Six converging threats to our way of life... and how to be ready for the ripples!

The Real Value of James Cameron's "Avatar"

By Mitch Lawrie

All the reviews of Avatar I’ve read seem to miss the real value of this visually stunning movie set on the fantastically alive planet of Pandora. While aspects of the plot are predictable, Avatar offers some powerful messages for our time once you scratch beneath the surface.

 For those who are not firmly entrenched in our mainstream culture’s cynicism and denial the movie, Avatar, is a powerful opportunity to sharply see and feel our current situation as a species that  has lost its way. As we experience the lives of Pandora’s indigenous people our own predicament comes into contrast. We become visible as a species that has become trapped within its own culture and system of domination and control... cut off from what really enlivens us.

 It is surprising that a movie with some of the messages of Avatar could even come out of the corporate dominated “homeland” that the USA has become. I wonder how many of the people walking out of the cinema really get it... that we, the consumers (no longer citizens) of industrial civilization are on the side of the baddies in this film. Not just occasionally, randomly bad... not just a few bad eggs such as the cold-hearted leader of the mercenaries on Pandora, Colonel Quaritch... but that our whole way of life is portrayed for what it is... inherently, pathologically insane.

When Quaritch declares “We’ll fight terror with terror.” he is speaking for us. We are the culture which for centuries has crushed all opposition to our insatiable resource demands. The Pandora native, Neytiri, speaks of their efforts to enlighten their would-be human “educators” and in one line says it all, “We couldn’t save them from their insanity.”

 That the writer and director, James Cameron, was given the freedom to convey his messages is probably due to his prior huge financial successes with Titanic and Terminator II. And, of course, he still had to include the requisite action and romance components for Avatar to receive the US $400 million in funding he needed.

 In the movie, the planet itself finally strikes back against the humans attempting to destroy nature for their short-sighted, short-term gains. Cameron obviously intends some symbolism here. Outside the movie, our own planet will also strike back. Perhaps not in as visually dramatic a way as on Pandora but in even more deadly terms over the time frame of the next 100 years according to the science on climate change. (For those still confused by all the hot air on the subject of climate change read the facts in Poles Apart: Beyond the shouting who’s right about climate change?)

 James Cameron is no fool. He could have just made a blockbuster. Instead, he is using one of the few remaining effective means of communicating with the masses in an age of information overload to say “wake up, look at the path we are on and get off it while we still can!” For we are, as TransitionWise.org describes, facing a perfect storm of six global threats of which climate change is but one.

 But unlike in Avatar, we don’t have another planet to flee back to.

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Richard Nelson
Posts: 11

Avatar Wiki
Reply #3 on : Mon January 11, 2010, 13:44:00

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I would like to see you post this article at the Wikia wiki:
http://james-camerons-avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Avatar_Wiki

Ron
Posts: 11

good insight
Reply #2 on : Thu December 31, 2009, 13:44:32

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Mitch,
Couldn't agree more. Don't know if those that parrot the reviewers don't get it, don't want to get it, or can't get it. Not matter why, it's bad for us all that the don't. Hope to see more from you,
r

Sherry Hartman
Posts: 11

The movie
Reply #1 on : Thu December 31, 2009, 13:05:54

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I also walked out of Avatar discussing and puzzling with my husband over why critics loved the stunning special effects, but said the story was dull,old hat,predictable. I, too, thought it should be a powerful wake-up call. It was archetypal in so many ways and the story of the failed, unconscious colonizers is all too close a foretelling of our own future. A beautiful story - I hope the story on earth has a similar ending.