Posted on 01/26/2010 9:52:35 PM PST by UAConservative
Conservatives have been very critical of the Golden Globe-winning film "Avatar" for its mystical melange of trite leftist themes. But what they have missed is that the essential conflict in the story is a battle over property rights.
"Avatar," written and directed by James Cameron and set in 2154, is the story of young American Jake Sully, who joins a military mission to the distant moon Pandora, which has a supply of an expensive and almost impossible to obtain mineral (thus its name, "unobtainium"). Living among the tall, blue natives in the form of an "avatar" -- a lab-created body hooked up by Wi-Fi to his own brain -- Sully comes to doubt his mission and to join the Na'vi people in resisting the earthlings' designs on their land.
Despite its magnificent 3-D special effects, it features a tired plot and merely serviceable dialogue.
But conservatives have focused on the ideas that the film embodies. In National Review, Frederica Mathewes-Green mocked its dreamy vision of "the apparently eternal conflict between gentle people with flowers in their hair and technology-crazed meanies."
Ross Douthat in the New York Times called it an "apologia for pantheism." John Podhoretz in the Weekly Standard complained that it asks "the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency." Lots of conservatives complain that a movie about American soldiers invading another planet and killing people is an allegory about the Iraq war. And many agree with Bolivia's socialist president that "Avatar" is anti-capitalist.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
"Avatar" director James Cameron responded to right-wing critics of his blockbuster hit movie on Tuesday night, saying that "as an artist, I felt a need to say something about what I saw around me."
"This movie reflects that we are living through war," Cameron added. "There are boots on the ground, troops who I personally believe were sent there under false pretenses, so I hope this will be part of opening our eyes."
Looks like Cameron disagrees with your silly statement that the movie is simply fantasy entertainment,
In the “extra material” for the STUDIO CLASSICS edition of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), the producer, Julian Blaustein, states unabashedly that they were stumping for World Government, and that they had to tread softly because people weren’t ready for it. ... That’s 1951.
“In the same way, if we allow subtle promotions of values and ideas that are contrary to our culture, then kids grow up absorbing those values rather than the traditional ones that the previous generations absorbed. Movies and TV are the top ways to do this. So, you may say that it is only a movie and it doesn’t have to be a big deal if it promotes some left-wing anti-American thinking, but really what you are saying is that you don’t value your own cultural ideals enough to protect them or promote them, and are content to let some commie nutjob have influence over the upcoming generations.”
Well Said
“I am sorry but I am not going to waste my hard earned money on a movie with a storyline that I find uninteresting and unappealing. Special effects have never been a selling point of any movie to me since “Star Wars” so that is no reason for me to go spend money to see it. Most importantly I do not need to spend my money or time on yet another tired piece of leftist, America hating propaganda.
Cameron is making plenty of money off this, he does not need any of mine”
He definitely will not get mine either!!
“This is like the BS surrounding the Harry Potter movies. When they first started coming out the zealots had a field day about how we were teaching our kids that witchcraft was a good thing.
“Stupid is as stupid does”
The kids knew the whole time that it was nothing more than fantasy entertainment.”
Harry Potter teaches that witchcraft if it’s used for “good” is a good thing. The end justifies the means. Witchcraft is not fantasy and is not good. But even if you don’t believe that, understand that all these movies are made to teach children lessons, they are not just entertainment. Our children are our future and we better not let others with an agenda teach them and program them. Children relate and try to imitate the “hero” in movies made for children. We better teach them the right things and give them real heros.
As for me and my house, we shall follow the Lord.
The trailers for the latest Potter movie have to bother you and it’s far from obvious that children’s minds would not be harmed. The old astral (planet-worshipping) and idolatrous religions were gotten rid of and banned for a reason and the practice of idolatry is the most major crime in the OT for a reason i.e. it turned much of the planet into an insane asylum for the thousand year period between the Jewish exodus and Alexander, see Julian Jaynes’ “Origin of Consciousness” for details if necessary. People were hearing real voices from those stupid idols, the voices were commanding them to sacrifice children and fight wars, and the voices were inside their heads and could not easily be disobeyed or ignored.
