and fascinated that they were some people out there who could look very deeply into that film and find certain aspects to it that had such precise implications. Anyways, in reading about “Avatar”, a lot of people talk about the liberal storyline of this film…but I can also see a conservative appeal there also…Having the marine in a wheelchair implies that this “hero” can no longer compete amongst his own…That he is impotent…The answer to that impotence is science and technology…The “Avatar”…This allows the hero a second chance at virility amongst a foreign element, an undeveloped competitor, thus he is an agent of that technology, (maybe even a parable to segregation in political discourses)…But here comes the warning of the film to conservatives…Basically it says why Affirmative Action does not work..Because if given the chance to revive one’s virility, a human agent of that technology will inevitably betray it’s own…even the provider of that virility….It’s a kind of subversion the film conveys in it’s narrative…Perhaps the sequel will probe the idea of having the N’avi (the “N” word) appropriate that technology to infiltrate the competitor’s population…(In the sense of Obama…or an Indian casino) and begin to incorporate that technology into their own populations as a defense mechanism….Just a few thoughts.
What film did you see, Toto? First off, I’m very right wing, very pro-war (I’d have started with nukes over Kabul and Baghdad) and I loved this film.
1- It’s not anti-military, they were mercenaries. The Marines were still “fighting for freedom back home”. And Even the bad mercs were tough and courageous. They just were taking their paychecks from the wrong people.
2- The N’avi weren’t just terran hippies, they had literal connections to their ecosystem through their nervous systems. Of course they would have a different attitude than we do.
3- Even the current local corporate bosses felt somewhat constrained by bad press back home, so they couldn’t “nuke the site from orbit” for PR reasons. Besides, it’s probably detrimental to your mining operations if you use nuclear weapons on your mine site.
@ 26. zapglow: Toto & Strawman
Exactly. Furtherandmore:
1) 50 cent plot > Realism
2) 2D characters > Normal;
No polymorphic perversity.
3) No humor > Potty or
misanthropic varieties.
I liked:
“If you play with that,
you’ll go blind.”
I still say he should have
provided Trucy Chacon with
an escape pod; this is the
2nd perfectly good Latina
warior he has wasted.
Cameron farced them all, and
they never even noticed.
You have it all wrong…it’s not Dances with Na’Vi in Space, it’s Ferngully in 3-D.
It was done Ten years ago, when it was called the Phantom Menace, the Gunguns are shorter versions of Na’vi, the Trade Federation is the corporation. Now these smurfs are keeping us from our resource, sorry it’s them or us, and I’m not picking them
I’m not even interested in seeing Avatar. I’m tired of humans being the enemy, of greed being the motivator du jour, and a southern accent being the meter of ignorance.
James Cameron can take his over priced, over indulgent, over special effected film and go to Copenhagen. It’s really cold there. Take boots, gloves and long underwear.
Dancing with Smurfs!! LOL!! Glad I wasn’t drinking coffee when I read that!!!!
Unbelievable effects.
Shallow character development.
Even shallower story line.
With that said it’s going to be very popular.
It’ll win what ever awards they have for films like that.
Avatar in 5 seconds
Can I haz planet?
No can’t haz!
*turns blue*
Now I haz planet!
OHNOES!
*Pew Pew*
really? The story is not this things selling point, never was. It’s all about the PEW PEW PEW of witch it has many (and it is awsome!)
I just saw the movie and loved it. I am also a conservative who is a staunch supporter of the military. To those who read a review and immediately decided that no “liberals” or “jihadis” will receive a dime from me, do yourself and favor and start making choices based on your own experiences, you might learn a thing or two.
The connection I saw most clearly was that of the US government’s policy towards Indians from about 1907 to the beginning of American history. Can anyone really argue that we did things the right way during those years, regarding our Indian policy?
My reliably conservative computer geeky twenty-something children came home all excited about how much they like this. They were comparing it to Orson Scott Card’s “speaker for the dead” (second in his Ender’s Game series). And yes, my son was very happy with the quality of the computer animation.
