Avatar

This past weekend my wife and I went to go see the long awaited Avatar in 3D.
It was beautiful, epic, and much greater than I suspected it would be.
The CGI was unbelievable and the 3D was surprisingly seemless and added a wonderful depth to the film without throwing in any gratuitous 3D gimmicks. It only took about 20 minutes for my eyes to fully adjust to the 3D and once they did, it was marvelous!
The greatest part of the movie was the love story between the human Avatar Jake Sully and the surprisingly breathtakingly beautiful Nav’i female Neytiri.
The many preachy-messages in the film were, however, a little strange and a little concerning.
For example, the Nav’i were dead-ringers for Native Americans. They dressed like them, talked like them, had the same world view and religion as them, rode horselike alien creatures like them, used bow and arrows like them, and even looked physically like them.
In the film predominantly white (I don’t think there were any speaking roles
for any non-Caucasian actors except for the Latino Michelle Rodriguez who ended up being a turncoat ) Americans show up on the moon Pandora to exploit the Nav’is natural resources and try to relocate the Nav’i in order to access them. The evil white Americans are willing to use deadly force in order to send a message to the Nav’i that their native homeland now belongs to man.
This of course was satire on Europeans taking North America from the Native Americans hundreds of years ago, which to be honest, I feel bad about often, but there’s nothing that can be done about it now so I don’t know why James Cameron focused so much energy on it.
The American humans in the movie apparently all work, not for the government, but for a private company after the money that comes from scientific discoveries on Pandora and mineral mining. This, tied in with the aforementioned storyline, is satire of the Iraqi war- suggesting that America is only in Iraq and Afganastan for the money that may be made for defense and oil companies, and to secure our much needed resources at the expense of another nation.
The private army in the film is reminisent of Blackwater and has no regard for the wellbeing of the Nav’i- more parallels with the Iraqi war.
While I am never a supporter of war, although it is sometimes neccesary, I do not believe that America is in the Middle East shearly for it’s own interests and again am not sure why James Cameron pushed that so heavily.
At one point in the film, an extremely large tree which an entire tribe of Nav’i lived in, was destroyed by the humans and the way in which it fell, the smoke billowing from it’s trunk, and the way that the Nav’i reacted to it’s destruction were definitely a statement on the September 11th terrorist attacks- but I’m not sure whose side the statement was for- as the humans made statements about “fighting terror with terror”.
The biggest/strangest push in the film was the pagan-nature-worship/environmental message. I am very much a supporter of man being a good steward of God’s creation and leaving nature in a clean state for our children, but Cameron took this to the extreme with the Nav’i who worship their ‘mother earth’ and believe that all nature is God and that God is in all nature. Because of this very Buddhist/Starwars’ish religous view, the Nav’i pray to/through a tree and deeply mourn the loss of both animal
and plant life.
The film shows that every living thing on Pandora is connected in a large ‘central nervous system’-like network and that the Nav’i's dead ancestors have been absorbed into this network and communicate with the living through praying to trees??
This message was very anti-God and very pro-paganism. It was so preachy that I almost wondered if Cameron has a weird agenda to push here- trying to get us to be so cautious of ‘mother earth’ that we actually start to worship her. Although, that certainly wouldn’t be anything new. Since the dawn of man, we have been sinfully worshiping created things instead of creator God.
All that being said, if you can get passed the highly preachy messages in Avatar, you will enjoy the most epic movie ever made, you will witness the best special effects ever produced, and you will temporarily escape to magical world that sometimes looks a little too much like our own.