Avatar Reality Check

The biggest grossing film of all-time deserves some air time on this blog. Avatar has made an impact culturally-speaking and for that it merits discussion. I just saw it this past week -- not very with it, am I? -- and was quite awed. The technology was certainly impressive, from the 3-D experience to the computer graphics of a new world. I knew it was good when I was tempted to get the man in front of me to sit down, only to realize that it was a man in the movie who was in my way. This happened several times!

I was also struck with the imagination it took to think up such a world and story. It was definitely captivating. You think Writer and Director James Cameron has a knack for that? The concept of being an avatar, living in something else's body, and then falling in love with something like that outer shell, is interesting. The idea of a people richly in tune with its planet and plant-life will also appeal to horticulturists as my mother-in-law can attest.

But alas, that is where the originality and brilliance of the story stops. To me, the anti-George Bush, anti-Iraq War, anti-military, anti-oil company, anti-interventionist message of the film was just too much. And boy, did they hammer it home. Pandora the planet and the Nav'i were clearly symbolic for Iraq and the Iraqi people. They even used the line, "shock and awe," when referring to the military tactics planned against the Nav'i. Talk about subtle.

I truly don't believe that the vast majority of American soldiers are unsympathetic, trigger-happy meatheads bent on destroying cultures and ethnic groups over a natural resource as the film might have us believe.

Greed does exist in corporate America, a lot of it, but I don't believe that oil company executives are senseless, idiotic, singularly-driven people without souls. The line from the executive Selfridge, "Oh just keep going, they'll move out of the way," as he eats his doughnut and almost bulldozes Nav'i people, was pretty far-fetched. I find it hard to believe the executives of ExxonMobil or Shell, most of who probably have families they care about, would act like that.

The Iraq War has been difficult and very costly on many levels. But I don't believe it was waged foolhardily or for a resource. I don't believe George Bush had in mind to disrupt the Iraqi environment, infrastructure and way of life just because Iraqis were sitting on something valuable to the bottom-line of stockholders, as Avatar would have us infer.