Themes in Avatar
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James Cameron, writer and director of Avatar, discusses the film. April 2010
The 2009 American science fiction film Avatar has earned widespread success, becoming the highest-grossing film in history. The blockbuster has provoked vigorous discussion of a wide variety of cultural, social, political, and religious themes identified by critics and commentators, and the film's writer and director James Cameron has responded that he hoped to create an emotional reaction and to provoke public conversation about these topics. The broad range of Avatar's intentional or perceived themes has prompted reviewers to call it "an all-purpose allegory" and "the season's ideological Rorschach blot". One reporter even suggested that the politically charged punditry has been "misplaced": reviewers should have seized on the opportunity to take "a break from their usual fodder of public policy and foreign relations" rather than making an ideological battlefield of this "popcorn epic".Discussion has centered on such themes as the conflict between modern man and nature, and the film's treatment of imperialism, racism, militarism and patriotism, corporate greed, property rights, spirituality and religion. Commentators have debated whether the film's treatment of the human aggression against the native Na'vi is a message of support for indigenous peoples today, or is, instead, a tired retelling of the racist myth of the noble savage. Right-wing critics accused Cameron of pushing an "anti-American" message in the film's depiction of a private military contractor that used ex-Marines to attack the natives, while Cameron and others argued that it is pro-American to question the propriety of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The visual similarity between the destruction of the World Trade Center and the felling of Home Tree in the film caused some filmgoers to further identify with the Na'vi and to identify the human military contractors as terrorists. Critics asked whether this comparison was intended to encourage audiences to empathize with the position of Muslims under military occupation today.Much discussion has concerned the film's treatment of environmental protection and the parallels to, for example, the destruction of rainforests, mountaintop removal for mining and evictions from homes for development. The title of the film and various visual and story elements provoked discussion of the film's use of the iconography of Hinduism, which Cameron confirmed had inspired him. Christians, including the Vatican, worried that the film promotes pantheism over Christian beliefs, while others instead thought that it sympathetically explores biblical concepts. Other critics either praised the film's spiritual elements or found them hackneyed.
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