If you want to see that extra video from me on writing exposition, you can watch it here: nebula.tv/videos/the-closer-look-how-to-write-great-exposition I break down a lot of examples from Avatar, to Revenge of the Sith, and if you like my normal content, you'll definitely enjoy this one! Have a great day, - Henry
I tend to hate on the nose stuff, but it isn't always a slip up, but deliberate choice. Zootopia couldn't afford to loose casuals, while powerpuff girls is biting and to the point As satire!
Okay, I usually don't comment on your videos, but this one really spoke straight out of my soul. I love your content and many others do aswell. Always stay the way you are ❤
Honey this movie made more money than Avengers: Endgame and Avatar 4 was in production before Avatar 2 was even released. Do you think thought-provoking and deep arguments sell tickets? Only the common denominator (what everybody already agrees with) does.
@@neonbunnies9596 Even if something is simple doesn't mean that it's propaganda. I don't think that this term applies to Marvel movies honestly. It seems to me that you just wanted to boost your own ego and shit all over most people because you're so much smarter than them.
At least with the Avengers films you can remember them after the end credits. The only thing people remember about either Avatar film is how much money they made.
Actually I think everyone has the ability to do that; it doesn't require any deep understanding of things or subtlety. It's the most basic use of storytelling (propaganda, cautionary tales, etc.): you can do it in a bad or good way, that's all. Providing nuance and reflection, and letting the viewer/reader making their own sense out of it, is a way better writing feat imo
This is why, in my opinion, Princess Mononoke is the epitome of an 'environmental film.' It masterfully avoids painting humans or nature as outright villains, recognizing that the issue at hand is incredibly complex. Throughout the movie, we witness a portrayal of both sides that highlights their strengths and flaws without passing judgment. In the opening scenes, nature is depicted through the terrifying demon boar that infects Ashitaka, and also embodied in San, a human who has grown to despise her own kind due to her adoption by spirits. San can be seen as the Jake Sully of this story, renouncing humanity because of its perceived 'evil.' On the other side, we have Lady Eboshi and Irontown, initially portrayed as the antagonists responsible for destroying the natural resources in the area. However, as Ashitaka explores the town, we come to understand that their actions are driven by a desperate need for survival. Ultimately, the film's message revolves around the importance of finding a balance and moderation in consumption. It advocates for embracing technological advancements while simultaneously respecting and preserving nature. Princess Mononoke encourages us to acknowledge the complexity of the environmental issue rather than resorting to simplistic narratives of good versus evil.
To add to this, understanding the importance of grey areas seems to be one of the main messages of the film, since the main force of evil is created by the hatred of both factions and they only defeat it by working together. Hayao Miyazaki is known for having a strong distaste for black-and-white stories, and I think Princess Mononoke was his way of expressing those feelings.
This right here. Nature is great and should be preserved and respected, but to say that modern technology is bad is just... wrong. Mononoke shows why both ideas are valid, the problem is the violence and hate that occurs between the two.
For the Kiri sickness part. Also, don't forget that the humans literally made human-navi avatars. Which means that they understand navi biology on a level that no navi at their current "technological level" will ever be able.
Yes!! And to make it worse there are actually good examples of traditional medicine that can help illnesses up to some point, but they don't even take inspiration from this for the films! Instead of Ronal showing her knowledge from actual resources from the land, sea, herbs e.t.c. all she does is this clishé ritualistic Witch Doctor mumbo jumbo, of blowing air and poking Kiri's stomach! This could actually have been an interesting scene if the humans and Ronal used their combined knowledge of medicine and technology to help Kiri, but that's just too much for Cameron's simple mind.
You should tell here on your channel how the English destroyed the Australian aborigines. I would like an explanation to determine a town that could not defend itself. .😢😢😢
I think touching on Jake’s disability in the beginning of the film more would’ve been a great way to bring a more realistic view to the Na’vi society- we know disabled people were taken care of since the prehistoric age, but it would’ve objectively been a lot harder for someone like Jake to survive without a wheelchair in the beginning of the film, something the Na’vi don’t have. The seizure was such a missed opportunity to potentially touch on disability and medical issues too
@@GREVIEWS02 Well it wasn't a set up for this movie so I'm not exactly holding my breath for the next decade on a point that will most likely have been forgotten by then
Basically, Eywa is a mega-organism of unknown nature. She created all the species on Pandora through a series of microorganisms designed to clean up the environment, eliminate disease, and control wildlife. Thus there are no evolutionary pressures that break the "peace forced by Eywa. So, the RDA knows that micro-organisms will save the earth from its climate catastrophe. But there is a problem, although the earth still has many resources there are two that have been exhausted, oil and "rare earths", without the latter it is not possible to produce electrical circuits and all the technology of humanity is reduced to the steam engine, and in the process all the industries of the RDA collapse. Unobtanium is the only thing the RDA's economic system can support, so in order to obtain it they convince humanity that invading Pandora is humanity's last hope
you have fallen for revisionism. most native American tribes left the disabled to die alone. Babies who werent considered to be strong was killed. Disney isnt history.
"The Na'vi were living in peaceful harmony with nature!" If you want an example of how you do the colonial invader plot right, I heartily recommend Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Because that's a story by an African writer about how the colonizers were able to take over Africa. One of the many points before it ever came to conquest by force was that the colonizers came in and found the cracks in the native society. They found the conflicts, the little failures that brought suffering to people who were easily overlooked, and so on, and then befriended them and turned them against their native culture. One of the things his book basically lays out is that the biggest allies of your enemies can be the people you disrespect while you yourself are in power. There's a lot more going on in the novel than just that, but I thought that aspect was particularly relevant here, because "peaceful natives living in harmony with nature" is one of the most insultingly infantilizing cliches in storytelling.
@@maykechi7752 I read it as well, that one scene where they ended up killing that Ikemefuna kid left me stunned because I didn't think they'd kill him off.
Despite not hating the films, something that has always bothered me about the ending to the first film is how Jake just totally separates himself from humanity all together to live with the Na’vi, and the films never really touch on how he could possibly help the billions of people suffering on his dying home planet, most of which probably aren’t bad people, and some of which probably have to do these things just to survive. Like, I’m sure many of the soldiers would be against what the humans are doing to the Na’vi, but can’t just totally defect as they have families back home they need to support that are also suffering and struggling to live.
Meh that actually makes sense to me. He's supposesed to be a jarhead thst the world doesnt need any more. Thats a special tyoe if discarded. A character such as himself, especially with him being crippled and being able to nit be crippled, and in a better body no less. It actually makes the choice pretty reasonable imo. Especially seeing the way your old society use jarheads like him to dominate other societys and bend them to their will, honestly if i was him id make the same choice as jake and say fuck humanity. Its pretty based if you ask me 😅
I think the criticism shoukd lie in telling stories that black and white. Which i actually dont have an issue with. The second movie sucked and shouldve expanded more on the world or took more risks. But having the the first movie, its definitely on the nose and black and white, but i dont hate it cause its like a retelling of stories weve told for thousands of years but in the context of a scifi future. Its literally sci fi cowboys and indians. Like its classic but yeah its definitely kinda shallow With two though they should've tried to add some depth, maybe another faction of navi that are truly ruthless and evil. That would set some high stakes and would refoect that some tribals are war like. Having the peaceful tribe we care about take on a violent tribe would be interesting. And maybe thats where the humans come back into the picture, like maybe our current faction having to swallow their pride and accept help from the humans so that they can drive away the other tribe because perhaps they woukd over run them both and flay them all or some crazy shit. That would add some grey area and set sime high stakes while still maintaining the dichotomy of good and bad
@@THE_MOONMAN How the fuck leaving humanity behind "cowardly" just to get legs and girl to breed is based? where's the afterthought in that action? What based is joining Na'vi to make human and na'vi coexist!
This is a reason why I like the first Black Panther movie. It has a similar dichotomy between Wakanda and the outside world, but T'Challa calls out both sides for their faults and hypocrisies, and comes to a better result by taking the good parts from both sides.
For me I wasn’t the biggest fan of the film cause it felt like it was just bashing who’re people the whole time, till that scene with t’challa. It felt raw, real, and genuine, not just some bs virtue signaling but an actual real message
Something that stuck out to me in the way of water was how humans in it were killed with no remorse, like if I remember correctly there was a scene where one of those subs were damaged so the humans got out and tried to escape but were purposely tangled up by some plants to have them drown.
There are a lot of moments where humans are killed in pretty brutal ways and are just brushed aside as if its nothing too bother about, the only time where it felt heavy was in the first movie where the aftermath of a Na'vi attack was shown, the soldiers all wiped out and their remains utterly decimated Oh, but that wasn't even in the movie, it was a deleted scene, which makes this worse
Honestly, I thought it was pretty ballsy, tbh. Not a lot of media has the guts to show humans getting killed in such a brutal way without trying to make you sympathise with the humans. They didn't even hide the human's faces with helmets, like most media does when they try to dehumanize humans, and honestly, I kinda liked this. I don't need helmets or such to NOT feel bad for humans. I don't need to constantly be talked down to by media how I'm supposed to feel bad for a human just because they're a human. Humans, in general, are already non-sympathetic IMO.
The dumbest thing about the Kiri seizure thing is that when she discusses hearing the voice of Eywa the science dude who has been living on Pandora for like 15 YEARS and studying for like ANOTHER 10 before that who KNOWS about the Eywa trees and that his boss got downloaded into Eywa and knows that Eywa took Jake and put his consciousness permanently into his avatar body.....he's turned into a total strawman atheist in this scene. "Oh it can't be Eywa doing anything, it must be Kiri is hallucinating!" Cameron wanted to have a MODERN MEDICINE BAD, TRIBAL MEDICINE GOOD thing but he botched it because it doesn't fit for this character to say ANY of that.
That was one of the things that did get me about Avatar 2. I was mostly just mindlessly watching it, enjoying the sound and graphics, and then I heard that line, and just had to laugh out loud at the ridiculousness of it. Like, come on Cameron. That science dude has spent an insane amount of time among the N'avi, studying alongside Grace and the others, has seen the Tsahik do her thing, and is just like "nah, the electrical signals we were seeing in those plants all the way back at the beginning of this saga mean absolutely nothing - it's just 'textbook hallucination'". A truly disappointing line that didn't need to be in there at all.
Why? Humanity has plundered plenty of places out of base greed. It certainly doesn't make humanity irredeemable, but it is very consistent with our history, and the history of imperialism (in the broad sense of all Empires throughout, not just 'the West') that greedy bastards will be greedy bastards.
@@jakespacepiratee3740 yeah but they never make that clear. they have one, **one** line where they say their world is dying and that's it. they never mention how or why it's dying. they never talk about how plundering Pandora is *necessary*.
@@jakespacepiratee3740 honestly, I couldn't really tell. There was no complexity or other side shown about the humans. It was just Navi good, and humans bad. Did that for 2 movies in a row, and will probably keep that up for however many more sequels there are.
@@DavidMartinez-ce3lp Even though there’s an entire city of humans on pandora who are obviously not all evil? Like of course the people we see are evil, they are meant to clear out the natives.
I actually had a perfectly good answer for why I didn't like Avatar: Because Jake Sully never had a real conflict. Pete Docter said it really well in an interview about the climax of UP - "if the choice is too easy, _then it isn't a choice."_ And the choice presented to Jake, _was too easy._ There was literally nothing tying him to Earth at all. There was no real emotional conflict for him at any point.Think about it. The events of the story seriously ask him: Would he rather protect the interests of a soulless megacorp and its psychotic paramilitary force who don't see him as anything but a tool to help them get to stripmining Pandora as fast as possible, and then go home to an Earth where his entire family is dead, he lives in an apartment the size of a closet, pollution is rampant to the point where the oceans are poisoned and all the animal species are dead and food is grown on algae farms, and the rest of the planet is reduced to overcrowded, grey hyper-urban squalor where poverty, loneliness and general misery are just facts of life, and also he's crippled/paraplegic? _Orrrrrrr_ would he rather live on an untouched paradise-planet as part of a tribe of peaceful, perfect, all-knowing, literally flawless people with a literal connection to the planet itself where he wouldn't ever want for anything and also in a healthy body which ALSO happens to let him have sex with the hot blue cat girl who is now in love with him? Why _wouldn't_ he take the latter choice? Some of us could explain why we disliked Avatar _just fine,_ thank you very much.
You should tell here on your channel how the English destroyed the Australian aborigines. I would like an explanation to determine a town that could not defend itself. 😢😢.😢.😢
100% This. And I'd like to add that in Avatar, they literally can connect their hive mind pony tail into every living thing on the planet and yet everyone is just like sniveling little humans with irrational thoughts who can't understand how other people/creatures think and feel. That is such a dumb plot hole or such small minded level of creativity. I'm also not 2 minutes in when he already lost me when it was "The cool thing to do is to hate on this movie because it's popular." Uh, I can tell you I was in the absolute minority of ONE who hated this movie. As in I am the only person I know of who couldn't stand this movie because I thought the writing was trash, the humans are all blatant bad guys vs these pure flawless gross CGI cat people, and I just can't get over the CGI. I mean at least with Dances with Wolves they had to tell a story without visual spectacle but now since there's sparkly plants it means it's just such a gosh darn well written movie. At least according to everyone. I thought everything was even worse with the second movie. Again these perfect beings have all the exact characteristics as tribal humans, except for that last drop. Nope that's just reserved for those gosh darn evil humans. Because we need them to be irritatingly perfect while making the humans irritatingly evil.
That thing about hating avatar being the cool thing to do was him quoting another reviewer that he disagreed with, it wasn't his opinion. You should probably actually listen to what someone is saying in full before replying.
Dawn of the planet of the apes would be a good example of your pitch for an improved avatar film. It gets you on the apes side, but also gives a case for the humans side aswell.
The Way of Water and the Planet of the Apes movies are already mostly the same writers so I am not sure you would be telling them anything they don't already know.
Avatar's issues are proof why EXECUTION MATTERS. You can have great ideas for themes and stuff but if you don't execute that properly, its not going to be that good. And I think Avatar's problem with execution is best highlighted by comparing it with Princess Mononoke, which is what Pilgrim pass did in his video. PM actually served as one of the inspirations for Avatar and have similar themes and ideas. But its the execution that drastically set them apart.
It had actual nuance by showing how some people benefit from the modern world compared to how things once were, in the movie it was the women and lepers who were given a place in iron town under lady Eboshi.
I like how the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy understood that there are really evil and hateful elements in both the human and the ape societies. What results from a quest for liberation from oppression can turn into a burning hatred that leads to incessant war until one side is completely destroyed. I kinda wish they they had a Na'vi version of Koba.
Eh, those movies are their own can of worms when it comes to generic science fiction and CG effects taking prominence of all else. It doesn’t help that like Avatar those films are becoming a safe haven.
That navi guy in the first movie that distrusted Jake and neytiri's ex fiance could have been the Koba of the Navi side But instead that character turned 180 and suddenly became submissive to Jake for some reason and then got killed off
@@Channeleven2345789gereric? those films have more things to say about society than avatar and his black and white message of Nature = good. White man = bad. And yes they are woke as shit yet people like ben shapiro and critical drinker barelly notice it because "wow pretty images with no politics"
20:29 the hilarious thing about the what if you do in this part, is that *is* the story. Cameron has explained in other media that Earth actually is dying, due to over population, and that Unobtanium is necessary for sustainable intersteller travel. I.e. Earth is so f'ed up, the largest ekspedition since ever is being funded to facilitate an evacuation of Earth. Now, of course, this is other media, and therefore can be completely disregarded as not a part of the movie. But I just found it funny when you went over that what if scenario.
That's my main issue with Cameron... He says all these things, has all these meticulous lores, but he does not show any of it in the film so it's the same as nothing. What's the point in saying that in an interview when he's just gonna gloss over it in the story and make the narrative black and white anyway? Most people who watch Avatar don't even catch any of this.
@@Yara_LocoBirdif it helps the unedited version of the film (I have no idea why it was cut out baling with so many scenes because it was very much needed but maybe it was for time limits??) the first set of scenes are in earth and having watched and preferred the longer version it was very much destroyed. Imagine if NYC and Tokyo combined into one concrete jungle.
@@Yara_LocoBird avatar the way of water says "oh, yeah, the earth is dying by the way" like it is just a minor insignificant detail where it should be a GIGANTIC PLOT POINT. Like, if the earth is not dying, the navi could theoretically win. They could destroy enough convoys, enough machines, enough soldiers that the cost benefit of exploiting pandora for their resources becomes negative, and the humans decide to leave. If earth is dying, and Pandora is the closest candidate for terraformation, then you ain't winning. Either humanity goes extinct, or they'll throw everything that they have to colonize Pandora. The worst part about him saying stuff out of movie is that all that stuff IS THE MISSING PIECES OF THE DIAGRAM Earth dying is a really strong "Reason for" for the RDA. I also remember hearing that Eywa regulary culls every species to mantain balance, including the Na'vi, which is a really REALLY strong "reason against" (imagine having a god that woke up one day and said "theres too many of yall, imma kill half of your entire population").
When I watched Avatar 2, I had a strong impression that there ALMOST was an arc for Sully, but the writters just didn't notice it? In how, even though still very militaristic in a very human way, Sully was determined to 100% fit in whichever Na'vi society he landed on, no matter what - even at the cost of his family's well being. When the kids were bullying his kids and then his son almost got killed in a prank and everything, and yet he kept saying "apologize, we are guests here", instead of being actually concerned about them. What good is being "hidden" for safety if your son is gonna be pranked to death? Is it really worth it? Of course, in the end they and the sea Na'vi just became bffs, so like, yeah. But that though just kept popping into my mind while watching. Oh yeah, also there's the way the adults didn't seem to care about the human kid at all, with him even being threatened at the end. I kept thinking maybe the kid would switch sides, or in the end when he already didn't maybe he'd leave his father to die since he realized he does more harm than good at this point, but nada. Nothing of it is ever adressed. He pretty much just leaves the guy alive for Sully to have to kill him again in a third movie or something
Yeah thats a good point actually, looking at sully in the second movie did kind of piss me off, because he has no trace of human left in him, he just becomes an apologiser trying to fit in as much as possible, and that sends a pretty shite message to the audience
@@etherdeef4303One would even call that a traitor to his own species. Like instead of learning from the Na'vi and bettering himself and his own species, he just joins them because...humans are evil? Great message lol, be a traitor to your species. It's why you can't take this movie seriously in any way.
@@etherdeef4303 nah, sully became more human than ever in the 2nd movie. Raising his kids so incredibly human, being a misogynistic ass. The message is right: humans are shit and forever will be.
I was going to put Avatar's weird message down to JC researching nothing because he didn't think the Navi were a direct metaphor for indigenous people but then I found that interview where he said Native Americans should have fought harder against being colonised and that's partially what inspired him to write the story. A lot of indigenous people HATE this movie and boycotted it.
Apparently in the next one we’re gonna see an evil tribe of the avatars to show that they aren’t all good. But that’s barely addressing the issue, I want to see the evils within the tribes we’ve been following. Inventing a new tribe that’s most likely going to be one-dimensionally evil is just adding to the issue
I think the main problem is not having depth within the individual characters, theres no real such thing as completely evil and completely good people. In the end we are just people and a story like this needs to contain that kind of depth instead of just slapping "these people good these people bad" onto it
I dont know why ppl here are assuming there is no conflict between the NAVI, from the way the green navi treated jake and his family when they arrived shows they are ethnic/cultural problems between them. I think white guilt may play a part in some of this criticism. A majority if most of our movies have a simple evil vs good dichotomy and we dont usually complain. I believe because the navi reminds some white ppl of how native americans were treated by white americans during coloniization a reaction is coming forth with the incistence of showing the Navi as having darkness amongst them just as the native americans had in real life. Except this is not real life. The navi are a fictional alien race and perhaps they might actually be a race of ppl that are all good unlike humans, they might be good and evil in the later films. However my point is that the movie follows a simple abd popular trope that has existed in many movies and story telling. A hero comes from outside the group of a noble ppl, joins them, helps them overthrow the ruthless enemy and becomes their king. You cannot draw parralels of the navi to.native americans or olden days human. They are a ficyional/fantasy race.
@@Lobsterwithinternet i know that trope. But it crosses a lot of cultural lines. Where there are stories of a foreigner being adopted by a new ppl and saving them. It doesnt just apply to white ppl. I am a black british guy of nigerian origin. Sometimes i think we give white ppl too much credit for certain things we consider negative. That white hero trope u talk about can be applied to different cultures such as yasuke the black samurai (based on real life) or king jaja of opobo an igbo(nigerian ethnic group) slave who became king among the ijaws (nigerian ethnic group). Not because we have seen white ppl be saviours of other races in movies means that now it becomes negative when we are talking about freaking aliens. Come on man.
This is why I love Andor, because it shows real people on both sides of the story. You really get a sense of many people working for the Empire who are simply trying to live their lives, like you described in your video. The Empire was not created from scratch by only recruiting evil people. Nearly everyone working for the Empire was previously working for the Republic. When the Republic was changed into an Empire, it wasn't some unexplained magical instance of every person who used to work for the Republic are now suddenly evil. Andor makes that clear by showing the different levels of society and how individuals on each social strata react differently to the new regime. And what you said about writers disproving their own ideology is why I love the Daredevil series (the original 3 seasons, that is). Other characters in Daredevil's life constantly confront him about whether or not his methods are sound. There is an underlying theme of Daredevil's actions stemming from internal pain as opposed to pure and noble reasons. When he first meets Punisher, you can see Daredevil aggressively confronting him for how he does things, and yet his issues with him are very similar to what other characters in Daredevil's life have actually been confronting him about. When Daredevil speaks to Punisher, you can feel him projecting his own pain and intentions onto Punisher, and his louder-than-usual speaking voice adds to this feeling that Daredevil is in denial about his own personal methods and aims his judgement outward instead of inward like he should. Absolutely brilliant in my opinion. The show doesn't take the side of any particular character, but instead zooms out to analyze EVERY character's intentions--and I mean EVERY. The show can feel like it's more about competing ideologies than competing characters--yet the writing makes every character so real and 3-dimensional that you are sucked into the story without feeling preached at.
With the ideas of for and against you bring up, it’s why I find the idea of Spider as a character interesting. He represents a way to show how the Na’vi aren’t perfect, how his silent rejection by them shows that they cannot accept someone like him. How he represents two worlds and neither can fully accept him as he is. With the direction Cameron is going it looks like this aspect won’t be explored which is a massive disappointment. I would love to see a character represent the balance between the two ways of life.
I disagree! (with your last concern, at least). Spyder's inclusion is obviously intentional, especially for that reason. I don't think it's any coincidence, either, that he is so involved with Kiri -- another character caught between two worlds (being the child/reincarnation of Dr. Grace). They're clearly meant to compliment and contrast each other. This essay seems to ignore that, in my opinion, so that it can make its points without having to address all nuances that don't support its conclusions.
I really hope I am wrong. What irked me a lot was how the movie just kind of glosses over that Spider is tortured and then is maimed by the people he suffered to protect and wants to be like with all his heart. His character is incredibly fascinating because of this imo. I would love the next movie to address this exactly like I imagine but I’ve learned to take a grain of salt with Cameron’s sense of nuance and subtlety. I think this essay does have some good points though. A more complex humanity would be more interesting. They hinted at this slightly with Ardmore (female general) mentioning that she’s not here for resources but to ‘make Pandora the next home for humanity’. That would be so much better to show, that everything humanity is doing is because they need to save as many people as they can. Money brings them to Pandora because Earth is dying. So every dead Tulkun and every piece of mined Unobtanium (or whatever resource they do next) represents dozens of lives saved with the money it makes from the highest bidder. That to me seems like such an interesting idea. I’m just not sure if Cameron is thinking about it like this from what he’s talked about. But again I would LOVE to be wrong.
