on 29 January 2010So I went to see Avatar, a satire on mankind’s acquisitiveness and obsession with technological progress. I wanted to catch it at the IMAX, but the Christmas traffic was too heavy. (If you’re hearing a funny noise in the background, it’s just the alarm on my irony meter.)
It still looked pretty impressive in the local multiplex. Nobody combines exploding CGI mayhem with weepy sentimentality like James Cameron, and Avatar delivers both in even larger bucketloads than Titanic. Challenging? Only in the sense that you’re required to overproduce adrenaline every time the virtual camera swoops through another vertiginous hail of laser-guided missiles, while simultaneously tutting disapproval, which is a tricky form of doublethink. But as entertainment, it works.
Although there’s an obvious and refreshingly un-American message, steering clear of real-world politics allows the film to moralise without theorising. Or maybe to theorise without moralising, I couldn’t quite decide. There’s no doubt that the human expeditionary force invading the remote moon Pandora is up to no good, so we don’t have to question the ethics of the indigenous population choosing to fight fire with fire. Well, not actual fire, which they don’t appear to have discovered (and we’ll come back to that), but spears and such.
Indeed, we can feel relieved that the Na’vi aren’t depicted as Social Science Model innocents, free from constructs like property, war and sex. That would have been dull. continue reading at www.macuser.co.uk
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