Slashdot Mirror
Anti-Technology Themes in James Cameron's Avatar
ThousandStars writes "'The anti-technological aspect [in James Cameron's Avatar] is strange because the movie is among most technically sophisticated ever: it uses a crazy 2D and 3D camera, harnesses the most advanced computer animation techniques imaginable, and has apparently improved the state-of-the-art when it comes to cinema. But Avatar’s story argues that technology is bad. Humans destroyed their home world through environmental disaster and use military might to annihilate the locals and steal their resources.' The question is two-fold: why have a technically sophisticated, anti-technical movie, and why are we drawn to it? Part of the answer lies in Neal Stephenson's Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out."
I saw it as showing bad uses of technology, and more about retelling the story of the native americans as well.
Essentially that is what it was.
Technology, like beer, is the solution to, and the cause of, all of mankind's problems.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I always read it as another "white people suck" movie, but this time, "white people suck in space", which is equally weird, because Cameron is about as white as they come.
This is my sig.
That it was a private military force that did the attacking, not a governmental one. Presumably, the government on Earth was not willing to allow any military attack on the Natives, hence their attempts for 5+ years for a diplomatic solution.
Also it should be noted that a statement such as "no greenery left on Earth" is an exaggeration at best, considering life would die on the planet without the Oxygen Cycle. Unless the Humans attempted to develop machines to replace the functions of the plants.
Just because a story criticizes something doesn't mean the teller wants to destroy it. In order to change something for the better, we need to criticize it. And if we just attack the criticism, we'll never get change.
Cameron knows better than most what's wrong with our technology and the way we use it. His dependence on technology makes it quite clear that he doesn't want to eliminate it. He's not "anti-technology", he's anti the things he says are bad, which is not technology itself. Really what he's anti is the ways people use technology to treat each other badly. Which is not about technology, but about people.
--
make install -not war
But Avatar’s story argues that technology is bad. Humans destroyed their home world through environmental disaster and use military might to annihilate the locals and steal their resources.
Humans can do bad things using technology. That doesn't mean technology is bad. Next on Slashdot: classic tale "Hansel and Gretel" has a secret message of "gingerbread is bad".
"harnesses the most advanced computer animation techniques imaginable"
Really? Because all I get from the trailers is that it's an updated version of The Smurfs.
Some of this is standard noble savage stuff.
It's an ideal -- peaceful people living in harmony with nature -- that doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. For instance, what do they do if one of their buddies is born with a genetic disease like Polycystic Kidney Disease or needs some other benefit of modern medicine. Also, in the real world packs of wolves and bears don't just leave you alone.
This stuff sounds great until you start to think about it really hard.
P.S. And at the end of the movie I was rooting for the "indians" just like everyone else.
Though not as prevalent as it was just a couple decades ago, "white guilt" is a feeling of responsibility particularly experienced by privileged white people for the suffering of blacks under the slave system. It is a modern phenomenon that such guilt is felt by people that are completely unconnected to slavery. The guilt manifests itself as an embrace of Black culture, a willingness to provide undeserved support to the African American underclass, and a tendency to promote multiculturalism and its anti-judgmental system of evaluating cultures.
So if the technology haves want to slum it with the have-nots, it shouldn't be any big surprise that they embrace an ideology that makes themselves the criminal and thus flagellating themselves thereby redeeming themselves. Of course, they do it in a way that doesn't actually put them in direct contact with the have-nots. This is typical behavior of those embracing cultural/technological guilt as a path to spiritual salvation.
that Luke uses 'The Force' and turns off the computer.
Was Lucas trying to say something with that, I wonder...
This Sig does not Exist.
Dances With Smurfs. That's what it was.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The fact that they rely on bio-centric technology doesn't make them low-tech. Every major organism on that planet has a universal neural bus that can establish a physical and logical link in about .3 seconds. Does that sound even remotely accidental?
frankly i'm a little tired of all the "deep" discussions about this movie popping up all over the place. it's just entertainment, for crying out loud. why have a technically sophisticated, anti-technical movie? because it makes money! why are we drawn to it? well, because of its aesthetics, romantic content, exciting action, and good old marketing. case closed.
p.s. and even if cameron truly believes in the "messages" of the movie, big freaking deal. he's a director. there are many people in the world whose opinion on such difficult philosophical topics has much higher value for me than that of someone in show business.
weinersmith
Apart from that, you can't really say it's anti-technology. Yes, it has a message about imperialism and how conolial powers - or companies despoil environments for their own gain. However that's been going on for venturies and doesn't have a tech. aspect to it. The tech just increases the speed of the destruction.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Is it truly an anti-technology message, or a warning against the misuse of technology?