The film quite definitely raises the bar for scifi movies; it represents as much of a leap forward from everything we've ever seen prior to 2009 as Star Wars and Alien represented in 1977 - 79.
The film is significantly more plausible than any previous scifi flick in a number of ways. Particularly the starship, and the idea which the film conveys about just how much much time and effort would be involved in getting to even the nearest other star. As in, "Wake up dear hearts, you've just been asleep in cryo for the last six years..."
The film works so well as a love story and an adventure story, that the leftist theological ideas it contains do not suffice to ruin it. That's quite an accomplishment. In fact I don't have the kinds of big problems with this film that I have with a lot of Hollywood glop or with something like the trailers I'm seeing for the latest Harry Potter film. This film just about has to be seen and it has to be seen with the new 3D technology.
That's the good news. Again this film is generally more plausible than most if not all previous scifi flicks.
The BAD news includes at least the following:
The cost of getting to AC would so totally dwarf the value of anything you could conceivably mine there as to make the basic thesis of the movie a joke.
There are only two reasons for which anybody would ever travel stellar distances, i.e. information/knowledge, or escape.
I didn't like the hair connections, I mean, you either have telepathic communications, or you don't. The idea of plug-in connect life forms struck me as bad thinking on Cameron's part.
The pseudo-religious ideas of the movie would have to bother anybody who keeps up with events. Environmentalism causes vastly more harm in the world today than it prevents. The needless banning of DDT for instance has resulted in 100M needless deaths from malaria, and anybody who isn't living under a rock has been reading about Climategate, the billion dollars Algor hoped to make from cap/trade legislation, the efforts to remove all mention of the medieval climate optimum from Wikipedia, etc.
Cameron shows the god of Pandora residing in a particular tree on Pandora and yet claims that life on Pandora is still based on the DNA/RNA model of all life as we know it. The logical problem with that is obvious enough before you even get to the question of Gaea worship being a form of idolatry. Moreover, you only need read the littlest bit of what Julien Jaynes had to say about idolatry to grasp why idolatry cannot be a good thing, here, there, or anywhere.
There is also a problem of consistency as well as the general problem which democrats and leftists have with the thing Jesus mentioned about a man not being able to serve two masters. The usual democrat problem with that one is the conflict between the unions, particularly the NEA, and their inner city constituency regarding such things as school vouchers. What we see here is the slightly less obvious conflict between atheists and evolutionites on one side, and the envirowhacks and Gaea worshippers on the other. In other words, if you're going to be any sort of a real leftist, you should be talking about Chuck Darwin and evoloserism, and not talking about some sort of a "tree of souls"...
I can't believe the film showed people shooting bows with two fingers. I've never heard of anybody shooting any sort of a real bow like that; you shoot a bow with three fingers, a thumb ring, or a modern release device and, far as I know, those are about the only three choices there are.
The humanoids having two legs and two arms like us while every other creature on the planet past some small size has six legs. I mean, you don't have to believe in evolution to see that as a problem...
The female na-vi having breasts; nothing else on the planet looks terribly mammalian or anything like that...
The na-vi having tails. There's a really good reason why creatures which walk straight upright as we do don't have tails, i.e. tails naturally go straight out from the spine, and an upright creature's tail would drag on the ground most of the time......
Now, obviously, I'm not stupid enough to hold my breath until somebody in Hollywood California makes a right of center scifi movie. But this one could have been made without the tree hugging or laughable pseudo-religious ideas.
Aside from everything else, I hope somebody in our military is taking a hard look at those Scorpion dual-fan gunships in Avatar, they look like they’d work...
Yes, and the novel Animal Farm is about animal husbandry and the role of agriculture in modern life.
