Avatar Thoughts

Don't get me wrong, I find Avatar to be a brilliant film. The visuals alone make it a marvel. The acting is fine. The story is one that I feel a lot of affinity for. It was well worth the price of admission. But having said that I have numerous issues with this film.

For one, the moon Pandora is portrayed as this lush eden, where every being lives in balance with every other being. What possible problem could I have with that? Well it's the idea that there is this lush eden in the universe when we live on the most perfect eden in the universe already. What the heck do we think planet Earth is? Is it boring, lifeless? Maybe it's time that we got out of our tiny concrete boxes and left the city to see the real world. I worry that the film, in a way, denegrates the majesty of life on earth by imagining another world and presenting it as more special than our own world.

One scene that made me want to wretch was the scene where the gunship pilot, disgusted by the actions of her fellow mercenaries declares: "I didn't sign up for this". Umm, you're a mercenary sister, what the fuck do you think you signed up for? You kill for money. You facilitate the destruction of ecosystems and the genocides of entire species. This is what you do. I'm just not sure that I believe that she would experience any kind of independent thought. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for redemption but, in the end, killing people and blowing up giant trees is pretty fun so it didn't strike me as realistic.

Finally the ending was a big disappointment. In their victory, the beings of Pandora (not just the Navi and this is an important point) quietly march the civilized humans back to their ships so they can leave the moon forever. Paradise is saved. Unfortunately this doesn't strike me as being a smart move, given any kind of understanding of history. Civilized people don't stop. I kept thinking about this quote from Thomas Jefferson, that most civilized of human, in regards to bothersome "Indian" tribes: "In the end, they will kill some of us. We will kill all of them". They are coming back and this time they are going to melt your planet from orbit. You don't matter, the resources you find yourself on matter and the civilized don't stop. Since it's unlikely that the Navi and their fellow beings can muster a defense against nuclear weapons, though I won't count them out yet, the least they could do would be to line up every single one of those fuckers on that airstrip and stick a blade dipped in painful neurotoxins into their stomachs and watch them die a painful death. Apart from the satisfaction of watching these murderers die, you would have the double benefit of instilling a degree of fear in your civilized enemies. They possibly wouldn't know what happened to their compatriots and this might help you when, inevitably the conflict resumes.

I wish I had had a notebook with me because I had lots of thoughts throughout the film. Ultimately there are a lot of lessons to be drawn from this film. The most important being the warning of where we are taking our beautiful eden, Earth. This can never become a "dead planet". What would our lives be worth them?