He also said Aliens was a Vietnam movie - a bunch of yankee chuds defending colonialism getting absolutely shredded by opponents they dramatically underestimate
Critical support to the Xenomorphs in their war against the imperialist colonial marines
Like the chapo hosts said, James Cameron is good. He's such a good director he doesn't really have to censor himself. Dude literally made a movie about indigenous people killing Americans and the studio said "make 3 more".
It's really not the groundbreaking anti colonial movie some here seem to think. The message is the only thing that can stop a bad white guy is a good white guy. It's Last Samurai in space but Last Samurai is racist but Avatar is apparently some amazing anti colonial masterpiece. Colonizer who goes native and learns from the beautiful savages and then fights for them is a super super old trope based on white saviour bullshit
Yeah kinda sucks it's gotta have the white guy lead but the charitable interpretation is that Cameron knows white people have to see themselves in a character. Jury still out on whether patting white people on the back gets them to actually care about things. I'm interested to see if the next movies do anything different.
So why doesn't say, Last Samurai or Pocahontas get the same charity? It's pretty much the same plot.
Edit: in regard to patting white people on the back gets them to care about things, the jury isn't out at all. The caring only extends to the point of personal inconvenience. It's a lib movie with white saviour overtones.
Pocahontas is not as good politically as Avatar. If you watch Pocahantas there are evil colonizers and evil natives, that want war with each other. That is protrayed as a bad thing, and eventually the protagonist Pocahantas deflates the situation, and the movie ends with peace. It's a both sides narrative, a "why can't we all just get along."
Where Avatar says there is a good side, the natives, and a bad side, the colonizers, and it ends with the protagonist joining an armed resistance against the US government and expelling the colonial force.
You are right about the white savior aspect, but I still rate the movie pretty highly.
Well I think you've got a legitimate criticism of the movie, that Avatar does the "white savior" trope. Jake Sully being like, the best Na'vi dragonrider and leading the resistance is absolutely absurd. I can get over it tho. The Last Samurai doesn't even have like the semblance of a good political message though right? That was more about the personal journeys of the characters I thought?
Not really that much less than Avatar. Tom Cruise still figures out the invasive force he was part of was bad and fights back against them. Depends on how much you want to read into either, Avatar is only blatantly political because you are. Most people see it as Jake's personal story or a romance across cultures or some kinda action thing. The messaging is there but it's a cliched message and the bad guys are so cartoonishly bad that most people won't see it as a reflection of current and past events but what could happen if evil people were in charge. They're both shallow trash and not worthy of discussion on this level but you can do that with pretty much any movie if you want to.
I don't remember the plots to either of those but in Avatar at least the main character doesn't really do all that much right? His big thing is uniting the clans or whatever and fighting the head white guy in a one-on-one but I can't remember if he's even the one that kills him.
He's also the chosen one that marries into their royalty and is the only one who can hair fuck the really big dragon. If anything Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson in the other movies impose themselves less on the culture they decided to involve themselves with. Pocahontas is kind of a bad example vis a vis the protagonist cause he gets saved from the natives by Pochanhontas, doesn't do much in fighting off white people and the whole movie paints both sides as equally bad. Last Samurai, Tom Cruise spends a shit load of time there before there's a threat and the final standoff is a loss but Tom and the samurai both learn tactically from each other to do better in the battle so theres a collaborative angle there. I'm remembering very far back to when I saw it but for "that kind" of movie I recall it actually not being super white savioury. Especially cause they just get mowwed down by a gattling gun at the end so he literally wasn't a savior, just a defector.
That's also a criticism of "chosen one" tropes, which are extremely stupid in their own right.
For sure, but when you combine it with the fact that their chosen one literally came as a colonisers with an invasive force. White savior angle and there's also the whole thing where they wouldn't have needed a chosen one had he not been there in the first place
Edit: Kung Pow did the chosen one tripe perfectly.
Cameron knows white people have to see themselves in a character.
And if we're being charitable, focusing on the actions of the white imperialist could be read as "here's what a white imperialist can do instead of going along with it, ineffectively resigning in protest/going AWOL, marching against it at home, boycotting products made with unobtanium, etc." Pointing out that using your knowledge of the imperial machine to help destroy it is a good message, even if a better movie would focus on a Na'vi Ho Chi Minh with Jake Sully as a supporting character.
Both do. "Material conditions informs politics" does not mean that material conditions determine 100% of a person's politics -- it means that material conditions are a much bigger driver of a person's politics than is usually recognized. Media absolutely has a hand in shaping people's opinions, there are just other major drivers, too.
The message is the only thing that can stop a bad white guy is a good white guy.
Have you seen Last Samurai recently? Because uhh, that is not really description of the plot of that movie.
Yeah, they're both trash. Avatar seems to dodge the criticism because Chapo did a bit about it being an amazing anti colonial text where its basically just Last Samurai in space.
I would argue that Last Samurai is substantially less "white savior"y than Avatar tbh. Cruz's character is pretty much just an observer to the events, and not a savior.
It definitely has a lot of the tropes/cliches of a white savior story, (white guy "goes native" and fights against his former allies) but I think one of the big aspects of white savior stories is the white dude beomces a better x than the x people themselves (or becomes as good as them). But Cruz doesnt really ever become a Samurai, at the end of the movie, the other surviving samurai commits seppuku while Cruz let's himself get captured, which would be dishonorable if he were a samurai.
Altho tbh, that movie has a lot wrong with it other than the white saviorism. Esp from a class based angle, the movie presents the samurai as being honorable and good, when they were aristocratic oppressors.
Also, the movie implicitly draws parallels between the Samurai and the native Americans, which is pretty fucking absurd and insulting, when there really was a group that was roughly analogous to the native Americans in Japan, the Ainu. Indigenous people of the northernmost island of Japan, who were the victims of colonialism, ironically, by Samurai.
You're giving it short shrift. If anything the message is that the only way to defeat colonialism is to reject whiteness as a concept wholesale, which is actually pretty good.
Yes, I'm sure that's what the white billionaire meant. It's a boring shallow movie where most of the attention was paid to CGI, 3D effects and James Cameron's weird obsession with making the fictional ecosystem have a degree of off screen logic to it. The quality of a movie isn't based on how impressive of a book report you can grasp for.
I mean, literally the quote in the post shows that he has a good understanding of constructed identities and power dynamics. Also, he's not a billionaire. Hating things all the time doesn't make you a better leftist, just a less fun person.
Oh my bad, he only has $750 million. He's also a notorious prick to work for. He made the bad robot a cop after the LA Riots. Hollywood wasn't big on the LAPD at the time in general. Reading depper leftist politics into a shallow boring movie about the action smurfs that you can't also find in fucking kids movies doesn't make you a better leftist either, it makes you someone who feels they need to justify your media consumption through your politics and that's what makes you the Critical Understand of Media. We've all heard that Ghostbusters is libertarian propaganda and the same boring takes over and over. It's also a fun movie about ghosts. Avatar has the same white dude anti colonial themes we"be seen since colonialism started and it's just not that good of a movie.
Remember Terminator 1 where the Terminator walked into a police station and did basically a standard mass shooting?
Unsurprising they made the original Terminator the hero after that, to be honest.
And they gave him the most memorable line of the movie right before that lol
The only negative of T2: Judgment Day is that not enough cops actually die
Sure, lots of them get their knees shot out, but at the end of the day I feel like the police station massacre in the first one is more cathartic for people like us
I've always liked the first one a lot more. T2 is great but the first one clicks with me more.
I'm a moron, so it's always nice when a director or writer tells me what their work is actually about, like theme-wise
