Blah blah Avatar, 3D sucks blue cat people DAE no cultural impact?? Can you remember any character names??
but seriously it was bold as fuck for someone like James Cameron to make something so blatantly anti-US-military at a time when literally the entirety of Hollywood was united in jerking off American imperialism. It was not the least bit subtle and that makes it all the more impressive that Cameron was able to make a pointed takedown of Iraq-era militarism on such a scale.
I mean... it's also basically just dances with wolves with blue body paint, and an extremely white saviour story. so I wouldn't go around calling it 'based'
People who were 10 when Avatar came out are now talking about how it was deep and it wasn't them just being young and naive
it is funny seeing people say redditors have no ability to analyse the themes and symbolism in a text, and then overlooking the VERY OBVIOUS point that the aliens are noble savages based on native Americans, and need a white man to save them, and it's a racist movie
It may be white savior, but I can't help but love that the message of the movie is "frag your commanding officer".
From what I remember Kevin Costner is chillin' by himself in the wilderness and a local tribe watches him playing with a wolf and they let him hang out with them. But doesn't the tribe get forcibly relocated at the end of the movie? And Kevin Costner goes with them? I don't think he saves anybody (technically he saves himself because he was suicidal at the beginning of the movie).
Americans don't know they're the bad guys from the She-Ra Netflix reboot
americans don't realize they're the aliens in every alien invasion movie...
The Chapo Trap House podcast had an episode in 2020 or maybe early 2021 about how based Avatar was, and they admitted it was weird it took that long for people to come to that conclusion
I've never listened to more than 2 minutes of the chapo podcast, I'm just here for the communism
At the time I remember a bunch of nerd reviewer types complaining about the movie's stereotypical portrayal of... US Marines as a bunch of violent rednecks :michael-laugh: They were also angry because they felt James Cameron was trying to make his white audience feel guilty over the genocide of the Native Americans. The Avatar Plinkett review did this too and even went "uhhh ackshually the Native Americans sometimes killed each other too so who's to say who the real bad guy is"
The overtly political right-wing reactionary YouTube guy did not exist at the time, and most of those people went on to become bog standard anti-Trump liberals with the associated baseline wokeness, which just goes on to show how reactionary nerd and broader culture were at the late 00s and early 10s and how it remained kind of unexamined until stuff like GamerGate
The Avatar Plinkett review did this too and even went “uhhh ackshually the Native Americans sometimes killed each other too so who’s to say who the real bad guy is”
Jesus, I'm generally fine with the RLM guys but that's just bad.
RLM pretty wisely keeps political topics out of their videos (unless you include their analyses of Hollywood rainbow washing), but occasionally something like this slips through and reveals that there are a lot of politically charged "non-political" things Americans are taught to believe.
RLM got pretty bad in one of the later Plinkett Star Wars reviews. Mike was pontificating about "forced diversity" without using that term exactly and his argument boiled down to something like: "This is a movie for kids, and when I was a kid, me and my friends never noticed or talked about race."
They just don't get it
The thing is, they constantly mention in their videos that they resent being dismissed as "flyover" midwesterners by coastal elites. Fine, I understand that lib stereotype of middle America isn't helping things. Yet from time to time the RLM crew does reveal they do hold some backwards or questionable views
I don't think they try to be reactionary. Politics isn't a big part of their content. They're certainly not ideologues or part of the right wing grifter media sphere, and I don't think people should go after them
But do think twice before recommending their videos. Wouldn't recommend anyone Asian watch the video where Rich, upon seeing Leo Fong, laughs and bellows out, "Why's his face so flat?" and a big "racist" label ironically pops up
The absolute worst Mike take is in last year's Picard Plinkett review, where he discusses sexuality in the context of how the show gave a female love interest to an established Star Trek character who had been previously portrayed as having exclusively hetero relationships (duh, it was the 90s) and goes full on "let's not get so open-minded we start fucking children"
Ironically I actually think Rich has come off pretty good on race and gender stuff lately despite his previous edgelord tendencies. He's visibly uncomfortable with misogyny and sexual violence and often jokingly worries whether a tape they watch is going to turn into insane right-wing propaganda
Didn't Jack and a few others end up separating a bit from RLM to be a bit more openly leftist on other platforms?
