Spoilers ahead…:
Reached via e-mail in Sweden where he is studying game design, Hill, 17, explained that his feelings of despair made him desperately want to escape reality.
“One can say my depression was twofold: I was depressed because I really wanted to live in Pandora, which seemed like such a perfect place, but I was also depressed and disgusted with the sight of our world, what we have done to Earth. I so much wanted to escape reality,” Hill said.
This was my primary complaint about the plot of Avatar, even above the whole Mighty Whitey fantasy it lives within: It portrays humans as wholly cruel without good reason, where the outliers of this future either die, or discard their humanity entirely.
By “cruel without good reason,” I mean that squashing a native culture is not in any way balanced by a statement about how the “unobtainium” is necessary to keep humanity alive, or keep Earth going, or anything. The most horrible things in our history were still done in misguided attempts to try and do something good for someone, insanity aside.
It’s clear if Earth is a dead planet (which it’s not made clear, which is part of the problem) then having this material as an energy source is part of a desperate attempt to keep humanity alive. There’s a bigger story behind why a corporation/government would go to such extremes to get this material than just “this shit makes a lot of money.”
I could be wrong: Cameron certainly wants to make a political statement that these kinds of atrocities happen in remote, isolated places where corporations are operating without government oversight, and where reports of such activity will never make it back to the people who could force them to stop. Maybe they are cruel for no reason after all.
So the characters we root for are all aliens, and the humans are without hope. How should the audience related to these characters? They can’t. That’s what this article is highlighting — those who agree with our protagonist are left feeling the only option is to change sides, not to change policies, or beliefs, or habits.
I think Cameron wanted to make the Human -> Na’vi change a symbolic message of “you need to completely change the way you live if you want to make a change” but the human condition is so realized on the one side, that I think this point is getting missed by a lot of people, and what’s left is just plain misanthropy.