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
I must have been answering the call of nature when the movie claimed that "technology is bad", because I didn't get that impression from it at all. At most, there was a "might makes right" is bad, and "allowing mankind to become subservient to quarterly shareholder reports" is bad, but that's about it.
The scientists in the movie did wondrous things with their avatar technology, and the Na'vi had their own, organic version of the same, but never did I see a message that any of this was bad. What was portrayed in a poor light was forcibly relocating a people so as to be able to mine out a large chunk of resource that they're sitting on top of, and that's just theft.
The submitter's 3D glasses must have been defective if he's getting an anti-tech message from this.
Frankly, I have no plans to see this movie -- I never had even the slightest interest in it. In fact, I just generally don't like any movie like this. Not my thing. I do enjoy making fun of it vis-a-vis the "Dances with Smurfs" thing from South Park, but what I've heard about the movie, that's probably a pretty apt sort of representation.
If you remember "Dances with Wolves" at all, its about an American military officer just after the Civil War who goes out to a frontier post and then ends up making friends with the Indians, and then helping them against a later invasion to attempt to drive them out onto a reservation type situation. Here, the Indians have been replaced by those little blue smurf-y things.
As someone noted above, the military force in this particular situation was private and not governmental, however it was essentially the private armies of the British East and West India Companies that were responsible for most of the horrors of colonization by the British (I've never been too clear on the situation with the Spanish insofar as to whether or not they were regular military or not).
This seems to be more like some sort of post-colonial clap-trap than an "anti-technology" film, of course the two things usually go hand-in-hand when perpetrating the myth of the noble savage. In any case, I have no interest in actually watching it.
I was astounded by the organic synaptic link technology the Navi had. The Navi were possibly more advanced than we were. Their organic synaptic link tech was more advanced than anything we have. The thing is, they didn't develop weapons. Their entire planet was a linked up hive mind.
What new possibilities could this technology have had? could they start growing Organic ships like the Vorlons from Babylon 5? I'd imagine the Navi probably had better math and science than us.
I've seen the movie twice and I'm a software engineer for a living. This movie is not making a statement about technology. It is making a statement that it is wrong to try to impose one peoples' way of living onto another people simply because they have something worth taking. It is sheer human arrogance that has been repeated throughout our history. It is highlighted by the statements in the movie shortly before the attack that stated (paraphrased) "that we tried to give them schools and roads." That is simply saying everything we do is better than anything you do. How many times has that been done on our dear Earth? As everyone knows, the movie itself was made with the most advanced technology to date. The plot involved using the most advanced technology in the future. But it was not the technology causing the problem. It was the greed driven decisions of the administrative and militant groups.
I'm pro-alcohol but also pro-moderation.
Avatar was a fairly amazing movie. I'm comparing and contrasting with the new Star Wars. There was probably even more bluescreen in Avatar than Star Wars but Pandora felt convincing and vibrant, completely alive. You never hear people criticizing the Death Star battle in A New Hope saying it looks like a video game, it was just awesome and exciting. I think part of the video game critique comes from movies that overuse bad CGI and make things look little better than the average page and part of it comes from the audience being unable to connect emotionally with those characters. Compare Pandora with any of the environments from the the new trilogy and it's just a lesson in CGI done wrong and CGI done right.
The false dichotomy most people fall into with environmentalism vs. tech is that it's an either/or proposition. "Look, we're either running around in the boonies with bones through our noses and die of preventable diseases before we're 30 or we have to clearcut the forests and live in sterile concrete and steel towers, there's no middle ground." And that's not really true. What's needed is the judicious application of technology, conforming with the needs of the environment rather than trying to thwart or control it.
