Anyone see Avatar yet?

Millancad
Mon, 04 Jan 2010 04:01:14 +0000

^The one actor who isn’t black (not including extras), I believe, is Native American.



I actually though the indigenous people were overly idealized. Shouldn’t people at their stage of development have tribal warfare, human sacrifices, SOMETHING that our culture would frown upon? It was just so easy to sympathize with them that the audience didn’t even have to think.

This. I complained about that a lot to my sister. The division into good and evil is so easy, simple, black and white. The plot in general is too simple. Though simple can be good. Many movies with more advanced plots become less impressive when viewers realize that it’s not complex, just convoluted. Nonetheless, simpler plots can be done with some grace. Even that sort of black-and-white bifurcation of good and evil can be handled more gracefully.
The plot works even less when viewed as an allegory (and everything Cameron has said makes it sound to me that viewers are supposed to take it as such). When I made complaints to my sister, with whom I saw the film, about the difficulties of living in a Neolithic society and the fact that Earth has much more to give the Na’vi than “light beer and blue jeans,” as Jake put it, my sister said that we don’t know enough about the Na’vi to know if they need these things. And she’s right. We don’t know if they have a high infant mortality rate, or the average life expectancy. We don’t know if they suffer famine on a regular basis, or how far away they are from developing significant agriculture. And Earth would have had to develop new technologies for the Na’vi for this new moon if they wanted to give them the benefits of modernity (nonetheless, humans could undoubtedly get “there” technologically before the Na’vi).
When we view the film as an allegory, we do, because we know how all of those things were on Earth. Returns to nature are not all good. It’s not even close to all good. Maybe the development technology leads, in Cameron’s mind, ineluctably to the destruction of the planet (or moon) on which it is developed, but with the millenia of greater health and longer lives it brings, moving towards modernity can be seen as a better path than remaining Neolithic. I just wish Cameron would have shown more balance, both in the portrayal of Neolithic society and elsewhere.