@@kevinhowe3280 I don't completely agree with the video but I think we should only talk about what actually exists in movie form. It seems too easy for the writers just say 'this or that is coming in 5 movies time'. That's too much of cop out
@@scalpingsnake I mean it's already been shot. Avatar 2 and 3 were shot simultaneously and James thought this entire story up years ago from a dream. They have an entire biology made up for this planet but ok
Human v Navi feels a lot like Harkonnen vs Fremen. What made Dune such a good book was the fact that the interaction it focused on was between those two factions but mainly on both of their relationships to House Atreides, which was led by a person with a moral compass who (at least in the books) was also manipulative and very vocal about the littlest things he did to garner positive public opinion. The Fremen were also realistically described as a society with their own strengths and flaws
You hit the nail on the head with this. I feel like in a way, Leto I. is used as a moral compass throughout the entire series. Everyone is judged in relation to him, his enemies are the villains and his friends are the good guys and his descendants' worth is judged by how much they are like him (Miles is considered the perfect man and soldier precisely because he is Leto's spitting image). This could backfire easily, but a brilliant thing that Herbert did was that he doesn't compare the other characters to Leto as a person. He compares them through the eyes of other characters to the image of Leto they have in their minds. Leto is this fixed point of moral goodness because that is how the other characters see him. He is a complex character with many dark aspects (like the manipulative tendencies, anger issues, pride etc.) in addition to the good ones, but when he is used as a point of comparison to other characters, it is through the eyes of Jessica, who loves him, Gurney who would lay down his life for him, or Stilgar who greatly respects him as a leader. Even in the later books, he is looked upon as the epitome of all that is good about the Atreides, but again, that is the legend, the mythologized version of him. Herbert manages to have his cake and eat it too by creating an incredibly complex character and then flattening him in the eyes of other characters so he can use him as a fixed point of morality.
I mean, that's not really what Dune is about, but okay. Dune is more about the subsumption of cultures, thinking people, etc . . . Into a Messianic Cult of personality that is under the control of nobody, not even the Messiah. To some extent, Paul's moral compass does not matter. A major theme of Dune is that even with his precognitive visions and insights, Paul cannot change certain aspects of the future without leading to unacceptable outcomes anymore than we can divert an avalanche once it has begun. The sum of decisions, the unleashed potential energy that began long before he was even born, cages his life and options. It's a parallel metaphor with the biological systems of Arrakis itself. To change Arrakis into a garden world is to change it irrevocably by releasing the tremendous amounts of pent up energy within its biosphere, the cycle of the Sand Plankton/Trout/Worms.
You are missing the part where the Freemen sweep across the galaxy in a genocidal jihad and kill hundreds of billions of people and that Paul is absolutely appalled by this future yet finds himself incapable of avoiding it... ...so yeah freemen good, harkonen bad is not the story.
Yeah there was a recent video by Alt Shift X called ‘The Real Dune’, and it hints at how ppl misinterpret Atreides as wholly good. Its pretty clear that Leto himself used propaganda apparatus, he sends Duncan as envoy to negotiate with the Fremen, to use them as ‘desert power’. Important word being ‘use’. The Avatar movies are like the very superficial readings of Dune as white-saviour narrative. Anyone who thinks Dune is that narrow-minded should read Dune: Messiah. Those books know pretty clearly how complex the issue is beyond good or bad, and explores all the consequences of religious fanaticism and this white-saviour trope embodied in Paul. Avatar, on the other hand, indulges in white-saviourism completely
@@Bustermachine’that’s not really what Dune is about’. Okay dude. Its someone’s interpretation/analysis, and the political themes are fucking MASSIVELY evident in the book. There’s a lot of themes, you describe some of the environmental ones, but the OP comment describes the other sort. To deny one and praise the other is so stupid to assume you know the author’s sole intent. Dune: Messiah makes the political themes and moral ambiguity even more clear.
Several of Hayao Miyazaki's movies explore humanity's relationship with nature and technology. Princess Mononoke as mentioned in other comments, but also Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and Castle in the Sky. Even Spirited Away has a brief message with the Stink Spirit / God. Takahata's movie Pom Poko also explores our relationship with nature. The movies explore these themes and issues without being preachy and so therefore remain entertaining. People can find them by looking but still just be an entertaining movie for those that aren't. I wrote my university dissertation on Miyazaki's movies so analysed them to death.
“Great art sets out to reveal the truth, whatever that truth might be” is a RAW af line that resonated with me as a creative more than anything I was expecting from this video
honestly a real easy way to show that both sides have their ups and downs is in that seizure scene. Kiri has a potentially life altering incident that, despite the tribe's best efforts, cant be healed with natural means. the humans do however help. not just completely heal, mind you, they help her recover, with physical therapy, some type of mobility aid (they have exosuits, there's no way they dont have something akin to a wheelchair just more advanced), maybe medicine for her condition. its not an *immediate* recovery, but its better than what the tribe would realistically do, which is leave her at home and possibly abandon her if she's too much for the tribe to support.
I find it absurd that the story presents that human technology is enough to ENTIRELY REPLICATE the biology of a navi to the point that their artificial avatars can breed with them, but somehow they have any upper hand in any medical way
I feel like this would have been a great way to show how the two methods could have worked together. Maybe the technology identifies what the problems are but the humans don't know what to do about it but the Na'vi do have history with this sort of thing and now that they know what the problem is, there actually is a means within their own culture to cure it. By working together they could have saved her. Maybe they could avoided some side effects the traditional ways have.
@@ReddFoxx1562 Knowledge about biology doesn't equal knowledge about medicine. I wouldn't know how or why humans would've collected as many medicinal studies and data about Navi that they could help in a specific anomaly as shown in that scene. It's not something that happens often with Navi, so how would humans know what it is and how to treat it? The last movie implied, that a ton about this planet, the neurological links etc is still not entirely understood, which is why they employed scientists to research it. We're not talking about humans trying to cure human indigenous folk, but alien indigenous folk. So what looks like magic woowoo to us might be just the very thing that works on this planet, who knows. I don't think the scene is as absurd or hard to believe considering we're not on planet earth in this movie.
@@megalodon4586 ....are you trying to assert that having knowledge in the field of biology would be completely useless to every doctor in a medical field?
I can think about a lot of reasons that’s a terrible idea: • as an American Indian, we drove a bunch of animals extinct before Europeans came-as did Aboriginal Australians, a number of Asian cultures, and the nomadic European peoples. Humans have never lived in balance with nature, because we are part of nature (and thus change it). • we are trying very hard to preserve species that colonists drove to near-extinction, but also those that we neglected. Because we have a lot more tools now. • making indigenous cultures the ideal means that often people accept things they shouldn’t, or at least accept things they hear uncritically. For instance, not every AmIndian tribe has more than two genders, but also not every one with two genders disallowed trans people before the Victorian era. For something easier to swallow, the Navajo haven’t had a modern female leader, but they may have historically, depending on who you ask and which sub tribe you’re a member of. • it’s sometimes just much more interesting to explore what these cultures really ARE if you’re going to waste four movies on it Edit: also I could tell you exactly why I hate these movies. It’s just the white savior trope. Literally just the white savior trope.
Did well it until you went woke at the end. How is it a White savior trope, you know the world's actual minority, when the overwhelming vast majority of villains in these movies are White? It White btw, not white.
Are you white if you are in a body that is not white, or human at all? And what other chance was there? Someone defected. It's a common arc. What's the harm? Sadly, Jim spent too much time building the world and had to cut out the scenes about the characters, but those deleted scenes are publicly available. Once you see what was cut out, people are a lot less 1 dimensional (still not good to have them out of the theatrical cut in the first place). Jake literally changed species. And don't forget that Jake was constantly moving the plot forward by giving information to the RDA - he's the reason they had accurate maps of Hometree. So is it really white saviour? Or is it a character arc independent of basic tropes? It's up to interpretation but I've given you my thinking.
You are not an American Indian, you are Native American. Did you not even pay attention in history class and learnt that Colombus was travelling to India and assumed America was India and that the whole 'Indian thing' is a misconception? Native American settlement literally predates Indian culture by thousands of years. You aren't Indian.
It’s just a whole movie filled with “noble savages”. To strip an indigenous culture of the unsavoury things they do (as all cultures do) is to strip them of all nuance, depth, and humanity. You shouldn’t need to paint an indigenous culture as morally perfect in order to decide that murdering them en-masse for special rocks is bad.
what about the elaborate and graphic scenes where the indigenous brutally attack the 'sky people', and not even just soldiers.. did you watch the movie or just repeating Twitter talking points..
The noble savage concept is borderline myth. It's also sad to the point of comical, that the same political side that loves that concept simultaneously misses no opportunity to call their patriotic political opponents "stupid and simple minded" for living on farms and hunting stuff..
Honey this movie made more money than Avengers: Endgame and Avatar 4 was in production before Avatar 2 was even released. Do you think thought-provoking and deep arguments sell tickets? Only the common denominator (what everybody already agrees with) does.
@@neonbunnies9596 it made more money after endgame was out of theaters, 10 years after its own release, due to so much time in it's initial run, and 4k theatrical release in china, that isnt yet available on home video or streaming, right after endgame. Endgame passed 2.5 billion in less than a third of the same amount of time it took avatar, just 20, vs the latter's 72
My problem with the first Avatar film is that Jake Sully was a terrible protagonist. He was given a second chance at life by the RDA and sent to broker a peace deal with the Na'vi so that Earth could get an invaluable resource which it desperately needed to survive and which the Na'vi seemingly had no actual use for. Rather than doing that, he instead spent all his time fetishizing their culture and sexually pursuing the chieftain's daughter. When the humans took the only option left available to them for their survival after he himself had told them that a peaceful resolution was impossible, and even took extra steps to ensure that they didn't unnecessarily kill any of the natives in the process, Jake proceeded to lead a rebellion against his own kind that saw the deaths of scores of humans, and then opted to give the finger to the billions left dying back on Earth so he could selfishly live in paradise with his new alien body; a body which he was only able to acquire thanks to the science and technology of humanity that the film goes out of its way to paint as backwards and evil. The story would've played out very differently if the Na'vi were insectoid monsters rather than blue cat people, but sure let's all act like Jake is the hero for betraying all of humanity so he could get his dick wet clapping alien catgirl cheeks. Then there's the fact that the story comes off like a shallow "I'm 13 and this is deep" telling of what should be a nuanced story, with a disgustingly pandering idealization of native culture, and a glossing over of any negative aspects of their society or behavior. Nothing bad is attributed to the Na'vi. They live in perfect harmony with nature, and they never wage wars (despite having a warrior class). They don't exploit the environment like the evil humans do (despite essentially mind-raping the animals they ride, which the film just whitewashes like it's not horrendous). The Na'vi are honorable and compassionate (despite coating their weapons in neurotoxin, which would be considered a war crime here on Earth). Meanwhile the humans - who COULD just obliterate every living creature on Pandora entirely if they really wanted to considering their level of technology, and are therefor heavily reining themselves in and TRYING to do things diplomatically - are consistently painted as nakedly malicious. EDIT: 25:10 Am I missing something? I thought I remembered unobtanium being described as exactly that in the first film? A room temperature superconductor that made space travel - and thus interstellar colonization that could save humanity from oblivion and alleviate the issues on overpopulated Earth - possible. It was immensely valuable precisely because it was so needed.
I went to watch Avatar 2 with my mom for my birthday this year and when we left, she was quick to point out that we don't see any disabled Na'vi, which begs the obvious question of how do they treat their disabled? There are a lot of things I generally like about Avatar (well, mostly the worldbuilding, the story is bland at best) but Kiri's seizure really struck a nerve with me, since I had just lost my little brother to a seizure less than a month prior. At the moment it was incredibly triggering, but now in hindsight I kinda feel insulted by it and the implication that the cardiac arrest could've easily been fixed without our high-tech machinery
En el deep lore de Avatar se explica que la "medicina tradicional" de los Na'vi no es producto de la evolución, fue creada por Eywa específicamente para ayudar a los Na'vi. Contienen una serie de micro organismosb diseñados para reparar a los na'vi. Esto hace imposible enfermar a un Na'vi, por eso tienen que usar potentes neurotoxinas en puntos específicos para matar.
keep in mind that pandora is the most hostile place known to man kind, there are probably disabled na’vi but they likely don’t survive dispute the clans efforts. as far as kiris seizure… the navi have very different body structures then humans and in the movies they are using technology based on humans, because when the events of the first movie take place not a single navi was willing to be the RDAs guinea pig and allow them to deeply study how their brains work. they allowed them to take dna to make the avatars but that’s it. and mind you juri was being taken care of the physic who have connections with eywa so they likely know more then humans.
Right, the problem with that is that the commenter wasn't complaining about the internal logic, but about its implications. The internal logic can be wonderful, but it's worth jack if its allegorical & metaphorical implications aren't good.
@@ruesneptune No. They don't know more then humans. Not even regarding themselves. These Navi don't even know what their eywah is. The humans do. The Navi think it's some god. Of course they do, they're neanderthals essentialy. They don't know anything. And they don't know a thing about themselves either. Humans can clone a god damn Navi and put their own mind in them. We are quite literally comparing stone age people to space aliens. You can't point at a neanderthals and claim he knows more about his own biology then some space alien would. It's a space travelling alien. It will have every biological fact regarding the neanderthal figured out in two seconds. Meanwhile the neanderthal will think he can save himself from poison by rubbing his cheeks. (Which are literally the case in Avatar)
@@ruesneptune If they can literally make Avatar bodies and download humans into them they know their biology inside and out already. If they didn’t know how their brains work Jake wouldn’t have woken up being able to think and speak and reason, or he wouldn’t have woken up at all, and we wouldn’t have had a movie.
15:53 I think what makes that scene not just bad messaging but outright dangerous is instead of using a fantastical medical condition or have the shaman use healing spoodge or something a medical EXPERT says conclusively that Kiri is having a seizure- a very real and life-threatening medical condition- then the shaman woman swats them aside and does- as TCL says- outright witchdoctoring with no actual medical procedures involved. At that point they may as well have treated a bullet wound by pulling it out (bad idea) or sucking out venom from a snake bite (also bad idea).
Okay fine... Something you could say about Avatar, is that the Na'vi basically live in an eco-theocracy of sort. Where religious leaders, like Neytiris mother are holding the highest authority in society and the will of Eywa has to be respected, no matter what.
En el deep lore de Avatar se explica que la "medicina tradicional" de los Na'vi no es producto de la evolución, fue creada por Eywa específicamente para ayudar a los Na'vi. Contienen una serie de micro organismosb diseñados para reparar a los na'vi. Esto hace imposible enfermar a un Na'vi, por eso tienen que usar potentes neurotoxinas en puntos específicos para matar.
But wasn't the point of this scene that whatever she had wasn't whatever the HUMAN medical experts thought? She got the 'seizure' from eywa, a literal planet. It looked like a seizure and could be thought of one, but the only thing that could fix her was a natural remedy. one from eywas creatures. We have to remember that while it's possible na'vi have similar medical issues to humans, they're still litterally aliens on a fantasy planet.
@randallbesch2424 no kidding, I thought she was going to be a direct link to Eywa considering she's hinted to be the reincarnation of the female scientists, Grace, that died in the first movie. She would have been an amazing shaman character.
It's setup for the next movie. You might be able to tell that it wasn't important to the plot. In movies where you need to set up for the next movie, some events are gonna happen that aren't directly linked to the plot -- they're character building moments that serve no other purpose. Usually this is bad because you gotta be concise and make everything matter, but it's justified because it'll be an issue in the next movie.
I read about one of the movie’s themes and it says,”Understanding other cultures,” and yet Jake Sully was willing to abandon the humans who need the resources that the planet need in order to save Earth
What makes it a little annoying when comparing the Nav’i and the Humans as colonialists and indigenous, is that the film is set in a science fiction planet that apparently isn’t hard to survive in if you’re a Nav’I. While there are predators they rarely attack, you don’t need fire because everything glows in the dark, there doesn’t appear to be any diseases or poisons to worry about, it doesn’t get too cold or too hot, they bond with nature and animals using tendrils in their braid, and the mystical or spiritual beliefs that they practice are real do to some weird energy across the planet. When compared to living in nature in the real world, there are a lot of risks and you need to worry about surviving more than just singing and dancing. You need fire for worth and light, you can die from diseases, poisons, and so on, food can become scares do to famine, you can freeze to death or die from heatstroke, there are predators everywhere and other animals that will steal your food, and many of the spiritual practices that they did are often not supported by medical science, basically you are vulnerable to nature unless your strong enough and smart enough to survive in it. But again, unless you’re a Nav’i, Pandora is almost the Garden of Eden.
The whole thing just feels so artificial, doesn't it? One could be forgiven for thinking Pandora was some kind of alien ant farm... I doubt he'll do it, but I would absolutely commend James Cameron if he revealed that Pandora was an elaborate supercomputer built by another alien civilization. It would actually make so much more sense if the planet was actually built by a far more advanced race of ETs to cultivate new life for resources, food and possibly even slave labor/lab rats/organ donors. Eywa could be the computer's OS, using information downloaded from the Navi's organic USBs to monitor and maintain a near-idyllic ecosystem. That way the Navi were pushed just enough to thrive in a primitive society, one which can be easily exploited by their hidden makers, all the while lacking enough pressures to drive them to invent more complex tools, weapons or medicine which would make them difficult to manage. And every millennium or so, the makers return to harvest the planet's life and reset the OS, moving on to the next artificial planet in line until it cycles back around a million years later.
@@goji3755Eywa is shown to have some control over the biosphere of Pandora and might be able to control the evolution of animals on it. I would like to have a more in depth depiction of the relationship between Eywa and the na’vi and maybe have Eywa learn about earth and try to spread to it both by trying destroying the humans damaging the system and by manipulating the na’vi to spread the seeds of Eywa to earth.
@@goji3755I mean tbh (it isn’t mentioned in the movie so iirc) but there are rules in pandora (put by Eywa ?) about not using wheel, not using steel (and a third one I forgot ?) which mean that it’s very much possible that Pandora IS a garden of Eden created by Na’vi ancestors to not recreate the error of the past (being a species so intelligent that it destroys itself) or by other aliens for whatever reasons
lack of nuance works on both ways im afraid. this movie(s) failed to portray humans side of the story. aside from one or two verbal confirmation, there was no sense of urgency. nobody was acting like the humanity's future is at stake. every human was busy with playing minigolf, gleefully decimating forests while sipping coffee or flexing with how their 3d printer can create buildings. and now 3rd movie on its way. i suppose they expecting us to get excited for ash tribe, but... its just feels like too little too late
We are Life is deadly we all die, we ard animals and we die as any other animal. The greatest dangers never came from other animals but from a lack of water (death in days), lack of food ( death in weeks), lack of shelter in colder regions (death from exposure), Danger of wounds which would not allow us to gather food or hunt.
When you mentioned the Medicine Woman bit and how she easily trounced future medical tech I had a thought to the old, live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, the Next Mutation. Yes, I know, not a favorite but hear me out. Early on the new dragon based villains are using some elixir that seems to make one of their guys stronger. Much stronger. The turtles get a hold of it and analyze it; Donatello via science and new girl Venus via magic and... both come up with nothing. Come the next fight Donatello realized *why* both of them couldn't work it out; it was a placebo. Honestly, if you want Avatar done right look at Princess Monoke.
So let me get this straight, the humans made anatomically correct "Avatars" of the Na'vi that can reproduce and psychically communicate with the other animals, but somehow at the same time don't know enough about their anatomy to diagnose the cause of a seizure. 🤣
Not only that, why not clone tulkun brain instead of constantly killing them? They figured out how to clone avatars of the Na'vi, why can't they just clone a tulkun or its brain?
@@kinera but what about just it’s brain? Then there wouldn’t be senseless killing of Tulkun for just a little jar. Not to mention the whole entire avatar project is expensive,wouldn’t it also be easier just to make money off of tulkun brain clones without loosing billions of dollars worth of men and machinery. It’s also less dangerous.
@@larchier Cloning body parts without a body isn't possible now, and might not be in the future. Of course synthesizing the brain juice directly might make more sense but there may be a reason why that can't be done.
@@kinera Synthesizing the brain juice directly from the Tulkun is common sense too! Instead of slaughtering them to extinction, they should just let them reproduce so they can have decades of brain juice haha
I just wanna share: I watched Avatar 1 for the first time a few months before Avatar 2 came out, I remember enjoying parts of it, but when it was over I was thinking almost exactly "I wonder what big mean white man will be the bad guy in the next one." To my surprise it was THE SAME ONE (but *blue*) lmao. It might just be a symptom of how bad the writing decisions were, but still.
After watching someone else’s critique of Avatar, it occurred to me that Selfridge would be instantly more human if he learns that the board of directors back on earth intend to replace him because he’s “under performing.” And he learns this just as Jake Sully is arriving on Pandora
That would have been great, especially if they followed along with him being sympathetic to the Navi. That his sympathy towards them is slowing profits/isn't producing enough resources to keep earth alive, and that if he doesn't increase production then he'll be replaced with someone worse.
This is such a more interesting concept in general. Remove the concept of cloning and just have it be about Humanity colonizing Pandora to get the Unobtanium. Have Selfridge be the protag who brings his family with him to the planet, he loses his well paying job because he is too compassionate and doesn't want to fuck over Pandora and the Navi while mining for the Unobtanium. You could go the extra mile and have his spouse leave him behind to return to earth after the fact. So he says fuck it, straps on an oxygen mask and takes some tech to try to trade with the Navi in exchange for him joining them. Only to then find out he is not the only human who felt the same way.
Not only that but you could contrast it by having a Navi character who is willing to fuck over their own people and land for the sake of co-operating with the colonialists and profiting from their deals. There are plenty of historical figures throughout history that you could base them off of.
A line from Dark Souls 2 that's highly apt about Cameron's motivations in his story decisions: "No matter how tender, how exquisite, *a lie will always be a lie.*"
Kinda like how the fanbase thinks having interesting lore automatically means the stories of the games are good when they are as bare bones basic as one can get
@@cheezemonkeyeater so long as you don't mind getting zero payoff for your struggles outside of a ten second clip that resolves nothing before smash cutting to the credits
I also think Jake Sully is just not a very compelling character in the first movie. He didn't have much reason to send with the Na'vi at first and certainly didnt have much of an arc. The second movie gave him more motivation to do things
no, don't give the second movie props for giving him the bare minimum of having him act as a parent. he's still a boring waste of space and so are his children and so are his beloved blue people. it's teaspoon shallow trash.
The best movie I’ve seen with a message of don’t destroy nature is Princess Mononoke. It didn’t argue “man bad, nature good” but instead called for balance. It showed that the people of Iron Town needed to harvest the land to protect themselves from invading forces. They are only painted as in the wrong when they try to kill the forest spirit.
I feel like the lack of subtlety is really damaging, lots of terrible things that happen aren't caused by 'evil people being evil' but normal people making the choice that's easier for them and collectively adding together to cause terrible harm, removing all the nuance to this extent stops any examination of why people are making some of the decisions that look damaging
What harm could black-and-white idealistic thinking do? It's not like Cameron's message could possibly dovetail with support for freedom-fighters, who simply wish to return a far-away country to the stone age by smashing local government and industry.