I'm interested to see what the conservative backlash against this movie will be. Conservatives have been wanting to chew Al Gore's eyeballs out ever since an Inconvenient Truth. There's a strange kind of glee about destroying environmental sacred cows like the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. It's not like the truck barreling down the road indifferent to whether or not there's an animal in the road, it's the truck deliberately swerving to hit the animal, just for fun. This movie is big, awesome, has s'plosions, is from a director who has made some of the most awesome guy movies ever, and it has a message that could only be seen as environmentalist propaganda. This is a 20th century fox film so that explains why Faux News has been told to keep a lid on it. If this came out from any other studio that network would be frothing. Dunno if Limbaugh had anything to say about it yet. He's not affiliated with Faux and has no financial stake in the project. He'd have to go apeshit over it.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Since the beginning of time:
* Look, fire! Now I can keep my family warm and safe.
* Look, fire! Now I can go burn down the hut of my annoying neighbors.
* Look, trigonometry! Now I can build bridges.
* Look, trigonometry! Now I can launch projectiles at those bridges.
* Look, printing press! Now I can communicate broadly.
* Look, printing press! Now I can subjugate broadly.
* Look, nuclear technology! Now I can radiate cancer and use PET scans.
* Look, nuclear technology! Now I can blow cities up...
etc.
The villian used the phrases "fight terror with terror" and "preemptive attack". He was described as gearing up a "shock and awe" attack.
He was using the military to steal a valuable foreign resource, and funnel it into private/corporate hands, killing civilians along the way.
You're saying the message of the movie isn't supposed to be a parallel for Iraq?
For the record, I don't think it is a fair comparison because we're not stealing oil in Iraq. The Iraqi people own the oil and receive every penny for selling the oil. If anything, going into Iraq was a fiscal nightmare for the US. We're footing the bill for the war, and for reconstruction. We're funneling tons of money into Iraq, and liberated 30 million people from a cruel dictator. But given that Cameron is a vocal Democrat who drives a Prius and has suggested Bush lied about Iraq to steal oil, I'm sure he very much intended that to be the message of the movie.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Nowhere in Avatar does it explicitly state that technology is the cause of an Earth where there's "no green left" (that's as close as I can recall to a quote from the lead character). It could just as easily been our tendency to breed like flies on a dung heap that led to the paving of the planet. It's also pretty clear that the main driving force behind the attempted rape of Pandora isn't Earth's government, but a greedy, conscienceless corporation.
It's typical of apologists for the on-going, real-life ecological devastation we're inflicting on our little blue planet to try to misrepresent Cameron's message as anti-technology. In fact it's clearly a cautionary tale against our current trend toward a global corporate oligarchy. The tech in the film is a tool, neither good nor evil. It's used by the heroes for positive purposes and the villains in the service of corporate greed.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Star Wars.
From "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed", through Luke "finding his way" in a swamp on Degobha, to the final battle of stick wielding Ewoks versus the evil technological Empire.
Utterly anti-technological.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Technology is viewed as the downfall of man...it's the basis of the ManMadeGlobalWarming(TM) religion. However, technology has been nothing but a friend, as mankind finds his way into the future.
Remember "London Fog"? Not just a line of outerwear in the 60's, it pointed to clueless Americans that time in history where 20,000 coal fires kept Britain warm back in the days of Sherlock Holmes. This 'fog' was actually smog, so thick that people with gardens (most of them, actually) had to sweep off the soot if they planned to get anything out of them. It collected that badly.
But here comes technology; no one loves pollution, so not only can we use one large coal plant and run wires everywhere, we also have piped natural gas and the skys are clear. Coal isn't without it's faults, but as recently as the 70's, things were pretty good.
Now, if we can ever get the liberals to permit us to create nuclear power plants, it could be better! Not because of the CO2, but because they're cleaner in general.
But that's not all:
- The story was set in a way to make us guilty of the removal of the indians. Not just in the story line, but they go to the trouble of using a native American 'war woop'. But I didn't DO that. Same for slavery: not gonna feel guilty.
- And lets not forget how America goes to foreign shores and loots them until they're poor!
Bullshit. You people have jobs. Where do you think that money comes from? Where'd it come from before we had a thriving overseas economy?
For example, in India a lot of people got jobs, thanks to the unions pushing up the cost of American production. Thanks, Nick-da-fish and the boys! Ever see India in Google? Wow...desolation. They REALLY NEED our technology.