He had to wait TEN YEARS for the technology? That’s why the script is lousy and dated?
What did he do with those ten years if not update the script?
Lenin called apologists for his evil works “useful idiots”.
We’re reading Miranda Rights to Terrorists AS WE LIVE AND BREATH NOW!
You are dangerously ignorant.
Saw it last night on one of the smaller 3D screens. I am a rabid conservative and there really wasn’t anything particularly distracting in the story line. There were no sermons. There were bad people, ignorant people, and good people. It wasn’t that bad of a story, and especially considering that a movie only has a limited amount of time to try to explain what is going on. I think this article badmouthing this film is doing so just to get the attention of readers. It was good enough that I would like to see it again at an IMAX theater. It isn’t perfect, but it is amazing eye candy and far better than most of the crap that comes out of the industry using all of the high priced actors.
Another big change from the 70′s is that although like “Star Wars”
the film is a 20th Century Fox vehicle…Today, 20th Century Fox is a subsidary of News Corp…under Murdoch(and his young Chinese wife)…which hardly makes it an American asset…It’s just a laundering outfit tied into European and Asian markets…
Conservative + Hollywood = Liberal…The Hollywood “divine” ethos is just to cheat somebody.
Never take candy from strangers boys.
I’m tired of the ungrateful hypocrites in Hollywood! They care more today about the international market than the American market that gave them their first big shot at wealth. Even if this isn’t too preachy (I doubt it) I will wait for it to come out on Blue Ray or DVD and then me and my family (and a few friends) can see it much cheaper in the comfort and privacy of our home. Hollywood made billions off of American capitalism / free enterprise and generosity and now they support and encourage the gradual transformation of our government to a Socialist monstrocity. Future innovators will not be encouraged the same way they were since productivity will be punished. It’s a pretty pathetic sight.
Meh, I’m not so easily impressed by cartoons. I’ll wait until it hits cable. Heck, just the term ‘unobtanium’ has so little creativity in it, the rest sounds just as childish. So Americans are laying out millions of dollars to watch a cartoon with a dumbed-down psudo-liberal message(if not just a blatantly lazy storyline) that sounds as if it were written by the crew at MSNBC. Pass. The only movie this year I actually paid money to see was Zombieland, and it looks like the only one offered that doesn’t insult anyone’s intelligence, it was exactly what it was supposed to be. I would probably be hard pressed to choose to even watch it on cable if ‘Up’ was on another channel.
So Americans are laying out millions of dollars to watch a cartoon with a dumbed-down psudo-liberal message(if not just a blatantly lazy storyline) that sounds as if it were written by the crew at MSNBC. Pass.
Yeah, a credible view since you haven’t seen the movie.
This movie was awesome. I thought that the story line was well developed and the themes were classic. One man’s “anti-Iraq” theme is another man’s “anti-Roman Empire” theme. They are just themes. I did notice the “shock and awe” comment but I didn’t hear any other comments specifically directed at the Iraq war.
Unobtanium was kind of a dumb name … but that’s the only criticism I have.
The movie was excellent. Even my very Republican/Libertarian, former US Army Major husband thought so.
Guys, Gals; “Unobtainiun” is an insider’s joke,
one of several salted away in the script; It is
the non-existent element the engineers would have
to use to meet the design requirements written by
the marketing dept. Example: “This Ground-to-
Orbit spaceplane will need wing leading edges
made of Unobtainium to withstand the heating.”
I know we’re supposed to go with the “willing suspension of disbelief.” But while movie makers (and everyone) are entitled to their own opinions, they’re not entitled to their own facts. And yet movies with this exact same fundamentally flawed premise get made again and again and again: Humanity has depleted Earth of its resources (all resources, or just energy resources), and has to go somewhere else and take them from someone. This beginning premise is simply economically ignorant. We don’t run out of resources; we use them until their relative scarcity raises the price so high that we replace them with something else that is cheaper. We don’t still use whale oil, but there are still oily whales out there. We may not always use oil, but when we cease to do so, there will be a lot of oil left in the ground—we will never have pumped it all out and used it up.