5:09 One thing I would argue is more closer to evil than what Aonung & his gang did to Lo’ak is when Neytiri threatened to KILL Spider in exchange for her daughter Tuk & we know she would’ve been willing to do it. While I know she was desperate to save her family, her prejudice (as much as we understand it to an extent) still led to her threatening to kill an innocent child just cos he was human & happened to be the son of her enemy, even when said child had lived among her OWN family from the time he was small 😔
my blind reaction to that scene I just had the lingering feeling "she is using him as bait", cutting him as a threat did cut me off guard but it is her emotional state and that is what makes her feel so.. real. observing neyriti she would definitely hold prejudice to humans but I know on a serious note, she is not the type to sacrifice anybody
I'm also mad that Cameron hired an ethnomusicologist to help write music for the Na'vi that sounded truly alien, creating an entire musical culture for the fictional people, only for Cameron to musically whitewash his own fictional culture but putting in a musical score that sounds like what Westerners THINK non-Western music sounds like. The actual Na'vi music that was written for this two-and-a-half hour movie showed up like only TWICE. I believe it was the TH-cam channel Sideways that put out an excellent breakdown of what happened.
Without there being a west to save you, you'd better have been well acquainted with Deutsch, because you'd be speaking it right now. Also you saying the words: "Whitewash" proves you think about race and are racist. Stop hating white people, when White people don't even think about you in their day to day. We have our own goals such as trying to feed our families, and survive just like everyone else. I'm sick of other races complaining about mine, get a life man.
He tried some out there ideas but decided to reign them in because it didn't work, as he was going for mass audience emotional engagement, not just to do something "weird and cool". And seeing how Horner's score is amazing and Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time, I think Cameron knows what he is doing more than some ethnomusic nerd on youtube
As someone who was enamoured with the Avatar films, aside from a basic plot line, my main problem with Avatar is the Na’vi themselves. They feel like a mish-mash or cherrypicked cultural identities from POC that are boxed into cute, completely innocent characters that are digestible to a western audience. Hell even the character designs reflect this. One of Neytiri’s original designs had 4 eyes, for crying out loud. That would make sense considering most animals on Pandora have multiple sets of eyes but noooo we gotta make her attractive to human men 😗
The Male Na'vi were just as much humanlike as the females and the reason for why they were human-like was not to make them "attractive to human men", it was because the movie would've been a lot less interesting otherwise. The fact that they closely resemble us and are yet very different from us, makes them more intruiging and their way of life more appealing. Also there's nothing bad about making a character attractive, it's no different from making a character look physically unappealing or going for a more alien look.
The whole time I was thinking about how much better ATLA is at commentary despite being meant for mainly kids. It has so many layers. It shows good and bad fire nation people, good and bad non-fire nation people. This Avatar just feels.. shallow.
@@naruchancutie1 Heck, there are good and bad people in the Water Tribe which two of our main characters come from. Plus some who are simply stuck in the old ways of thinking and who probably won't ever think otherwise.
@@claytonrios1 Exactly! No nation was exactly free from bad people. Ba Sing Se was corrupt and controlling its people just as the fire nation does. I think Jet was an amazing character too because it showed what happens to a person consumed by hate. So much that he was willing to wipe out innocent people. The fire nation were the main aggressors of the series but they weren’t the only people in the wrong for their actions. Likewise, there were good people from the fire nation like Jeong Jeong and Sokka’s master. Iroh as well though his past was not good. It showed how good kids were exposed to propaganda at an early age as well. Such a well done show.
@@naruchancutie1 Heck you could say that the Ember Island Players episode works as a recap episode and a way to show Fire Nation propaganda in action right before the series finale.
I think the message is more so 'demonizing destruction of the natural world'. Also quite the difference between technology built to drain and take over a world vs new vfx technology😂
You can't be serious man, you're literally doing the meme. James Cameron: "We should improve society somewhat." You, an intellectual: "Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent!"
@@Aaron-xj2fo The phrase “we should improve society” is an incredibly empty statement cause it says nothing. James cameron is saying “ we should improve society BY returning to our indigenous roots, abandoning the search for better technology, and revert to being one with nature. The reason for this is because those who are one with nature are inherently good people while those who seek the advancement of technology are fundamentally evil people on every level.” Seeing as you’re so “intelligent” yourself you mustve grasped that right? Do you need help grasping why thats a dumb message?
If the Na'vi were truly a peacable people, in total harmony with nature, then the concept of warfare would be utterly alien to them and there would be no need for any warriors. They wouldve been curmbstomped even harder.
@@jovo7631 and they are perfectly adepted to their natural environnements, and still hunt, fight over territories etc... Being 'in harmony with nature' (like the tribes of southern america maybe) doesn't mean being very peacefull... Just look at the damn ants ! totally different ants in the same specie just for sighting wars that can cause millions of death (amongs the ants)
I felt the same during that Seizure scene. Like she has an alternative medicine solution. It's like demonizing medicine and unfortunately we know real people who happily jump onto alternative medicine.
I didn't experience the scene the same way at all. The movie never says the shaman actually cures her, she just happens to wake up at more or less the end of the process, but really, to me it's still "shamanism" without proof. And it's not that the medicine isn't working, they don't get to actually help because they are chased away before having the time to do anything, unceremoniously..
it seems they REALLY wanted to promote primitive or alternative medicine. they could have used ALIEN medicine instead: like using their brain-jack head-tail to allow another smurf (or a special tree) link with her mind to stabilize the seizures... like a vulcan mind meld. aliens have different physiology, make use of that!
@@Nerh4k It’s not alternative tho. Kiri was raised Na’Vi, and that stuff is what Na’vi medicine is. That is what ours was before we formally discovered drugs. Max and Norm didn’t actually help much either. Sure they diagnosed a probable cause. There are also a variety of ways you could view it rather than hop right to “ah their making my beliefs look bad!” Like maybe it could be a foreshadowing of how the next movie goes? Maybe Kiri has another seizure and when Metkayina methods fail, Max and Norm save her.
@@Nerh4k Also, their medical equipment is the equivalent of a very advanced first aid kit, being handled by someone who is a medical adjacent scientist rather than a doctor, while they're trying to diagnose one of a very small number of human/Navi hybrids. The ultimate point of that scene, IMO is to intertwine the scientific and spiritual worlds of the Navi and Humanity, much as Eiwa has a scientifically understandable basis (a planet spanning slow neural net woven in to the biosphere) does not detract from the spiritualism experience by the Navi tribes.
I see that scene more like the Na'vi have achieved the same advancements as humans have, just instead of technology and electricity they use their own herbology and religion (although their religion is obviously different than ours with the scientists actually having proof). So maybe they aren't demonizing medicine, it's showing us an alternate reality if humans went down a different route.
I immediately threw my phone on the ground & destroyed the corporate hotel im currently staying in, the second i heard that i'd be happier without them. Now im joining the rebellion in cuba or guam or something. Thanks for the wisdom!
Glad to see your harmony with nature has restored your access to the internet and TH-cam to post this comment. Living with nature really does only provide good things and no form of recession in any way.
I attacked one end of a USB cable to my head and the other to a tree. I am now more enlightened and healthier than ever. I also plugged it into a cat and now the cat and I are able to talk to each other.
During the holidays I vacationed at Malaysia Borneo Sarawak and stayed at an indigenous longhouse for a period of time. They were a great community, with culture and all that and they were very harmonious with nature and each other, and they also had a history with human head-hunting. Basically, merely a century ago, if you wanted to prove you were a man/adult in the community, they would have their adolescent men raid neighbouring villages and kill and cut their heads as souvenirs, doesn't really matter if the victims were old or young, man or woman, just bring back a head, and you are a man. Yeah, our native guide admitted they were quite grateful that the Brookes helped abolish the practise.
17:00 thats like going back in time, and you run across a native American with severe pneumonia, and you have a pocketful of antibiotics, and you try to get the sick one to take it, after explaining bacteria to them, and Kicking bird runs in and says to get away, he will fix it, and he shakes a stick, sings HEYA WEYA while dancing in a circle and beating a drum.
A big thing people don't really consider is how little we knew long ago. I feel the medicine scene gets worse when ya consider the Na'vi probably don't even know how the stomach works, or what a lot of their own organs are for. They know their herbs and medicine and spiritual beliefs and weird magic, but they don't know how a brain functions or what's causing the systems in a body for the seizure. It's SO easy to go "Hey, long ago they had it alright" when you fail to realize what wounds, what troubles, etc. Also, just go full Warhammer and own up to it. Make humanity completely evil, I love those trailers and videos that change the tone to humanity fighting against the Na'vi as being heroic. That'd be so cool.
>warhammer >humanity =evil nice cope. we're the protagonists of that universe, and for as flawed as we are, we're the only ones worthy to stand the test of time there. or are you going to make up some copes around "muh tau"?
@@DioBrandoWRYYYYYY humans are 100% definitely evil in warhammer. everyone in warhammer is evil. that's the whole point. humans don't get a win just because they're the "protagonists", protagonists can still be the bad guys.
@@elizabethb4168 i think there'd probably be a more graceful or explicit way to handle that aspect, but yes, that's my thought too. na'vi are obviously gonna understand how to treat na'vi better (or at least, more reliably) than humans would.
I watched "Avatar" in class recently, and I was watching the scene where they fight the military to defend their tree, and the tree gets destroyed, and I just thought, "Holy shit, this entire movie is literally just the Noble Savage trope!"
And white savior. A white dude literally comes in and saves the natives from their plight, disguised as one of them. It's Pocahontas, but if John Smith dressed himself as a native and painted himself to look like one.
@@qc6265 dances with wolves is so different to avatar and the onto thing that connects them is a very very basic telling of a similar story. If you actually look into the characters and what drives them and the actual plot points in avatar and why they happen then you can see that it’s really nothing like dances with wolves. there is a really good video by localscriptman about avatar and he goes into why it works the way it does
I think you give a generous interpretation that Cameron was attempting to make a good story and wasn't actively making a piece of propaganda. I think Cameron is very, very aware that the story of his Avatar films so obviously falls into propaganda territory. The films are extremely reliant on the latest in technology to make, and he's used lots of advanced tech in all his diving endeavors. The propaganda is intentional. Also, the character of Selfridge is probably a direct nod to Harry Gordon Selfridge - one of the pioneers of modern consumerism.
How does relying on latest and advanced Tech qualifies the Movies a propaganda ? Isn't that more like Hypocrisy ? Calling for Primal Lifestyle while cannot function without several Non-Environmentally-Friendly Industries
It's strange that people who hate tribal films are people from white colonist countries. It's like asking Trump to be the spokesperson for Black Lives Matter. How about asking people from Asia, South America, and Africa? Avatar is widely beloved here in Asia and a huge chunk of its box office comes from here..
For me the problem with Cameron's writing is that he's refusing to let nuance enter the chat, so to speak...? The issues involved, as they exist in our real world, have many complicated facets. E.g. yes we vitally need certain extractive resources to maintain a technological society. But no, they don't necessarily have to be sourced as destructively & exploitatively as they are now, and we don't have to use them in just constructing things which will break or be discarded in a year or two & then be unrecycleable. Similarly, the colonialist territory-grabbing & refusal to consider compromise depicted amongst the corporate humans in Avatar is not at all unknown in our own world, and nor is the jingoistic violence of Quaritch? But they all come across as kind of cartoon characters because they too lack any nuance, seemingly not having been given any personality or background outside of these 2D flat characterizations. My guess is that maybe Cameron's crew chose to oversimplify all their characters & messages so they could focus instead on spectacle and action? Again, not even slightly uncommon in blockbuster films!! 🙄 Just disappointing, as it would've been great to see a more thought-provoking plot that could rise to the level of those incredible visuals....
@@anna_in_aotearoa3166 I'm going to suggest that nuance isn't always to the benefit of a story. Or if it is, it might only be to show that not all nuance is genuine, sometimes nuance is just obfuscation. The reality is that the RDA and later the military enforcers of the second film are shown as callous and brutal because they are the pointy end of an extractive industry that is under virtually no higher oversight. Those are never friendly or nuanced at the pointy end. A good example of this is listening to the CEO of 'Fair Phone' which has gone to great lengths to try and ethically source raw materials for their very repairable on long life supported smart phones. To their credit, they really do seem to be trying. But it is very hard and the results so far are imperfect. He likened sourcing some of the raw materials they needed to trying to employ an addict while leaving that addict in an addictive environment. They got their supplier for one element to work with an ethical source, turned around, and six months later they'd switched back to a cheaper, more polluting, more harmful to their workers, mine in violation of their contract. Now you can see that there's nuance here, but the nuance is not actually at the point of extraction. And that's here on earth, where reporters and normal people could plausibly go and inspect these things. Pandora is in another star system and gate kept behind earth's small fleet of starships.
@@Bustermachine Good point re the need for (& lack of) oversight! If the contractor or subcontractor you've hired to do the extraction is operating not on an ethics-based model, but instead a shareholder-based one, then it seems highly likely that quick money will eventually beat out doing things right...? Of course on earth we do try a range of solutions to restrain this tendency in terms of auditors, regulatory inspectors, embedded observers etc.... with mixed success. Interesting to contemplate how that might deploy in a multi-planetary context; distances would be exacerbated, but then presumably any society that could achieve sustained space flight would also have comms solutions that could effectively bridge that gap...?
15:41 I’m gonna disagree with you on this take. Ronal’s ritual took hours considering there’s light by the time she went in and it’s night when Kiri woke up. Imo, the ritual didn’t do sh*t. Kiri woke up on her own after being unconscious for hours.
Anti-consumerist and anti-industrial messaging in a very high budget, highly merchandisable movie, made with very powerful computers, by a major corporation that relies on highly developed infrastructure just falls flat as hypocritical.
The film gets kind of close to the point on having more of a reason for why they are doing everything. In the second film there is a brief mention that Pandora is needed as a second earth. But then it is never mentioned again and just seems like a paraphrase of “see we can’t afford to just move to Mars, we just have to be Green now”.
Honey this movie made more money than Avengers: Endgame and Avatar 4 was in production before Avatar 2 was even released. Do you think thought-provoking and deep arguments sell tickets?
@@neonbunnies9596 I'd argue they do. The Way of Water and The Last Wish came out within a span of 10 days of one-another, and despite Avatar 2 having so much going for it, The Last Wish still managed to carve out the 10th place spot of movies released in 2022 despite being released at the tail end of December, being an animated movie with significant themes throughout its runtime, AND competing directly against Avatar for tickets. That's an insanely big achievement considering this is an animated children's film with thought-provoking ideas made by a non-Disney studio. Of course, action sells. It's why it's so popular in film, and that reflects in all the movies of the top 10 grossing movies of 2022 list I mentioned, but the best films imo are able to use their action in service of a greater story, especially one which tells a message. Because that's what art is: The conveying of ideas, of themes and messages. The best artists can tell a thought-provoking story, make a deep argument about whatever it is they feel like (political or otherwise) and still make it enjoyable.
I love how the internet says people hate things. But in real life of the hundreds of people I meet and talk to most don't hate the things that supposedly people hate according to the internet.
Reminds of twitter being memed on how the buzz of a movie is so strong there but it’s a box office flop and some movies get hated to oblivion there but did great in the box office with a strong fanbase outside of the media 😂
I really dislike how one dimensional everyone is in Avatar. There is no bad Nai'vi, they're all so pure and lovely to the point where it makes them unlikeable and sometimes hypocritical. They also have a "holier than thou" kind of attitude that really gets under some peoples skin and causes some, myself included, to actually root for the humans, despite them being horrendously evil. Also, I love how it's conveniently ignored in the 2nd Avatar that humanity is now no longer fighting for its own corporate greed but for the survival of its own species. This could've been a great plot point and struggle Jake has to go through (loyal to the Nai'vi, or save his species from extinction), but alas, no.
@@lalaland2107 The humans were horrendously evil in Avatar 1 when you think they are on Pandora simply for unobtanium. It isn't explained that this particular mineral is somehow pivotal to human survival.
I think there are bad navi. I think they want to explore that in the next movie with a group that is against the water people and kinda hint at it in the first when theyre rallying tribes as there is hesitation in beliving theyll actually help
I think one of the best takes I ever found on "politics" in stories was from a video I watched a while ago. It was that politics in a story are the surface-level aspect to discussions of human nature, because every political system humanity has ever created is at its core a set of rules and prescriptions trying to come to terms with the human condition. A well done political story that delves into the themes of its politics peels away its layers and tackles the core conflict of human nature that the politics aim to address and makes its critique at that deeper level. While poorly done politics simply take a side. Thus creating propaganda. Thus the phrase "keep politics out of entertainment," is a layman's phrasing of the statement, "keep propaganda out of entertainment," that comes about because the people who are put off by it aren't sure exactly what is so off-putting and thus point to the most readily obvious thing which made them uncomfortable, which was the political message. It is in-a-sense, confusing the thing itself with its method of implementation.
TBF the only people saying keep politics out of entertainment are right wingers who have a low media literacy to begin with. What they mean is "keep liberal politics out of entertainment"
so basically propaganda should never touch with any film story ever. sounds boring if you ask me. Although, obiviously if every movie is all about propaganda, it'll also be boring too.
"The phrase 'keep politics out of entertainment' is a layman's phrase for 'keep propaganda out of entertainment'" That's actually an eloquent way of putting it. And it kind of highlights the idea that sometimes humans can see stuff wrong when they don't even know what it is
Kiri being diagnosed with epilepsy really annoyed me as I thought you know it might be at least mentioned in the plot again. I also was really curious how the bad guys would find them, like how many places would Jake let them invade before he revealed himself. But no they just used her having a seizure as an excuse to bring in the humans which therefore led them to their location 🙄 Very lazy screenwriting.
Well it was said that she should not connect with the home tree anymore or else she might die. Pretty sure that there will be a pay off and this is why they chose to write it like this. Using this setup as the reason for the humans to find them…that’s lazy especially when it could have been so much easier aka some tribe just knowing about Sully and telling the humans because idk…humans threaten to execute some children 🤷🏼♂️
Cameron had already talked about greed and the thirst for power taking innocent lives in Aliens. He had the opportunity to tell a more nuanced story and, given that he was already planning to spread it across multiple films, also a more layered one, with characters who changed positions based on the events that unfolded. Instead, we got a "good vs bad" contrast, devoid of any reason of interest apart from the technical sector.
I disliked the latest Avatar for three big reasons. 1) As a throwaway line they say earth is dying and people would be coming to the new planet to stay. Then they have humans as the unambiguous villains of the film. I spent much of the movie wondering why it thought I would root against my own species’ survival. 2) Cameron then shifted to what, in that context, was a side show. He made his whole movie that references earths impending collapse about whale oil. 3) Finally, expecting me to believe the naavi (a hunter gather culture) would be any match militarily for humans that came from the other side of the galaxy is dumb. I’m sorry but an entire fleet of warriors shooting arrows on the backs of dragons are no match for a single F35. The naavi wouldn’t even see what killed them, let alone be able to stop it. Expecting me to forget that took me out of the movie completely.
Omg yes finally someone said it. I find sully incredibly selfish for turning sides and not having sympathy for all his fellow humans left to die on earth, but sympathises for new creatures he never belonged with without human technology. And they couldn't figure a way to cohabitate? I find it hard to believe given how advanced human tech is. Even colonising a tiny part of the planet would be more than enough for human survival without killing all the natives. it's basically a version of native tribes Vs colonisers, the aliens wouldn't stand a chance, I was so irritated while watching the movie.
I don't have an issue with humans being painted in negative light when the deserve it. Deforestation, Hunting Whales, etc. But it's very weird that they don't acknowledge the fact not EVERYONE is like that. Look at Grace. They should of understood not everything is black and white and that you cannot define humans as simply good or bad.
Not to mention we were supposed to be rooting for the protagonist and his viewpoints even though he thoroughly was responsible for everything bad that went on to happen in the first place. If he did his job as a messenger properly and just mention that his species were there for the unobtainium reserves, instead of boning the chief's daughter, the entire discussion could have gone a lot smoother in the first place. there could have been atleast hope of better negotiations rather than outright war, or at the very least, even if war was inevitable, atleast the Navi would have been more better prepared against the threat. And yeah, lets send all the humans back to their dying planet for the faults of their ancestors which they are trying to escape from and not even think of a compromise that would atleast give them back something. Avatar could have been a great film with if they executed the ideas and exploring both the positives and negatives rather than pushing on one message hard. If the Navi acknowledged the ambiguity of the human's condition and managed to grow past their differences and struggles to find common ground in the ending, I am sure it would have been impactful. However, Avatar and its sequel just served as what would come to be wrong with movies and franchises as of late: Distracting the audience with visuals while feeding them half baked ideas.
Basically, Eywa is a mega-organism of unknown nature. She created all the species on Pandora through a series of microorganisms designed to clean up the environment, eliminate disease, and control wildlife. Thus there are no evolutionary pressures that break the "peace forced by Eywa. So, the RDA knows that micro-organisms will save the earth from its climate catastrophe. But there is a problem, although the earth still has many resources there are two that have been exhausted, oil and "rare earths", without the latter it is not possible to produce electrical circuits and all the technology of humanity is reduced to the steam engine, and in the process all the industries of the RDA collapse. Unobtanium is the only thing the RDA's economic system can support, so in order to obtain it they convince humanity that invading Pandora is humanity's last hope
Oddly enough, Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal approach the issue of energy and razing a planet/civilization for energy much better. The Argent is a miracle substance, "A solution to a problem the world had no answer for" and even the Khan Maykr says "I feel for the humans, I do, but I also have a people to save" illustrating that both Maykrs and Humans are fighting an existential fight.
Also, hell lord, Davoth, is in all of his right to destroy all universes in "reckoning" for what the maykrs did to him, he wanted to create the perfect world, devoid of what existence was abundant: voilence and death, but he was betrayed and forgotten, what he did was definitely not justifiable but was objectively understandable, there is no pure evil or pure good, there is always a reason, nothing is perfect and everything have a purpose.
Not daring to depict the more questionable side of native peoples is a pattern present in both fiction and the mainstream narrative in the real world. What's sad about that is that it dehumanizes them.
Yeah, this is true for a lot of “progressive” media, so scared of portraying their minority characters in any negative light that they end up dehumanizing them. It sucks
@@neonbunnies9596 .. dude, stop copy and pasting.. you're only making your argument appear weak and wrong by doing that garbage.. it's not even that you're wrong, it's almost like you're just being obnoxious on purpose to make your point annoying and therefore dismissed all the easier..
Even if you didn't want to highlight those aspects of native peoples in the real world, I think they still could have introduced a nuance. Maybe there could be a realization that human weapons and technology are better than what the naavi have, and therefore the naavi characters could have developed a greed in obtaining that technology and stealing it from nearby tribes and humans. That's just human nature, so to speak, and it could have added some depth to the discussion of greed and man-made stuff vs nature.
yeah making all natives appear all bad or making all natives appear all good are both dehumanizing. instead of treating them like backward primitive people or like perfect paragons of nature who can do no wrong, what if we just treated them like actual people?
Right before the second movie came out, my theatre had a replaying of the original avatar available that me and some friends went to go watch. The entire time, I felt that same anxious "wait, what..." Feeling film critjc described having while watching. My friends and I walked out of the theatres all a little "hm, well, okay", but we could never really place why. When the full trailer came out for the second movie, none of us wanted to see it. One of us did though, and after she came out just said "yeah, I think we should just watch Puss In Boots". God, The Last Wish was amazing.
Its so funny to me how often I'll get completely blindsided by praise for The Last Wish, just in the wild. Like, I'm not disagreeing at all, it deserves all the praise its getting and more. But its just how it'll come from completely nowhere and literally everyone will be in complete agreement on how good The Last Wish is lmao. Its like the Deep Rock Galactic of movies.
