by westwood.

I swore I would never bend to the will of the usually-mindless masses and go to this movie. However, since it turned out to be a multi-generational activity (thank you, father dear and grandfather dear for the ridiculously expensive ticket and popcorn). The  graphics were indeed rather impressive (I didn’t grab at floating objects like a dorkus, but I did desire to. However, my higher-order desire to not look like a dorkus triumphed) and I enjoyed myself. Although, I did notice a rather gaping contradiction staring me in the face.

Avatar forced a lot of morals, or ethical principles, down my throat (note the ‘oral’ in ‘moral’… coincidence? I think not). The main moral, though goes along the lines of ‘don’t destroy the environment and its dwellers to obtain a stupid material item’
Good job, James ‘hypocrite’ Cameron. You violated your own ethics.

If you’ve been living under a rock, Avatar is a blockbuster touted as having 3-D graphics of unprecedented quality. Probably true, but since the cost ranged from $230-$500 million (depending on your source), it is the most expensive movie ever. That is using a lot of resources. Especially computers, each of which used over 40 types of minerals that were mined somewhere. Perhaps they came from beneath someone’s ‘home tree’. Like gold.

Combing the web yielded absolutely no reports that the production or distribution of the movie was eco-friendly… not even any corporate greenwashing from the studio. Nothing.  No commitments to powering their electronics with renewable energy, no bringing in cast members by train or bus, not even any of those pithy, penance-reminiscent carbon credits. If one was try to build a case, they could go the  computer-generated animation vs outdoor shooting route. True, transportations costs were likely significantly less due to the use of soundstages rather than on-location shooting. However, this could easily have been outweighed by the thousands of computers that ran around-the-clock, rendering graphics, for a year during production. Avatar may present a green world and a green message, but it is in no way green itself. It is just one more installment in the saga of materialism, where we pour money in for flashy graphics that induced an awful lot of material costs in their production.

This rather short-sighted writer thinks that the movie would have been better with the message removed. If Cameron was going to make this massive movie no matter what… as I suspected he would have… I suppose it’s at least a good thing that it bears a positive message to its audience. Even that message is just another contradictions (like its secondary anti-corporation moral… in a movie funded by corporations).

One could cry, “but what about education? The educational value of Avatar vastly outweighs these drawbacks.”

That is a whole other kettle of fish, but emerging research is suggesting that environmental education only goes so far, and may even be failing us entirely. Plus, we already have Pocahontas and Ferngully to teach us our lessons, without leaving my weak eye feeling awful funny. So please, JC, practice what you preach. In the meantime, I’ll check out your ex-wife’s movie, so I can declare it better.

Avatar/Pocahontas Mashup from Randy Szuch.