So the problem is, we will never arrive at the situation justifying the irrational actions undergirding the story. Yet this economically illiterate premise underlies “Avatar” and so many other films. (“Independence Day”—the aliens had run out of resources, and went from planet to planet stripping planets dry, ostensibly.)
@David:
I can see where you would think that the premise is that the homeworld had run out of resources in Avatar or Independence Day. In Avatar there are a couple lines about the “dying world” back home or the ID4 aliens moving on like locusts. But I think these are metaphors or just rationalizations for the real motive of both invaders, at least in these specific movies. If the ID4 aliens had the resources to move their entire civilization from system to system undefeated, then it was probably a matter of choice to live the way they did. And the RDA was on Pandora for pure profit in the form of a specific mineral. It wasn’t lack of resources that necessitated either invasion, it was more about greedy people going for the gold as cheaply as possible with a callous disregard for the locals.
You’re perfectly correct about the relative scarcity of resources and the prices here on Earth. We’ll still have a lot of oil and coal in the ground after we’ve switched to something else. Just as the Vikings weren’t starving when they raided other lands, they were supplementing their economies with plunder.
@ 45. zapglow: Viking economy
“It is well enough, to go in Viking
as a youth, but when a man grows
older, he sees that the real wealth
is here at home, in the land.”
ID aliens = Zenophobic scum
Terrans needed Unobtanium to survive ?
@ M. Report:
Excellent quote.
And spot on with the ID4 aliens. Worse than H.G. Well’s Martians, who where at least driven to their plight by a dying ecosystem, contempt for the locals, and limited worlds within range for relocation.
I’m not ready to concede Unobtanium as necessary for Earth’s survival. I just don’t think the humans were desperate enough. Sure, the RDA acted like greedy bastards when push came to shove, but the situation had taken years to get this bad. They had tried trade negotiations, or at least their previous agents had. And they did balance direct assault against bad press at home. If the mineral was of direct survival value at home I’m not sure there’d be any significant civilian opposition. Also I think we’d have sent in the real Marines first and the miners later, unless the RDA was a corrupt contractor for a corrupt government. I think it was more about greed on the RDA’s part. Cheaper to kill the locals to get at “all that cheddar”.
You know what gets me is all the people who jump political in their reviews, automatically seeing a critique of Iraq. Sure, there are some throwaway lines, contemporary to this decade. All movies have that. But this plot device of one of “us” going “native” is well established. Edgar Rice Burroughs was doing it a hundred years ago on Mars, Venus, Africa, even the center of the Earth. C.J. Cherryh’s done it for several times. So did Heinlien, Thomas Berger, Rudyard Kipling, and at least half the cowboy movies made since 1960. Superman wasn’t born in Kansas, and he sure as hell preceded Vietnam and Iraq.
I agree with A.W. wholeheartedly. This is a DIRECT rip off of Orson Scott Card. Let me briefly summarize the relevant part of the Ender series: the humans encounter an alien race on a planet upon which the humans cannot breath. When the aliens die, they have a seed placed in their body. When the tree grows, it has absorbed their soul and is part of a huge, sentient network of their ancestors into which the aliens can tap and commune. Is any of this sounding familiar yet?
If I were Orson Scott Card, I’d be livid. Its as if Cameron took that one part out of the Ender series and just made it into a movie with a few extra pieces added to avoid having to pay royalties.
Zapglow, even War of the Worlds had an anti-colonialism theme built into it, though far more subtle than this one.
@ Javelin:
Depends on which version you’re referring to. The George Pal film was more about a redo of WW II, only with Martians and energy weapons rather than the Japanese or German militaries. The Spielberg film was more faithful to the book in that it at least contained more elements from the original source. The original book had a lot of references to colonialism to it, in that was a burning issue in Europe at the dawn of the 20th century. But I always thought that was just a mask for Wells’ eugenics cheerleading. He clearly thought that his Martians were the idealized blueprint for the human race in a progressive future. His early stories ended with a restoration of the old order, but he was obviously excited about the what he thought was the inevitable rule of a scientocracy in the future. If Wells had written Avatar the party looking to crush all opposition and rule both worlds wouldn’t be an aggressive military force, nor greedy corporate bosses, but the scientists themselves.
