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Avatar-same old story

January 5, 2010

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Just saw Avatar tonight. I appreciated the anti-capitalist, pro-environment message, its too bad it comes in the tired narrative of whitey coming to save the natives. It was exciting, the CGI was entertaining and helped numb the brain enough to deal with the bad dialogue.
The movie represents the characters relationship to Capitalism as a permeating factor in life’s choices and lays bare its systemic view towards nature-resources to be extracted, to make objects for consumption, leading to profits/wealth for a few (late night simplicity for ya).
So what should one do about it? Well, the conscientious objection of one character during a “battle” scene still leads to the incredible devastation of the indigenous characters homeland. The real resolution portrayed in the film is-direct action and armed resistance.
From this portrayal I wonder if this film is capable of encouraging civil society and our governing institutions to expand the definitions of “resistance”, reducing those of “terrorism”. Because identifying with the films protagonists aligns one to many of the animal & environmental activists, and political prisoners incarcerated in the United States today. But that’s a lot to expect from art, isn’t it?
I also question “if a gabillion dollars was given to make a film from a perspective other than the white male hero, what would it look like?”
I guess we’ll find out when that story can sell over a billion dollars in cinema tickets, worldwide!

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2 comments on “Avatar-same old story”

haha, yea man… It’d probably beautiful. The white male hero is constantly changing faces and scenarios and still remains the opposition to actual indigenous people of this planet. Haha, entertainment is one thing but there’s nothing heroic about escaping reality into an avatar world that is irrelevant to our lives. The movies that should be made are the ones based off of the knowledge we have learned. This is too far fetched to actually make any sort of impact because it has no relevance to our lives. If we want to be effective we have to show the world it’s real problems in a way that depicts something similar, a hero actually saving earth and it’s indigenous people from the oppression of corporate greed.
People are too dense to realize how this pans out in their lives.
I guess what i’m trying to say is that if a similar movie was made from another not so typical of white america movie it would probably have the same effect because the writers are still doing it for the wrong reasons, aka cash monay.

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