1. Worth seeing for the visuals alone. Absolutely stunning effects, cinematography and use of color. Some of the scenes depicting Na'vi as angelic get a bit on the nose, though.

  2. Story itself is pretty thin. Don't get me wrong, Cameron gets a lot of points for making an explicitly anti-colonial big budget blockbuster, but even good politics can't obfuscate how cliché and predictable the plot is. Think Ferngully meets Neverending Story meets an episode of Full House.

  3. The way the anti-colonial conflict is framed plays on tropes of Evil Technology vs. Virtuous Nature, with the Na'vi playing the role of the noble savages who protect Virtous Nature. It rubbed me the wrong way a bit, the way all such stories do, as I'm a person who would not be able to survive without the benefit of modern medicine and technology. The absolute benevolence of Pandora's biosphere elides equally "natural" things like infectious disease, elder infirmity, infant mortality, starvation and lifelong disability, and the idealized portrayal of hunter-gatherer societies - complete with only "healthy" people and no queer relationships in sight - gives me slight eco-fascist vibes.

  4. Shout out to the one lib scientist working for the human colonziers who knows he's a parasitic piece of shit and deserves death. He is my Mood Kindred.

  • TerminalEncounter [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    It would be interesting if he shows the "dark" side of nature - the thing that makes us want to accumulate capital and kickstart class society thereby, you know old age, sickness, wanting more leisure time, etc. I think it would be hard to do that in a blockbuster movie without making the imperialist humans look like the good guys though. There is a way out, but it's called socialism and solidarity. Kinda feels like that kind of topic could only thoughtfully and maturally be handled in, like, a LeGuin novel or something.

    • Bluegrass_Buddhist [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Yeah, it'd be neat to see a story about an industrialized, post-capitalist society being threatened by colonialism, but the only one that comes to mind outside of fringe zine stuff is The Dispossessed.

      • barrbaric [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I enjoyed The Dispossessed, A Wizard of Earthsea (and the rest of the series), and The Lathe of Heaven. In terms of politics, she seems to be some strain of leftist but nothing specific.