Hey, do you ever wish you could watch a movie without trying to look for the subtexts, obvious or otherwise? I had heard so much pro and con about Avatar and I was all set to not go see it, but then I decided that I would go and I would just enjoy it as a movie. I wouldn’t look any deeper into it than what was on the screen and after I left the theater the only things I would discuss about it were the awesome special effects. And it actually worked! Dude, if you can put aside everything else and just go brain dead for a couple of hours, the special effects combined with the 3-D technology in that movie are mind blowing. Seriously. Just a thought.

What would have been fun would be to have the Na’vi be the ones to pull off the creation of avatars, so that they could send embassages to the humans. They could, instead of being the noble savages so technologically inferior to the whites/humans, be so advanced that their tech is made to be all but seamless with nature. (Which would confuse the heck out of humans who associate technology with shiny metal cities and strip-mining.)

Many of Annalee Newitz’s points were on the money. But at the end of the movie, the protagonist (Jake Sully)lets his human body die and assumes the Na’vi body. There is no going back. Even before this point, he has gone to war against the Earth army trying to take over the planet, and clearly would be be considered a traitor to Earth (not to say the USMC). I don’t see how he could go back to regular human identity under those circumstances.

The “white savior” aspect of the movie is of course a problem. To some extent it is dealt with by explaining that only a human being could accurately disclose human being’s weaknesses and mal-intentions.

Nah, I have a tough time with the whole “see how superior the white guy/gal is — a few months/years with the savages and he/she rules them!” genre.

You know: Tarzan, Dances with Wolves, the whole Renno The White Indian series of drugstore novels, that sort of thing.

Aw man, don’t take my snarkiness to heart. In reality, movies like Avatar make me bawl like a baby.

And solid point on District 9 being about Wikkus missing white privilege rather than just being white – it was one of the few films that actually touches on the hard reality of that notion.

A very good point vis a vis Dictrict 9 — a movie that didn’t at all lack for problematic elements, but at least had the stones to tell that part of the story straight.

The other part that bugged me pretty badly about Avatar was the line (from memory, but I think more or less verbatim) “we don’t have anything they want.” Because Jesus…really? I know that the heart and soul of the noble savage fantasy is that they’re so At One With Nature that contact with the outside can only be corrupting, but you only have to spend a hojillionth of a second thinking about it to realize how fucking patronizing and infantalizing that is, because the line frankly presumes that the Na’vi are stupid. In reality, the native population of the US realized very quickly that the europeans had several things they wanted very badly, not least of which were the rifles that were clearly going to be necessary to fight them.

This would seem orthogonal to Avatar’s story, except for one tiny detail: the film ends with the non-collaborating humans being… sent back to the orbiting transport ship? The orbiting military transport ship? How quickly Cameron forgot the lesson of his own best work: “I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

Ok just for a moment I will digress to some analytical thinking about Avatar. First of all the white guy didn’t save the native. Hell the white guy was the reason the natives didn’t have a tree to live in any more. Sure the white guy tamed the big colorful dragon which helped unite the different clans, but thats about the biggest thing he pulled off. When he came to the natives HE was the moron by all accounts. THEY taught HIM and not the other way around. He didn’t show them how to use 50 cals, they taught him how to fly dragons and shoot arrows that would knock futuristic helicopters out of the sky. Not only that, but the native (his girlfriend) actually ended up having to save HIS arse. But biggest of all it was their spiritual deity that really saved the day in the end, not the white guy. Something he never would have believed in or imagined before coming to them. Now I will admit, him “mating” with the princess so to speak was problematic, but hey who amongst us has never had a lil curiosity? Just sayin. In closing, while it has some analogies to Dances With Wolves I think there are a lot of differences especially in that the natives actually won and kicked the white guys off their planet/floating island or whatever the hell it was.

And I sum all of this up to say that this is exactly why I didn’t want to do this kind of heavy lifting over a movie about blue aliens. Sometimes its ok to just enjoy a movie without over thinking it. The special effects in this movie were unlike any I have ever seen, especially in 3-D and quite honestly I could have probably enjoyed the movie almost just as much had there been no sound at all. And that’s why I would recommend it to anybody, because you have to WANT to look for all of that other stuff in order to not enjoy the movie IMHO