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Worth seeing for the visuals alone. Absolutely stunning effects, cinematography and use of color. Some of the scenes depicting Na'vi as angelic get a bit on the nose, though.
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Story itself is pretty thin. Don't get me wrong, Cameron gets a lot of points for making an explicitly anti-colonial big budget blockbuster, but even good politics can't obfuscate how cliché and predictable the plot is. Think Ferngully meets Neverending Story meets an episode of Full House.
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The way the anti-colonial conflict is framed plays on tropes of Evil Technology vs. Virtuous Nature, with the Na'vi playing the role of the noble savages who protect Virtous Nature. It rubbed me the wrong way a bit, the way all such stories do, as I'm a person who would not be able to survive without the benefit of modern medicine and technology. The absolute benevolence of Pandora's biosphere elides equally "natural" things like infectious disease, elder infirmity, infant mortality, starvation and lifelong disability, and the idealized portrayal of hunter-gatherer societies - complete with only "healthy" people and no queer relationships in sight - gives me slight eco-fascist vibes.
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Shout out to the one lib scientist working for the human colonziers who knows he's a parasitic piece of shit and deserves death. He is my Mood Kindred.
Pretty much. A bit more about the joys of the nuclear family
It's about family, and that's what's so powerful about it.
It would be interesting if he shows the "dark" side of nature - the thing that makes us want to accumulate capital and kickstart class society thereby, you know old age, sickness, wanting more leisure time, etc. I think it would be hard to do that in a blockbuster movie without making the imperialist humans look like the good guys though. There is a way out, but it's called socialism and solidarity. Kinda feels like that kind of topic could only thoughtfully and maturally be handled in, like, a LeGuin novel or something.
Yeah, it'd be neat to see a story about an industrialized, post-capitalist society being threatened by colonialism, but the only one that comes to mind outside of fringe zine stuff is The Dispossessed.
She's quite good, she has a bunch of short stories if you don't want to spend a bunch of energy on reading her longer form stuff (totally worth it imo). You can always try The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.
I enjoyed The Dispossessed, A Wizard of Earthsea (and the rest of the series), and The Lathe of Heaven. In terms of politics, she seems to be some strain of leftist but nothing specific.
Na’vi playing the role of the noble savages
:shocked-pikachu: stop letting white guys make these films
First, James Cameron fucking loves water and the sinking of the whaling shipade for a very dynamic third act.
The pacing drags a bit in the second act but it was important set up for what came after.
The stakes were much smaller in this one. The main conflict was 1 on 1 revenge. With humanity committing to settler colonialism on Pandora I wonder if we'll see larger scale conflict in Avatar 3.
The Na'vi must develop nuclear deterrence.
The Na’vi must develop nuclear deterrence.
:yes-sicko:
Deffo weaker than the first one but re-hashing the same story, but I'm letting it slide because Cameron has already filmed at least two more of these films and it's been ten years since the first one so the public needs a refresher. Anyone who says that you can't do the same movie twice needs to know that Cameron is one of the few who can pull it off, with Terminator 2
I'll need to get super high and watch it again to see if I can spot any deeper framing, although watching the
US militaryRDA do a blatant Vietnam on the Na'vi village was pretty amusing. And terrifying.The RDA forward base was almost ridiculously grim and "evil"-looking, but as with Colonel Quaritch, the US military really does have that aesthetic real life.
I liked people in the audience clapping and cheering at the whale hunters getting violently destroyed
Kind of? Depends on if you're actually watching the movie for the story or if you just want to get really high and watch all the trippy underwater bioluminescence scenes.