Honestly, I think a movie that tackles this super well is Princess Mononoke. It shows both sides and I just can't hate or prefer any side because I understand both.
And Miyazaki managed that with one film barely over 2 hours, and yet Cameron still feels like he needs at least 3, close to or over 3 hour films just to get to that point for a change.
Yeah this is why I love the writing in things like Disco Elysium and One Piece. In one piece the world government is clearly the bad guys and the straw hats are good. But not all pirates are good guys just for opposing the world government. And not all government agents are bad, to the point where someone like Fujitora who is an admiral, one of the highest ranking government agents, is disgruntled with the world government but still works to change it from within, and actively tries to do good despite the larger organization around him. And there's tons of examples of other characters like him like Garp and seemingly all of Sword. And not to mention that one of Luffy's first friends he made on his journy is Koby, who he 100% supports his dream of joining the Marines, despite it being the main opposing force to Luffy's own dream. And in Disco, despite clearly being a fairly left-winged game or at the very least coming from extremely left-wing devs, they made the wise decision of having Everart, the representation of the Worker's Union, being the most fantastically corrupt and outwardly disgusting individual in the game, while Joyce, the representative of the megacorporation that is fucking over its workers, is portrayed as this nice gentle person who is almost always reasonable and calm with the player. Before I realized what was happening for a large part of the game I was just sorta siding with Joyce by default because they clearly wanted to make the issue less black and white. If the Union Rep was the fine upstanding gentlement that was trying to do everything in their power to grant more power to the workers, while the megacorp rep was the slimy hostile individual, then there'd no longer be any depth. It'd just be black and white morality which is just boring and uninteresting and all of the depth in the game that comes from having to choose whether or not to help each of them is completely lost.
A major reason they are hated rather than just disliked and ignored is how it's pseudo depth was pushed hard by the film industry, fans, and Jamees Cameron. If it had been "Hey, here's a film with great special effect and a fashionable message about nature and capitalism," then at worst people who didn't like it would've just said it sucked and moved on. But then we got articles about how it was some sort of spiritual awakening. People started having post-Avatar depression, wanting to off themselves to be reincarnated as a Navi, spending all day at the theater watching the movie over and over. Avatar fandom became a cult, and this was promoted by the press and James.
Myeah. People love to go on about the internet hate of things but usually there's 3 times as many people adoring the thing just as extremely and "illogically"
@@spectroelectro3772 Yeah lol, people we're genuinely obsessed with Avatar when it came out. Painting themselves blue, getting into jumpsuits and all sorts of weird stuff
I would like to suggest Sideways' video on Avatar as a companion video to this one. It's about the original ideas for the soundtrack, and how Cameron "colonized" the fictional culture of the Na'vi (particularly it's music) to better fit his ideas and bias of what tribal/ alien music sounds like
@@TheDinisPT Agree. Of course i agree. Avatar has many critics for more than ecade now. But i think it is important to remeber that these are expensive movies. And i choose to defend him (Cameron), before everything, beacuse these are very expansive movies.
My friends only remember these movies just because of how detailed the CG is. Thats it. And now that tons of movies have good CG now. The second movie just didn’t stand out.
This video reminded me of why i love a lot of old Stargate episodes. It wasnt afraid to make its main characters make some morally grey decisions, and when dealing with new peoples they'd offer medicine, technology or defense. However, one episode, The Other Side, shows the danger of doing that as well. And almost had the heroes help the wrong side in a world war. Plus it questioned a lot of military interventionist ideas as well even though the heroes were supposed to be part of the US military.
The whole... 'Prime Directive' thing also gets explored in the reverse throughout SG-1's many seasons where Humanity encounters other, more advanced, races who are unwilling to share their technology with them because of the potential consequences of doing so, the best examples of this being the Asgard and the Tollan.
I often disagree with your videos and there main thesis, but I can always appreciate the points you bring up and the detail you put into explaining them. Always offers me a nice different perspective.
Huh... I wonder how that's possible. I watch a lot of film critics. I have never been like, "premise simply wrong." Because it's just interpretation and advice which you just simply take into account along with your ideas. Unless... You are also a published author/do it for a living? I genuinely want to know what you disagree with so often. How do you do it?
@@jewels3400 well I never said his premise is wrong, did I? If it came across like that that was not my intention. I simply meant I often personally disagree with some of his main points but I can appreciate and/or understand why he's drawing his conclusions about certain things because of his evidence. I intended the comment as a compliment. I haven't seen his specific channel in my feed in a second so I felt like leaving this comment because my brain went. This is the one you often disagree with but respect. It was not necessarily about this specific video. As for what exactly I would personally disagree with (not highlight as wrong because when it comes to writing in my opinion there's no such thing. Everything works in certain circumstances and everything should be experiment with) I would want to go through and make sure I purposely quote specific examples he brought to the table so the conversation can be constructive discussion. I don't want my commentary to be use by trolls or welling meaning but naysayers all the same to bash this channe or the thesis he painstakingly research for his videos. I hope this makes sense. I'm a tad exhausted at the moment but I didn't want to forget to respond to your comment. Perhaps when I have more energy I'll go re-watch/ find some of his videos and tell what exactly made me make the comment above.
@@zanyawesome30 huh, okay. I'll take that into consideration. My use of the word premise was more a stand-in for other words than what I thought you specifically meant. I did come from a place of not understanding what you were talking about. However, the premise, and the "main thesis," are practically the same thing. I will take what you said into consideration. Thank you. And get some rest lol
Apparently in the third movie they were going to introduce the ash people, i heard that they were going to be the villain of the movie. that the third movie was supposed to depict the more flawed side of the na'vi people. I hope they stick to that and dont just have some human manipulate them into being bad.
I can bet that's exactly what will happen though. Either Na'Vi collaborators, or evil na'vi being evil just because they weren't content with living in a tree.
Unobtainium being suddenly worthless makes no sense. The sequel claims that the brain juice was known about even during the first film, yet it wasn't a priority. Sure, it makes sense that it can be highly valuable, but no sense that unobtainium would be completely neglected just to keep the ultra-wealthy alive indefinitely. They are two completely different, and highly lucrative, applications.
To me I had a "Somehow Palpatine returned" moment when I found out the ore was not good enough anymore so they jumped the weird space shark and made the movie's maguffin IMMORTALITY JUICE
My issue with Avatar films are just how incredibly self congratulary they are. For something with plot akin to Ferngully to just keep propping itself up as just such a good movie when it's not. And then they made the same movie twice. I knew I was done with it when the antagonist gets told his mission was only to hunt the protagonist, Instead of... Oh I dunno, help subdue the tribe causing the evil human transports, causing actual issues to the evil humans. No, evil guy, your job is to stand around till you can go fight good guy.
The entire reason they hunted Jake was because he was the one leading the rebellion because he was an experienced marine that knew the ins and outs and lead them. There's not many other Na'vi out there doing much against the humans at all, especially when Jake left and started a more peaceful life with the Metkayina.
I mean, I love these movies so much that nothing is going to stop me from loving them ( that was probably not even the purpose of the video ) but it is nice to hear another view on it and not just a bland commentary. Nice to see a closer look on this one! Cameron did say that in the next film the films are going to explore the other side of the navis more. Besides im not really the "I got my life lessons from movies" type of guy
Same, I absolutely love and adore these movies. Their ability to transport me onto a new planet whilst watching it on the big screen is unmatched. No other film has immersed me into the world quite like they have. But it can still be critiqued and that’s fine, doesnt stop my love for them tho
I understand why some people like these movies, they are very pretty. The problem is they can be very pretty and still have a good story. Cameron dropped the ball on the story and that makes it a bad movie regardless of how good it looks. There is nothing wrong with liking a bad movie, many bad movies have aspects that people like. Avatar is one of those bad movies.
@@MancoNinja Just because you can enjoy a movie without deriving life lessons from it doesn't mean that you can't derive life lessons from other movies. Besides, online reviews show that most people enjoy the Avatar movies in spite of their faults (rottentomatoes scores of 82% and 76%).
I never relized how much dislike there was towards Avatar untill recent years. I always thought everybody enjoyed the movie about blue aliens as much as I did. The I relized I was 10 when the movie came out and I havent rewatched it once in the 13 years since.
@@chasehedges6775 I think this is the problem qhen you take like 15 years to release an idea. Dude had Avatar in the works since the 90s and the 90s just never left the work. Either way, I didn't like it mainly because it topped the box office on technical achievements alone. That is hella wack.
@@TallicaMan1986 I like the first Avatar movie and the second; the only thing that I ask Hollywood is to entertain me for a couple hours or so! Was it great, of course not, but it was entertaining. 😊 Most people can't have an opinion by themselves on a movie, a tv show; as soon as someone - who has a certain significance for them - tell that he didn't like a movie or tv show, those people will jump in the wagon of that someone. 🤦♂
I remember hearing about the hype around the time it came out, but aside from the visuals of humans and na'vi on screen at the time being impressive, I found the plot to be generic at best.
I completely agree with your point and Cameron’s naturalist message basically made me mad especially in the second scene with the miracle shaman. That scene made me go ape crazy like my ancestors. Why? Because I live in an area of the world where people are more “na’vi” than most western world and every year those people get criticized for not immunizing their kids to the point that they don’t go the hospitals unless death is knocking on their doors. I won’t tell you how many babies died because their parents went “na’vi” and decided to put their trust on faith than the local doctors. It’s so sad to see some prick from New Zealand preach about naturalism and never visit a 3rd world country that still has to live with sickness and starvation.
The difference between what you're talking about on Earth and the world of Pandora is that on Pandora you can actually commune with their god in a physical way. It's not faith. It's there with them and in them. They can literally just let the planet heal them when they are ill. It's not an allegory for human religion at all.
If I am correctly informed, the next movie will be about the fire navi (inspired by the above mentioned raiding natives) and they will be the antagonist, while the humans will be trying to protect their new colonies full of newly arrived civillians. (Earth is bust, they have to go to pandora.) If this is all true, it will be a good if a bit late fix of these problems. (I was disapointed about this aspect of the previus movies too.)
10:46, Because huge numbers of people really do think that natives and tribes around the world were singing kumbaya before the evil colonists came lol. Cameron created the noble savages everyone was fantasizing about.
For me the second movie specifically was the issue. First movie was very average in the plot department, and it was very one-sided. But for some reason I though that it was part of the plan, and the second movie was going to explore human side of the conflict. Unfortunately, that was not at all what we got
One of the first scenes of avatar 2 has a human ship touching down with giant thrusters that set the forest and all the woodland creatures ablaze. It was so cartoonishly evil I rolled my eyes
It’s not cartoonishly evil that’s now nuclear thrusters work It’s like the our rockets have booster that would do the same thing on a much smaller magnitude
I think a failure of the Avatar franchise is that a lot of reasons for why things happen, is addressed in forms of canon outside of the movies. The comics series shows the aftermath of the first movie and the tensions between the Na’avi and the remaining humans that need to harvest resources to survive as well as Na’avi individuals being antagonistic. The Avatar Encyclopedia tells you that unobtanium is a highly conductive metal that has a versatile list of uses like powering the RDA’s high speed transportation network on Earth and is incredibly valuable because it actually runs Earth. Some of the film’s shortcomings are also present in the comics, the human vs Na’avi conflict is brushed upon but pushed aside in favor of Jake’s journey as a full-time Na’avi after being human. The thing is, unless you go looking for this lore, you won’t know it exists. I think Pandora as a world has so much potential for storytelling because of how cool the planet is in its entirety and I hope we see more of that in the future movies.
The irony to me as something of a contrarian, is how easy it is to argue that the humans are actually the good guys of Avatar, at least in the first film (I opted not to waste my time or money on watching the second). From the backstory we're given, all of human civilization relies on Unobtanium to survive in its current form. Suddenly running out of Unobtanium could bring the whole edifice of human society crumbling down in an apocalyptic fashion. So how does humanity approach dealing with primitive aliens squatting on top of the only rich source of Unobtanium in known space? Do they swoop in, seize control, forcibly relocate the natives or anything else? No. They set up a few bases and mining camps on land that is not the core territory of any of the Na'vi tribes, then start trying to talk and negotiate with those tribes. They even invest incredible amounts of time, money and resources into a boondoggle project to make hybrid clones of Na'vi bodies for human negotiators and diplomats to inhabit by telepresence so they can speak with the Na'vi with fewer misunderstandings. Meanwhile, the Na'vi are pretty much universally hostile the entire time, and actively attempt to kill human personnel whenever they come across them. And after the Na'vi (with the help of human traitors) successfully massacre most of the human personnel on the planet, then force the rest to leave, how does humanity respond? Remember, the Na'vi have just put all of human civilization at risk of collapse by suddenly and violently cutting off the flow of Unobtanium. Historically, genocides have been committed for much, much less. So again, how do the humans respond? Do they take the extremely cheap and easy road (which they could have taken all along) and drop rocks from orbit until there are no Na'vi left to stop them from strip-mining the planet? Nope. Do they create chemical or biological weapons to exterminate the Na'vi? Nope. They basically just land in greater force, and expel the Na'vi tribes who'd made enemies of humanity from their old land. If you ignore the second film and just leave it at that, it's remarkably easy to paint the humans as good guys who exercise incredible compassion and ethical restraint given what's at stake for humanity, while the Na'vi are little more than mindlessly hostile savages who barely even consider coexistence a possibility when it comes to humanity.
It always irked me how Jake essentially doomed his own species to destruction because he had no legs Clearly humanity survived as of the second movie but I've yet to see it
@@MikeTall88 unobtanium is an extremely important resource for earth's failing infrastructure, IIRC. Earth is meant to be dealing with extreme resource shortages, overcrowding, climate catastrophe, and civil unrest - what little we're told/shown of Earth is downright dystopian and apocalyptic.
It's sad because Avatar, visually, is one of the best movies I've ever seen, but the writers failed to meet the same standard set by the art team. If the writing was good as GoT or LoTR it could've easily been one of the best films ever made.
The movie had no 'writers' it is 100% a James Cameron vision both in the visuals and plot. It just goes to show how incredibly lopsided the mans talents are.
2 things: I believe your idea about unobtainium being crucial for the survival of humanity is actually a scene that exists but was left on the cutting room floor for one reason or another. I've also heard that the 3rd movie will indeed explore a lot more of the gruesome things the Na'vi are up to, which is something to look forward to if true. Both of these things are rumours so I'm not sure about either of them, still interesting food for thought.
Cameron himself said that 3 would explore the darker side of the Na'vi Jack Champion said the script "takes a hard left turn", maybe that could entail seeing the better side of humanity too?
The main thing I remember thinking while watching Avatar was that "Ender's Game did this better". I don't remember exactly what "this" was, but a fair assumption would be that it was referring to the portrayals of a conflict between humans and an alien species, and further (for lack of a better word) humanization of said species.
A channel called "Sideways" did a fascinating breakdown of the music from the first movie that ties into this well. TLDR, while trying make a thought-provoking movie, JC ended up making a pretty cliché movie, and even tho he was probably trying to faithfully and respectfully represent ethnic cultures thru music, he still ended up being, well...kinda racist...
I can't remember who made it, but I watched a similar video essay from someone. Tldr Avatar was just a white savior story that amalgamated native cultures into a stereotypical, 'western' depiction of them, in the same way orientalism does to asian cultures.
Avatar is just so shallow, everyone talks about how in-depth the nature and animals are but the universe is as shallow as a puddle, it’s like a good looking children’s book taking itself too seriously
Honestly, I think a movie that tackles this super well is Princess Mononoke. It shows both sides and I just can't hate or prefer any side because I understand both.
@@naruchancutie1 I think the reason so many Western films end up so black and white is Christian influence, that attaches the good and evil dichotomy to everything. When you watch films from Asia, you're more likely to see films without an antagonist. Heck, the film Hero has the assassin and the assassin's target coming to agree with each other.
The thing I found haunting about these movies were the message that Indigenous way of life is the ideal way of life, combining it with Avatar being a story about colonialism, but failing to bridge fiction and reality. The films so finely slipped into the different "Savage" tropes that harm our perspective of reaily. There are Indigenous people still around, but still they are portrayed like artifacts from a different world. It almost feel like when the Danes took Inuits from Greenland back to Europe to put them on display, or Saami from Northern Norway. Still Indigenous from around the world are treated either like lesser humans or like these etheral beings who know something greater. Still they're facing oppressions for a huge number of reasons, many because their lifestyle doesn't fit the modern world. I saw an article that Native Americans boycotted a cinema because they were furious a multi-million franchise about what they have and continue to endure is forgetting them. It feels like, especially with these films, that we as humans will always struggle to see all of us as the same.
If you know of John Smith from Jamestown and his whole situation dealing with the native tribes, he was successful because he saw them as people. Not like "oh were so equal you are such an advanced noble people" but seeing they were also very smart and ruthless to where he had to play his cards right or they would swoop in and take every advantage they could. It was a sticking point where some of his bosses saw them as almost childish and played their hand putting Jamestown in a dangerous situation. It was all about shrewd politics on both sides playing back and forth where despite the British being a massive empire the Jamestown settlement was at a massive disadvantage to the local tribes and could be wiped out if they messed up. I mean John was captured and was going to be killed because he left himself open and the only reason things worked out and he got the ability to work as a diplomat was because Pocahontas took a liking to him (from his autobiography thats pretty much his reasoning, she thought he was handsome and decided to keep him alive). This is pretty typical to most of the early interactions where tribes see what advantage they can get out of the new players on the block in the regional politics against other tribes or in raiding the settlers. Its why we hold the story of thanksgiving so high because the Pilgrims and local tribe became friends altruistically and had a peace which lasted until every person who was there at the first feast had passed away with zero conflict between them, even though at the start the Pilgrims had nothing to offer and were starving to death.
In the case of Navi, I can accept they are "better" than our real life counterpart because their biology allows them to be empathetic by definition (the antennae connection that make them empaths amongs themselves). So it kinda explains how they should be kinder, and do not develop a need for slavery or unexplained sacrifices. But it doesn't make the story any better, and the most faulty parts of Avatar's lazy writing doesn't relate to this, but to the lack of nuance on the plot itself and the humans as real people.
If you want to see that extra video from me on writing exposition, you can watch it here: nebula.tv/videos/the-closer-look-how-to-write-great-exposition
I break down a lot of examples from Avatar, to Revenge of the Sith, and if you like my normal content, you'll definitely enjoy this one!
Have a great day,
- Henry
Thanks
very cool but iasdhgisAHgoashh
I love your content
I tend to hate on the nose stuff, but it isn't always a slip up, but deliberate choice. Zootopia couldn't afford to loose casuals, while powerpuff girls is biting and to the point As satire!
Okay, I usually don't comment on your videos, but this one really spoke straight out of my soul. I love your content and many others do aswell. Always stay the way you are ❤
“Art gets the audience to think; propaganda does the thinking for them” that’s the most succinct and accurate distinction I’ve ever heard
Honey this movie made more money than Avengers: Endgame and Avatar 4 was in production before Avatar 2 was even released. Do you think thought-provoking and deep arguments sell tickets? Only the common denominator (what everybody already agrees with) does.
@@neonbunnies9596 Even if something is simple doesn't mean that it's propaganda. I don't think that this term applies to Marvel movies honestly. It seems to me that you just wanted to boost your own ego and shit all over most people because you're so much smarter than them.
@NeonBunnies ahh money the ultimate qualifier of art
At least with the Avengers films you can remember them after the end credits. The only thing people remember about either Avatar film is how much money they made.
@@berserkasaurusrex4233 That and "CGI good".
"Great writers have the ability to romanticize the things they hate as well as demonize the things they love." I love this line.
It’s sooooo true
@@Kagemusha7 lmao, what? Sorry, will need an example here
Actually I think everyone has the ability to do that; it doesn't require any deep understanding of things or subtlety. It's the most basic use of storytelling (propaganda, cautionary tales, etc.): you can do it in a bad or good way, that's all. Providing nuance and reflection, and letting the viewer/reader making their own sense out of it, is a way better writing feat imo
hypocritical if you as me
@@Kagemusha7 Sure they do, stories often have some kind of moral message and that often involves demonizing something.
This is why, in my opinion, Princess Mononoke is the epitome of an 'environmental film.' It masterfully avoids painting humans or nature as outright villains, recognizing that the issue at hand is incredibly complex.
Throughout the movie, we witness a portrayal of both sides that highlights their strengths and flaws without passing judgment. In the opening scenes, nature is depicted through the terrifying demon boar that infects Ashitaka, and also embodied in San, a human who has grown to despise her own kind due to her adoption by spirits. San can be seen as the Jake Sully of this story, renouncing humanity because of its perceived 'evil.'
On the other side, we have Lady Eboshi and Irontown, initially portrayed as the antagonists responsible for destroying the natural resources in the area. However, as Ashitaka explores the town, we come to understand that their actions are driven by a desperate need for survival.
Ultimately, the film's message revolves around the importance of finding a balance and moderation in consumption. It advocates for embracing technological advancements while simultaneously respecting and preserving nature. Princess Mononoke encourages us to acknowledge the complexity of the environmental issue rather than resorting to simplistic narratives of good versus evil.
To add to this, understanding the importance of grey areas seems to be one of the main messages of the film, since the main force of evil is created by the hatred of both factions and they only defeat it by working together. Hayao Miyazaki is known for having a strong distaste for black-and-white stories, and I think Princess Mononoke was his way of expressing those feelings.
Such a good movie
Pilgrim's Pass made a video comparing Princess Mononoke to Avatar. It's well worth a watch.
This right here. Nature is great and should be preserved and respected, but to say that modern technology is bad is just... wrong. Mononoke shows why both ideas are valid, the problem is the violence and hate that occurs between the two.
@@Leitis_Fella I went and watched the video from your suggestion. It was a great watch and covered the topic very well
For the Kiri sickness part. Also, don't forget that the humans literally made human-navi avatars. Which means that they understand navi biology on a level that no navi at their current "technological level" will ever be able.
Yes!! And to make it worse there are actually good examples of traditional medicine that can help illnesses up to some point, but they don't even take inspiration from this for the films!
Instead of Ronal showing her knowledge from actual resources from the land, sea, herbs e.t.c. all she does is this clishé ritualistic Witch Doctor mumbo jumbo, of blowing air and poking Kiri's stomach!
This could actually have been an interesting scene if the humans and Ronal used their combined knowledge of medicine and technology to help Kiri, but that's just too much for Cameron's simple mind.
You should tell here on your channel how the English destroyed the Australian aborigines. I would like an explanation to determine a town that could not defend itself. .😢😢😢
@@randomcamus9445 Destroyed? They elevated them
@@julius43461 OK colonizer
@@XaraK1Dont have to be a colonizer to see the reality that the aboriginals are far better off now than they were.
I think touching on Jake’s disability in the beginning of the film more would’ve been a great way to bring a more realistic view to the Na’vi society- we know disabled people were taken care of since the prehistoric age, but it would’ve objectively been a lot harder for someone like Jake to survive without a wheelchair in the beginning of the film, something the Na’vi don’t have. The seizure was such a missed opportunity to potentially touch on disability and medical issues too
It's not a missed opportunity if it's just a set up for the next movies.
