Deciphering Avatar

One aspect of the movie that is interesting is the heroism theme that is unavoidable in virtually any American movies. A person, or a group of people who fought against the evilness and ultimately save the world has become so prevalent that one may suspect that something was missing if heroism is not present in the movie itself. We could easily list several examples from the blockbusters. In Mission Impossible III, the spy Ethan Hunt, used his wit to find out the plotter, found the “Rabbit’s Foot” and prevented the Earth from destruction. In Avatar, Jake is the hero, saved planet Pandora as well as found his true love on Pandora, just like the heroes in many other movies. The love between Jake and Neytiri is not incidental, but deliberate. The hero and heroine always fall for each other after they had fought together, and escaped from the enemies. Heroism and love – the two eternal themes are well expressed in the movie.

“Science fiction is excellent for that because if you make a comment about the Iraq war and American imperialism in the Middle East, you’re going to get a lot of people pissed off at you in this country, but you do it in a science-fiction context, where you do it at a metaphorical level, people get swept in by the story and they get to the end of the movie before they realize they’ve been rooting for the Iraqis.”

This interview abstract clearly show that the director James Cameron has indeed alluded to American imperialism in a very subtle way. In the movie, the Na’vi, even though able to communicate and store information through the holy “Hometree”, has no modern gunpowder weapons like guns, cannons and missiles. The only “weapon” they have are wild animals, bows and arrows and blades. This kind of reminded me of the invasion of the Eight-Nation Alliance in the Battle of Peking in 1900. The then under-developed Qing Empire has no modern guns and cannons like the western troupe. The Qing army fought in futility against the Eight-Nation troupes using outdated hand-made rifles and swords. With no surprise the Qing Empire lost entirely to the alliance. In Avatar, human beings invaded and wanted to get the rich deposits of unobtanium. The breath-taking beauty of planet Pandora all reminded us of the pre-industrial environment of planet Earth – the Earth before severe environmental destruction. The human beings, armed with all the powerful weapons and robots, attacked the Na’vi to obtain natural resources just as the Europeans attacked the native Indians in the 17^th century. All those who resist will die. We can see from the movie that innocent, lightly-armed Na’vi are killed by tanks and guns easily. But the final outcome for the Na’vi is different. They have a powerful warrior and leader – Jake – who is ironically a traitor of the human beings, the race who want the Na’vi destroyed. With his comprehension of the weakness of human weapons, the Na’vi beat back the human and managed to keep their sacred Hometree safe and sound.