nihilnoetia:

This may get a little long-winded…

Okay. So it ticked all the right boxes for me in terms of design and composition and a fully-realised world. It had a very distinct narrative structure and it stuck to that very rigidly. Certainly, it mirrored a number of films like Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai and Pocahontas, and it certainly stood out from them in terms of technical and conceptual realisation.

What bothered me about the film was on a more fundamental level. The Na’vi are a hunter-gatherer society deeply attuned to the rich and magical ecosystem around them. Humanity is portrayed as a corporate money-grubbing, military industrial complex that rather than hopping from continent to continent in search of fresh biodiversity to plunder is now hopping from planet to planet to do so (it being heavily implied in the film that Earth is a mined-out husk). So where does that leave us? The culmination of the story ends with a crippled Marine leaving his battered human body behind and inhabiting his avatar permanently, thus completing his integration into the spiritual hunter-gatherer society that he’s so fallen in love with. So far, so good. I agree with the overall sentiment of fighting to protect a wonderfully diverse and fascinating ecosystem against the almighty power of the corporate dollar. But guess what? We have a wonderfully diverse and fascinating ecosystem right here on earth.

What bothers me is this. The movie is pure escapism. I’ve seen a lot of posts about people wanting to go and live on Pandora and be a Na’vi and all that jazz and sure, that’s exactly the kind of sentiment the movie seems designed to evoke. The Na’vi are tall, graceful, zen warriors willing to fight and die to protect their world and their way of life, and humans generally suck. So, what, you’re happy to completely write off the human race as a lost cause? You want to write off this world that we’ve damaged so utterly as a lost cause and go start fresh on Pandora? What does that say about us? Why isn’t the film standing up and saying no, fuck that kind of escapism, let’s do something here, today, about the damage we’re causing.

You can argue that it does, certainly, but look at the mechanics of what’s there. The protagonist ends up as one of The People, but he does so in a body that’s genetically half Na’vi, half human DNA. He’s not pure. And he’s going to be mating with a princess of their species? So straight off the bat we’re introducing human DNA into that bloodline; I don’t need to give you a history lesson on where else that has happened right here on our planet. Moreover, just because our flora and fauna isn’t alien and bio-luminescent, does that make it any less magical? Just because we’ve damaged our environment so much that we’ll never be able to return it to what it once was, does that mean we can’t preserve what we have and foster at least a return to values that will actually encourage that? Do we really have to write off our species as needlessly self-destructive and try and hop over into another species that isn’t, rather than taking a good, hard look at ourselves and trying now, in one of the most technologically and spiritually innovative periods in our tiny little history, to step up and take responsibility for shaping the course of our future on this pale blue dot? Or do we need the flight-of-fancy and genetic equivalent of inhabiting a World of Worldcraft character because it’s just too hard, you can’t change human nature and that’s the way we’ve always been? Stop dodging the fucking bullet. As an exercise in entertainment yes, the film succeeded. But don’t dress it up as some environmentally friendly morality tale when you’re completely dismissing your entire target audience’s species as a lost cause.

Well spoken, Mr. Neotia. This is waaay deeper than I would care to take a serious discussion on Avatar though… I’ll be the first to admit it’s all about the bio-luminescence in this one.