Not really. Jack, like Josh and Tim, has never been an employee at RLM- they're just friends and appear whenever they can. I do get a sense that Jack wasn't entirely happy that Previously Recorded, his video game review show/Twitch channel he hosted with Rich ended (from what I understand mostly due to Rich getting burned out on live streaming) and that he wanted to do more in the video game/content creation space (he's just a guest on RLM, they're not his shows) which is why he ended up at The Escapist. His lessened appearances as of late can probably be chalked up to coronavirus + him being busy with Escapist stuff.
He is more politically vocal on Twitter than any of the others in the RLM crew though, which is why RLM's chuddier fans regularly get mad at him for things he says about nerd culture war hot button issues.
Also, a funny sidenote regarding The Escapist and leftist content- around the time GamerGate happened, the site's old shitty management put all their eggs in what would become the alt-right basket and went full pro-GamerGate. In fact, on the Escapist forums the site's owner (who I believe went on to work for Peter Thiel or something) would tell users to read up on cultural marxism and white replacement.
The editorial staff and talents were left-leaning liberals though but the aforementioned shitty management's awful treatment of anyone that wasn't Yahtzee Croshaw had caused them to hemorrhage most of them (including Jim Sterling) so the owners decided to go mask off and hoped to capitalize on the burgeoning fascist-curious nerd market. It didn't pay off, and after a number of years circling the drain solely sustained by Zero Punctuation, the site was bought out by some of the old staff who used to work on it and they hired new talents including Jack Packard. (They also hired back Moviebob but he was let go in less than a year :michael-laugh: )
To be fair though, The Escapist is and has always been pretty much the Zero Punctuation channel- if you look at their Youtube views, ZP gets hundreds of thousands or the occasional over a million views per episode while everything else is lucky to break 10,000
They also hired back Moviebob but he was let go in less than a year
I have never seen a guy on the net who was more openly self destructive than moviebob. Guy needs a thread in The dunk tank and I shall be the one to do it one of these days
Mike is mostly apolitical but sometimes it does very much slip through that he grew up in a straight up old timey racist household (seriously his parents are / were like actual white nationalists)
Flyover country is so real and whining about being treated as an empty cultural backwater when you live in an empty cultural backwater that has been utterly devastated and hollowed out by neoliberalism is extremely provincial and cringe. The Midwest sucks, and it's few bright spots just reinforce how shitty everything else there is, and if you think that's somehow unfair you're pathetic.
This was shortly after the Avatar review so it's also a decade ago, but I remember an early Half in the Bag where Mike and Jay make fun of George Lucas for talking about how hard it was for him to get Red Tails, a WWII movie starring black people, made. They essentially called him a liar covering for his movie sucking, pointing to movies like Blade existing and accused him of sowing racial tension or something
I remember that, it's like every five years we get a "black guy movie" and that convinces everyone that there isn't racial discrimination in Hollywood. That said, Red Tails really sucked.
Oh, it definitely did. It's just annoying that they sometimes cannot hold two ideas in their heads simultaneously, like "Red Tails sucks" and "Hollywood doesn't want to greenlight movies starring black actors"
or "Sony is milking the angry chud reaction to Ghostbusters 2016" and "There are actually a lot of chuds disproportionately mad about this shitty movie"
RLM are the normiest normies that ever normied. They are three white guys who grew up on american propaganda, so I wouldn't be surprised if back in 2010 they used to believe america's racist past was behind them and the country is good now. Also, this is my interpretation and I wasn't there, but I think Mike is just mad that the military guy in Avatar isn't Picard. He wants the future to be the liberal nonsensical utopia because that's what he grew up on, so being forced to look at anything resembling the shittiness of the real world makes him mad. Again, the normiest normie.
