Avatar does. Incredibly<\/a>.<\/p>\n Kids who grow up watching WALL-E<\/a> and now Avatar are probably going to have an easier time imagining future scenarios that are not based on industrial-age values \u2013\u00a0i.e., the externalities<\/a> that often don’t get considered when deciding whether or not to replace a complex ecosystem with a much simpler, and perhaps, doomed one. <\/p>\n (I’m not sure what role Star Wars played in global political culture during the 80s and 90s \u2013\u00a0the SDI missile defense<\/a> plan, aside \u2013\u00a0given that its message of rebels versus empire had already played out<\/a> in much of the world by the mid 1970s. Roger Ebert has called Avatar a welcome successor to that trilogy and I agree \u2013 a hundred times over.)<\/p>\n Earlier this year, I passed along this anecdote<\/a> about the Iraqi insurgent who loved Titanic: “He recounted watching it seven times and crying every time at the ending, as Kate Winslet lets the dead Leonardo DiCaprio slip into the freezing North Atlantic.” Given Avatar’s complex politics \u2013 its celebration of both localism and “miscegenation” \u2013\u00a0I can’t begin to imagine how this movie will play out across the world. postscript<\/strong> Avatar is as close to perfect as a movie gets \u2013 and\u00a0certainly one that is oriented, by market forces, for a PG-13 release. Others will do a much better job assessing the movie’s many gifts to our culture (e.g., in terms of technique, it leaves the uncanny valley far, far behind) so I want to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"brazil-before-after\"](\"http:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/brazil-before-after.png\" "\\"brazil-before-after\\"")
<\/p>\n
\n <\/a>
\nWhich is all the more reason to make note of one glaring shortcoming: the scenes of ritual prayer. Considering the sophisticated craftsmanship that went into imaging and populating the hybrid world of Avatar (familiar-alien, present-future, live-cg) the scenes in which the fictional Navi people are shown in prayer are corny and cliched<\/a>. I don’t have the heart to research who is to blame for that oversight but they were clearly mismatched for the project \u2013 and if it was the director’s doing, he should have delegated. Taken out of context, they’re almost offensive.<\/p>\n
\nAvatar’s environmental agenda is only one part of a broader satire. The plot pivots on a loaded bribe: a military official, acting on behalf of a corporation and its shareholders, offers a wounded veteran access to otherwise unaffordable health care. In exchange, the vet is asked to commit an act of betrayal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"