Sorry, but how can anyone overlook the typically leftish plot here (even though I dont see it so much in the light of the Iraq-war)? This is civilizational exhaustion at its best. Bad, Bad humans completely ruined earth with their capitalist greed and now an evil corporation tries to get its hands on the planet of peaceful and so much wiser aliens who live, of course, in complete harmony with nature, without any technology. Its the xenophilic and selfhating delusion mixed with strong eco-cult elements, a despise for the military and capitalism and the glorification of the never dying romantic image of the wise savage. Im not very impressed by pictures but the story is important for me and to talk about a “50 cent script” gives the story too much credit.
I saw the movie. Avatar is new age religion all the way, and made everyone to feel bad for not worshiping the creation.
The sacred tree, earth worship, and we all go back as energy to be reused.
It is a film to dazzal, and mislead millions away from the true truth. G-d so loved the world he gave his only begotten son to die for mankinds sin. Through Christ’s defeat of death and sin is the only way to everlasting life.
The movie is more like want happened before Noah’s flood. Half human hybreds,(giants, Nephelim, earth born, ruled the world, and corrupted DNA, and religion.
Perhaps, the Marine is the Anti-Christ connected to the Red Dragon leading mankind away from the true truth.
Way to go Hollywood. Worship yourself as a god, and creation, rather than the Creator.
The effects were so realistic that I was immersed into the movie and quickly forgot that I was wearing the glasses and experiencing a special effect.
With that said, I have to agree with Elize. I am impressed that so many of you can apply your knowledge of history and sci-fi in ways that interpret the movie differently, but for the left, this is pure Bush-bashing joy. After the line about fighting “terror with terror” a guy sitting right in front of me loudly said, “George W. Bush” for the benefit of anyone unable to pick up on the movie’s not so subtle politics.
One point I would add to the article in showing how this really isn’t relevant to current events is the difference in handling prisoners. The Na’vi pretty much send you home to Earth unharmed after the fighting is over. We all know what Al Quaeda does to prisoners, civilian or otherwise.
You are trying to have it both ways – first you blast the movie because you deem that it is targeting the Iraq situation, then you blast it for getting it’s blasting wrong, since you rightly point out the NaVi do not parallel the Iraqi regime very well at all and the US is not taking oil out of Iraq, like the humans are trying to take unobtainium off of Pandora. Could it not be that these latter points just mean that your first hypothesis is wrong – this film is not making any point about Iraq because as you yourself point out, it doesn’t fit. Remember, it was you, not the film-makers who made any such claim.
Broaden your perspective – if any commentary is there, I personally see it as a statement about situations like this which have repeated themselves incessantly throughout human history like an archetypal story – clashes of cultures, battles for dominance that ultimately involve misunderstanding and exploitation. There might be overtones of Iraq there but they clearly are not the main commentary, just an acknowledgement that hints of these deeper broader older themes and stories may exist there too.
I did also notice similarities to themes in the books of Orson Scott Card – except that Card does them with more subtlety and depth. Even so, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie.
Greetings to one and all: In that most precious name. That name which is above every name, the name: “Jesus”
There’s tremendous power in that name. I’d suppose we’ll never fully realize all that can truly be accomplished, by us simply calling out that name in true faith.
There’s an old, old, gospel song that goes like this: Faith in the Father, faith in the Son, faith in the Holy Spirit, great victories are won. Demons will tremble and sinners will awake, faith in Jehovah will anything shake.
For you who have never come into this realization, if you’re reading this, just give him a welcome into your heart and life. You will both feel and see an awesome difference. You will have also purchased the ticket to heaven (by accepting, therefore making him welcome to come into your life. You will also sup from His cup that contains living water. (As did the woman at the well of Bethesda.) John 4:10
Much love,
Your brother in Christ Jesus, who is both our Lord, and Savior.
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