Let's talk about colonialism, kiddies.For the last half a millennia or so, Europeans have been going to other parts of the world, establishing bases, running up flags, and generally kicking ass, taking names, and giving out the occasional blanket covered in small pox. Imagine Christopher Columbus in wrap-around shades with an Uzi in one hand and the Spanish flag in the other discovering the new world so he can BRING THE GODDAMN HURT, and then you've got a pretty good idea of how it went down. If you've ever actually been to England, you'll understand, too, because the place is a boring shithole.
However, eventually people got tired of listening to the 17th century equivalent of "America, Fuck Yeah!" on repeat and watching an unstoppable army of white guys named John O'Sullivan shoot down indigenous people like it was garbage day, so they came up with the concept of the noble savage.
In short, the "Noble Savage" is a romantic way to dress up racism-- In this version of racism, instead of the natives being inferior to civilization, the "savages" have a closer connection to nature due to their primitive, unencumbered-by-civilization state. However, in order to survive the destructive presence of the all-powerful white man, they need to be led into enlightenment by a white man. In noble savage stories, a white man is always the one who saves the day for those poor, salt-of-the-earth virtuous natives.
And that's where I come back to James Cameron's epic Avatar, because it is chock-full of this same racist, hacked-together "noble savage" bullshit I'm tired of being force-fed. I went into this movie expecting to have my intelligence and morals insulted like being ball-gagged and forced to watch The Glenn Beck Snow without commercial interruptions, but then something so rage-inducingly frustrating happened that I can't even put words to the sheer mangled hatred that boiled through my veins.
The movie was actually pretty good.
Does a white guy working for an EVIL CORPORATION(tm) join a tribe of native oversized smurfs, become their leader, and save the day due to his uniquely racial tenacity and ability to think outside the box? Yes. Should that be fundamentally belittling to the plight of native peoples around the globe? Yes. Is the film equally insulting to human civilization, even going so far as to trivialize the sum of human creative, social, and technological achievement as "light beer and blue jeans?" Yes. Is is awesome?
Sadly, yes.
James Cameron's Avatar is good. The CGI is so photorealistic that every single frame of this movie could make an amazing desktop background. The flora, fauna, and native civilization are imaginatively put-together. The character development is thin enough that one doesn't get the sense that this is nothing more than a pompous version of Fern Gully, but thick enough that when the final battle sequence starts TWO AND A HALF HOURS INTO THE MOVIE you almost don't feel like you've lost two hours of your life. The movie is in every way worth your ten bucks.
But beware, all you who might fall prey to the movie's romantic view of nature and criminalizing view of society. Life among those blue-skinned natives isn't so great. Yeah, the Na'vi might be able to fly around on pterodactyls powered only by their minds and have face paint that is metal as fuck, but they don't have any of the benefits of a real human civilization. You may think this a eurocentric point of view, and you're damn right: I'll take having a written language and the scientific method over faith healing and flying pterodactyls any day.
And so, I'll leave you with the greatest example of colonialism I can muster:
And PS: Hardcore movie nerds may have caught the name of this film's macguffin, the little rock that the humans want to mine on Pandora. The element is called "Unobtainium," which happens to be the same name as the plottainium element from the 2005 bomber The Core.
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