Avatar Modernized
Avatar: A Billion Dollar Message?
In the movie, Avatar, we are immersed in the world of Pandora, a distant planet with life that we humans have never seen before. They have massive animals that resemble nothing less than dinosaurs; it has wildlife with vibrant colors that astonish the normal person. But with all this beauty the planet is being invaded by humans with one goal in mind and that is to make money from mining their ground for the valuable Unobtanium that lies beneath the land. We are introduced to all of this within a story that has been labeled by the director James Cameron as “an old-fashioned jungle adventure with an environmental conscience” It can be argued, however, that camerons “environmental conscience” amounts to nothing more than an environmentalist pacifism that undermines its own message by notable inconsistencies as seen in the film’s focus on technology, militarism, racial stereotypes and anti-corporate stance.
“Despite its pseudo new-age lust for the natural, the film is a gluttonous celebration of technology” says Ari Y. Kelman in his review of Avatar. And with James Cameron describing this movie with an anti-technology stance it’s hard for some to agree with Cameron and mostly from the central stand point that this movie took 500 million dollars to make to buy the most up to date technology known to man. And with 500 million dollars to spend on a movies technology its hard the storyline or the message at all. It immediately contradicts Cameron’s statement of focusing on anti-technology messages; Cameron focuses on the technology as the main selling point of this movie, not the hidden messages throughout. Cameron can stand by this message of being a very “anti-technology” movie all he wants, but with him having to resort to this amount of money to get this type of technology is very ironic in a sense. He used all this new age tech to describe a world with none what so ever. He contradicts himself even before he starts to shoot the
In the movie, Avatar, we are immersed in the world of Pandora, a distant planet with life that we humans have never seen before. They have massive animals that resemble nothing less than dinosaurs; it has wildlife with vibrant colors that astonish the normal person. But with all this beauty the planet is being invaded by humans with one goal in mind and that is to make money from mining their ground for the valuable Unobtanium that lies beneath the land. We are introduced to all of this within a story that has been labeled by the director James Cameron as “an old-fashioned jungle adventure with an environmental conscience” It can be argued, however, that camerons “environmental conscience” amounts to nothing more than an environmentalist pacifism that undermines its own message by notable inconsistencies as seen in the film’s focus on technology, militarism, racial stereotypes and anti-corporate stance.
“Despite its pseudo new-age lust for the natural, the film is a gluttonous celebration of technology” says Ari Y. Kelman in his review of Avatar. And with James Cameron describing this movie with an anti-technology stance it’s hard for some to agree with Cameron and mostly from the central stand point that this movie took 500 million dollars to make to buy the most up to date technology known to man. And with 500 million dollars to spend on a movies technology its hard the storyline or the message at all. It immediately contradicts Cameron’s statement of focusing on anti-technology messages; Cameron focuses on the technology as the main selling point of this movie, not the hidden messages throughout. Cameron can stand by this message of being a very “anti-technology” movie all he wants, but with him having to resort to this amount of money to get this type of technology is very ironic in a sense. He used all this new age tech to describe a world with none what so ever. He contradicts himself even before he starts to shoot the