Avatar - Great Film, Controversial Themes on Cross-Cultural Communication

After posting a criticism on the sexist, undeserving Box Office champion from last November known as New Moon, I realized how much I really missed writing film reviews.

Not only that, but I also never really realized how much more meaningful and personal film reviews can be when I write them in a context beyond the scope of plot or essential filmmaking qualities. New Moon's impeccable parallel to the problems with anti-Feminst rhetoric today helped me understand the film on a deeper level - as something that exists not only as one small piece of a mass media puzzle, but also as an indicator of cultural values and tensions.

Accordingly, I have revisisted the same process with the most recent blockbuster toward which I contributed nine bucks: Avatar, James Cameron's latest indulgence in visual effects and action-packed romance.

Avatar generally emulates the plot structure of films about cultures of "The Other," like Disney's Pocohantus: culture with bad intentions invades Other culture that wasn't doing anyhing to them. Boy from culture with bad intentions meets girl from Other culture. Boy learns from this more exoticized, "spiritual," nature-worshipping culture about life. Boy and girl fall in love. Cultural interactions end in tragedy and death for many, with a fairy tale ending for some.

Quite frankly, Avatar is, as most seem to have agreed, an excellent film. It is well paced, hypnotically alluring (with or without the immersive 3-D atmosphere) and overall, successful in its ability to entertain spectators.

However, in addition to talented editing and astonshing technology, there are bundles of profoundly relevant themes one could take away from Avatar that its well-endowed budget could not provide.

Avatar demonstrates how universally destructive interactions with cultures can be. Although many have argued the film illustrates a redundant and recycled theme with no original interpretation, Avatar manages to refresh us with ideas that are so significant, we cannot ignore them.

No, I'm not referring to any war in a distant country in which our nation has diplomatically, economically, and militarily invested. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq do indeed exemplify the types of situations to which Avatar alludes; however, they do not afford the full picture of what Cameron's story truly symbolizes.

The scientists in the film who attempt to mimic a culture through physical avatars is equally representative of the problematic ways in which countries invade other areas of the globe without a conscious effort to preserve, understand, or respect the cultures they are studying.

These scientists, portrayed as protaganists, or at the very least, as foils to the antithetically depicted military personell, are just as guilty as their myopic foes, but seem to go unpunished and act unrealized. Why is the military, with their guns and political inferences, painted with such patently nefarious motivations, when their counterparts in the film - scientists encouraging the trivialization of an entire culture by recreating its members' physical apperances - are reduced to a neutral state at which they are neither the heroes nor villains? Don't the scientists require a moral obligation to review their actions, too? Interactions that operate under assumptions of cultural hubris or the "right to study" do not exist within some heirarchy of ethical standards; an invasion is an invasion, whether it's with test tubes or bullets.

To be fair, I think the movie is worth seeing. Still, I do think it's interesting how Avatar incorporates real global issues into its nearly three-hour-long span while escaping some valuable critiques on human history and international relations. So-called "humanitarians" and "peace-keeping" scientists of exorbitantly wealthy nations that lead experiements and research in foreign lands are sometimes brutually unwelcomed and can dismantle cultures as effectively and efficiently as any military or greedy corporation.

Overall, Avatar is a fantastic film. As I said, it strictly follows guidelines for great filmmaking and does not seem to fail in any explicit way. Nevertheless because the cultural understandings and subtle implications of films' conclusions are often left unnoticed, we cannot hold Cameron or the film itself fully accountable for its failure to develop and criticize discourse on cross-cultural communication. It's a part of an extensively muted dialouge, which is why I am pointing it out to you today.