Oh you got to be kidding me.....Learn Cherokee
Alternate title: Avatar, An Exercise in Escapist Pornography
Now, I’ve been biased against this film since I first saw the trailers, because honestly…I knew what I was going to see before I went in. James Cameron, the director of Titanic ("Gags) has made a movie where humans in the future land on an alien planet full of giant blue cat elves who live in harmony with nature, making a general environmentalist utopia (besides lack of indoor plumbing i suppose, thats just to be expected) . Then the big bad humans come in with their greed, selfishness, and decadence and try to destroy this paradise, until the main white characters comes and unites the primitives, I mean natives together in a great coalition and defeats the evil cooperation. Thus proving that spears with the power of love can beat bullets (just ask the Zulus…no wait). I knew that the movie would be pretty and have inventive new graphics, but ultimately would be lackluster propaganda, as I am very much not impressed by visuals. So I thought I would be leaving the film in a state of rage that might give me an ulcer. And that didn’t happen. The graphics didn’t impress me as much as I thought they would (which is saying a lot) and the plot didn’t annoy me as much as I thought it would, at least when I watched it. It was the next day when walking my dog that I was hit with intense ulcer inducing rage, for what the film represents, and I think i need a doctor. See also, Mediocre Pornographic Propaganda
The plot is exactly as I described it, except that the EVIL corporations have the ability to create these fake bodies of the native blue people (called Navi, and quite frankly, are about as annoying as that damned Zelda fairy). Basically, a humans plugs himself into a terminal and awakes in one of these artificial beings where he can walk around with his real body miles away. Maybe I’ve been jaded by the internet, but the first thing I thought when I heard a crippled white man was pretending to be a hot blue nature loving archer was “hey its just like World of Warcraft”. Oh right, the main character has lost the use of his legs, which adds whole levels of escapist subtext to the film, I’ll get to that later. Anyways, so our main character…I think his name was Jack. Actually, speaking of that, I’m not sure about the names of any of these characters. The main guy I have dubbed Mini Mel, as he does everything short of wearing a kilt in his big battle speech (in the DVD he blames the Jews for the invasion), who has his big “we must fight the invaders with our barbarian rawr” speech and pretty much exists as a Mel Gibson stand in, but not as good an actor…gods help us all. At random moments in the film, I swear an Australian accent suddenly emerged, even through the character normally sounds American.
OK , lets recap the plot.
The movie opens with Coming Home goes into Platoon, does a cleaner (see stupider) version of Matrix with a tip of the hat to Alien, then its out into the jungle where we replay Jurassic Park straight into Dances With Wolves, and finishes the jungle bits with a little of Dinotopia.
Back at the base we shift between Apocalypse Now and generic bad US military – corporate talk, (see Fern Gully), Back to the jungle we have Dances with Wolves/Braveheart/ Last Samurai/Apocolypse Now/Castles in the Sky/ Dynatopia/ Star Wars 3/Princess Monanokee/more Castles in the Sky/Apocalypse Now/The Matrix/ The hero and chick kiss and the curtain drops. At least I think it drops because I left the Theater after the defeated capitalist leave the planet. Feel free to fill in your own movies, because I’m not sure I got everything (some people have mentioned Dune which I haven’t read, and um, the Smurfs? Also there are some things taken from Titanic, does that count?)
The scenery of air ships attacking floating rocks in the sky is impressive, but lacking the complexity and depth that Castle in the Sky brought us, what we see here feels like a hollow attempt to capture another film's glory. Avatar is just a list of
1) How can you glorify nature when this MOVIE IS ONLY MADE POSSIBLE THANKS TO THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. Hell, this movie would only sell because our culture is so seeped in escapism and boredom that we have the luxury of seeing a Romanized jungle as an attraction. I mean, if you want to show man vs. nature, fine, and if you want to be anti imperialism, I’m down with that, but don’t play up the role of the Noble Savage if this movie's main selling point is its advanced 3-D graphics.