@@GREVIEWS02 Well it wasn't a set up for this movie so I'm not exactly holding my breath for the next decade on a point that will most likely have been forgotten by then
Basically, Eywa is a mega-organism of unknown nature. She created all the species on Pandora through a series of microorganisms designed to clean up the environment, eliminate disease, and control wildlife. Thus there are no evolutionary pressures that break the "peace forced by Eywa. So, the RDA knows that micro-organisms will save the earth from its climate catastrophe. But there is a problem, although the earth still has many resources there are two that have been exhausted, oil and "rare earths", without the latter it is not possible to produce electrical circuits and all the technology of humanity is reduced to the steam engine, and in the process all the industries of the RDA collapse. Unobtanium is the only thing the RDA's economic system can support, so in order to obtain it they convince humanity that invading Pandora is humanity's last hope
you have fallen for revisionism. most native American tribes left the disabled to die alone. Babies who werent considered to be strong was killed. Disney isnt history.
Why would the Na'vi need wheel chairs They didn't have disability in their society.
"The Na'vi were living in peaceful harmony with nature!"
If you want an example of how you do the colonial invader plot right, I heartily recommend Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Because that's a story by an African writer about how the colonizers were able to take over Africa. One of the many points before it ever came to conquest by force was that the colonizers came in and found the cracks in the native society. They found the conflicts, the little failures that brought suffering to people who were easily overlooked, and so on, and then befriended them and turned them against their native culture. One of the things his book basically lays out is that the biggest allies of your enemies can be the people you disrespect while you yourself are in power.
There's a lot more going on in the novel than just that, but I thought that aspect was particularly relevant here, because "peaceful natives living in harmony with nature" is one of the most insultingly infantilizing cliches in storytelling.
I read that book last year.
@@maykechi7752 I read it as well, that one scene where they ended up killing that Ikemefuna kid left me stunned because I didn't think they'd kill him off.
Oh that sounds really interesting.
@@lauraw2526 It absolutely is.
New book added to my list
Despite not hating the films, something that has always bothered me about the ending to the first film is how Jake just totally separates himself from humanity all together to live with the Na’vi, and the films never really touch on how he could possibly help the billions of people suffering on his dying home planet, most of which probably aren’t bad people, and some of which probably have to do these things just to survive. Like, I’m sure many of the soldiers would be against what the humans are doing to the Na’vi, but can’t just totally defect as they have families back home they need to support that are also suffering and struggling to live.
Meh that actually makes sense to me. He's supposesed to be a jarhead thst the world doesnt need any more. Thats a special tyoe if discarded. A character such as himself, especially with him being crippled and being able to nit be crippled, and in a better body no less. It actually makes the choice pretty reasonable imo. Especially seeing the way your old society use jarheads like him to dominate other societys and bend them to their will, honestly if i was him id make the same choice as jake and say fuck humanity. Its pretty based if you ask me 😅
I think the criticism shoukd lie in telling stories that black and white. Which i actually dont have an issue with. The second movie sucked and shouldve expanded more on the world or took more risks.
But having the the first movie, its definitely on the nose and black and white, but i dont hate it cause its like a retelling of stories weve told for thousands of years but in the context of a scifi future. Its literally sci fi cowboys and indians. Like its classic but yeah its definitely kinda shallow
With two though they should've tried to add some depth, maybe another faction of navi that are truly ruthless and evil. That would set some high stakes and would refoect that some tribals are war like.
Having the peaceful tribe we care about take on a violent tribe would be interesting. And maybe thats where the humans come back into the picture, like maybe our current faction having to swallow their pride and accept help from the humans so that they can drive away the other tribe because perhaps they woukd over run them both and flay them all or some crazy shit. That would add some grey area and set sime high stakes while still maintaining the dichotomy of good and bad
@@THE_MOONMAN How the fuck leaving humanity behind "cowardly" just to get legs and girl to breed is based? where's the afterthought in that action? What based is joining Na'vi to make human and na'vi coexist!
He made sure people who are friendly to Navi stayed on Pandora.
a) fuck earth and fuck people
b) avatar is a misanthropic film that's clearly not for you.
This is a reason why I like the first Black Panther movie. It has a similar dichotomy between Wakanda and the outside world, but T'Challa calls out both sides for their faults and hypocrisies, and comes to a better result by taking the good parts from both sides.
For me I wasn’t the biggest fan of the film cause it felt like it was just bashing who’re people the whole time, till that scene with t’challa. It felt raw, real, and genuine, not just some bs virtue signaling but an actual real message
Ah yes, centrist message good
Something that stuck out to me in the way of water was how humans in it were killed with no remorse, like if I remember correctly there was a scene where one of those subs were damaged so the humans got out and tried to escape but were purposely tangled up by some plants to have them drown.
Tbf those people escaping the sub were hunting children.
There are a lot of moments where humans are killed in pretty brutal ways and are just brushed aside as if its nothing too bother about,
the only time where it felt heavy was in the first movie where the aftermath of a Na'vi attack was shown, the soldiers all wiped out and their remains utterly decimated
Oh, but that wasn't even in the movie, it was a deleted scene, which makes this worse
Honestly, I thought it was pretty ballsy, tbh. Not a lot of media has the guts to show humans getting killed in such a brutal way without trying to make you sympathise with the humans. They didn't even hide the human's faces with helmets, like most media does when they try to dehumanize humans, and honestly, I kinda liked this. I don't need helmets or such to NOT feel bad for humans. I don't need to constantly be talked down to by media how I'm supposed to feel bad for a human just because they're a human. Humans, in general, are already non-sympathetic IMO.
Goes both ways. I hate how both the humans and the Na'vi are brutal and ruthless to each other. Like all.
@@baalfgames5318 Um
The dumbest thing about the Kiri seizure thing is that when she discusses hearing the voice of Eywa the science dude who has been living on Pandora for like 15 YEARS and studying for like ANOTHER 10 before that who KNOWS about the Eywa trees and that his boss got downloaded into Eywa and knows that Eywa took Jake and put his consciousness permanently into his avatar body.....he's turned into a total strawman atheist in this scene. "Oh it can't be Eywa doing anything, it must be Kiri is hallucinating!" Cameron wanted to have a MODERN MEDICINE BAD, TRIBAL MEDICINE GOOD thing but he botched it because it doesn't fit for this character to say ANY of that.
yeah.
La planta medicinales no son producto de la evolución, son cradas deliberadamente por eywa para curar enfermedades.
That was one of the things that did get me about Avatar 2. I was mostly just mindlessly watching it, enjoying the sound and graphics, and then I heard that line, and just had to laugh out loud at the ridiculousness of it. Like, come on Cameron. That science dude has spent an insane amount of time among the N'avi, studying alongside Grace and the others, has seen the Tsahik do her thing, and is just like "nah, the electrical signals we were seeing in those plants all the way back at the beginning of this saga mean absolutely nothing - it's just 'textbook hallucination'". A truly disappointing line that didn't need to be in there at all.
Yeah, Cameron is a stellar director but a mediocre writer at best.
Cameron did Norman dirty
Man, that simple change of making the humans plunder Pandora out of necessity instead out of greed would make the Avatar such a good piece of sci-fi.
Why?
Humanity has plundered plenty of places out of base greed.
It certainly doesn't make humanity irredeemable, but it is very consistent with our history, and the history of imperialism (in the broad sense of all Empires throughout, not just 'the West') that greedy bastards will be greedy bastards.
...thats already what they are doing. Earth is dying. Pandora is a second start.
@@jakespacepiratee3740 yeah but they never make that clear. they have one, **one** line where they say their world is dying and that's it. they never mention how or why it's dying. they never talk about how plundering Pandora is *necessary*.
@@jakespacepiratee3740 honestly, I couldn't really tell. There was no complexity or other side shown about the humans. It was just Navi good, and humans bad. Did that for 2 movies in a row, and will probably keep that up for however many more sequels there are.
@@DavidMartinez-ce3lp Even though there’s an entire city of humans on pandora who are obviously not all evil? Like of course the people we see are evil, they are meant to clear out the natives.
I actually had a perfectly good answer for why I didn't like Avatar:
Because Jake Sully never had a real conflict.
Pete Docter said it really well in an interview about the climax of UP - "if the choice is too easy, _then it isn't a choice."_
And the choice presented to Jake, _was too easy._ There was literally nothing tying him to Earth at all. There was no real emotional conflict for him at any point.Think about it. The events of the story seriously ask him:
Would he rather protect the interests of a soulless megacorp and its psychotic paramilitary force who don't see him as anything but a tool to help them get to stripmining Pandora as fast as possible, and then go home to an Earth where his entire family is dead, he lives in an apartment the size of a closet, pollution is rampant to the point where the oceans are poisoned and all the animal species are dead and food is grown on algae farms, and the rest of the planet is reduced to overcrowded, grey hyper-urban squalor where poverty, loneliness and general misery are just facts of life, and also he's crippled/paraplegic?
_Orrrrrrr_ would he rather live on an untouched paradise-planet as part of a tribe of peaceful, perfect, all-knowing, literally flawless people with a literal connection to the planet itself where he wouldn't ever want for anything and also in a healthy body which ALSO happens to let him have sex with the hot blue cat girl who is now in love with him?
Why _wouldn't_ he take the latter choice?
Some of us could explain why we disliked Avatar _just fine,_ thank you very much.
In the official comics Cameron shows his conflict in accepting his new life as an na'vi, to the point of suicidal thoughts.
You should tell here on your channel how the English destroyed the Australian aborigines. I would like an explanation to determine a town that could not defend itself. 😢😢.😢.😢
Damn a valid subjective point. I take my hat off sir even if I’m on the other side of the fence
100% This.
And I'd like to add that in Avatar, they literally can connect their hive mind pony tail into every living thing on the planet and yet everyone is just like sniveling little humans with irrational thoughts who can't understand how other people/creatures think and feel. That is such a dumb plot hole or such small minded level of creativity.
I'm also not 2 minutes in when he already lost me when it was "The cool thing to do is to hate on this movie because it's popular." Uh, I can tell you I was in the absolute minority of ONE who hated this movie. As in I am the only person I know of who couldn't stand this movie because I thought the writing was trash, the humans are all blatant bad guys vs these pure flawless gross CGI cat people, and I just can't get over the CGI. I mean at least with Dances with Wolves they had to tell a story without visual spectacle but now since there's sparkly plants it means it's just such a gosh darn well written movie. At least according to everyone.
I thought everything was even worse with the second movie. Again these perfect beings have all the exact characteristics as tribal humans, except for that last drop. Nope that's just reserved for those gosh darn evil humans. Because we need them to be irritatingly perfect while making the humans irritatingly evil.
That thing about hating avatar being the cool thing to do was him quoting another reviewer that he disagreed with, it wasn't his opinion. You should probably actually listen to what someone is saying in full before replying.
Dawn of the planet of the apes would be a good example of your pitch for an improved avatar film. It gets you on the apes side, but also gives a case for the humans side aswell.
Also Princess Mononoke.
Definitely
The Way of Water and the Planet of the Apes movies are already mostly the same writers so I am not sure you would be telling them anything they don't already know.
@@kinera - Cameron remains as the main writer.
@@kinera not even close, dont compare this blue shit with POTA
Avatar's issues are proof why EXECUTION MATTERS. You can have great ideas for themes and stuff but if you don't execute that properly, its not going to be that good. And I think Avatar's problem with execution is best highlighted by comparing it with Princess Mononoke, which is what Pilgrim pass did in his video. PM actually served as one of the inspirations for Avatar and have similar themes and ideas. But its the execution that drastically set them apart.
It had actual nuance by showing how some people benefit from the modern world compared to how things once were, in the movie it was the women and lepers who were given a place in iron town under lady Eboshi.
I like how the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy understood that there are really evil and hateful elements in both the human and the ape societies. What results from a quest for liberation from oppression can turn into a burning hatred that leads to incessant war until one side is completely destroyed. I kinda wish they they had a Na'vi version of Koba.
even planet of the apes went too deep into "humans are complete assholes, and they are also stupid".
Eh, those movies are their own can of worms when it comes to generic science fiction and CG effects taking prominence of all else. It doesn’t help that like Avatar those films are becoming a safe haven.
That navi guy in the first movie that distrusted Jake and neytiri's ex fiance could have been the Koba of the Navi side
But instead that character turned 180 and suddenly became submissive to Jake for some reason and then got killed off
Yes, or X-Men 1
@@Channeleven2345789gereric? those films have more things to say about society than avatar and his black and white message of
Nature = good.
White man = bad.
And yes they are woke as shit yet people like ben shapiro and critical drinker barelly notice it because "wow pretty images with no politics"
20:29 the hilarious thing about the what if you do in this part, is that *is* the story. Cameron has explained in other media that Earth actually is dying, due to over population, and that Unobtanium is necessary for sustainable intersteller travel. I.e. Earth is so f'ed up, the largest ekspedition since ever is being funded to facilitate an evacuation of Earth.
Now, of course, this is other media, and therefore can be completely disregarded as not a part of the movie. But I just found it funny when you went over that what if scenario.
That's my main issue with Cameron... He says all these things, has all these meticulous lores, but he does not show any of it in the film so it's the same as nothing.
What's the point in saying that in an interview when he's just gonna gloss over it in the story and make the narrative black and white anyway? Most people who watch Avatar don't even catch any of this.
@@Yara_LocoBirdif it helps the unedited version of the film (I have no idea why it was cut out baling with so many scenes because it was very much needed but maybe it was for time limits??) the first set of scenes are in earth and having watched and preferred the longer version it was very much destroyed. Imagine if NYC and Tokyo combined into one concrete jungle.
@@Yara_LocoBird avatar the way of water says "oh, yeah, the earth is dying by the way" like it is just a minor insignificant detail where it should be a GIGANTIC PLOT POINT.
Like, if the earth is not dying, the navi could theoretically win. They could destroy enough convoys, enough machines, enough soldiers that the cost benefit of exploiting pandora for their resources becomes negative, and the humans decide to leave.
If earth is dying, and Pandora is the closest candidate for terraformation, then you ain't winning. Either humanity goes extinct, or they'll throw everything that they have to colonize Pandora.
The worst part about him saying stuff out of movie is that all that stuff IS THE MISSING PIECES OF THE DIAGRAM
Earth dying is a really strong "Reason for" for the RDA. I also remember hearing that Eywa regulary culls every species to mantain balance, including the Na'vi, which is a really REALLY strong "reason against" (imagine having a god that woke up one day and said "theres too many of yall, imma kill half of your entire population").
When I watched Avatar 2, I had a strong impression that there ALMOST was an arc for Sully, but the writters just didn't notice it? In how, even though still very militaristic in a very human way, Sully was determined to 100% fit in whichever Na'vi society he landed on, no matter what - even at the cost of his family's well being. When the kids were bullying his kids and then his son almost got killed in a prank and everything, and yet he kept saying "apologize, we are guests here", instead of being actually concerned about them. What good is being "hidden" for safety if your son is gonna be pranked to death? Is it really worth it?
Of course, in the end they and the sea Na'vi just became bffs, so like, yeah. But that though just kept popping into my mind while watching.
Oh yeah, also there's the way the adults didn't seem to care about the human kid at all, with him even being threatened at the end. I kept thinking maybe the kid would switch sides, or in the end when he already didn't maybe he'd leave his father to die since he realized he does more harm than good at this point, but nada. Nothing of it is ever adressed. He pretty much just leaves the guy alive for Sully to have to kill him again in a third movie or something
Yeah thats a good point actually, looking at sully in the second movie did kind of piss me off, because he has no trace of human left in him, he just becomes an apologiser trying to fit in as much as possible, and that sends a pretty shite message to the audience
@@etherdeef4303he is basically trying to culturally assimilate and that is the most shitty way I have seen some one assimilate into a culture.
@@etherdeef4303One would even call that a traitor to his own species. Like instead of learning from the Na'vi and bettering himself and his own species, he just joins them because...humans are evil? Great message lol, be a traitor to your species.
It's why you can't take this movie seriously in any way.
@@etherdeef4303 nah, sully became more human than ever in the 2nd movie. Raising his kids so incredibly human, being a misogynistic ass.
The message is right: humans are shit and forever will be.
I was going to put Avatar's weird message down to JC researching nothing because he didn't think the Navi were a direct metaphor for indigenous people but then I found that interview where he said Native Americans should have fought harder against being colonised and that's partially what inspired him to write the story. A lot of indigenous people HATE this movie and boycotted it.
Yeesh, that's a pretty messed up take on JC's end.
He didnt say that
The boycotts just brought more attention to the movie, if anything. I'm sure they will boycott the next one as well.
Wtf?
@@Noob-yx1cu My source? My source is that I made it the fuck up!
Apparently in the next one we’re gonna see an evil tribe of the avatars to show that they aren’t all good. But that’s barely addressing the issue, I want to see the evils within the tribes we’ve been following. Inventing a new tribe that’s most likely going to be one-dimensionally evil is just adding to the issue
I think the main problem is not having depth within the individual characters, theres no real such thing as completely evil and completely good people. In the end we are just people and a story like this needs to contain that kind of depth instead of just slapping "these people good these people bad" onto it
@elainerogers9595 The depth and relatable is what makes character good. I am not even the best writer and I know that.
I dont know why ppl here are assuming there is no conflict between the NAVI, from the way the green navi treated jake and his family when they arrived shows they are ethnic/cultural problems between them.
I think white guilt may play a part in some of this criticism. A majority if most of our movies have a simple evil vs good dichotomy and we dont usually complain.
I believe because the navi reminds some white ppl of how native americans were treated by white americans during coloniization a reaction is coming forth with the incistence of showing the Navi as having darkness amongst them just as the native americans had in real life.
Except this is not real life. The navi are a fictional alien race and perhaps they might actually be a race of ppl that are all good unlike humans, they might be good and evil in the later films.
However my point is that the movie follows a simple abd popular trope that has existed in many movies and story telling. A hero comes from outside the group of a noble ppl, joins them, helps them overthrow the ruthless enemy and becomes their king.
You cannot draw parralels of the navi to.native americans or olden days human. They are a ficyional/fantasy race.
@@hunterzolomon1303You mean the ‘White Savior’ trope?
@@Lobsterwithinternet i know that trope. But it crosses a lot of cultural lines. Where there are stories of a foreigner being adopted by a new ppl and saving them. It doesnt just apply to white ppl. I am a black british guy of nigerian origin. Sometimes i think we give white ppl too much credit for certain things we consider negative. That white hero trope u talk about can be applied to different cultures such as yasuke the black samurai (based on real life) or king jaja of opobo an igbo(nigerian ethnic group) slave who became king among the ijaws (nigerian ethnic group).
Not because we have seen white ppl be saviours of other races in movies means that now it becomes negative when we are talking about freaking aliens.
Come on man.
This is why I love Andor, because it shows real people on both sides of the story. You really get a sense of many people working for the Empire who are simply trying to live their lives, like you described in your video. The Empire was not created from scratch by only recruiting evil people. Nearly everyone working for the Empire was previously working for the Republic. When the Republic was changed into an Empire, it wasn't some unexplained magical instance of every person who used to work for the Republic are now suddenly evil. Andor makes that clear by showing the different levels of society and how individuals on each social strata react differently to the new regime.
And what you said about writers disproving their own ideology is why I love the Daredevil series (the original 3 seasons, that is). Other characters in Daredevil's life constantly confront him about whether or not his methods are sound. There is an underlying theme of Daredevil's actions stemming from internal pain as opposed to pure and noble reasons. When he first meets Punisher, you can see Daredevil aggressively confronting him for how he does things, and yet his issues with him are very similar to what other characters in Daredevil's life have actually been confronting him about.
When Daredevil speaks to Punisher, you can feel him projecting his own pain and intentions onto Punisher, and his louder-than-usual speaking voice adds to this feeling that Daredevil is in denial about his own personal methods and aims his judgement outward instead of inward like he should. Absolutely brilliant in my opinion. The show doesn't take the side of any particular character, but instead zooms out to analyze EVERY character's intentions--and I mean EVERY. The show can feel like it's more about competing ideologies than competing characters--yet the writing makes every character so real and 3-dimensional that you are sucked into the story without feeling preached at.
With the ideas of for and against you bring up, it’s why I find the idea of Spider as a character interesting. He represents a way to show how the Na’vi aren’t perfect, how his silent rejection by them shows that they cannot accept someone like him. How he represents two worlds and neither can fully accept him as he is.
With the direction Cameron is going it looks like this aspect won’t be explored which is a massive disappointment. I would love to see a character represent the balance between the two ways of life.
I disagree! (with your last concern, at least).
Spyder's inclusion is obviously intentional, especially for that reason. I don't think it's any coincidence, either, that he is so involved with Kiri -- another character caught between two worlds (being the child/reincarnation of Dr. Grace). They're clearly meant to compliment and contrast each other.
This essay seems to ignore that, in my opinion, so that it can make its points without having to address all nuances that don't support its conclusions.
I really hope I am wrong. What irked me a lot was how the movie just kind of glosses over that Spider is tortured and then is maimed by the people he suffered to protect and wants to be like with all his heart. His character is incredibly fascinating because of this imo.
I would love the next movie to address this exactly like I imagine but I’ve learned to take a grain of salt with Cameron’s sense of nuance and subtlety.
I think this essay does have some good points though. A more complex humanity would be more interesting. They hinted at this slightly with Ardmore (female general) mentioning that she’s not here for resources but to ‘make Pandora the next home for humanity’. That would be so much better to show, that everything humanity is doing is because they need to save as many people as they can. Money brings them to Pandora because Earth is dying. So every dead Tulkun and every piece of mined Unobtanium (or whatever resource they do next) represents dozens of lives saved with the money it makes from the highest bidder.
That to me seems like such an interesting idea. I’m just not sure if Cameron is thinking about it like this from what he’s talked about. But again I would LOVE to be wrong.
Well in th next avatar they're going to introduce an evil Navi clan. This was always th plan. So all this complaining is a waste of time.
@@kevinhowe3280 I don't completely agree with the video but I think we should only talk about what actually exists in movie form. It seems too easy for the writers just say 'this or that is coming in 5 movies time'. That's too much of cop out
@@scalpingsnake I mean it's already been shot. Avatar 2 and 3 were shot simultaneously and James thought this entire story up years ago from a dream. They have an entire biology made up for this planet but ok
Human v Navi feels a lot like Harkonnen vs Fremen. What made Dune such a good book was the fact that the interaction it focused on was between those two factions but mainly on both of their relationships to House Atreides, which was led by a person with a moral compass who (at least in the books) was also manipulative and very vocal about the littlest things he did to garner positive public opinion. The Fremen were also realistically described as a society with their own strengths and flaws
You hit the nail on the head with this. I feel like in a way, Leto I. is used as a moral compass throughout the entire series. Everyone is judged in relation to him, his enemies are the villains and his friends are the good guys and his descendants' worth is judged by how much they are like him (Miles is considered the perfect man and soldier precisely because he is Leto's spitting image). This could backfire easily, but a brilliant thing that Herbert did was that he doesn't compare the other characters to Leto as a person. He compares them through the eyes of other characters to the image of Leto they have in their minds. Leto is this fixed point of moral goodness because that is how the other characters see him. He is a complex character with many dark aspects (like the manipulative tendencies, anger issues, pride etc.) in addition to the good ones, but when he is used as a point of comparison to other characters, it is through the eyes of Jessica, who loves him, Gurney who would lay down his life for him, or Stilgar who greatly respects him as a leader. Even in the later books, he is looked upon as the epitome of all that is good about the Atreides, but again, that is the legend, the mythologized version of him.
Herbert manages to have his cake and eat it too by creating an incredibly complex character and then flattening him in the eyes of other characters so he can use him as a fixed point of morality.
I mean, that's not really what Dune is about, but okay.
