Avatar, the latest sci-fi adventure by world-famous director James Cameron, has achieved the ninth-largest opening weekend gross of all time. At the current gross sum of $745,078,889 worldwide, the movie has obviously been wildly successful. Much of this success can be attributed to the stunning visual effects and sizable budget, reputed to be nearly half a billion dollars between production and marketing. While I must admit the film was aesthetically impressive, the feature that struck me the most was its blatant anti-Western, anti-American bias.
The story takes place in the year 2154 on a distant moon called Pandora, where an American corporation has established a base in order to mine the moon's rare and valuable ore. Pandora's indigenous are the Na’vi, a primitive, pagan people who greet the human explorers with mistrust and hatred.
The film's plot focuses on the main character Jake Sully, a former U.S. Marine who travels to Pandora to replace his twin brother in a quasi-military operation to protect the base and the field researchers. To do so, Jake periodically becomes an avatar – a remotely controlled, human-Na’vi hybrid. Jake enters the world of the Na'vi with the original intent of negotiating terms of relocation with the indigenous, but ends up assimilating to their culture and beliefs, culminating in the eventual betrayal of his own country and people.
Throughout the movie, James Cameron’s obvious hatred of American history is portrayed. He displays Americans as evil, war-mongering imperialists who are motivated by greed and are ready and eager to commit the genocide of the native people to achieve their ultimate goal of making a profit. Predictably, all of the oppressors are white. The exception is a female, Hispanic helicopter pilot (Michelle Rodriguez) whose conscience comes around as she too turns against the American forces. The only redeemed whites are those who "go native" à la Dances with Wolves and are considered "race-traitors."
When Jake Sully completes his training to become a warrior of the Na’vi, he ritualistically sheds his culture and civilization by participating in a pagan rite dedicated to the natives' mother goddess, Eywa. His new loyalty to the natives eventually leads him to turn on his own country and people, as he coordinates an attack on the American colonists, slaughtering a great number of them. The twisted part of this movie is that Jake Sully and his band of America-hating murderers are portrayed as heroes, while the Americans are presented as evil, capitalist exploiters who attack the traditionalist, cultured tribesmen with complete disregard for their belief systems and cultural symbols.
Clearly, the film is a not-so-subtle critique of America's founding (and European colonialism in general) and the War in Iraq. Here, however, Cameron seems to contradict himself. In one of the more notable scenes, the film's chief antagonist, Colonel Miles Quaritch, leads an attack on the Na'vi's dwelling place, Hometree. The scene is a mix between the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now (I half expected "Ride of the Valkyries" to start playing) and the footage of the attacks from September 11. In an interview, Cameron said he was "surprised at how much it did look like September 11." Problematic to his critique, however, Cameron portrays the Na'vi reacting to the assault by mounting an attack of their own and decimating the forces of the "terrorists."
Of course, this all fits in with the liberal narrative that non-white, indigenous peoples alone have the right and privilege to be "xenophobic" defenders of their own culture and heritage. Before Jake can become one of the Na'vi, he must learn their ways and fully assimilate into their culture. Peoples such as the Na'vi achieve their highest purpose in defending their civilization, while whites are only redeemed by abandoning and actively fighting against their own civilization in defense of primitive, pre-industrial societies.
While I believe the critique of excessive industrialism and unfettered capitalism is somewhat valid, it need not be presented in the context of an anti-American, anti-Western plot. Many intellectuals such as the Southern Agrarians and J.R.R. Tolkien have managed to achieve just that. Mr. Cameron, however, couldn't help but express his deep-seated hatred of the West.