2) Ok, an actual movie point, this culture's not a culture. They have weird rituals, they love nature, awesome internet styled spiritual connection like connection with…everything and lack any sort of civil disunity. There are no problems in their society, a shallow portrayal of a society just the glamorized advertisements (like many of my college pamphlets). Its essentially a utopia. Ladies and Gentlemen, lets talk tribal societies for a second. The Native Americans and African tribes which this movie is blatantly copying were very advanced people with their own cultures, customs and depth. However they weren’t a utopia, they had their own flaws, which is why they lost. I"m Cherokee, and that tribe was notable because we conformed to the white lifestyle (at last before the Trail of Tears) The whites would trade guns and trinkets to the tribes in exchange for assistance or land, and would play the tribes against each other. When the great native victory came at Little Bighorn, the tribes after winning simply dispersed rather than doing anything with their victory. And disenfranchised members of the tribe were willing to work with whites to better there station. I mean the Na’vi have a caste system for gods sake, why are they so hollow? We see not dissatisfied members of the society, nobody who displays a personality against that of the main three characters (like not working with the guy who helped fire bomb your tree, no matter how pimp his ride), or even people who are cubby?
3) Hey, for Aliens they are very human, patronizingly so. To the point where they don't even feel like Aliens, just an obvious knock off of real life human cultures....wait
4) The world feels like a fan fiction. I mean, planet that is alive and everybody having a special connector cord? Really
5) I am not politically opposed to this film. Is imperialism wrong? Of course it is, the company has no right to destroy the village and the Na’vi are justified in defending themselves. However, it is very misleading to simply have the industrialist be a bunch of generic evil stereotypes. Again, Princess Monokee, the iron companies have a perspective.Its insulting that they don’t think I can handle complexity. It’s the Disney problem, if you give people heavy handed idealism, you just get a generation of kids with black and white mentalities. I mean, seriously, don’t give me a perfect idealized race, don’t give me some utopian planet, give me real people, other wise the message doesn't have any meaning, its just Soviet style insecure propaganda. If the film's message is just, it can afford to give its villain some depth.
Finally this film is scenic pornography. I hate porn, not because I’m opposed to sex, but because it isn’t sexy. Ok, and because its sexist, supports eastern European slavery, and is really disgusting (feel ashamed). But aside from all that, its just so blatant that it ruins any beauty in sex, you have contrived situations where people have overly unrealistic sex for pretty much not reason other than to show off the girls and pander to the audiences hormonal urges. The beauty is there, but the real beauty is the spirit behind the act, and it’s tainted if it’s just flaunted like a cheap device to make money. In a similar sense, this film is just pandering to my appreciation of the visual, but without any spirit behind it, its just cheap landscape porn. Contrast to Castle in the Sky or Princess Monokee, where the landscape is truly beautiful and overwhelming but with the feeling that both are labors of love, not just another marketing toy of the same
Finally, escapism. The movie had the potential brilliant in terms of touching upon the escapist nature of a movie, a self referential comment upon the escapist nature of film, like Vertigo, and the Matrix. In our current world of advertising and self indulgence, movies are just another empty past time, and ultimately, that is what Avatar is. The film is not about the crippled marine learning that though is body is broken he is capable of living a complete life. Instead we have an emotional crippled society that cares more about fantastical utopias instead of facing the real sociopolitical challenges in life, like imperialism and racism. Apocalypse Now is a journey inward, revealing the dark and disturbing essence of humanity, while Avatar is simply a whimsical fantasy of wish fulfillment.
This clumsily allows me to diverge into racism. The film isn’t racist as “Dances with Wolves” is, but it’s the same manifestation of White Guilt, a typical white oppressor who realizes the corrupt nature of his society and joins the oppressed. However, even after “integration” he isn’t becoming a victim, a standard member of the tribe forced to deal with being an oppressed group. Instead Mini Mel dominates the natives indirectly, thus satisfying his guilt without having to actually give power to the natives. Is Avatar racist? No, but the format it follows is, it cops out actual racism because they don't show any real groups, but its still racist in the same sense Jar Jar Binks is a racist depiction.
Why I’m so angry is because this is so typical of
from
EE
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