Dune is more about the subsumption of cultures, thinking people, etc . . . Into a Messianic Cult of personality that is under the control of nobody, not even the Messiah. To some extent, Paul's moral compass does not matter. A major theme of Dune is that even with his precognitive visions and insights, Paul cannot change certain aspects of the future without leading to unacceptable outcomes anymore than we can divert an avalanche once it has begun. The sum of decisions, the unleashed potential energy that began long before he was even born, cages his life and options.
It's a parallel metaphor with the biological systems of Arrakis itself. To change Arrakis into a garden world is to change it irrevocably by releasing the tremendous amounts of pent up energy within its biosphere, the cycle of the Sand Plankton/Trout/Worms.
You are missing the part where the Freemen sweep across the galaxy in a genocidal jihad and kill hundreds of billions of people and that Paul is absolutely appalled by this future yet finds himself incapable of avoiding it...
...so yeah freemen good, harkonen bad is not the story.
Yeah there was a recent video by Alt Shift X called ‘The Real Dune’, and it hints at how ppl misinterpret Atreides as wholly good. Its pretty clear that Leto himself used propaganda apparatus, he sends Duncan as envoy to negotiate with the Fremen, to use them as ‘desert power’. Important word being ‘use’. The Avatar movies are like the very superficial readings of Dune as white-saviour narrative. Anyone who thinks Dune is that narrow-minded should read Dune: Messiah. Those books know pretty clearly how complex the issue is beyond good or bad, and explores all the consequences of religious fanaticism and this white-saviour trope embodied in Paul. Avatar, on the other hand, indulges in white-saviourism completely
@@Bustermachine’that’s not really what Dune is about’. Okay dude. Its someone’s interpretation/analysis, and the political themes are fucking MASSIVELY evident in the book. There’s a lot of themes, you describe some of the environmental ones, but the OP comment describes the other sort. To deny one and praise the other is so stupid to assume you know the author’s sole intent. Dune: Messiah makes the political themes and moral ambiguity even more clear.
Several of Hayao Miyazaki's movies explore humanity's relationship with nature and technology. Princess Mononoke as mentioned in other comments, but also Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and Castle in the Sky. Even Spirited Away has a brief message with the Stink Spirit / God.
Takahata's movie Pom Poko also explores our relationship with nature.
The movies explore these themes and issues without being preachy and so therefore remain entertaining. People can find them by looking but still just be an entertaining movie for those that aren't.
I wrote my university dissertation on Miyazaki's movies so analysed them to death.
“Great art sets out to reveal the truth, whatever that truth might be” is a RAW af line that resonated with me as a creative more than anything I was expecting from this video
honestly a real easy way to show that both sides have their ups and downs is in that seizure scene. Kiri has a potentially life altering incident that, despite the tribe's best efforts, cant be healed with natural means. the humans do however help. not just completely heal, mind you, they help her recover, with physical therapy, some type of mobility aid (they have exosuits, there's no way they dont have something akin to a wheelchair just more advanced), maybe medicine for her condition. its not an *immediate* recovery, but its better than what the tribe would realistically do, which is leave her at home and possibly abandon her if she's too much for the tribe to support.
I find it absurd that the story presents that human technology is enough to ENTIRELY REPLICATE the biology of a navi to the point that their artificial avatars can breed with them, but somehow they have any upper hand in any medical way
I feel like this would have been a great way to show how the two methods could have worked together. Maybe the technology identifies what the problems are but the humans don't know what to do about it but the Na'vi do have history with this sort of thing and now that they know what the problem is, there actually is a means within their own culture to cure it. By working together they could have saved her. Maybe they could avoided some side effects the traditional ways have.
It was already in that movie just to prove that alien voodoo is 100% more effective than evil human science
@@ReddFoxx1562 Knowledge about biology doesn't equal knowledge about medicine. I wouldn't know how or why humans would've collected as many medicinal studies and data about Navi that they could help in a specific anomaly as shown in that scene. It's not something that happens often with Navi, so how would humans know what it is and how to treat it? The last movie implied, that a ton about this planet, the neurological links etc is still not entirely understood, which is why they employed scientists to research it. We're not talking about humans trying to cure human indigenous folk, but alien indigenous folk. So what looks like magic woowoo to us might be just the very thing that works on this planet, who knows. I don't think the scene is as absurd or hard to believe considering we're not on planet earth in this movie.
@@megalodon4586 ....are you trying to assert that having knowledge in the field of biology would be completely useless to every doctor in a medical field?
I can think about a lot of reasons that’s a terrible idea:
• as an American Indian, we drove a bunch of animals extinct before Europeans came-as did Aboriginal Australians, a number of Asian cultures, and the nomadic European peoples. Humans have never lived in balance with nature, because we are part of nature (and thus change it).
• we are trying very hard to preserve species that colonists drove to near-extinction, but also those that we neglected. Because we have a lot more tools now.
• making indigenous cultures the ideal means that often people accept things they shouldn’t, or at least accept things they hear uncritically. For instance, not every AmIndian tribe has more than two genders, but also not every one with two genders disallowed trans people before the Victorian era. For something easier to swallow, the Navajo haven’t had a modern female leader, but they may have historically, depending on who you ask and which sub tribe you’re a member of.
• it’s sometimes just much more interesting to explore what these cultures really ARE if you’re going to waste four movies on it
Edit: also I could tell you exactly why I hate these movies. It’s just the white savior trope. Literally just the white savior trope.
So you're a racist.
Whiteman bad
Did well it until you went woke at the end. How is it a White savior trope, you know the world's actual minority, when the overwhelming vast majority of villains in these movies are White? It White btw, not white.
Are you white if you are in a body that is not white, or human at all? And what other chance was there? Someone defected. It's a common arc. What's the harm? Sadly, Jim spent too much time building the world and had to cut out the scenes about the characters, but those deleted scenes are publicly available. Once you see what was cut out, people are a lot less 1 dimensional (still not good to have them out of the theatrical cut in the first place).
Jake literally changed species. And don't forget that Jake was constantly moving the plot forward by giving information to the RDA - he's the reason they had accurate maps of Hometree. So is it really white saviour? Or is it a character arc independent of basic tropes? It's up to interpretation but I've given you my thinking.
You are not an American Indian, you are Native American. Did you not even pay attention in history class and learnt that Colombus was travelling to India and assumed America was India and that the whole 'Indian thing' is a misconception? Native American settlement literally predates Indian culture by thousands of years. You aren't Indian.
It’s just a whole movie filled with “noble savages”. To strip an indigenous culture of the unsavoury things they do (as all cultures do) is to strip them of all nuance, depth, and humanity. You shouldn’t need to paint an indigenous culture as morally perfect in order to decide that murdering them en-masse for special rocks is bad.
I can't believe you just tried to make that massacre argument in the 21st century 💀
what about the elaborate and graphic scenes where the indigenous brutally attack the 'sky people', and not even just soldiers.. did you watch the movie or just repeating Twitter talking points..
The noble savage concept is borderline myth.
It's also sad to the point of comical, that the same political side that loves that concept simultaneously misses no opportunity to call their patriotic political opponents "stupid and simple minded" for living on farms and hunting stuff..
Honey this movie made more money than Avengers: Endgame and Avatar 4 was in production before Avatar 2 was even released. Do you think thought-provoking and deep arguments sell tickets? Only the common denominator (what everybody already agrees with) does.
@@neonbunnies9596 it made more money after endgame was out of theaters, 10 years after its own release, due to so much time in it's initial run, and 4k theatrical release in china, that isnt yet available on home video or streaming, right after endgame. Endgame passed 2.5 billion in less than a third of the same amount of time it took avatar, just 20, vs the latter's 72
My problem with the first Avatar film is that Jake Sully was a terrible protagonist. He was given a second chance at life by the RDA and sent to broker a peace deal with the Na'vi so that Earth could get an invaluable resource which it desperately needed to survive and which the Na'vi seemingly had no actual use for. Rather than doing that, he instead spent all his time fetishizing their culture and sexually pursuing the chieftain's daughter. When the humans took the only option left available to them for their survival after he himself had told them that a peaceful resolution was impossible, and even took extra steps to ensure that they didn't unnecessarily kill any of the natives in the process, Jake proceeded to lead a rebellion against his own kind that saw the deaths of scores of humans, and then opted to give the finger to the billions left dying back on Earth so he could selfishly live in paradise with his new alien body; a body which he was only able to acquire thanks to the science and technology of humanity that the film goes out of its way to paint as backwards and evil.
The story would've played out very differently if the Na'vi were insectoid monsters rather than blue cat people, but sure let's all act like Jake is the hero for betraying all of humanity so he could get his dick wet clapping alien catgirl cheeks.
Then there's the fact that the story comes off like a shallow "I'm 13 and this is deep" telling of what should be a nuanced story, with a disgustingly pandering idealization of native culture, and a glossing over of any negative aspects of their society or behavior. Nothing bad is attributed to the Na'vi. They live in perfect harmony with nature, and they never wage wars (despite having a warrior class). They don't exploit the environment like the evil humans do (despite essentially mind-raping the animals they ride, which the film just whitewashes like it's not horrendous). The Na'vi are honorable and compassionate (despite coating their weapons in neurotoxin, which would be considered a war crime here on Earth). Meanwhile the humans - who COULD just obliterate every living creature on Pandora entirely if they really wanted to considering their level of technology, and are therefor heavily reining themselves in and TRYING to do things diplomatically - are consistently painted as nakedly malicious.
EDIT: 25:10 Am I missing something? I thought I remembered unobtanium being described as exactly that in the first film? A room temperature superconductor that made space travel - and thus interstellar colonization that could save humanity from oblivion and alleviate the issues on overpopulated Earth - possible. It was immensely valuable precisely because it was so needed.
I went to watch Avatar 2 with my mom for my birthday this year and when we left, she was quick to point out that we don't see any disabled Na'vi, which begs the obvious question of how do they treat their disabled?
There are a lot of things I generally like about Avatar (well, mostly the worldbuilding, the story is bland at best) but Kiri's seizure really struck a nerve with me, since I had just lost my little brother to a seizure less than a month prior. At the moment it was incredibly triggering, but now in hindsight I kinda feel insulted by it and the implication that the cardiac arrest could've easily been fixed without our high-tech machinery
En el deep lore de Avatar se explica que la "medicina tradicional" de los Na'vi no es producto de la evolución, fue creada por Eywa específicamente para ayudar a los Na'vi. Contienen una serie de micro organismosb diseñados para reparar a los na'vi. Esto hace imposible enfermar a un Na'vi, por eso tienen que usar potentes neurotoxinas en puntos específicos para matar.
keep in mind that pandora is the most hostile place known to man kind, there are probably disabled na’vi but they likely don’t survive dispute the clans efforts.
as far as kiris seizure… the navi have very different body structures then humans and in the movies they are using technology based on humans, because when the events of the first movie take place not a single navi was willing to be the RDAs guinea pig and allow them to deeply study how their brains work. they allowed them to take dna to make the avatars but that’s it. and mind you juri was being taken care of the physic who have connections with eywa so they likely know more then humans.
Right, the problem with that is that the commenter wasn't complaining about the internal logic, but about its implications. The internal logic can be wonderful, but it's worth jack if its allegorical & metaphorical implications aren't good.
@@ruesneptune
No. They don't know more then humans. Not even regarding themselves. These Navi don't even know what their eywah is. The humans do. The Navi think it's some god. Of course they do, they're neanderthals essentialy. They don't know anything. And they don't know a thing about themselves either. Humans can clone a god damn Navi and put their own mind in them. We are quite literally comparing stone age people to space aliens. You can't point at a neanderthals and claim he knows more about his own biology then some space alien would. It's a space travelling alien. It will have every biological fact regarding the neanderthal figured out in two seconds. Meanwhile the neanderthal will think he can save himself from poison by rubbing his cheeks. (Which are literally the case in Avatar)
@@ruesneptune If they can literally make Avatar bodies and download humans into them they know their biology inside and out already. If they didn’t know how their brains work Jake wouldn’t have woken up being able to think and speak and reason, or he wouldn’t have woken up at all, and we wouldn’t have had a movie.
15:53 I think what makes that scene not just bad messaging but outright dangerous is instead of using a fantastical medical condition or have the shaman use healing spoodge or something a medical EXPERT says conclusively that Kiri is having a seizure- a very real and life-threatening medical condition- then the shaman woman swats them aside and does- as TCL says- outright witchdoctoring with no actual medical procedures involved. At that point they may as well have treated a bullet wound by pulling it out (bad idea) or sucking out venom from a snake bite (also bad idea).
I immediately thought of the quack cures for autism and covid that have been going around the last few years, that moment made me feel sick.
Okay fine... Something you could say about Avatar, is that the Na'vi basically live in
an eco-theocracy of sort. Where religious leaders, like Neytiris mother are holding
the highest authority in society and the will of Eywa has to be respected, no matter what.
En el deep lore de Avatar se explica que la "medicina tradicional" de los Na'vi no es producto de la evolución, fue creada por Eywa específicamente para ayudar a los Na'vi. Contienen una serie de micro organismosb diseñados para reparar a los na'vi. Esto hace imposible enfermar a un Na'vi, por eso tienen que usar potentes neurotoxinas en puntos específicos para matar.
@@alisha8099 True but that moment could have shown how important it was to adapt.
But wasn't the point of this scene that whatever she had wasn't whatever the HUMAN medical experts thought? She got the 'seizure' from eywa, a literal planet. It looked like a seizure and could be thought of one, but the only thing that could fix her was a natural remedy. one from eywas creatures. We have to remember that while it's possible na'vi have similar medical issues to humans, they're still litterally aliens on a fantasy planet.
That epilepsy scene baffled me so much, felt like they just dropped that plotline in an instant. Didn't realise that the shamen cured her
That scene pissed off the epilepsy community. Like GJ Cameron.
@@Ouchimoo v understandable, pure nonsense
Ironic since in many cultures epilepsy was seen as a sign of the gods for this person to become a shaman.
@randallbesch2424 no kidding, I thought she was going to be a direct link to Eywa considering she's hinted to be the reincarnation of the female scientists, Grace, that died in the first movie. She would have been an amazing shaman character.
It's setup for the next movie. You might be able to tell that it wasn't important to the plot.
In movies where you need to set up for the next movie, some events are gonna happen that aren't directly linked to the plot -- they're character building moments that serve no other purpose. Usually this is bad because you gotta be concise and make everything matter, but it's justified because it'll be an issue in the next movie.
I read about one of the movie’s themes and it says,”Understanding other cultures,” and yet Jake Sully was willing to abandon the humans who need the resources that the planet need in order to save Earth
What makes it a little annoying when comparing the Nav’i and the Humans as colonialists and indigenous, is that the film is set in a science fiction planet that apparently isn’t hard to survive in if you’re a Nav’I.
While there are predators they rarely attack, you don’t need fire because everything glows in the dark, there doesn’t appear to be any diseases or poisons to worry about, it doesn’t get too cold or too hot, they bond with nature and animals using tendrils in their braid, and the mystical or spiritual beliefs that they practice are real do to some weird energy across the planet.
When compared to living in nature in the real world, there are a lot of risks and you need to worry about surviving more than just singing and dancing. You need fire for worth and light, you can die from diseases, poisons, and so on, food can become scares do to famine, you can freeze to death or die from heatstroke, there are predators everywhere and other animals that will steal your food, and many of the spiritual practices that they did are often not supported by medical science, basically you are vulnerable to nature unless your strong enough and smart enough to survive in it.
But again, unless you’re a Nav’i, Pandora is almost the Garden of Eden.
The whole thing just feels so artificial, doesn't it? One could be forgiven for thinking Pandora was some kind of alien ant farm...
I doubt he'll do it, but I would absolutely commend James Cameron if he revealed that Pandora was an elaborate supercomputer built by another alien civilization. It would actually make so much more sense if the planet was actually built by a far more advanced race of ETs to cultivate new life for resources, food and possibly even slave labor/lab rats/organ donors.
Eywa could be the computer's OS, using information downloaded from the Navi's organic USBs to monitor and maintain a near-idyllic ecosystem. That way the Navi were pushed just enough to thrive in a primitive society, one which can be easily exploited by their hidden makers, all the while lacking enough pressures to drive them to invent more complex tools, weapons or medicine which would make them difficult to manage.
And every millennium or so, the makers return to harvest the planet's life and reset the OS, moving on to the next artificial planet in line until it cycles back around a million years later.
@@goji3755Eywa is shown to have some control over the biosphere of Pandora and might be able to control the evolution of animals on it. I would like to have a more in depth depiction of the relationship between Eywa and the na’vi and maybe have Eywa learn about earth and try to spread to it both by trying destroying the humans damaging the system and by manipulating the na’vi to spread the seeds of Eywa to earth.
@@goji3755I mean tbh (it isn’t mentioned in the movie so iirc) but there are rules in pandora (put by Eywa ?) about not using wheel, not using steel (and a third one I forgot ?) which mean that it’s very much possible that Pandora IS a garden of Eden created by Na’vi ancestors to not recreate the error of the past (being a species so intelligent that it destroys itself) or by other aliens for whatever reasons
lack of nuance works on both ways im afraid. this movie(s) failed to portray humans side of the story. aside from one or two verbal confirmation, there was no sense of urgency. nobody was acting like the humanity's future is at stake. every human was busy with playing minigolf, gleefully decimating forests while sipping coffee or flexing with how their 3d printer can create buildings.
and now 3rd movie on its way. i suppose they expecting us to get excited for ash tribe, but... its just feels like too little too late
We are Life is deadly we all die, we ard animals and we die as any other animal. The greatest dangers never came from other animals but from a lack of water (death in days), lack of food ( death in weeks), lack of shelter in colder regions (death from exposure), Danger of wounds which would not allow us to gather food or hunt.
When you mentioned the Medicine Woman bit and how she easily trounced future medical tech I had a thought to the old, live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, the Next Mutation. Yes, I know, not a favorite but hear me out.
Early on the new dragon based villains are using some elixir that seems to make one of their guys stronger. Much stronger. The turtles get a hold of it and analyze it; Donatello via science and new girl Venus via magic and... both come up with nothing.
Come the next fight Donatello realized *why* both of them couldn't work it out; it was a placebo.
Honestly, if you want Avatar done right look at Princess Monoke.
So let me get this straight, the humans made anatomically correct "Avatars" of the Na'vi that can reproduce and psychically communicate with the other animals, but somehow at the same time don't know enough about their anatomy to diagnose the cause of a seizure. 🤣
Not only that, why not clone tulkun brain instead of constantly killing them? They figured out how to clone avatars of the Na'vi, why can't they just clone a tulkun or its brain?
@@larchier It might be insanely expensive to clone a tulkun if cloning a Navi is already expensive.
@@kinera but what about just it’s brain? Then there wouldn’t be senseless killing of Tulkun for just a little jar. Not to mention the whole entire avatar project is expensive,wouldn’t it also be easier just to make money off of tulkun brain clones without loosing billions of dollars worth of men and machinery. It’s also less dangerous.
@@larchier Cloning body parts without a body isn't possible now, and might not be in the future. Of course synthesizing the brain juice directly might make more sense but there may be a reason why that can't be done.
@@kinera Synthesizing the brain juice directly from the Tulkun is common sense too! Instead of slaughtering them to extinction, they should just let them reproduce so they can have decades of brain juice haha
I just wanna share: I watched Avatar 1 for the first time a few months before Avatar 2 came out, I remember enjoying parts of it, but when it was over I was thinking almost exactly "I wonder what big mean white man will be the bad guy in the next one." To my surprise it was THE SAME ONE (but *blue*) lmao. It might just be a symptom of how bad the writing decisions were, but still.
That is recognizing reality not bad writing.
After watching someone else’s critique of Avatar, it occurred to me that Selfridge would be instantly more human if he learns that the board of directors back on earth intend to replace him because he’s “under performing.” And he learns this just as Jake Sully is arriving on Pandora
That would have been great, especially if they followed along with him being sympathetic to the Navi. That his sympathy towards them is slowing profits/isn't producing enough resources to keep earth alive, and that if he doesn't increase production then he'll be replaced with someone worse.
This is such a more interesting concept in general. Remove the concept of cloning and just have it be about Humanity colonizing Pandora to get the Unobtanium. Have Selfridge be the protag who brings his family with him to the planet, he loses his well paying job because he is too compassionate and doesn't want to fuck over Pandora and the Navi while mining for the Unobtanium. You could go the extra mile and have his spouse leave him behind to return to earth after the fact. So he says fuck it, straps on an oxygen mask and takes some tech to try to trade with the Navi in exchange for him joining them. Only to then find out he is not the only human who felt the same way.
Not only that but you could contrast it by having a Navi character who is willing to fuck over their own people and land for the sake of co-operating with the colonialists and profiting from their deals. There are plenty of historical figures throughout history that you could base them off of.
Unfortunately, it wasn't important to the plot, and you already got a 2h 45m movie so no
A line from Dark Souls 2 that's highly apt about Cameron's motivations in his story decisions: "No matter how tender, how exquisite, *a lie will always be a lie.*"
Kinda like how the fanbase thinks having interesting lore automatically means the stories of the games are good when they are as bare bones basic as one can get
@@jeremyallen5974 Yes, the wikipedia approach to storytelling is definitely a flawed one.
@@cheezemonkeyeater not to mention the endings are lousy as well
@@jeremyallen5974 Are you talking specifically about Dark Souls? Because the ones I played seemed fine.
@@cheezemonkeyeater so long as you don't mind getting zero payoff for your struggles outside of a ten second clip that resolves nothing before smash cutting to the credits
I also think Jake Sully is just not a very compelling character in the first movie. He didn't have much reason to send with the Na'vi at first and certainly didnt have much of an arc. The second movie gave him more motivation to do things
His brother would have been a better protagonist. (I think he was a botanist in love with nature)
Yeah, we know nothing about his life in earth other than he was in armed forces and lost his legs...
An absolute example of lazy writing.
no, don't give the second movie props for giving him the bare minimum of having him act as a parent. he's still a boring waste of space and so are his children and so are his beloved blue people. it's teaspoon shallow trash.
I dunno. I hate him even more in the second movie. He is like a toxic father
He’s a mediocre character that nobody cares about
The best movie I’ve seen with a message of don’t destroy nature is Princess Mononoke. It didn’t argue “man bad, nature good” but instead called for balance. It showed that the people of Iron Town needed to harvest the land to protect themselves from invading forces. They are only painted as in the wrong when they try to kill the forest spirit.
I feel like the lack of subtlety is really damaging, lots of terrible things that happen aren't caused by 'evil people being evil' but normal people making the choice that's easier for them and collectively adding together to cause terrible harm, removing all the nuance to this extent stops any examination of why people are making some of the decisions that look damaging
What harm could black-and-white idealistic thinking do? It's not like Cameron's message could possibly dovetail with support for freedom-fighters, who simply wish to return a far-away country to the stone age by smashing local government and industry.
5:09 One thing I would argue is more closer to evil than what Aonung & his gang did to Lo’ak is when Neytiri threatened to KILL Spider in exchange for her daughter Tuk & we know she would’ve been willing to do it. While I know she was desperate to save her family, her prejudice (as much as we understand it to an extent) still led to her threatening to kill an innocent child just cos he was human & happened to be the son of her enemy, even when said child had lived among her OWN family from the time he was small 😔
my blind reaction to that scene I just had the lingering feeling "she is using him as bait", cutting him as a threat did cut me off guard but it is her emotional state and that is what makes her feel so.. real. observing neyriti she would definitely hold prejudice to humans but I know on a serious note, she is not the type to sacrifice anybody
After watching the deleted part she was Ready to kill him kind of explanes Why he saved hes father
I'm also mad that Cameron hired an ethnomusicologist to help write music for the Na'vi that sounded truly alien, creating an entire musical culture for the fictional people, only for Cameron to musically whitewash his own fictional culture but putting in a musical score that sounds like what Westerners THINK non-Western music sounds like. The actual Na'vi music that was written for this two-and-a-half hour movie showed up like only TWICE. I believe it was the TH-cam channel Sideways that put out an excellent breakdown of what happened.