Because people are really bad at reading into media
Even when it isn't subtle, they just go "This is entertainment and has no bearing on my actual life or beliefs"
That's why most of the discussion about the movie was that it retread the same ground as Pocahontas (which aside from the colonialism angle, isn't that similar) and not the actual themes of the film
The Starship Troopers paradox. When confronted with the image of Neil Patrick Harris in SS garb at a Nazi funeral, the average American media consumer blurts out, "wow, the good guys in this space bug killing movie sure are snappy dressers."
Starship Troopers was actual satire though. Avatar was really ham fisted and obvious to the point of being patronizing and shallow and that's why people don't like it.
all but stating out loud humans started the war
deliberate fascist propaganda about how weak and stupid the enemy is
countless lives lost to achieve a relatively minor victory
Americans: "Hahaha, it's afraid!"
One of my favorite parts about Starship Troopers is that the movie starts chronologically after the ending, showing people dying horrifically. Even when the movie ends on a relative high note, it outright tells you (via the beginning) that it doesn't matter and everyone's fucked.
Ya, that's also Bong Joon-ho's eternal struggle with American audiences. Like his movies aren't subtle at all, but all Americans see is cold train go zoom.
remember all those lib celebrity tweets after Parasite won Best Picture about how Parasite showed the importance of coming together in the time of Trump
"Boy howdy, that was fucked up how that rich family had their lives ruined because of their own actions and inability to show compassion for others. I'm glad the poor family got what was coming to them"
To parapharase you don't have to hand it to them, the anti-imperialism themes get mired with the white savior narrative that is a big part of the story. I get feeling a connection with a movie but as you get further along the left from when you were when younger things like that get harder and harder to ignore.
The average American probably doesn't read political themes in media unless it's directly spelled out for them. They will however scan something as politically motivated if the protagonist is a woman, LGBTQ, or black.
When Americans do scan fictional media as political in its content, they will invariably read it as supporting their particular ideology. It wouldn't surprise me to hear chuds have an understanding of Avatar as expressing right wing ideology. They think The Matrix is right wing for God's sake.
Instead I think most Americans try to scan media as political outside its specific content, like they know actors express direct liberal values, so they assume the media itself presents liberal values because the actor is in it. Politics in America can't be expressed through the symbolic, because that entire field of expression has already been subverted to act in the interests of status quo capitalism. Things only seem political if they're expressed directly, in a clear voice, and literally.
They think The Matrix is right wing for God’s sake.
Oh I know that one, that's the movie where the main character takes a red pill and realizes women are stupid
The matrix is a movie where a bunch of Gen X dropouts decide to do something with their life, and by "Something" I mean snort estrogen and blow up a building and literally shoot The Man right in the head. The terrorists are the good guys, the bad guy is your boss, and the explicit path to liberation is a workplace shooting.
Best movie of the 20th century.
I totally agree that Avatar is pretty based, but I think Hollywood at the time was actually moving away from being pro-military. This is because people were pretty sick of the Iraq war and it had been revealed to be predicated on lies. Two years earlier Shooter was released, and that was all about how corrupt the government and the military were (the Chapo episode about it is great). Obviously that didn't last, perhaps not even up to the release of Avatar, but considering the script was written in 2006, it would make sense for the film to get caught up in the anti-imperialist tide.
this was the same year The Hurt Locker won Best Picture, Hollywood hadn't moved away from shit
This. America, fuck yeah! Had run its course by 2009 and everyone was now a libshit huffing Obama's dank gas. This is when every dem who voted for the war was suddenly always against it. It was a super safe time to put out a movie like this because everyone figured Obama was gonna end the wars.
I mean, it would have helped if it was actually a good movie.
Yeah, they tripped up making it so that the protagonist leads the natives by being better at native stuff than they are.
Would've been much more based if he'd just spent the movie funneling intelligence and weapons to the Na'vi
smh just ask them if they can remember any character names from Inception lmao, i know i fuckin can't
Oh god yeah no I have nothing and I’ve seen Inception several times. I think the dead wife is like, Mel or Mal or something like that? That’s the only one I even have a clue on.
Because it's just Fern Gully which did exactly the same thing first. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3tdmgt
Yep, I'm certain it and a few other movies from that period had a big influence on me.
