SubscribeAll of my friends look at me with indignation when I tell them my opinion of Avatar. It's not the horrible, hang-your-head-in-shame-and-embarrassment type of dialogue, nor is it the fact that the plot is a simple rehash of Disney movies (see image below) and classic stories. For me, it is the political implications of Avatar that put it near the bottom of my "Worst Movies Ever" list. It's not just that it's a bad movie (I knew that it wouldn't be great given that James Cameron's filmography is full of films ranging from bad to merely decent), it's more that the film produces the exact opposite meaning from what it intends.
Touted by many as an "environmentalist" movie, Avatar simply pulls us out of our environment. It's simple escapism. An extreme example is that some fans have developed suicidal tendencies after watching the movie. But let's not get distracted by things surrounding the film; let's back up and talk about the film itself. Here's a quick sketch I've drawn from the full plot:
Obviously American company goes to hostile environment to mine natural resources.
Military goes along to protect the company and others.
Non-Governmental Organization goes along to study the environment.
Military attacks natives and NGO fights back alongside natives.
Military eventually backs out after significant damage is done.
All that this plot says is that America is strong enough to take over and destroy an entire planet. As superficial as it seems, this is a politically accurate reading of Avatar. If we want to be more specific, we can say that America has the power to fulfill its desire for natural resources. This is the really existing message of the movie. You would have to work pretty hard to prove that the facts of the plot-line do not tell us this. The plot does not tell us that "America desires natural resources, and this is bad", or even, "America desires money and will destroy anything to get it." The message of the film is that we can.
What prevents this from being an environmentalist reading is that Pandora the planet is not Earth the planet. It might have been an environmentalist movie if the plot were to take place on Earth because we are destroying parts of our planet to mine out natural resources. We do not need symbolic fiction to tell us this--it is an existing condition on our planet. Rather than bringing us closer to Earth, Avatar brings us further away from our environmental concerns. It places them on another, idyllic world.
It's not just the plot that distances us. The transportative effects of the much-praised 3-D graphics contribute to this. It takes us into an alternative non-reality that is doubled by the non-reality of the use of avatars for characters to move around the planet Pandora.
This natural resource on Pandora is called "Unobtanium", shown here:
Besides being a stupid name for a nonexistent ore/metal, it is supposed to have properties that could save Earth from its energy crisis. Let us not forget that this movie is set in the future, while Earth's energy crisis is beginning right now. It's not just time that brings us away from environmentalism, the movie tells us that our solution, our single, unitary solution is another natural resource on a distant planet: the delay of our crisis is just a few light-years distant. The solution is not the multiplicity of solutions that really are available on Earth at this very moment: wind, solar, water, and other types of naturally existing energy. The movie poses this One Solution to a problem that could be solved right now with a variety of techniques implemented on many levels, from the societal to the individual. The solution is a distant one, one that will never happen on earth or on any other planet, as unobtainable as its name.
Not only is Avatar poorly written and directed, it does damage to the environmentalist cause that it attempts to further. I am not so disappointed in the lack of quality as I am by the fact that very few people seem to question the role of environmentalism in this film. Hopefully more people will be come aware of the array of possibilities for our environment, but films like Avatar are not the way to go about raising this type of awareness.