Avatar: An anti-imperialist saga or a technical self-indulgence?

Most of the times what you hear about a movie before you have chance to see it makes you disappointed at the end. Once you see it you realize that it did not deserve any of the praise you have heard in advance. Yes, I saw it and I did not like it as many movie-goers suggested that it has a strong and unique message against the current imperialist system. Avatar carries a very classical and extremely cliché story with technological decorations and a few imaginative powers (floating mountains, colorful big birds, instantly blossoming flowers, a planet that lives like a colossal organism, the giant neural network, pantheist harmony which reminds the uniting power of religion etc…) sprinkled around it to make it look pretty and impressive. It is like an old motorbike painted with glowing colors. Yes, it is shining but it does not go anywhere!!! Yes, it would be an amazing experience to see 3D images but unfortunately I saw it in 2D because the tickets for 3D have been sold out till March. It is successful as a technological thriller but it is definitely a failure as a movie to offer something new, as a story which is told millions of times in the exactly same way and as a theme which leads to an incomplete, immature conclusion on the nature of wild capitalism that actually seems the true reason behind the problems mentioned in the movie.




First of all, I should start with director’s obsession with J. Jack in Titanic, John Connor in Terminator and now Jake in Avatar. Can we say this is a coincidence or would James Cameron really like to see his own initial as a hero in the movies? Does he want to create an alt-ego like Kafka’s K? But what we see in this movie is another imperialist look in which the salvation of Pandora people is provided by the human race. They are not capable enough to protect their lands from exploiters because what they believe is harmony and some sort of pantheistic approach to the nature. This makes them weak against power-crazy, profit-oriented human minds. Then they need a hero, a human-navi hybrid, or a body of navi (strong but not smart enough) with human mind (smart but not strong enough). What will happen to them after they defeat the humans? Will they keep their simple life or will start developing weapons against them so that they will be able to defend their land during the prospective invasion attempts?

Let’s start with the story. What is good about the story? Didn’t we see the same story before at “Dances with Wolves”, “Robinson Crusoe”, “The Mission” or many other post-colonial / anti-imperialist novels / movies? Couldn’t the director create something better than repeating the well-known stories? The only difference in this story is this one is set in a different planet and it has some elements which are related to today’s political agenda. So what? There is love in the story like all other blockbusters. Of course! It is the engine of the plot as usual although “hatred” is supposed to be the engine of this story once we think what the movie is dealing about. There are good ones and bad ones! Despite movie’s three dimensions the characters are one dimensional. This makes the movie very predictable. Of course the natives are irrational –or rational in a way that rational human beings cannot understand and can have right to call them “savages”- and humans are scientific, advanced in medicine, defense mechanisms etc…




Second problem was the “happy end”. In one scene, the soldier shouts with anger “We will fight terror with terror” (reminding Bush) although the story does not need a statement like this because there is no terrorism in the story, there are navis trying to save their land from exploitation. So there is war and it is justified for the navis as they are about to lose their soil. This part of the story has a historical value and can be considered as a realistic approach. But the more the story advances, the more it loses its real point. At the end, again with the help of humans, the navis can fight against the human soldiers. Isn’t it surprising? But in reality, the exploiters do not give up until they consume all the exploitable materials. Movie is optimistic, therefore not realistic. In reality, things happen in a different way. Exploiters leave the exploited lands only after they use up all the materials they need. So a sad ending would be better as it can give people to think about the future of the world and its residents… If we look at the world as it is now, there is not much to hope for the future. Happy ends are good for common movie-goers but at the same time it makes people’s mind numb in a way they stop seeing the movie as a reference to the reality. It just stays in minds as pretty images with heroic actions.



Thirdly, the movie is misleading people’s mind by showing Bush or his war policies as the main target. Now, Bush has gone, any change in US policies in Iraq or Afghanistan happened during last year? Nobel Peace prize is given to Obama and he ironically justified the war in his Nobel lecture in the most fashionable way. I think even Bush must have felt very happy when he listened to Obama’s speech because if he has said the same things, he would have been hit by a shoe. But Obama was clapped and considered as a hero. So what changed in the world? Nothing changed and nothing will change in the future either. The reason is simple: It does not matter if it is republican or democratic; the American imperialism has the same agenda around the world. Since they lost in Vietnam, they keep losing the wars. Because they keep losing wars, they keep waging new wars as well. It is scary for a power-driven economy like US. It is like a wounded bear trying to bite more and more while losing power. The more it loses, the more it gets angry. The more it gets angry, the more it attacks…

I understand that the director does not like Bush or he has moderately left views. But making a block-buster movie whose success is heavily based on its technical extravaganzas is not the way for an artist to show his anger. For me I look at the sincerity of the artist if s/he is criticizing something. The movie made more than a billion dollars so far. It will probably exceed two billion dollar in the near future. So how much of this money will go to the people who have been suffering in the exploited lands? I am not talking about only Iraq and Afghanistan; I am talking about almost every third world country where the huge corporations of developed nations play their dice on human lives since they cannot do it in their own homelands where human lives are costly.

These days it is fashion to criticize Bush and his warriors as he has gone away. It is also fashion to talk about how white man wiped out American Indians in the past, how European powers divided the nations of Africa and Asia on tables, how England left India after consuming up all the resources. All these sound like a old sad story which we like to talk about when we want to look smart among our modern friends. But imperialism is not a past story, it is going on right now, everywhere we look. Avatar is this kind of movie in which exploiters behave like thieves, like bad people who are evil by nature. In reality, exploiters are also fathers of innocent children and they too have pretty wives, they too laugh at good jokes and they too help poor when they want to purify their souls. Nothing is black and white as shown in the movie and this makes the movie failure in another way. I believe Avatar is another form of cultural imperialism where we are forced to think that exploitation comes from outside, from those who are bad people with bad characteristics. But in reality, exploitation comes in the form of money, debt, unregulated foreign investments which benefit only a few rich people in the country, IMF, World Bank etc… Exploitation is everywhere there is a huge gap between poor and rich. Exploitation is on the street where we see beggars, poor people who are forced to sell their kidneys to organ mafia to have some pocket money, poor villagers who work hard not to lose their lands to the big corporations… It is in the factories where the cost of the lunch for a Vietnamese worker is less than 5000 VND while their boss spends thousands of dollars for a sumptuous dinner at 6 star hotels. There is no need to go to Pandora or any other planet to see how things went wrong in the last few centuries… We just need to open our eyes and see the real pictures in 4D (fourth dimension will be “heart” if you would like to call it) because the movies made in 3D are made to mislead us to believe that enemy is outside although it is actually living with us…



Finally, if you would like to see a sci-fi saga with vivid colors and extremely lavish settings, Avatar is there. It is a movie which deserves some Oscars in technical areas. Just do not expect any originality from it as it is not original at all... And the message given in the movie is not something more than you can get from a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Bad cat deserves to be humiliated and good mouse enjoys its smart moves.