That was not a subtle theme...
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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Avatar is just recycled CGI Fern Gully anyway
It's a motif as old as time. Foreign invader getting Stockholm Syndrome with the natives. Another famous example is Dances With Wolves. That film called The Great Wall as well. Some versions of Robin Hood has it. Anthropologists call it Going Native, which is what Carlos Castañeda did.
But they're not all about economic expansionism
I saw the film in a theater with someone who wanted to impress upon me that someone pointed out to her how alike it was to what happened to indigenous peoples in the Americas (someone else had pointed that out to her, so she assumed I wouldn't get it on my own). I was like, if you think that's a novel observation, you really need to be hit in the face with concepts to understand things. It couldn't have been more obvious.
But maybe that highlights how much some people just aren't observant or introspective or whatever else. It would explain a lot.
Yeah man, we all understood that the first time around when it was called Fern Gully.
Like Avatar if you want but like.... it is not a deep piece of media with hard-to-discern messaging. Shit is pretty clear.
One time I unmatched someone from a dating app because the second avatar movie was coming out and they said that it was weird of me to say that the alien people were supposed to represent Native Americans because "they're just blue aliens why would you compare them to real life?"
Apparently media literacy makes you a weirdo?
Yes it definitely makes you weird. Turn the brain off and consume the media like a good little sheep (/s if it wasn't obvious)
Fucking Tarzan was fighting evil white exploiters of pristine Africa in books back in the early 1900s.
A good white saviour from the evil white people, because the indigenous can't do it for themselves. Just like in Ferngully and Avatar.
Are there even any indigenous people in Tarzan? I haven't read the book, but from the movie I only remember his gorilla buddy and the little elephant. I think Tarzan is more about rebelling against civilization in general, instead of colonization in specific (which James Cameron's Avatar is). It's very post-industrialization in that sense.
Edit: Whoops, just read the synopsis on Wikipedia. I don't think Tarzan is the white saviour you're looking for...
I can't decide if I should post the "wait, it's all the failures of capitalism?" or "wait, it's all systemic racism?" meme, cuz it's wait it's all both (always has been).
It is also about settler colonialism. There are natural gas fields off the coast of Gaza.
Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.
Explore, exploit, exterminate.
Satisfactory music starts playing
Paved paradise, put up a parking lot.
Difference being the colonists of our world left perfectly habitable areas. In avatar the earth isn't habitable to most and so the colonists are actually kind of sympathetic. The real bad guys never have to leave earth but because it's Cameron it falls on the poors to play the bad guys
So... We manage to master space travel. We manage to master interstellar travel. We eventually find a planet with suitable environment for sustaining our species. And we just overlook it.
Can someone explain me the reasoning behind this?
Sci-fi to the side, there are more minerals available - readily - on asteroids and barren planets than anywhere else. Why go hopping around looking for habitable planets, to the reason of 1 out of who knows how many, to then strip mine it?
There could be many reasons:
- The thing you are mining is actually very rare, and although it could be elsewhere, it's the only place you found it. This is the case in Avatar. The Unobtanium they are mining is not found anywhere else.
- It's easier to mine on a habitable planet. You don't have all the extreme difficulty of operating in space or a planet/moon with no atmosphere. In Avatar workers can freely operate without any special equipment, using just a gas mask, and don't need to be astronauts.
- You are assuming they found Pandora to mine on it. They probably found it through scientific research, and the mining angle only appeared later when the resource was found.
Another important detail is that in Avatar they don't have any faster than light tech. Pandora is in the Alpha Centauri system, the closest star to the Sun, and it takes years to get there anyway. Sure, there might be lots of better places to choose, but it's literally the only habitable body in reachable distance from Earth unless you want to spend decades flying in one direction.
Tbf, the air on Pandora is toxic to humans. That was the entire point of using the avatars in the first movie... Wouldn't exactly call that suitable for sustaining the life of our species
And that material they found in the planet was some fictional things humans had never encountered before.
The resource being extracted on the avatar planet was unobtanium.
It was only available on that planet, precisely so intelligent people like you can’t say “why not mine barren rocks instead”?
Pandora was a moon, not a planet. (Doesn't change your point, just correcting the detail.)
This annoyed me also.
If the Avatar universe has physics like ours, which it looks like it does from the way things move etc..
The protoplanetry disk that the planet formed from, must have had the unobtanium, since it is so evenly spread around the later formed planet.
Yes, there are higher concentrations in various places, which could have come from impact events in the past; if this is the case the impactors are likely from the local asteroid belt or equivalent.
The unobtanium must be available, in a much easier to extract form, in asteroids in the soloar system or the moons of Pandora.
Either way, a mineral is a terrible maguffin for a space faring civilization.
In the second movie, the whale brain juice is a much better maguffin, but still kinda stupid for a technologically advanced species.
Assume that to get interstellar travel, with the suspended animation and brain beaming tech we are shown, humans are a good 200 years ahead of where we are now....given that they can also make fully functional alien bodies from scratch, that can breed and pass on genetic material to what look like viable offspring. The level of synthetic biology expertise must be insane, and they can't make this brain juice....it is just stupid.
Me too.
It’s supposed to be an indictment of capitalism. But that falls flat when you realize it was one of the most profitable movies of all time; grossing over 2 billion and being one of the fastest to reach the various benchmarks at theaters.
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Literally Satisfactory
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