Avatar
James Cameron’s Avatar, a conventional Hollywood-animistic-war-movie-with-a-heart-of-gold, is mostly about war. The trees win — Gaia triumphant, by using dinosaur rhinos to trample the heartless destroyers. Using “shock and awe” buzzwords, just so we are clear where Cameron stands, the director/writer provides us with airborne attack craft that look like WWII-flying-tanks. Cameron needed someone with talent and a reasonable set of values to write the script.
Cameron also throws in his Hollywood take on Native Americans, which looks suspiciously like paternalistic aboriginal sentimentality but Avatar presents as pure hagiographic goodness; these cat-eyed fashionably anorexic toy-people are violent, but good violent, because they are innocent in Cameron’s condescending fantasy.
Cameron even lifted an evil fighting machine from the Alien movies: a huge robot operated as a larger than life bad-soldier. This monster truck with arms was used as a tool to give the good guys a fighting chance in Aliens, but now is a tool of evil itself, aka America, as Cameron sees it. Cameron is the Busby Berkeley of the extreme green movement. Human Beings=Evil; deserving to die on their dying planet.
This evil is personified in mind-numbing stereotypes: the American as macho-military-dunce along with a sidekick cold blooded corporate drone, to provide the orders to destroy.
Any close examination of the director would betray Cameron as something of a despoiler himself — a major league exploiter of modern technology, which is a primary source of the ruination of the landscape. It must be nice for Cameron, relaxing in his high end hybrid, lecturing the masses on their evil ways, and later being celebrated by his fellow wealthy entertainment-celebrity pals for his nobility. Cameron must believe what his pals tell him — he is that insulated, in his little forest of self-regard.
