Avatar

Movie Review: Avatar directed by James Cameron

So I finally got around to seeing what I suppose will be the favorite for the 2009 Oscar for Best Picture (though I haven't seen any of the other nominees except for "Up," which may or may not have been better; it's sort of like comparing apples to oranges). I don't want to make this review too long or comprehensive, so I'll try to stick to some main points.

I left the theater feeling pretty sore, sad and angry. My initial protest was that such a blatant, transparent parable cannot possibly end the feel-good way it did. Of course it wasn't feel-good at all, and the friends with whom I saw it reminded me of this as we talked about it on the car ride home. Jake Sully and the Na'vi do win the day, but the more immediate thing that any conscious person will take away from that movie is the way it flushes out and vividly, steadily details the atrocities any imperialist nation commits when it decides it will exploit the resources of an indigenous people for wealth. Yet, I felt insulted that "Avatar" could have the nerve to posit an outcome where nature does quench technology, indigenous peoples can subdue the richer, more powerful, more numerous conquerors, and most of all, where after the initial fight is over, the Americans don't just return with more troops and more zeal and more destruction, when anyone who has paid attention in school or really, in their everyday life, knows that this is not how it ever ends. It ends with no redemption, no silver lining; there is only genocide and more economic polarity and few consequences for the aggressors.

At the same time, I did really enjoy the movie for its thematic undertakings. This is one of the most clear outcries against colonialism I've ever seen in film, and I do believe that it can go far to spread awareness among younger generations. Any elementary, middle or high school teacher could viably teach "Avatar" and engage minds that would otherwise be resistant to and bored with the usual moralizing via straight world history. Merely telling kids about what Andrew Jackson did to the Native Americans somehow doesn't seem as effective as doing a unit on "Avatar," in terms of helping them understand how high the stakes are when a country like the U.S. invades a country like Iraq, no matter what the officially stated goals or the media's treatment of our rationale might be. Some, incidentally, may argue that "Avatar" is fairly irrelevant to our modern militaristic endeavors, since we not motivated by greed, officially, but rather by an altruistic concern for the freedoms of citizens controlled by a dictatorial government, however I contest that when the script includes lines like "I can do it with minimal casualties to the indigenous," and "Exterminating the indigenous is bad press, but the one thing [...] stockholders hate more than bad press is a bad quarterly statement," and portrays American Marines shouting their present-day motivational cheer ("Get some!") right before launching missiles into the sacred and pristine Na'vi countryside merely to scare the defenders away and/or create havoc, and portrays warhawk Americans using the loaded word "terror" to describe how the natives mobilize in retaliation... when all this appears in the text, no responsible viewer can avoid at the very least considering it in the context of the last 50 years of American foreign politics.

But while the value of the film's political commentary is high, I'm still not satisfied with "Avatar." I feel like all my life I have been a consumer of epic stories whose most direct purposes are to moralize and supply me with lifelong definitions of greed, heroism, justice, and so on. It is the artist's right to offer opinions, however strong, in their work, but what I have a problem with is how formulaic it has become and how so-called progressivism and revelation has become utter convention. I would have liked to see this movie end up not being about whether or not the Na'vi successfully defend Pandora, or whether the terrible Marine general with the purple scars in his head ends up being destroyed, but maybe about the lives of some of the characters post- or mid-invasion, or maybe a more in depth rumination about the culture of the Na'vi, or about what actually has become of Earth and the people on it at this point in time in what we can assume to be the near future. I know it is unfair of me to demand more creativity out of such an already creative movie, whose setting serves as such a showcase of scenic and biological beauty, but I am tired of the same old story, no matter how incendiary and educationally valuable Hollywood can contrive to make it. I want to see more incisive movies for the whole family that do not depend on a storybook ending or a clear delineation between good and evil. I have a feeling that what I am asking for is impossible, but I still want to ask and will keep asking, because I think we as creators and storytellers are capable of even more.