25 Jan 2010

Avatar against Imperialism


Great article by Noah Tucker...Joel Kovel goes to me last night 'have you seen Avatar, it's great'....the real Avatar is in Peru where Hugo Blanco and Aidesep battle for our planet!

By Noah Tucker

“How does it feel to betray your own race?” These are the infamous last words of the mercenary colonel Miles Quartrich, snarled at the hero Jake Sully in the final minutes of David Cameron’s Avatar; set a century and a half into the future and 25 trillion miles from our planet. But Sully and the tiny minority of humans who change sides to fight alongside the Na’vi people in the 3D sci-fi epic were far from being the only ones who became traitors.

In the here and now of Earth in 2010, in the darkness of thousands of movie theatres, though purely passively and for the brief period of two and a half hours, more than one hundred and fifty million people (so far) have enthusiastically betrayed their ‘own race’, cheering on in their hearts- and often out loud- the defensive war of the imaginary blue-skinned Na’vi of the planet Pandora against the predatory corporate, militaristic, and environmentally destructive forces of homo sapiens.

And how did that feel? It felt very good; even, apparently, for the millions of people in the USA who have watched the movie.

More here

1 comment:

RobM said...

Went to see it last night with my son. Actually a very good film.

Scenes of the tribal warriors riding dragons and carrying sub-machine guns reminded me very strongly of the cover illustration from a Michael Lowy book on Permanent Revolution I read many decades ago showing a boy on an elephant with a rocket launcher!

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