Avatar

By Tom Kando

We just saw James Cameron’s movie Avatar. At a cost of $400 million, and earnings of 1.1 billion during its first 3 weeks, it may break all the records, including Titanic, the previous record-holder and also a Cameron film. Story: Earthlings try to colonize the distant planet Pandora in order to exploit its mineral riches (a metal called Unobtanium). This leads them to wage a war of extermination against the native Na’vi. The Na’vi are noble savages who, unlike modern humans, live in harmony with nature. They are like American Indians in movies such as Dances with Wolves.
Scientist Sigourney Weaver has a clever Avatar program: She can put a human into deep sleep in a pod, and temporarily transfer his consciousness into an Avatar, i.e. a pre-fab Na’vi body. Such an Avatar can then go and mix with the Na’vi, to either befriend them, or to spy on them and harm them. The movie’s hero, Jake Sully, is one such individual. At first, he is sent as a spy for the terran (translate: US) military, but he turns native, like Kevin Costner did. Thanks to Sully, the Na’vi win the battle, and the earthlings are forced to return to - quote - “their dying planet.”

To begin with: I agree with everybody that the special effects are stunning and that the movie is a visual feast.

The problem with the movie is that (1) it is aimed at a 12-year old audience and that (2) it is full of political messages. Hemingway once said that writers should write stories, not messages. I don’t go to the movies to get sociology lessons, especially when I am already familiar with the material.

The film is drenched in political correctness. Now don’t misunderstand me, I am pretty politically correct myself. But why do I have to be told by Hollywood, in a really dumbed-down way, that:

1. Modernity is bad
2. Pre-industrial peoples are better and have better values.
3. Green is good. The destruction of forests is bad.
4. American military intervention overseas is cruel and heavy-handed

The Na’vi noble savage is so obviously modeled after groups such as the Sioux in Dances with Wolves, it’s almost embarrassing. The language, the rhetoric, the lifestyle, the mysticism, everything reminds you of some earlier film. When the hero hunts down and kills a deer-like creature, he thanks his prey and assures it that by eating it, they will join and become one. When hauling things cross-country, the Na’vi use drag sleds because, like American Indians, they haven’t invented the wheel. You recognize aspects of Kicking Bird and Wind-in his-hair from the Kevin Costner movie. One, a wise man, the other a hothead warrior who first wants to kill the hero, but then learns to love him... The movie is a melange of borrowed elements. Every five minutes I had a deja vu, whispering to my wife, “ there goes Kevin Costner,” or “that’s right out of Apocalypse Now.”
The message, “Green is good” is also very thick. The destruction of Pandora’s rain forest is an obvious reference to what’s going on Brazil and elsewhere, including the loss of plants with medicinal value.

And then there is the military operation, which takes up almost the whole second half of the movie, to the point of tedium. Here, we see enormous airplanes, helicopters, stinger-like missiles, jungle warfare. It’s all so familiar, right out of footage from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s all about the heavy-handed and destructive way in which America has waged war around the world for decades. It’s obvious that the sky people are white and that they are Americans.

God knows I have criticized modernity myself (for example, I find Ken Wilber’s writings fascinating). But here, it’s all so simplistic. Don’t forget that the most virulent critics of modernity are Osama Bin Laden and his associates. That should make you pause. And as to the noble savage: Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto shows us a different face of pre-industrial civilization. He exaggerates Mayan cruelty, you say? A caricature? Maybe, but no more than Avatar, and probably less naive.

Another faddish idea is borrowed from the Matrix: when riding horselike and giant birdlike creatures, the Na’vi plug their own tails into part of their mount’s body, which connects the rider’s and the mount’s energies and consciousness. The idea that in order to achieve total connectedness, one-ness - “mind-meld,” one just needs to find a plug and an outlet, seems to have great appeal among the electronic generation.

The funny thing is that while reviewers recognize much of what I have just said, many of them still don’t get it: Take David Brooks who wrote on January 9 in the NY Times that the movie Avatar is an “offensive antique” (and he is not alone). He writes about what I call the Tarzan syndrome. He deplores the fact that in this movie, as so often in the past, it takes a white man to save the natives. According to him, then, Avatar is still patronizing, Eurocentric and racist. People like Brooks remain unable to shake their white guilt, and they will go to the end of the earth to be PC. The problem with this movie is not that it is racist. It’s that it is a cliche.

Overall grade: B leave comment here