In the Na'vi, or The Last Samurai Treehugger Dances with Blue Pterodactyls
To call the movie formulaic would be putting it mildly: military man accepts recon mission among the natives, realizes that they are Noble while the American civilization from which he himself comes is Ignoble, switches sides and goes native, and finally leads the home team into battle against his own people. In this case, the military man is Jake Sully, a Marine who has been paralyzed from the legs down, but is nevertheless sent on a mission to Pandora-a moon of a gas giant orbiting Alpha Centauri A- because he is the identical twin of a scientist who had been scheduled to go, but died. Since his DNA is identical, he will be able to interface with his dead brother's avatar- a living being concocted of both human and native DNA (or its local equivalent), and able to look like the homies while housing his own, human consciousness.
And here, at the outset, lies the first of many problems with Avatar: such a cloned being would be a living entity in its own right, and inevitably have a consciousness of its own. To deprive it of that natural consciousness would be in effect to kill a sentient being. And even aside from the ethical issue, the question of how to destroy that consciousness without damaging the avatar's neurocerebral hardware would pose a major problem. The creation of the avatars would create seemingly insurmountable obstacles, both ethical and practical.
These are simply ignored. The avatars are presented to us as biological machines, cyborgs without any mechanical components whatsoever- and also without any consciousness apart from that of the human parasites whose minds inhabit them. By implication, this deprives the avatars themselves of any moral significance apart from that of the humans who are part-time residents in their otherwise vacant brains. When the consciousness of the human user leaves them, they simply become inert. This is a convenient situation, but one which begs the rather significant question of how one evicts the original inhabitant without damaging the house's wiring- to say nothing of the question of whether doing so can be morally justified even if it were possible.
While some of the scientists on the planet (notably Sigourney Weaver) are interested in studying the wonders of Pandora for the sake of scientific knowledge, the real reason for the presence of the Earthlings is the exploitation of a natural substance called unobtainium- a mineral which somehow defies gravity in the presence of electromagnetic fields such as exist on the moon. Entire mountains of the stuff are floating about, and provide the backdrop for most of the action in the latter part of the film. But for some reason, instead of mining the readily- accessible mountains, the Nasty Militarists and Greedy Capitalists from Earth are determined to evict the Na'vi from their most sacred ground, which happens to house the richest deposit of unobtainium on Pandora. Why gaining access to that particular deposit, rich though it may be, is so urgent in the face of plentiful supplies of the stuff elsewhere on the moon and accessible with no great inconvenience to anybody is never explained.
Naturally, Jake (promised surgery to restore the use of his legs if he fulfills an undercover assignment among the native Na'vi) is overjoyed to be using a pair of legs again the moment his consciousness enters the host. These legs, moreover- like everything about his Na'vi/human hybrid body- are capable of a great deal more than his human members ever were.
At first, his eventual Na'vi love interest, Netyri- who interferes to save his live when through his own negligence he is attacked by (rather than dances with) a pack of what pass for wolves on Pandora (they can climb trees, btw), treats him with disdain, But then, A Miracle Occurs. That miracle is the onset of the transformation of Avatar from a sci-fi film with phenomenal special effects into an example of the kind of heavy-handed political propaganda in which Hollywood has engaged far too often in recent years.
A sign is given that the planetary consciousness and deity of the Na'vi has chosen Jake and blessed him. Introducing himself as Jakescully, Warrior of the Jarhead Clan, Jake is fully accepted by the Na'vi, receives the training normally given a Na'vi on the verge of young... er, Na'vihood- and becomes a full and trusted member of the tribe.
Pandora is a world in which the Gaia hypothesis- a kind of pantheism treating an entire ecosystem as a single, living entity to which personality and divinity are ascribed- is apparently real. The Na'vi communicate with their horse-analogs, with the blue pterodactyl-like birds on which they hunt, and even with their planetary deity through what resemble fiber-optic cables in their hair, which interface naturally upon being placed into proximity with the equivalent fibers on the other entity involved. The deity is "prayed" to by interfacing these fibers with the long, glowing tentacles hanging from a sacred tree. When the final military confrontation takes place between the bad-guy Marines and the good-guy Na'vi- a conflict whose outcome is wholly unrealistic- the Gaia-being responds to Jake's prayer (contrary to the theological presuppositions of the Na'vi) by enlisting the wildlife of the moon (including, at a convenient moment, a pair of hammerhead hippopattomi) as the Na'vi Reserve.
At the end of the movie, the impression is given that the issue has been decided, and that the human invaders are being decisively evicted. The surviving humans (at least those who have not gone over to the Na'vi at some point in the film and chosen to stay) are herded under guard into the shuttlecraft in which they arrived for transport to a ship in orbit and thus back to Earth, where they belong. Given the value of unobtainium and the technological realities of a confrontation between a society of even the tallest and bluest of stone age tribesmen and one capable of space travel, it seems hard not to predict the return of the humans in overwhelming force- force great enough to resume their mining operation and do all manner of dirt to the Na'vi despite even the efforts of Pandora's intelligent ecosystem. After all, as one of the humans tells the Na'vi, the Sky People (as the Earthlings are locally known) "killed their mother" (Earth).
Of course, they had done no such thing. As the Jeff Goldblum character in the book version of Jurassic Park eloquently points out, it is the height of hubris to think that human beings are capable of destroying our planet. Earth has taken on tougher customers than humanity and survived. And apparently even in the film Earth's ecosystem is alive enough that it harbors residents capable of mounting an industrial and military expedition to another star system, and to accept its wayward children when they are implausibly sent home with their metaphorical tails between their legs by a race of arboreal blue giants who really do have tails, but lack any technology more formidable than the bow and arrow. Pandora, too, would doubtless survive the worst humanity could do to it. But I have serious doubts that it would ultimately be any more successful in resisting humanity's determination to exploit its resources than Earth has been.
Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed Avatar. The special effects alone are worth the price of admission. But while it will undoubtedly be nominated for Best Picture on the strength of its merits as a technological achievement, it's nothing special as a story. In the last analysis, it's finally a beautifully told piece of political propaganda for the Left, like so many otherwise estimable Hollywood products.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, at one level; Hollywood's ecomaniacs have every right to their voice. But don't see Avatar with any idea that you'll be viewing a cinematic masterpiece. It's a very pedestrian story told with great beauty- and the beauty, rather than the story, is the reason to see it.
I recommend that you do. But bear in mind that you've seen this movie before- and more than once.
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