Avatar Movie Review Part Two
WHAT is a review of a popular SF movie doing in THIS ahimsa-themed blog?
Well, the last hour of the melodrama glorifies Hollywood mayhem WAR with the before-noted stunning special effects. Thrilling if you are a little boy with not much experience or an adolescent with the aggression juices freely flowing.
Satisfactorily, by the end, the good guys are bruised and bleeding but the bad guys are vanquished complete.
The biggest baddie is rightfully dead (he deserved to die!) and some of his surviving minions are ignominiously shipped back to their self-wasted and selfish planet
The thing is--there is a hint of things in real-time current events in the movie.
Things which are widely known but hardly mentioned in polite society.
Some earthling ex-Marines--now mercenaries--are going to win the hearts and minds of some aliens so the sky people (earthlings) can mine the alien's planet of some fantastically valuable mineral desired by huge, faceless earth corporations. If the local residents don't like this, the earthlings are going to destroy the alien's tree-village and kill as many of them as necessary.
Substitute "oil" for valuable mineral and Iraq/Afghanistan for alien, far-away planet and the usual huge, faceless corporations manufacturing war-materials and so forth--the Blackwater cowboys and other soldiers-for-hire and you have a rather bold anti-war statement--especially since the aliens who must be eliminated to get the valuable mineral are portrayed as more-or-less noble and sexy high-principled savages heroically fighting to preserve their homeland and way of life from unprincipled intruders.
This very popular movie shows a change perhaps in American's patriotic knee-jerk support of all these endless foreign wars.
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