Some thoughts about Avatar.
This post contains spoilers. But I was, like, the last person to see the movie who actually wanted to see it, right?
1. It’s a shame that this means The Sparrow will probably never get made into a movie.
2. Leaving aside all of the political stuff, I thought the film was more self-aware than most people have given Cameron credit for. I mean, yeah, there’s the “unobtanium” thing, which is a groaner…except that when they made the same joke in The Core six years ago, everyone just ran with it. Because everyone knew that movie wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously.
3. And meanwhile, here’s a movie, made almost entirely inside a computer, that glorifies the natural world. And people have been confused by this, chalked it up to the drab irony of twenty-first century life, and moved on. Yet this planet is comprised a network of trees, all interconnected, like it was some kind of giant internet or something.
4. Incidentally, Pandora is a utopian, undemocratic society ruled by an all-powerful computer. This is the type of planet that the old James T. Kirk absolutely lived to destroy.