[China hijack]
snort Because with their strict IP enforcement, there’s certainly not any bootleg copies out in China!
[/hijack]
Probably an oversight and not in the direction Cameron wanted to take his narrative.
Oh, I get that. I was just ruminating out loud, so to speak.
Wow, if the Chinese moviegoers hadn’t noticed that parallel before, I’m sure they do now, now that the government has so kindly pointed it out to them. Way to shoot yourself in the foot!
It sounds sort of like the right-wing groups that objected to the Star Wars prequels, since they showed that the evil empire was evil, and the evil empire was obviously intended as a reference to Bush.
I for one am extremely happy that I can go watch a fictional movie set in the future where alien races exist and mountains can hover and not come away feeling like the director pissed in my political cereal bowl.
The message I came away with was that this eye candy popcorn flick deserves 15 more of my dollars before it leaves the IMAX screens. The movie taught me that today’s 3D technology is pretty kickass when paired with an IMAX screen and sound system. 
If you can reduce it to such simplicity, the story applies to a gazillion conflicts throughout all of history. “One culture sees the resource of another culture and tries to take it by force” is one of the most generic stories possible, and if this movie were made in a different time period they’d apply it to whatever popular culture story matched in that time period. Iraq is certainly no different from the thousands of times this scenario has occured in human history, it’s just the one most prominent in our conciousness.
The analogy doesn’t match. A better one would be Americans moving westward, displacing the Cherokee and Sioux, in the absence of other competing interests who might have their own reasons for defending the Cherokee and Sioux. Taking out Saudi Arabia would piss off a great many people who trade daily with Saudi Arabia. To make the analogy work, you’d have to assume the U.S. and Saudi Arabia were the only nations on Earth.
Absolutely. But that’s the problem with Cameron’s “shock and awe” references - it takes an absolutely typical story that can stand on its own with no reference to any real world analog, and forces you to think about it in terms of Iraq. It was a terrible move, and the movie would have been much stronger (though still crap, IMHO) without it.
What you are ignoring is that then is not now. The most important social and political costs would be the ones at home. As cynical as I am about Americans, not even I think they would be indifferent to nuclear genocide by their own government. If the America of the present thought like the America of centuries past but was otherwise unchanged, I expect we’d kill just about everyone in the entire Third World in order to take their land and resources; and quite probably exterminate every country on the planet that didn’t have nukes they can point back at us.
Example: All the rigmarole about how we were “liberating” Iraq was aimed at the American people, and pretty much worked with only them. But that was enough for the war to get rolling. By the same token, the general public of future Earth has to be convinced that attacking the Na’vi is acceptable, or doing so is political suicide.
What about the Sgt. Rock-like psychopath ex-Marine colonel? This guy is macho, likes his scars (momento of encounter with the Na’vi), and likes to kick ass.
His boss ( the weasel-like manager who doesn’t do much but banter with Sigourney) seems to let the colonel do what he wants.
Enya is clearly gaia-and that hokey chanting ceremony where everybody hooks up with Enya is the most hilarious part of the movie!
In lieu of a Na’vi-sympathetic news agency, how would the future American-equivalents even know about this? Vague stories might get back years afterward, when it’s too late to do anything about it.
Because we’re talking about an ALIEN SPECIES. Like, OMG THE WORLD HAS MASSIVELY CHANGED OMG ALIENS WOOT! shit. People would be utterly fascinated by them and want to know everything about them. It would be the most game-changing moment in human history. Yet people act like we would regard them as nothing more than some obscure species of mole rate in Tasmania and exterminate them at will.
It’s OK though, because there’s probably nowhere in China that you could find an unauthorized copy of the movie, or cheap electronic equipment to play it on.
Exactly. It’s one thing to trample all over some group when people aren’t looking; it’s quite another to do so when tens, hundreds of millions are glued to every detail.
Who’s glued to the details? Why is it necessary to keep making up stuff that wasn’t in the movie?
Are you saying making first contact with an alien world wouldn’t be a significant event to humanity and that we wouldn’t mind if some corporation exterminated them, or that within 150 years we’ll make contact with so many races that any particular one is fairly mundane?
I’m not making anything up. I’m saying the idea that humanity could turn a blind eye to the extermination of an alien species is utterly absurd in every detail.
Quite frankly, the entire line of argument of “like, dude, we’d totally wipe out the Navi and take their shit with no hesitation cause like, look what happened 800 years ago with colonialism and shit” has about 8 gazillion holes in it, and really just serves as a platform for people to say “check me out, I think even less of humanity than you do”
Well, deeeeeep philosophical musings about the nature of man aside, why is it necessary to make up additional material to explain away a film’s weaknesses?
It’s not additional material. The argument goes “we’d just exterminate them for resources like some cultures have done before!” and that argument is easily rejected by showing that:
A) We live in a massively different society than previous cultures who committed widespread genocide and extermination, and there’s no indication that we’re going to slide backwards (sure, you still have Rwanda and such in the world, but they’re not goint to be the ones pioneering interstellar travel). We’re nothing like the colonial powers that commited these acts in our history both because we culturally will not tolerate that sort of thing, and because we’re much better informed - we have an expectation of knowing what’s going on in the world (or the galaxy, in this case) and it’s much harder to send a small expeditionary force to quietly exterminate some faraway natives when society has up to date information and discussion of current events, and not a vague idea of what was printed in a 1 page newspaper (probably censored) delayed by months for the word to spread.
B) Even if you accept that we would be willing to exterminat faraway native humans in modern times, discovering alien life would be the most significant event in mankind’s history. There would be no subject that has ever captured the world’s attention like this one has. Our entire culture would be deeply involved in this contact, and there’s no way you can silently wipe them out and no one back home would notice.
This is just an extrapolation of human behavior, no additional material is necesary. It’s far more ridiculous to assume that between now and the time in the movie, our culture will have devolved so severely that we’d now treat the extermination of another sentient race the same way we’d treat the extinction of the horned toad of Madagascar.
Yes, there is nothing to suggest that nuclear extermination is a realistic possibility in the context of the film. Remember this is just a corporation; there is no particular reason to believe they would be given access to nuclear weapons . And there isn’t much reason to believe that the Earth government or public would have much sympathy for the corporation.
Yes, it is. Relying solely on what is actually presented in the film:
-The corporation wants the mineral and it is very valuable.
-There are marine-mercenaries all over the place, and they have lots and lots of guns.
-There’s a ticking-clock element - the bulldozers will be at the big tree in a few months and if the Na’vi haven’t moved by then, there’s no indication that it’ll be “okay, we’ll turn around and go somewhere else”.
-When things get bad enough, and with no consultation with (or indeed an evident consideration of) Earth-based authority, the corporation will (though perhaps not cheerfully) allow the marine/mercs to blow the crap out of the Na’vi.
There is simply no point coming up with some reason why the corporation can’t slaughter the Na’vi because we see them trying very hard to slaughter the Na’vi. I can buy that the corporation isn’t happy about this, but whatever sadness they feel sure ain’t stopping them.