We brought air-cleaners, clean rooms, caused them to create infrastructure, and now people who might be begging are aswering phones. That's not evil. I wish we had someone who could do that, here!
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
...the blue people ever since they revealed what they were doing with the natives.
The takeover of the Native Americans, and the slavery of Africans, were the two most savage acts the United States every did. There was no way even a futuristic United States would allow such actions to proceed. I wouldn't be surprised after they went home there was some type of investigation and charges filed against the CEO and other people within the company for genocide. This is why we need to remember out past, or we will be doomed to repeat it.
A long time ago when we justified the hostile takeover of Native Americans, we considered them as "savages." Guess who the real savages were?
Like the posters before me have said, this isn't a statement on anti-technology, but how technology needs to be responsibly used.
Don't limit yourself to the history of the United States please. There is plenty of shame to go around the World for every empire or power that ever existed. Then you will realize that it wasn't necessarily "The United States did this or did that bad thing" but it is "Humans quest for power has no limits on one another."
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
First of all, the obvious : Nice graphics, of course, though still not quite out of the "uncanny valley", where I'd want them to be. A nice evolutionary step, but certainly not something that won't be surpassed next month (year). It's a bit like those old Disney movies like fantasia "pushing the boundaries of animation". Great looking, but easily surpassed.
Imho the movie is massively anti-technology and pro-"magic". Magic in a sort of a mythological "natural religion" kind of way, and of course conveniently leaving out anything even remotely resembling an actual natural religion (just one example : all natural religions mandate (yes mandate) intra-religious wars between families, individuals and villages, or various combinations of that. Of course, deadly competition between inhabitants of the same place is a physical necessity in any non-agricultural religion, due to the massive inflexibility, unpredictability and unreliability of food sources, and the (natural) inability of a species to do birth control, resulting in exponentially increasing populations that regularly get "adjusted" by a famine or some such, a subject conveniently skipped over in the movie).
Before you ask, flying dragons, and other magical servile creatures seemlingly bread to replace everything from a helicopter to a toast maker do not count as "technology" in my mind. I do not find this strange at all. Nature has provided us with far less than it has provided these aliens. It seems gaia didn't love us from the start ... my ancestors never rode on flying dragons.
Another thing I find quite funny is the location of that village and that tree. What energy source would they have ? Given the extreme "coincidental" location they have, one would think it ... just might be those very same minerals. This would mean, of course, that all that "native" stuff is just "plundering" exactly the mineral source as the humans want. If that wasn't the case, imagine just how "unlucky" those natives must have been to build exactly there. But, of course, keeping mountains floating in the air is just so much more important than keeping humans alive (after all, the movie dialog makes clear that following any course of action other than acquiring those "unobtanium" minerals would result in massive casualties on earth. Of course you'd think that sort of urgency would make people appoint a military commander who is actually capable of dispatching multiple ships, or realize that a space-faring human race probably has options of using orbital bombardment, or even just sending one of those probes to make a *tiny* course correction on a meteor. Problem solved. The aliens obviously have no hope at all of repulsing any form of long-distance attack, whether that's missiles, ray weapons or even meteors).
Avatar as a suicide fantasy
Given the reaction on other blogs this review will loosen quite a few feelings. Apparently it hits close to home for quite a few people. Great stuff for discussions.
I don't dislike historical movies. I saw about half of 300, but wasn't particularly impressed with it. I majored in English Literature with a minor in Classical History, so I came to the movie with a bit of a different perspective than many people, having studied the actual event. it just didn't really do it for me.
Similarly, I about damned near went berserk during the version of Beowulf which had Angelina Jolie in it. I've read that poem over 300 times. I've translated it from the original myself. That movie was straight up bullshit.
This movie seems to be of a new trend where poor story telling is "made up for" by fancy graphics to bring people into the theatre. The entirety of the new Star Wars trilogy was the same. 300 also made use of fancy graphics to make up for poor historical accuracy.
If they wanted to make a film about the American Indians, that's cool. I'd go see it if were weren't dressed up in computer-generated smurfs, poorly masked allegorical names, and a bunch of other bullshit.
