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[samvara]

Avatar was unbelievably pretty; the 3D effects were gorgeous and well integrated although I now have a pounding headache.

The movie itself was composed of the most humiliating, colonial, imperialist, sexist, capitalist, racist, militarist montage I have ever seen. I haven't felt the urge to walk out of a movie in years but I hung in there hoping miserably for a magical fix that didn't come. I am embarrassed on behalf of the human race.

Comments

[angriest.livejournal.com]

I actually am desperately craving the discussion, I'm just so bruised and bloodied this year from stumbling around in online discussions about race/gender/disability/takeyourpick and finding myself positioned by others into apparently claiming something I'm not. But I really want to talk about it because the wildly different reactions are fascinating me (and often confusing me).

I found the film to be a fairly blunt and heavy-handed criticism of US military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. It presented a combinated of military and corporate interests driving into an unfamiliar world not of their own, and simply assuming superiority and greater wisdom. ("They're just trees, they can move somewhere else!", and so on.) The destruction of the Hometree had so much similarity to the fall of the World Trade Centre in 2001 as well - I can't imagine Cameron wasn't pushing all of these buttons on purpose.

I think it's interesting that the film continues Cameron's career-long distrust and dislike of corporate interests, which is of course hilariously ironic given that Rupert Murdoch gave him more than $250m to make Avatar. I mean in the Terminator films you have a corporation creating an AI to make money and bringing about the end of the world. In Aliens you have a faceless corporation caring more about profits for their bioweapons division than the lives of their employees. In The Abyss you have corporate interests signing a scientific installation over to the military with disastrous results. In Titanic corporate interests lead to a ship sinking and few thousand poor people dying horribly at sea. Avatar fits in very smoothly with those films I think, in that it presents a military-backed corporate project that values a $20m per kilo rock above the lives and welfare of an entire nation of people. It has a colonel who happilly drinks a cup of coffee while committing genocide. It has a scientific/diplomatic mission getting screwed over because its priorities no longer fit a profit margin.

I think the film goes out of its way to demonstrate that those military and capitalist values are wrong. This is why I found your response so unfamiliar, because where you saw a pro-military, pro-capitalist film, I honestly saw (and continue to see) the opposite of that. It doesn't endorse these values, I think it says (rather nihilistically) "these values will never change, and that is horrible". You're supposed to feel pain, shame and regret, because Cameron's isn't telling a nice story. You mention the possibility that the film may be a depressing tragedy about the evils of human nature - I totally think that is, in part, what Cameron is saying.

I also think of all the humans only Jake is able to actually engage with the Na'vi and respect them as equals. To the Colonel and Parker they're an obstacle and to Sigourney Weaver and her team they're a science experiment. To Jake they are people.

[black-samvara.livejournal.com]

heya, not ignoring you, just struggling to find a way to express this in a way that might make sense to you... pondering

[angriest.livejournal.com]

Tha's cool.