Is there any way to hear this music 😢
Without there being a west to save you, you'd better have been well acquainted with Deutsch, because you'd be speaking it right now. Also you saying the words: "Whitewash" proves you think about race and are racist. Stop hating white people, when White people don't even think about you in their day to day. We have our own goals such as trying to feed our families, and survive just like everyone else. I'm sick of other races complaining about mine, get a life man.
I miss Sideways
Well to be fair, tribal alien composers that wright alien sounding music are hard to come by these days.
He tried some out there ideas but decided to reign them in because it didn't work, as he was going for mass audience emotional engagement, not just to do something "weird and cool". And seeing how Horner's score is amazing and Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time, I think Cameron knows what he is doing more than some ethnomusic nerd on youtube
As someone who was enamoured with the Avatar films, aside from a basic plot line, my main problem with Avatar is the Na’vi themselves. They feel like a mish-mash or cherrypicked cultural identities from POC that are boxed into cute, completely innocent characters that are digestible to a western audience. Hell even the character designs reflect this. One of Neytiri’s original designs had 4 eyes, for crying out loud. That would make sense considering most animals on Pandora have multiple sets of eyes but noooo we gotta make her attractive to human men 😗
Counter point : they'd still be attractive with four eyes, so this change wasn't necessary
The Male Na'vi were just as much humanlike as the females and the reason for why they were human-like was not to make them "attractive to human men", it was because the movie would've been a lot less interesting otherwise. The fact that they closely resemble us and are yet very different from us, makes them more intruiging and their way of life more appealing. Also there's nothing bad about making a character attractive, it's no different from making a character look physically unappealing or going for a more alien look.
Unlike a different Avatar that was an example of great commentary in a kids show no less!
The whole time I was thinking about how much better ATLA is at commentary despite being meant for mainly kids. It has so many layers. It shows good and bad fire nation people, good and bad non-fire nation people. This Avatar just feels.. shallow.
Princess Mononoke also explored this nature vs humans theme much better than this did
@@naruchancutie1 Heck, there are good and bad people in the Water Tribe which two of our main characters come from. Plus some who are simply stuck in the old ways of thinking and who probably won't ever think otherwise.
@@claytonrios1 Exactly! No nation was exactly free from bad people. Ba Sing Se was corrupt and controlling its people just as the fire nation does.
I think Jet was an amazing character too because it showed what happens to a person consumed by hate. So much that he was willing to wipe out innocent people. The fire nation were the main aggressors of the series but they weren’t the only people in the wrong for their actions.
Likewise, there were good people from the fire nation like Jeong Jeong and Sokka’s master. Iroh as well though his past was not good. It showed how good kids were exposed to propaganda at an early age as well.
Such a well done show.
@@naruchancutie1 Heck you could say that the Ember Island Players episode works as a recap episode and a way to show Fire Nation propaganda in action right before the series finale.
It's funny that for James to create a 'nature movie' that 'demonizes technology', he had to 'make new technology' to be able to film it.
I think the message is more so 'demonizing destruction of the natural world'. Also quite the difference between technology built to drain and take over a world vs new vfx technology😂
You can't be serious man, you're literally doing the meme.
James Cameron: "We should improve society somewhat."
You, an intellectual: "Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent!"
@Aaron-xj2fo you're putting too much thought into this bro
@@Aaron-xj2fo The phrase “we should improve society” is an incredibly empty statement cause it says nothing. James cameron is saying “ we should improve society BY returning to our indigenous roots, abandoning the search for better technology, and revert to being one with nature. The reason for this is because those who are one with nature are inherently good people while those who seek the advancement of technology are fundamentally evil people on every level.” Seeing as you’re so “intelligent” yourself you mustve grasped that right? Do you need help grasping why thats a dumb message?
@@edun4513That person is just quoting a meme word for word, for what it’s worth.
nah, the worst crime these movies commit is sometimes confusing people when you're talking about the last airbender.
Exactly
If the Na'vi were truly a peacable people, in total harmony with nature, then the concept of warfare would be utterly alien to them and there would be no need for any warriors. They wouldve been curmbstomped even harder.
Isn't a bear an animal ?
@@antoslv3913yes, yes it is 🤨
@@jovo7631 and they are perfectly adepted to their natural environnements, and still hunt, fight over territories etc... Being 'in harmony with nature' (like the tribes of southern america maybe) doesn't mean being very peacefull... Just look at the damn ants ! totally different ants in the same specie just for sighting wars that can cause millions of death (amongs the ants)
@@antoslv3913 and then there's the polar bears, whose natural habitat is being destroyed by global warming 😢 James Cameron was right...
@@antoslv3913that and also: we do know that there are clans who commit atrocities on Pandora. They will be probably the main theme of the third movie.
I felt the same during that Seizure scene. Like she has an alternative medicine solution. It's like demonizing medicine and unfortunately we know real people who happily jump onto alternative medicine.
I didn't experience the scene the same way at all. The movie never says the shaman actually cures her, she just happens to wake up at more or less the end of the process, but really, to me it's still "shamanism" without proof. And it's not that the medicine isn't working, they don't get to actually help because they are chased away before having the time to do anything, unceremoniously..
it seems they REALLY wanted to promote primitive or alternative medicine.
they could have used ALIEN medicine instead: like using their brain-jack head-tail to allow another smurf (or a special tree) link with her mind to stabilize the seizures... like a vulcan mind meld.
aliens have different physiology, make use of that!
@@Nerh4k It’s not alternative tho. Kiri was raised Na’Vi, and that stuff is what Na’vi medicine is. That is what ours was before we formally discovered drugs.
Max and Norm didn’t actually help much either. Sure they diagnosed a probable cause.
There are also a variety of ways you could view it rather than hop right to “ah their making my beliefs look bad!”
Like maybe it could be a foreshadowing of how the next movie goes? Maybe Kiri has another seizure and when Metkayina methods fail, Max and Norm save her.
@@Nerh4k Also, their medical equipment is the equivalent of a very advanced first aid kit, being handled by someone who is a medical adjacent scientist rather than a doctor, while they're trying to diagnose one of a very small number of human/Navi hybrids.
The ultimate point of that scene, IMO is to intertwine the scientific and spiritual worlds of the Navi and Humanity, much as Eiwa has a scientifically understandable basis (a planet spanning slow neural net woven in to the biosphere) does not detract from the spiritualism experience by the Navi tribes.
I see that scene more like the Na'vi have achieved the same advancements as humans have, just instead of technology and electricity they use their own herbology and religion (although their religion is obviously different than ours with the scientists actually having proof).
So maybe they aren't demonizing medicine, it's showing us an alternate reality if humans went down a different route.
I immediately threw my phone on the ground & destroyed the corporate hotel im currently staying in, the second i heard that i'd be happier without them. Now im joining the rebellion in cuba or guam or something. Thanks for the wisdom!
Glad to see your harmony with nature has restored your access to the internet and TH-cam to post this comment. Living with nature really does only provide good things and no form of recession in any way.
@@collectiusindefinitus6935 i keep having to destroy these phones
I attacked one end of a USB cable to my head and the other to a tree. I am now more enlightened and healthier than ever. I also plugged it into a cat and now the cat and I are able to talk to each other.
@@chazzitz-wh4ly wow i gotta try that!
During the holidays I vacationed at Malaysia Borneo Sarawak and stayed at an indigenous longhouse for a period of time. They were a great community, with culture and all that and they were very harmonious with nature and each other, and they also had a history with human head-hunting. Basically, merely a century ago, if you wanted to prove you were a man/adult in the community, they would have their adolescent men raid neighbouring villages and kill and cut their heads as souvenirs, doesn't really matter if the victims were old or young, man or woman, just bring back a head, and you are a man.
Yeah, our native guide admitted they were quite grateful that the Brookes helped abolish the practise.
interesrinf
17:00 thats like going back in time, and you run across a native American with severe pneumonia, and you have a pocketful of antibiotics, and you try to get the sick one to take it, after explaining bacteria to them, and Kicking bird runs in and says to get away, he will fix it, and he shakes a stick, sings HEYA WEYA while dancing in a circle and beating a drum.
A big thing people don't really consider is how little we knew long ago. I feel the medicine scene gets worse when ya consider the Na'vi probably don't even know how the stomach works, or what a lot of their own organs are for. They know their herbs and medicine and spiritual beliefs and weird magic, but they don't know how a brain functions or what's causing the systems in a body for the seizure. It's SO easy to go "Hey, long ago they had it alright" when you fail to realize what wounds, what troubles, etc.
Also, just go full Warhammer and own up to it. Make humanity completely evil, I love those trailers and videos that change the tone to humanity fighting against the Na'vi as being heroic. That'd be so cool.
My thing with the medicine scene is that like, Na'vi aren't humans, I don't know how much they should apply human biology/medical science to them
They're just as likely to solve a headache by drilling a hole in the skull and letting the demons out.
>warhammer
>humanity =evil
nice cope. we're the protagonists of that universe, and for as flawed as we are, we're the only ones worthy to stand the test of time there. or are you going to make up some copes around "muh tau"?
@@DioBrandoWRYYYYYY humans are 100% definitely evil in warhammer. everyone in warhammer is evil. that's the whole point. humans don't get a win just because they're the "protagonists", protagonists can still be the bad guys.
@@elizabethb4168 i think there'd probably be a more graceful or explicit way to handle that aspect, but yes, that's my thought too. na'vi are obviously gonna understand how to treat na'vi better (or at least, more reliably) than humans would.
I watched "Avatar" in class recently, and I was watching the scene where they fight the military to defend their tree, and the tree gets destroyed, and I just thought, "Holy shit, this entire movie is literally just the Noble Savage trope!"
And white savior. A white dude literally comes in and saves the natives from their plight, disguised as one of them. It's Pocahontas, but if John Smith dressed himself as a native and painted himself to look like one.
Holy shit this entire movie is just dance with Wolves
@@qc6265did we watch the same movie?
Are we talking about the first one?
@@qc6265 dances with wolves is so different to avatar and the onto thing that connects them is a very very basic telling of a similar story. If you actually look into the characters and what drives them and the actual plot points in avatar and why they happen then you can see that it’s really nothing like dances with wolves. there is a really good video by localscriptman about avatar and he goes into why it works the way it does
I think you give a generous interpretation that Cameron was attempting to make a good story and wasn't actively making a piece of propaganda. I think Cameron is very, very aware that the story of his Avatar films so obviously falls into propaganda territory. The films are extremely reliant on the latest in technology to make, and he's used lots of advanced tech in all his diving endeavors. The propaganda is intentional.
Also, the character of Selfridge is probably a direct nod to Harry Gordon Selfridge - one of the pioneers of modern consumerism.
How does relying on latest and advanced Tech qualifies the Movies a propaganda ?
Isn't that more like Hypocrisy ? Calling for Primal Lifestyle while cannot function without several Non-Environmentally-Friendly Industries
It's strange that people who hate tribal films are people from white colonist countries. It's like asking Trump to be the spokesperson for Black Lives Matter. How about asking people from Asia, South America, and Africa? Avatar is widely beloved here in Asia and a huge chunk of its box office comes from here..
For me the problem with Cameron's writing is that he's refusing to let nuance enter the chat, so to speak...?
The issues involved, as they exist in our real world, have many complicated facets. E.g. yes we vitally need certain extractive resources to maintain a technological society. But no, they don't necessarily have to be sourced as destructively & exploitatively as they are now, and we don't have to use them in just constructing things which will break or be discarded in a year or two & then be unrecycleable.
Similarly, the colonialist territory-grabbing & refusal to consider compromise depicted amongst the corporate humans in Avatar is not at all unknown in our own world, and nor is the jingoistic violence of Quaritch? But they all come across as kind of cartoon characters because they too lack any nuance, seemingly not having been given any personality or background outside of these 2D flat characterizations.
My guess is that maybe Cameron's crew chose to oversimplify all their characters & messages so they could focus instead on spectacle and action? Again, not even slightly uncommon in blockbuster films!! 🙄 Just disappointing, as it would've been great to see a more thought-provoking plot that could rise to the level of those incredible visuals....
@@anna_in_aotearoa3166 I'm going to suggest that nuance isn't always to the benefit of a story. Or if it is, it might only be to show that not all nuance is genuine, sometimes nuance is just obfuscation. The reality is that the RDA and later the military enforcers of the second film are shown as callous and brutal because they are the pointy end of an extractive industry that is under virtually no higher oversight. Those are never friendly or nuanced at the pointy end.
A good example of this is listening to the CEO of 'Fair Phone' which has gone to great lengths to try and ethically source raw materials for their very repairable on long life supported smart phones. To their credit, they really do seem to be trying. But it is very hard and the results so far are imperfect.
He likened sourcing some of the raw materials they needed to trying to employ an addict while leaving that addict in an addictive environment. They got their supplier for one element to work with an ethical source, turned around, and six months later they'd switched back to a cheaper, more polluting, more harmful to their workers, mine in violation of their contract.
Now you can see that there's nuance here, but the nuance is not actually at the point of extraction.
And that's here on earth, where reporters and normal people could plausibly go and inspect these things. Pandora is in another star system and gate kept behind earth's small fleet of starships.
@@Bustermachine Good point re the need for (& lack of) oversight! If the contractor or subcontractor you've hired to do the extraction is operating not on an ethics-based model, but instead a shareholder-based one, then it seems highly likely that quick money will eventually beat out doing things right...?
Of course on earth we do try a range of solutions to restrain this tendency in terms of auditors, regulatory inspectors, embedded observers etc.... with mixed success. Interesting to contemplate how that might deploy in a multi-planetary context; distances would be exacerbated, but then presumably any society that could achieve sustained space flight would also have comms solutions that could effectively bridge that gap...?
15:41 I’m gonna disagree with you on this take. Ronal’s ritual took hours considering there’s light by the time she went in and it’s night when Kiri woke up. Imo, the ritual didn’t do sh*t. Kiri woke up on her own after being unconscious for hours.
But that is not the way the movie makes it feel
Anti-consumerist and anti-industrial messaging in a very high budget, highly merchandisable movie, made with very powerful computers, by a major corporation that relies on highly developed infrastructure just falls flat as hypocritical.
You forget my friend that nothing sells better than criticism of capitalism, and at some point someone had to take that market.
@@Marianjowalski Except it rarely sells well, Avatar did well because it's pretty. That's literally it
@@Marianjowalskibut Avatar isn't famous because of its anti-capitalist messaging, nor it's world building, it's famous because of its CGI
Princess Mononoke is everything Avatar wishes it could be
Nobody care about Princess whatever.
@@palmoart Its a great film. Highly reccommend
Those are two different movies, comparing them is a little unfair
@@CinnaBon-h5p Ye, because Ghibli movies are actually good
@@CinnaBon-h5p two films with remarkably similar plots.
The film gets kind of close to the point on having more of a reason for why they are doing everything. In the second film there is a brief mention that Pandora is needed as a second earth. But then it is never mentioned again and just seems like a paraphrase of “see we can’t afford to just move to Mars, we just have to be Green now”.
Honey this movie made more money than Avengers: Endgame and Avatar 4 was in production before Avatar 2 was even released. Do you think thought-provoking and deep arguments sell tickets?
@@neonbunnies9596 I'd argue they do. The Way of Water and The Last Wish came out within a span of 10 days of one-another, and despite Avatar 2 having so much going for it, The Last Wish still managed to carve out the 10th place spot of movies released in 2022 despite being released at the tail end of December, being an animated movie with significant themes throughout its runtime, AND competing directly against Avatar for tickets. That's an insanely big achievement considering this is an animated children's film with thought-provoking ideas made by a non-Disney studio.
Of course, action sells. It's why it's so popular in film, and that reflects in all the movies of the top 10 grossing movies of 2022 list I mentioned, but the best films imo are able to use their action in service of a greater story, especially one which tells a message. Because that's what art is: The conveying of ideas, of themes and messages. The best artists can tell a thought-provoking story, make a deep argument about whatever it is they feel like (political or otherwise) and still make it enjoyable.
I love how the internet says people hate things. But in real life of the hundreds of people I meet and talk to most don't hate the things that supposedly people hate according to the internet.
That's because everyone can say anything on the internet without real consequences.
Reminds of twitter being memed on how the buzz of a movie is so strong there but it’s a box office flop and some movies get hated to oblivion there but did great in the box office with a strong fanbase outside of the media 😂
@@AstroSully box office flop but did good, yeahhh no
I really dislike how one dimensional everyone is in Avatar. There is no bad Nai'vi, they're all so pure and lovely to the point where it makes them unlikeable and sometimes hypocritical. They also have a "holier than thou" kind of attitude that really gets under some peoples skin and causes some, myself included, to actually root for the humans, despite them being horrendously evil.
Also, I love how it's conveniently ignored in the 2nd Avatar that humanity is now no longer fighting for its own corporate greed but for the survival of its own species. This could've been a great plot point and struggle Jake has to go through (loyal to the Nai'vi, or save his species from extinction), but alas, no.
Esa es la misión de Eywa.
When are they horrendously evil?
are you dumb? the 3rd movie is about evil na'vi
@@lalaland2107 The humans were horrendously evil in Avatar 1 when you think they are on Pandora simply for unobtanium. It isn't explained that this particular mineral is somehow pivotal to human survival.
I think there are bad navi.
I think they want to explore that in the next movie with a group that is against the water people and kinda hint at it in the first when theyre rallying tribes as there is hesitation in beliving theyll actually help
I think one of the best takes I ever found on "politics" in stories was from a video I watched a while ago. It was that politics in a story are the surface-level aspect to discussions of human nature, because every political system humanity has ever created is at its core a set of rules and prescriptions trying to come to terms with the human condition. A well done political story that delves into the themes of its politics peels away its layers and tackles the core conflict of human nature that the politics aim to address and makes its critique at that deeper level. While poorly done politics simply take a side. Thus creating propaganda.
Thus the phrase "keep politics out of entertainment," is a layman's phrasing of the statement, "keep propaganda out of entertainment," that comes about because the people who are put off by it aren't sure exactly what is so off-putting and thus point to the most readily obvious thing which made them uncomfortable, which was the political message. It is in-a-sense, confusing the thing itself with its method of implementation.
TBF the only people saying keep politics out of entertainment are right wingers who have a low media literacy to begin with. What they mean is "keep liberal politics out of entertainment"
so basically propaganda should never touch with any film story ever.
sounds boring if you ask me.
Although, obiviously if every movie is all about propaganda, it'll also be boring too.
"The phrase 'keep politics out of entertainment' is a layman's phrase for 'keep propaganda out of entertainment'"
That's actually an eloquent way of putting it. And it kind of highlights the idea that sometimes humans can see stuff wrong when they don't even know what it is
Kiri being diagnosed with epilepsy really annoyed me as I thought you know it might be at least mentioned in the plot again. I also was really curious how the bad guys would find them, like how many places would Jake let them invade before he revealed himself. But no they just used her having a seizure as an excuse to bring in the humans which therefore led them to their location 🙄 Very lazy screenwriting.
Well it was said that she should not connect with the home tree anymore or else she might die. Pretty sure that there will be a pay off and this is why they chose to write it like this. Using this setup as the reason for the humans to find them…that’s lazy especially when it could have been so much easier aka some tribe just knowing about Sully and telling the humans because idk…humans threaten to execute some children 🤷🏼♂️
Cameron had already talked about greed and the thirst for power taking innocent lives in Aliens.
He had the opportunity to tell a more nuanced story and, given that he was already planning to spread it across multiple films, also a more layered one, with characters who changed positions based on the events that unfolded.
Instead, we got a "good vs bad" contrast, devoid of any reason of interest apart from the technical sector.
That was more of a "fuck you!" As well given We-Yu's incessant want to use the Xenomorphs in their weapons division
I disliked the latest Avatar for three big reasons.
1) As a throwaway line they say earth is dying and people would be coming to the new planet to stay. Then they have humans as the unambiguous villains of the film. I spent much of the movie wondering why it thought I would root against my own species’ survival.
2) Cameron then shifted to what, in that context, was a side show. He made his whole movie that references earths impending collapse about whale oil.
3) Finally, expecting me to believe the naavi (a hunter gather culture) would be any match militarily for humans that came from the other side of the galaxy is dumb. I’m sorry but an entire fleet of warriors shooting arrows on the backs of dragons are no match for a single F35. The naavi wouldn’t even see what killed them, let alone be able to stop it. Expecting me to forget that took me out of the movie completely.
A Mig21 or an F5 would have been enough to drive their “Airforce” away. And those Jets carry like 6 missiles MAX.
Omg yes finally someone said it. I find sully incredibly selfish for turning sides and not having sympathy for all his fellow humans left to die on earth, but sympathises for new creatures he never belonged with without human technology.
And they couldn't figure a way to cohabitate? I find it hard to believe given how advanced human tech is. Even colonising a tiny part of the planet would be more than enough for human survival without killing all the natives.
it's basically a version of native tribes Vs colonisers, the aliens wouldn't stand a chance, I was so irritated while watching the movie.
I don't have an issue with humans being painted in negative light when the deserve it.
Deforestation, Hunting Whales, etc.
But it's very weird that they don't acknowledge the fact not EVERYONE is like that. Look at Grace.
They should of understood not everything is black and white and that you cannot define humans as simply good or bad.
Not to mention we were supposed to be rooting for the protagonist and his viewpoints even though he thoroughly was responsible for everything bad that went on to happen in the first place. If he did his job as a messenger properly and just mention that his species were there for the unobtainium reserves, instead of boning the chief's daughter, the entire discussion could have gone a lot smoother in the first place. there could have been atleast hope of better negotiations rather than outright war, or at the very least, even if war was inevitable, atleast the Navi would have been more better prepared against the threat.
And yeah, lets send all the humans back to their dying planet for the faults of their ancestors which they are trying to escape from and not even think of a compromise that would atleast give them back something.
Avatar could have been a great film with if they executed the ideas and exploring both the positives and negatives rather than pushing on one message hard. If the Navi acknowledged the ambiguity of the human's condition and managed to grow past their differences and struggles to find common ground in the ending, I am sure it would have been impactful. However, Avatar and its sequel just served as what would come to be wrong with movies and franchises as of late: Distracting the audience with visuals while feeding them half baked ideas.
Basically, Eywa is a mega-organism of unknown nature. She created all the species on Pandora through a series of microorganisms designed to clean up the environment, eliminate disease, and control wildlife. Thus there are no evolutionary pressures that break the "peace forced by Eywa. So, the RDA knows that micro-organisms will save the earth from its climate catastrophe. But there is a problem, although the earth still has many resources there are two that have been exhausted, oil and "rare earths", without the latter it is not possible to produce electrical circuits and all the technology of humanity is reduced to the steam engine, and in the process all the industries of the RDA collapse. Unobtanium is the only thing the RDA's economic system can support, so in order to obtain it they convince humanity that invading Pandora is humanity's last hope
Oddly enough, Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal approach the issue of energy and razing a planet/civilization for energy much better. The Argent is a miracle substance, "A solution to a problem the world had no answer for" and even the Khan Maykr says "I feel for the humans, I do, but I also have a people to save" illustrating that both Maykrs and Humans are fighting an existential fight.