I also tend not to really dig on science fiction films that much. I did enjoy Firefly/Serenity, and some older movies are pretty cool. I was a major fan of Jurassic Park, which of course uses Malcolm's rants to inject the commentary and opinion on man manipulating nature that was clearly the point of the whole exercise.
So, I think that this mostly has to do with my dislike of "blockbuster" type films than it does with the story per-se. Maybe I'm a pretentious private-school polo-shirt wearer who just happens to make his living off of a high school hobby that was spawned from my un-willingness to do math by hand rather than a "true geek" who eeks out over flashy graphics. Chances are I'm a total jerk like that.
But its not because I think that Indians got a raw deal and I don't want to be reminded that my great grandfather graduated West Point in 1883, was commissioned in the cavalry and actually did fight indians (incidentally, he was born on a plantation in 1853 and my family did own slaves, so I'm pretty much directly in line for blame of all the bad things to happen in this country). I just don't want to watch a bunch of computer-generated blue people fight against future East India Company because they couldn't find actors like Jimmy Stewart, Steve McQueen or Paul Newman 'cause the "movie stars" and the animators drove all the story telling and art out of mass-market film, causing me to have to suffer through the weird-ass shit on IFC if I want to see something where they're at least trying.
I think it has more to do with the fascination about the End of Times.
My grandmother believed all of my (at least) life that we lived in the end times, and that the apocalypse was near. It was -- for her. She died in 2003 at age 99 a few months before her 100th birthday. The apocalypse comes for us all, sooner or later.
In reality, I think this is where technology went wrong: instead of making our lives simpler and easier, it has ended up making them more complex and more stressful for us all!
That hasn't been my experience. If my car broke down when I was young, I'd have to walk to find a pay phone to call a tow truck. Now I keep a phone in my pocket. The cars themselves were more deadly -- no air bags, abs, the dash wasn't even padded. If I wanted popcorn I had to put oil in a pan, put the popcorn in, and watch it until it was done. Now I just throw a bag in the microwave and hit the "popcorn" button. My dad was an electrical lineman, and had to climb poles. By the time he retired they had bucket trucks; no more climbing.
I can't think of a single piece of tech that has made my life more stressful of complex; technology has only removed stress, gruntwork, and complexity. What tech has made you life more stressful and complex?
there's a point where you just have to think, "Yes, we may have gone too far..."
Aside from nuclear weaponry, how has it gone too far?
I think that point comes when you look at the world you live in and see that we are obsessed with death and mayhem on the news
That hasn't changed in my lifetime, and I'm not young.
many people suffer and we (as a collective) do nothing to aid their lives.
You have never seen a food pantry or homeless shelter? Two hundred years ago they had debtors' prisons.
If it's not in our interest to discover better ways to use technology to clear sand dunes and create better irrigation systems in the desert, it just won't happen.
I'm not sure I follow you there, but at any rate irrigating the desert doesn't sound like a good idea to me. The desert has its own ecosystems, irrigate it and they die.
Free Martian Whores!
We, as humans, abuse things by nature
We're not the only species that does that, and possibly all do. Elephants will make a green area into a desert. Before there was multicellular life, the anarobic bacteria changed the earth's entire atmosphere, filling it with the deadly oxygen. Those life forms that couldn't adapt to the poisonous atmosphere went extinct.
It's not human nature to abuse nature, nature abuses itself.
Free Martian Whores!
>but Native Americans essentially lost...
And that was my final take of the move, as the colonists left Pandora - the Na'Vi are fucked. Just like the brief glory for the Indians at Little Big Horn, in the end it provoked a tidal wave of retribution against which there was no hope of resistance.
As I watched the human colonists column off to leave Pandora, I was thinking, "In a few years an automated drone will arrive in orbit to bathe the Na'Vi villages in a neutron death-ray and solve the problem forever."
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
You mean the same guy who bought us such pro-technology, pro-big government, pro-big business block-busters as Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Aliens, The Abyss, Titanic, and The Dark Angel Series has now gone over to the dark side?
Say it isn't so!
It's a "people who try to take things from others by force suck" movie.
Exactly, a "white people suck" movie because the implication is that all white people ever do it take by force, except for one lone hero who "breaks the mold".
You are just echoing the reason why the movie thinks white people suck.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley