Another chud
It should be noted that the typical Hollywood diversity in casting is, SHOCKINGLY, missing when it comes to human colonists, who are essentially all white and even referred to as “pink-skins” by Na’vi.
Which I’m sure means nothing :)) a very innocent creative choice :)))))
Damn right, face the wall cracker 
Long Live Jakesully 
Ok, now I’ll bite. Why does Hollywood entertain these obviously proletariat films even circling around? Performative self-deprecation? The rich saying “yeah. We kind of suck.” is some defensive move? It still shapes culture to be against the ruling class and subverts white supremacy. This is unabashedly an anti-settler film?
There’s no way people except us would watch this and see their sacred cows be the bad guys eating shit.
What are they playing at?
They’re selling movie tickets. You purchase the feeling of shattering the grand illusion. Then the next day you go back to work.
I was thinking of that quote, trying to remember what philosopher said it lol
jokes on you it was a
Every single person in the world could watch RRR, The Battle of Algiers, Battleship Potemkin, Soy Cuba, or your other favorite revolutionary films and it won’t do much more than let them enjoy the feeling of resistance (and really believe that they are in the movie, beating the bad guys) but they still have to go to work tomorrow. Media like this just works as a release valve so that people can allow their screens to perform activism on their behalf. Social media (Hexbear included) can perform the same role. It’s a simulacrum of actually doing something that substitutes the real thing.
Capital subsumes and commodifies everything including the criticism of capitalism.
Its not proletarian. Its James Cameron’s radlib noblesse oblige mixed with his teenage deviant art portfolio.
It’s the “They killed someone, but they did it for a good reason” versus “They did it for a good reason, but they killed someone” sleight of hand.
You can adopt any concept and so long as you have total discourse, media and educational dominance like the modern West does, which prevents any serious counter-narratives from spreading, it will still serve your interests as long as you frame it correctly.
I haven’t watched this latest instalment but I bet eventually, one of the dramatic narrative arcs will be that, caught up by the atrocities that the humans commit against the indigenous people, one of the protagonist’s children/friends/loved one will allow their “emotions to understandably get the better of them” and start to “fight fire with fire” beyond the protagonist’s moral comfort level. They’ll have a conflict. The plot will then contrive its way to affirm that the character who took things too far was wrong and that the protagonist was right to be conflicted. Nia Frome coined this trope as “The Swerve”
Here’s another on: I bet at the end of this box office revenue milk farm of a series, the indigenous population will either work out an understanding with the humans so that the latter can continue to exploit the land under an “equal partnership” or the last scene will be the humans realizing their fault, and one of them nodding to the protagonist before embarking on the departing ship, without the fight ever being taken to Earth itself.
No revenge, no reparations, no reprisals, no blowback. You don’t need to forgive, but you must forget. Peace is contingent on the victim unilaterally promising everything that’s happened is water under the bridge and the colonizer walking away in confidence that this chapter has been closed and a new leaf imposed (which is to say, the colonizer will get to enjoy the position of “victim” if the victim ever wants to unilaterally revisit the issue). That would be one of many ways in how to create a pro-colonial “anti-colonial” narrative.
I’m pretty sure Cameron has said the final film(s) will take place at least partially on Earth. A counter attack isn’t out of the realm of possibilities. Also I think the direction they may go is that humans are subsumed into the N’avi life and culture by way of Eywa, the hivemind goddess of Pandora. We’ve never once had a single moment that justifies human society, other than like scientists just doing some science and medicine.
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tbf it’s not as though the Navi have interstellar warships
maybe they can commandeer some
The problem isn’t the lack of revenge, the problem is that the system that fundamentally caused the problem still remains and a mere symptom was temporarily palliated.
They do it because james cameron movies sell tickets and he has an anti-colonial hyperfixation at the moment
decades long moment, but yeah
Oh yea, avatar 1 is like 20 years old at this point
He’s been sort of a radlib since Terminator.
one can dye their hair green and so on and so forth
These aren’t proletarian films and they do not threaten the status quo. They are a release valve to let people feel satisfaction at the idea of rebellion without encouraging rebellion or educating on rebellion. I have nothing against Avatar, but it absolutely is not some sort of problem to capitalism that capitalism has turned a blind eye to.
Ok, but is Avatar even a proletarian film franchise? Yeah, one the one hand, the colonized natives kill space Americans, but it’s also about a white guy who literally comes to inhabit an indigenous body and proves himself to be a better native than the actual natives.
Also they’re dogshit movies. The first one was kinda neat, if you saw it in 3D, in 2009, but beyond that they’re forgettable as hell ¯\(ツ)/¯
I kinda think they’re subverting the white savior thing? There’s some hints of that in the second movie, but I haven’t seen the third yet so who knows
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Having seen only Avatar: it’s very entertaining as an enormous budget blockbuster that isn’t completely morally bankrupt (as opposed to the usual defenders of the status quo capeslop) but I think it’s fair to say it’s not a visionary film. It’s forgettable, generic, and has “unobtainium.” You don’t have to love it.
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Again I only saw the first one but I hardly think they could be solid in every aspect. Every aspect? That’s ridiculous.
First of all, they could stand to be a lot gayer. There’s no time travel. Glaring lack of basketball B plot (leaving the basketball court in the base as an unfired Chekhov’s gun). At best, I can give them points for tall women and hair sex. But my checklist’s boxes are bereft of marks here.
It’s okay to hate Hollywood movies. Avatar is not not some cinematic masterpiece
I don’t recall the first one super well, but the second one was genuinely wretched in so many ways. Even the visual effects which were touted so much just felt artless in their photorealism.
I think the writing/narrative has no impact and is entirely secondary to the visual aspects of the films. The visual aspects are absolutely groundbreaking and seriously advanced the state of the art of filmmaking.
Like, they’ve got someone who’s job is to build a Navi conlang, which is a wasted effort if they’re all speaking English regardless, but then they’re also rendering water so perfectly it’s indistinguishable from reality and crossing past the uncanny valley to have fully CG photorealistic characters.
I actually believe that.
Like, I couldn’t tell you any of the characters names off the top of my head right now.
Their narrative is threadbare and really only in service of showing off a big visual spectacle.
I feel the same way about most Christopher Nolan movies too. Wtf were Inception or Tenent about? Idk, but they looked cool, I guess.
James Cameron has a similar thing going on with the Avatar movies
It’s all about the