And those are the progressive assessments.
(The right wing dismisses 'Avatar' as anti-American, anti-troops, anti-white, and anti-human. Little more than a suicidal liberal revenge fantasy.)
Because I generally boycott movies people insist I see, my little sister threatened to tie me up and drag me.
What they say is true. 'Avatar' is all Joseph Campbell and no Kafka. It evokes The Last Samurai and Romeo and Juliet without the courtesy of changing up the genders or killing off either lover.
It respools Disney's Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves, Emerald Forest, Ferngully, and At Play in the Fields of the Lord. It rivals every other white-guilt/savior-meets-native story in fetishistic romanticism of indigenous peoples. A Tarzan yell through Jurassic Park sums up the role of the Pandoran wildlife.
'Avatar’s' intensely hued 3D and seamless CGI more than impresses, but, aimed at the agegroup that will pay to see it half a dozen times, characters and storyline (Disney romance plus lots of explosions) are flat. The moral thunders throughout with all the nuance of a wrecking ball. All brought to you by none other than Rupert Murdoch.
One more thing about 'Avatar.' You REALLY should see it. No, really.
You see, the film doesn’t only wrestle with, or try to write out, the demons of EuroAmerica's past. It calls up the First World’s continual savaging of the Third World, and its fragile remaining wilderness. (I'm tempted to ask those offering race-based readings of 'Avatar' how much or if a Will Smith or Benjamin Bratt protagonist would have improved that score. Or if 'white colonial' critiques might have more ooomph if they weren't made sipping coffee from the deforested Amazon, hammered out on American laptops--cadmium courtesy a Congolese 8-year old?)
On the far-off moon of Pandora, the faith of the indigenous Na’vi powerfully echoes the Druidic Sacred Grove, and Celtic rituals lost to ravening hordes and cultural genocide. European armies wiped out their own nature clans and holy traditions, and those ghosts haunt and mourn from within. EuroAmericans hold a claim to that grief, and to their own plundered spiritual legacies.
Our present-day disconnect with the natural world and our cannibalizing of ecosystems is amounting, quite literally, to our Last Supper. This is now, and the film’s oxygen-masked, orphaned Earthling contractors—the crew from a planet that ‘killed its own Mother’--is our fast-approaching destiny. In this, 'Avatar' cannot be reduced to race, unless we're talking about the human race.
In the end, despite the inglorious blessing/curse of technology, 'Avatar’s' protagonist cannot go forward in his war-crippled, pallid, gasping human state. He must die to his old self, and after having his soul weighed by Pandora's diety, be born again as a Na’vi. This is not just a “white man rescues native” story. It is the story of a native recognizing and rescuing a kindred spirit—“I see [into] you” as Omaticaya say. From this saving grace, the broken, pale human flesh, and all the violence and arrogance it once encompassed, is ultimately left behind, unmissed.
'Avatar' is a bottled message from our future, asking us—begging us--for a different past.
Nauseating, sentimental, predictable pastiche? Probably.
But allegorical calls to atonement are often simplistic and full of pathos. They pretty much have to be.
If you don't go for the message, go for the spectacle. And, with as little irony as possible, bow before the wonders of technology the film decries.