Exactly. They did the same thing with George Orwell's fictional novel 1984. It's nothing more than guy meets girl, but they read all this political nonsense into it.
Exactly. It’s a STORY, a FANTASY. The bad guys are bad guys; the primitives are the few surviving natives (hey, it’s a terminally harsh world) trying to work with a bigger picture they don’t understand (which includes a global organic brain, a tidbit everyone misses). And while the director allegedly had ulterior motives, the story worked just fine without them.
I thought it was awesome.
David Boaz is hardly a moonbat. He is a long-time Libertarian and he has a point about property rights. I haven’t seen the movie-—and I won’t, because I know what the message is “supposed” to be. But the fact is, whomever owned the land had the rights to it. It’s s simple premise.
I went to see the movie (as have my parents in that are in their 70's) to get a glimpse at the latest greatest in animated film bling. I do prefer to see a film or read a book for myself before engaging in discussions about what it is or is not. Don't know that I would advocate that approach for the young and clueless among us, but for young adults on up that would be my recommendation.
My daughter's (college freshman) said it was "pretty", but was not impressed with the character development or story line. It was more like 'a comic book' than a movie one could take seriously.
To me, that is what most people are going to take away from it. It was a high tech special effect comic book and not one of the best ever written. If the film was supposed to convey some deeper meanings...well, did you remember how Issue No.17 of Superman just rocked the modern world? No, oh, well, such is life.
My daughter and I both just about lost it with the "unobtanium". She did loose it when they went by the basketball court...and the sad clothes....and the tails. About the tails, notice how they were all sitting around the sacred ancient tree doing the meditative USB link thingy....while sitting down cross legged? Sit down and cross your legs and then imagine how that would feel with an 8ft tail sticking straight down off your spine. Then imagine how it would feel rocking and reeling back and forth on it while singing "Kum ba ya".
Still, for a comic book depth movie it's not too bad. I think Batman is still my favorite.
I fail to see how a tale about an invading force of people who do not have legal title to the land under the prevailing legal system in force over that land can be about “property rights”.
The author is an idiot.
Having said that, I have no problem with people who want to see “Dances with Thunder Smurfs”.
Hollywood must really hate things like Slumdog Millionaire or Gran Torino, i.e. really good movies which make it on pure acting and could otherwise look as if they could have been made with a camcorder and a $1000 budget. The only actor Eastwood needed to pay more than min wage for Torino was himself...
I saw the movie and based on how the Na'vi are portrayed I doubt they would even have a concept of "owning" the forests where they live. The message could just as easily be that it's the white interlopers who bring the notion of ownership with them. The movie actually undercuts the moral legitimacy of ownership by showing that all property was at some point seized by force. The Na'vi believe that no one owns nature, or conversely that it's owned by all, which makes them innocent of the moral crime of ownership and property rights. They are perfect collectivists who exist in Rousseau's ideal state of nature, and their main virtue is in fighting the capitalist aliens who have the gall to think they can come and make some part of nature "their own". To me it's just as easy, and in fact is more natural, to interpret the movie this way as it is to see libertarian themes about property rights. I think this libertarian guy is looking for a silver lining in a movie that amounts to a huge propaganda victory for the property-rights hating Left (though I haven't read the article -- maybe he makes his point better than I'm imagining he made it).
I just don’t see a lot wrong with his review. He gives the film some harsh licks which are well deserved. He was not as hard on it as I am.
I think this is a poorly written story with weak characters. I would call it a totally innocuous movie, but for the four or five obvious jabs at the right. Shock and awe? Daisy cutter? Give me a break. Now Cameron has made a meaningless movie that is offensive to half the country.
I think the author at least makes a decent argument for the property rights angle. I didn’t see it, mainly because the natives were communal and didn’t view it as their property. People project a lot of ideas on their viewing experience.
Oh, it has really neat special effects.
Three out of ten stars for me.
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