Also, hell lord, Davoth, is in all of his right to destroy all universes in "reckoning" for what the maykrs did to him, he wanted to create the perfect world, devoid of what existence was abundant: voilence and death, but he was betrayed and forgotten, what he did was definitely not justifiable but was objectively understandable, there is no pure evil or pure good, there is always a reason, nothing is perfect and everything have a purpose.
Not daring to depict the more questionable side of native peoples is a pattern present in both fiction and the mainstream narrative in the real world. What's sad about that is that it dehumanizes them.
there were also natives who willingly followed the whites because they wanted revenge on other tribes who robbed and pillaged them in the past
Yeah, this is true for a lot of “progressive” media, so scared of portraying their minority characters in any negative light that they end up dehumanizing them. It sucks
@@neonbunnies9596 .. dude, stop copy and pasting.. you're only making your argument appear weak and wrong by doing that garbage.. it's not even that you're wrong, it's almost like you're just being obnoxious on purpose to make your point annoying and therefore dismissed all the easier..
Even if you didn't want to highlight those aspects of native peoples in the real world, I think they still could have introduced a nuance. Maybe there could be a realization that human weapons and technology are better than what the naavi have, and therefore the naavi characters could have developed a greed in obtaining that technology and stealing it from nearby tribes and humans. That's just human nature, so to speak, and it could have added some depth to the discussion of greed and man-made stuff vs nature.
yeah making all natives appear all bad or making all natives appear all good are both dehumanizing. instead of treating them like backward primitive people or like perfect paragons of nature who can do no wrong, what if we just treated them like actual people?
No wonder why I still chose the humans instead of na'vi in the avatar game
I‘m always with Colonel Quaritch and his squad 💪🏻
Right before the second movie came out, my theatre had a replaying of the original avatar available that me and some friends went to go watch. The entire time, I felt that same anxious "wait, what..." Feeling film critjc described having while watching. My friends and I walked out of the theatres all a little "hm, well, okay", but we could never really place why. When the full trailer came out for the second movie, none of us wanted to see it. One of us did though, and after she came out just said "yeah, I think we should just watch Puss In Boots". God, The Last Wish was amazing.
A reason is why the first movie mostly just stood on movie tricks (CGI) !
But today that movie tricks arent realy special anymore!
Its so funny to me how often I'll get completely blindsided by praise for The Last Wish, just in the wild.
Like, I'm not disagreeing at all, it deserves all the praise its getting and more. But its just how it'll come from completely nowhere and literally everyone will be in complete agreement on how good The Last Wish is lmao. Its like the Deep Rock Galactic of movies.
@@Kami74159it was kind of like a craze in my opinion mqinly because of how we had set the bar too low and how it payed off.
@@killerkraut9179The Way of Water was still absolutely special in the VFX and cinematic world even today. That’s just a false statement.
@@AstroSully By so much Cgi today it isnt that special!
Honestly, I think a movie that tackles this super well is Princess Mononoke. It shows both sides and I just can't hate or prefer any side because I understand both.
And Miyazaki managed that with one film barely over 2 hours, and yet Cameron still feels like he needs at least 3, close to or over 3 hour films just to get to that point for a change.
Yeah this is why I love the writing in things like Disco Elysium and One Piece. In one piece the world government is clearly the bad guys and the straw hats are good. But not all pirates are good guys just for opposing the world government. And not all government agents are bad, to the point where someone like Fujitora who is an admiral, one of the highest ranking government agents, is disgruntled with the world government but still works to change it from within, and actively tries to do good despite the larger organization around him. And there's tons of examples of other characters like him like Garp and seemingly all of Sword. And not to mention that one of Luffy's first friends he made on his journy is Koby, who he 100% supports his dream of joining the Marines, despite it being the main opposing force to Luffy's own dream.
And in Disco, despite clearly being a fairly left-winged game or at the very least coming from extremely left-wing devs, they made the wise decision of having Everart, the representation of the Worker's Union, being the most fantastically corrupt and outwardly disgusting individual in the game, while Joyce, the representative of the megacorporation that is fucking over its workers, is portrayed as this nice gentle person who is almost always reasonable and calm with the player. Before I realized what was happening for a large part of the game I was just sorta siding with Joyce by default because they clearly wanted to make the issue less black and white.
If the Union Rep was the fine upstanding gentlement that was trying to do everything in their power to grant more power to the workers, while the megacorp rep was the slimy hostile individual, then there'd no longer be any depth. It'd just be black and white morality which is just boring and uninteresting and all of the depth in the game that comes from having to choose whether or not to help each of them is completely lost.
love to see a disco elysium comment. such an underrated game
Avatar is basically just "what if we take Princess Mononoke and make it really shallow?"
Princess mononoke did a great job with the "reconnecting to nature" aspect. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend
A major reason they are hated rather than just disliked and ignored is how it's pseudo depth was pushed hard by the film industry, fans, and Jamees Cameron. If it had been "Hey, here's a film with great special effect and a fashionable message about nature and capitalism," then at worst people who didn't like it would've just said it sucked and moved on. But then we got articles about how it was some sort of spiritual awakening. People started having post-Avatar depression, wanting to off themselves to be reincarnated as a Navi, spending all day at the theater watching the movie over and over. Avatar fandom became a cult, and this was promoted by the press and James.
Myeah. People love to go on about the internet hate of things but usually there's 3 times as many people adoring the thing just as extremely and "illogically"
Wait what that actually happened?
@@spectroelectro3772 Yeah lol, people we're genuinely obsessed with Avatar when it came out. Painting themselves blue, getting into jumpsuits and all sorts of weird stuff
@@crazydragy4233 Why am I not as suprised as I should have been?
@@crazydragy4233 bro that's just a normal fandom thingy, have you evet heard what a cosplay is, smh ppl really running out of things to hate
I would like to suggest Sideways' video on Avatar as a companion video to this one. It's about the original ideas for the soundtrack, and how Cameron "colonized" the fictional culture of the Na'vi (particularly it's music) to better fit his ideas and bias of what tribal/ alien music sounds like
Chill out. He was making the most expansive movie ever made. Avatar franchise are movies for the masses. This is not James Joyce.
@@sebastian11346 Oh no! someone critiques lazy writing and Cameron's hypocrisy in his work! How dare you engage with the media you consume!
@@crazydragy4233 I dont even know what that means.Can you be more specific?
@@sebastian11346 his work isn't free from criticism just because he spent a lot of money on it
@@TheDinisPT Agree. Of course i agree. Avatar has many critics for more than ecade now. But i think it is important to remeber that these are expensive movies. And i choose to defend him (Cameron), before everything, beacuse these are very expansive movies.
My friends only remember these movies just because of how detailed the CG is.
Thats it. And now that tons of movies have good CG now. The second movie just didn’t stand out.
This video reminded me of why i love a lot of old Stargate episodes. It wasnt afraid to make its main characters make some morally grey decisions, and when dealing with new peoples they'd offer medicine, technology or defense. However, one episode, The Other Side, shows the danger of doing that as well. And almost had the heroes help the wrong side in a world war. Plus it questioned a lot of military interventionist ideas as well even though the heroes were supposed to be part of the US military.
The whole... 'Prime Directive' thing also gets explored in the reverse throughout SG-1's many seasons where Humanity encounters other, more advanced, races who are unwilling to share their technology with them because of the potential consequences of doing so, the best examples of this being the Asgard and the Tollan.
I often disagree with your videos and there main thesis, but I can always appreciate the points you bring up and the detail you put into explaining them. Always offers me a nice different perspective.
Huh... I wonder how that's possible. I watch a lot of film critics. I have never been like, "premise simply wrong." Because it's just interpretation and advice which you just simply take into account along with your ideas. Unless... You are also a published author/do it for a living?
I genuinely want to know what you disagree with so often. How do you do it?
@@jewels3400 well I never said his premise is wrong, did I? If it came across like that that was not my intention. I simply meant I often personally disagree with some of his main points but I can appreciate and/or understand why he's drawing his conclusions about certain things because of his evidence. I intended the comment as a compliment. I haven't seen his specific channel in my feed in a second so I felt like leaving this comment because my brain went. This is the one you often disagree with but respect. It was not necessarily about this specific video. As for what exactly I would personally disagree with (not highlight as wrong because when it comes to writing in my opinion there's no such thing. Everything works in certain circumstances and everything should be experiment with) I would want to go through and make sure I purposely quote specific examples he brought to the table so the conversation can be constructive discussion. I don't want my commentary to be use by trolls or welling meaning but naysayers all the same to bash this channe or the thesis he painstakingly research for his videos. I hope this makes sense. I'm a tad exhausted at the moment but I didn't want to forget to respond to your comment. Perhaps when I have more energy I'll go re-watch/ find some of his videos and tell what exactly made me make the comment above.
@@zanyawesome30 huh, okay. I'll take that into consideration. My use of the word premise was more a stand-in for other words than what I thought you specifically meant. I did come from a place of not understanding what you were talking about. However, the premise, and the "main thesis," are practically the same thing. I will take what you said into consideration. Thank you. And get some rest lol
Apparently in the third movie they were going to introduce the ash people, i heard that they were going to be the villain of the movie.
that the third movie was supposed to depict the more flawed side of the na'vi people.
I hope they stick to that and dont just have some human manipulate them into being bad.
I can bet that's exactly what will happen though. Either Na'Vi collaborators, or evil na'vi being evil just because they weren't content with living in a tree.
Nah, quarich will make them evil
@@potato_723 I'm laughing cause I feel like that's what's gonna happen and I hope that doesn't happen but it most likely will
Unobtainium being suddenly worthless makes no sense. The sequel claims that the brain juice was known about even during the first film, yet it wasn't a priority. Sure, it makes sense that it can be highly valuable, but no sense that unobtainium would be completely neglected just to keep the ultra-wealthy alive indefinitely. They are two completely different, and highly lucrative, applications.
To me I had a "Somehow Palpatine returned" moment when I found out the ore was not good enough anymore so they jumped the weird space shark and made the movie's maguffin IMMORTALITY JUICE
My issue with Avatar films are just how incredibly self congratulary they are. For something with plot akin to Ferngully to just keep propping itself up as just such a good movie when it's not.
And then they made the same movie twice. I knew I was done with it when the antagonist gets told his mission was only to hunt the protagonist, Instead of... Oh I dunno, help subdue the tribe causing the evil human transports, causing actual issues to the evil humans. No, evil guy, your job is to stand around till you can go fight good guy.
The entire reason they hunted Jake was because he was the one leading the rebellion because he was an experienced marine that knew the ins and outs and lead them. There's not many other Na'vi out there doing much against the humans at all, especially when Jake left and started a more peaceful life with the Metkayina.
I mean, I love these movies so much that nothing is going to stop me from loving them ( that was probably not even the purpose of the video ) but it is nice to hear another view on it and not just a bland commentary. Nice to see a closer look on this one! Cameron did say that in the next film the films are going to explore the other side of the navis more. Besides im not really the "I got my life lessons from movies" type of guy
Same, I absolutely love and adore these movies. Their ability to transport me onto a new planet whilst watching it on the big screen is unmatched. No other film has immersed me into the world quite like they have. But it can still be critiqued and that’s fine, doesnt stop my love for them tho
The thing is that you're part of a minority, one of us that doesn't get life lessons from movies.
I understand why some people like these movies, they are very pretty. The problem is they can be very pretty and still have a good story. Cameron dropped the ball on the story and that makes it a bad movie regardless of how good it looks. There is nothing wrong with liking a bad movie, many bad movies have aspects that people like. Avatar is one of those bad movies.
@@clwho4652 Exactly and a lot of this laziness very much detracts from the amazing potential of the world or outright takes you out of it.
@@MancoNinja Just because you can enjoy a movie without deriving life lessons from it doesn't mean that you can't derive life lessons from other movies. Besides, online reviews show that most people enjoy the Avatar movies in spite of their faults (rottentomatoes scores of 82% and 76%).
25:40 Ironically if my science is correct a room temperature superconductor would actually help very much with nuclear fusion technology
I never relized how much dislike there was towards Avatar untill recent years. I always thought everybody enjoyed the movie about blue aliens as much as I did. The I relized I was 10 when the movie came out and I havent rewatched it once in the 13 years since.
It’s mediocre, cheesy 90s movie that got released in 2009
@@chasehedges6775 I think this is the problem qhen you take like 15 years to release an idea. Dude had Avatar in the works since the 90s and the 90s just never left the work.
Either way, I didn't like it mainly because it topped the box office on technical achievements alone. That is hella wack.
I liked it and still think the effects are solid
@@TallicaMan1986 I like the first Avatar movie and the second; the only thing that I ask Hollywood is to entertain me for a couple hours or so! Was it great, of course not, but it was entertaining. 😊
Most people can't have an opinion by themselves on a movie, a tv show; as soon as someone - who has a certain significance for them - tell that he didn't like a movie or tv show, those people will jump in the wagon of that someone. 🤦♂
I remember hearing about the hype around the time it came out, but aside from the visuals of humans and na'vi on screen at the time being impressive, I found the plot to be generic at best.
I completely agree with your point and Cameron’s naturalist message basically made me mad especially in the second scene with the miracle shaman.
That scene made me go ape crazy like my ancestors.
Why? Because I live in an area of the world where people are more “na’vi” than most western world and every year those people get criticized for not immunizing their kids to the point that they don’t go the hospitals unless death is knocking on their doors. I won’t tell you how many babies died because their parents went “na’vi” and decided to put their trust on faith than the local doctors.
It’s so sad to see some prick from New Zealand preach about naturalism and never visit a 3rd world country that still has to live with sickness and starvation.
Totally agree, except Cameron is a Canadian
@@benjaminthibieroz4155 then the whole nature thing makes sense
Yeah because White People don't refuse to be vaccinated.
Talk about one hell of a non-sequiter you just went on. Also James isn't from New Zealand, lol
The difference between what you're talking about on Earth and the world of Pandora is that on Pandora you can actually commune with their god in a physical way. It's not faith. It's there with them and in them. They can literally just let the planet heal them when they are ill. It's not an allegory for human religion at all.
If I am correctly informed, the next movie will be about the fire navi (inspired by the above mentioned raiding natives) and they will be the antagonist, while the humans will be trying to protect their new colonies full of newly arrived civillians. (Earth is bust, they have to go to pandora.) If this is all true, it will be a good if a bit late fix of these problems. (I was disapointed about this aspect of the previus movies too.)
Then well get the.. earth navi and the air navi. If he can churn them out before he dies ofc.
10:46, Because huge numbers of people really do think that natives and tribes around the world were singing kumbaya before the evil colonists came lol. Cameron created the noble savages everyone was fantasizing about.
For me the second movie specifically was the issue. First movie was very average in the plot department, and it was very one-sided. But for some reason I though that it was part of the plan, and the second movie was going to explore human side of the conflict. Unfortunately, that was not at all what we got
One of the first scenes of avatar 2 has a human ship touching down with giant thrusters that set the forest and all the woodland creatures ablaze. It was so cartoonishly evil I rolled my eyes
I mean...it's accurate.
It’s not cartoonishly evil that’s now nuclear thrusters work
It’s like the our rockets have booster that would do the same thing on a much smaller magnitude
I think a failure of the Avatar franchise is that a lot of reasons for why things happen, is addressed in forms of canon outside of the movies. The comics series shows the aftermath of the first movie and the tensions between the Na’avi and the remaining humans that need to harvest resources to survive as well as Na’avi individuals being antagonistic. The Avatar Encyclopedia tells you that unobtanium is a highly conductive metal that has a versatile list of uses like powering the RDA’s high speed transportation network on Earth and is incredibly valuable because it actually runs Earth. Some of the film’s shortcomings are also present in the comics, the human vs Na’avi conflict is brushed upon but pushed aside in favor of Jake’s journey as a full-time Na’avi after being human. The thing is, unless you go looking for this lore, you won’t know it exists.
I think Pandora as a world has so much potential for storytelling because of how cool the planet is in its entirety and I hope we see more of that in the future movies.
The irony to me as something of a contrarian, is how easy it is to argue that the humans are actually the good guys of Avatar, at least in the first film (I opted not to waste my time or money on watching the second). From the backstory we're given, all of human civilization relies on Unobtanium to survive in its current form. Suddenly running out of Unobtanium could bring the whole edifice of human society crumbling down in an apocalyptic fashion.
So how does humanity approach dealing with primitive aliens squatting on top of the only rich source of Unobtanium in known space? Do they swoop in, seize control, forcibly relocate the natives or anything else? No. They set up a few bases and mining camps on land that is not the core territory of any of the Na'vi tribes, then start trying to talk and negotiate with those tribes. They even invest incredible amounts of time, money and resources into a boondoggle project to make hybrid clones of Na'vi bodies for human negotiators and diplomats to inhabit by telepresence so they can speak with the Na'vi with fewer misunderstandings. Meanwhile, the Na'vi are pretty much universally hostile the entire time, and actively attempt to kill human personnel whenever they come across them.
And after the Na'vi (with the help of human traitors) successfully massacre most of the human personnel on the planet, then force the rest to leave, how does humanity respond? Remember, the Na'vi have just put all of human civilization at risk of collapse by suddenly and violently cutting off the flow of Unobtanium. Historically, genocides have been committed for much, much less. So again, how do the humans respond? Do they take the extremely cheap and easy road (which they could have taken all along) and drop rocks from orbit until there are no Na'vi left to stop them from strip-mining the planet? Nope. Do they create chemical or biological weapons to exterminate the Na'vi? Nope. They basically just land in greater force, and expel the Na'vi tribes who'd made enemies of humanity from their old land.
If you ignore the second film and just leave it at that, it's remarkably easy to paint the humans as good guys who exercise incredible compassion and ethical restraint given what's at stake for humanity, while the Na'vi are little more than mindlessly hostile savages who barely even consider coexistence a possibility when it comes to humanity.
It always irked me how Jake essentially doomed his own species to destruction because he had no legs
Clearly humanity survived as of the second movie but I've yet to see it
And then he betrayed his new species again😂
What? Doomed hos species?
It was one company that wanted minerals no? Or did I forget something?
@@MikeTall88 I am pretty sure they were there to collect something necessary to saving the Earth so it wouldn't die
@@MikeTall88 unobtanium is an extremely important resource for earth's failing infrastructure, IIRC. Earth is meant to be dealing with extreme resource shortages, overcrowding, climate catastrophe, and civil unrest - what little we're told/shown of Earth is downright dystopian and apocalyptic.
There's so many dumb and lazy plot points in worldbuilding like this it makes me hate it even tho the world of Pandora made me adore it
It's sad because Avatar, visually, is one of the best movies I've ever seen, but the writers failed to meet the same standard set by the art team. If the writing was good as GoT or LoTR it could've easily been one of the best films ever made.
The movie had no 'writers' it is 100% a James Cameron vision both in the visuals and plot. It just goes to show how incredibly lopsided the mans talents are.
I mean, the writing of your two examples isn't exactly stellar to begin with, so Avatar isn't that far behind in that sense.
GoT and especially LOTR are great because of the genius minds of Martin and Tolkien. It’s not a shame for Cameron to „lose“ against writers like that.
@@philipmelaas317 Bro said Tolkien's works aren't stellar ? 💀 Please go pick up a book bruh
2 things:
I believe your idea about unobtainium being crucial for the survival of humanity is actually a scene that exists but was left on the cutting room floor for one reason or another.
I've also heard that the 3rd movie will indeed explore a lot more of the gruesome things the Na'vi are up to, which is something to look forward to if true.
Both of these things are rumours so I'm not sure about either of them, still interesting food for thought.
It's mentioned like once or twice, but never brought up again as a plot point.
Cameron himself said that 3 would explore the darker side of the Na'vi
Jack Champion said the script "takes a hard left turn", maybe that could entail seeing the better side of humanity too?
The main thing I remember thinking while watching Avatar was that "Ender's Game did this better". I don't remember exactly what "this" was, but a fair assumption would be that it was referring to the portrayals of a conflict between humans and an alien species, and further (for lack of a better word) humanization of said species.
A channel called "Sideways" did a fascinating breakdown of the music from the first movie that ties into this well. TLDR, while trying make a thought-provoking movie, JC ended up making a pretty cliché movie, and even tho he was probably trying to faithfully and respectfully represent ethnic cultures thru music, he still ended up being, well...kinda racist...
That’s a good video
I can't remember who made it, but I watched a similar video essay from someone. Tldr Avatar was just a white savior story that amalgamated native cultures into a stereotypical, 'western' depiction of them, in the same way orientalism does to asian cultures.
Avatar is just so shallow, everyone talks about how in-depth the nature and animals are but the universe is as shallow as a puddle, it’s like a good looking children’s book taking itself too seriously
I agree so much with this comment
Honestly, I think a movie that tackles this super well is Princess Mononoke. It shows both sides and I just can't hate or prefer any side because I understand both.
@@naruchancutie1 I think the reason so many Western films end up so black and white is Christian influence, that attaches the good and evil dichotomy to everything. When you watch films from Asia, you're more likely to see films without an antagonist. Heck, the film Hero has the assassin and the assassin's target coming to agree with each other.
Yeah, the second movie really smacked me in the face with those recoloured water dinosaur models and coral reefs lol
@@Edax_Royeaux Yet many black and white stories are beloved. Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter...
The thing I found haunting about these movies were the message that Indigenous way of life is the ideal way of life, combining it with Avatar being a story about colonialism, but failing to bridge fiction and reality. The films so finely slipped into the different "Savage" tropes that harm our perspective of reaily. There are Indigenous people still around, but still they are portrayed like artifacts from a different world. It almost feel like when the Danes took Inuits from Greenland back to Europe to put them on display, or Saami from Northern Norway. Still Indigenous from around the world are treated either like lesser humans or like these etheral beings who know something greater. Still they're facing oppressions for a huge number of reasons, many because their lifestyle doesn't fit the modern world. I saw an article that Native Americans boycotted a cinema because they were furious a multi-million franchise about what they have and continue to endure is forgetting them. It feels like, especially with these films, that we as humans will always struggle to see all of us as the same.
If you know of John Smith from Jamestown and his whole situation dealing with the native tribes, he was successful because he saw them as people. Not like "oh were so equal you are such an advanced noble people" but seeing they were also very smart and ruthless to where he had to play his cards right or they would swoop in and take every advantage they could. It was a sticking point where some of his bosses saw them as almost childish and played their hand putting Jamestown in a dangerous situation. It was all about shrewd politics on both sides playing back and forth where despite the British being a massive empire the Jamestown settlement was at a massive disadvantage to the local tribes and could be wiped out if they messed up. I mean John was captured and was going to be killed because he left himself open and the only reason things worked out and he got the ability to work as a diplomat was because Pocahontas took a liking to him (from his autobiography thats pretty much his reasoning, she thought he was handsome and decided to keep him alive). This is pretty typical to most of the early interactions where tribes see what advantage they can get out of the new players on the block in the regional politics against other tribes or in raiding the settlers. Its why we hold the story of thanksgiving so high because the Pilgrims and local tribe became friends altruistically and had a peace which lasted until every person who was there at the first feast had passed away with zero conflict between them, even though at the start the Pilgrims had nothing to offer and were starving to death.
In the case of Navi, I can accept they are "better" than our real life counterpart because their biology allows them to be empathetic by definition (the antennae connection that make them empaths amongs themselves). So it kinda explains how they should be kinder, and do not develop a need for slavery or unexplained sacrifices.
But it doesn't make the story any better, and the most faulty parts of Avatar's lazy writing doesn't relate to this, but to the lack of nuance on the plot itself and the humans as real people.