NickM has had a go. Commenter Robert E. Phelan sums it up on a Bishop Hill post like this:
We’ve already had the movie. It’s called “Avatar”, one of the all-time success stories of the movie industry. It’s got a great plot, loveable heroes, subtle villians and graphics that made me cringe (I’ve got a THING about heights, you need to understand)… but it is also an evil work of propaganda catering to the Green agenda. It depicts a world that may actually be sentient (Gaia, anyone? James Lovelock?) with an indigeneous, sentient species that not only lives in harmony with nature but regards their prey as brothers who should be prayed for and thanked after killing them (the noble American Indian… see Dances with Wolves or Last of the Mohicans) and who are being dispossesed by evil capitalist, technologically advanced, militaristict humans who are destroying their own world and the Pandora Garden of Eden as well. The hero receives redemption by discarding his humanity.
All that is true enough. But I went to see the film anyway. Yes, it’s an appalling allegory in which we’re expected to believe that evil capitalists will kill nice aliens to make a quick buck. There are too many films in which the capitalists are bad guys; not enough in which the government are. Yes, the aliens are in harmony with nature and energy and hug trees.
But it’s science fiction, and plenty of this stuff makes science fiction sense. The aliens are not religiously making up nonsense about spirits and vague energy, the trees really do form a neural network, the planet really is sentient and really can store the memories of ancestors. That’s quite a good science fiction idea for a blockbuster movie. And there are some more, such as the avatars themselves, the aliens’ ability to connect their brains to flying dragon-like creatures and go for a ride, and the transfer of minds between bodies — something I’d quite like people to get used to the idea of in my lifetime…
It’s great to see an alien world brought to life in high definition 3D. The 3D is more than a gimmick, here. In one scene near the start our hero wakes up in a long chamber in freefall. We are treated to the disorienting way that there is no fixed up and down in zero gravity — it depends on your perspective. The aliens are 12 feet tall. In scenes from their perspective, humans look like dwarfs. In scenes from the humans’ perspective, aliens look like giants. The spaceships and giant earth-moving vehicles look cool. The mech suits look even better than they did in Aliens. All the machinery has a believable logic to it.
I did struggle with the floating mountains. Low density coral with pockets of helium inside, perhaps?
If you can supress the urge to make everything into a metaphor, there is a lot of enjoyment to be had from this film. Go and see it in 3D while you can.
Update: Michael Jennings sends me a link to an even better defense of Avatar. David R. Henderson argues that it is a defense of capitalism and property rights, and an attack on eminent domain.
Sorry, but I just succumbed to the temptation to google myself and found your essay. For the record, I am not the guy at Trinity College who has probably been receving all my hate mail. He does physics, I do sociology.
James Cameron is a fine movie maker. No question. Avatar, however, caters to an anti-human ideology that seeks to enlist us all in a program of genocide…. or maybe genosuicide…. Cameron’s world is NOT a real world…. buthis message has real effects in this one. Reject the message. It is false.