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Avatar is a showcase of superb movie-making. From the first minutes, the film assaults our senses and batters our emotions. James Cameron, the auteur/director, has never been known as a subtle filmmaker.

However, for all its dazzling pyrotechnics and computer-generated wizardry, Avatar merely plays with our intelligence. At the heart of the matter — the conflict between modernity and tradition — there is an inescapable fallacy. While the Nav’i bows and arrows face down the gunships of the galactic corporation, in the real world, native people never vanquish the outsiders.

The outsiders always win. The land is always despoiled and desecrated, leaving subsequent generations to ponder the richness and diversity that once existed. Indeed, over the decades, I’ve driven through hundreds of miles of such terrain — whether in Malaysia or Indonesia — where the past has been obliterated, trees felled and undergrowth torched.

As I said, the outsiders always overcome the natives. Brandishing guns and superior technology, they bulldoze their way through the landscape.

Watching the film, I couldn’t help but feel that in our world, Cameron’s lovingly realized Nav’i would be reduced to being little more than desperate scavengers hanging around the corporation’s base-camp. Ironically, in the real world, the Nav’i would only be immortalized in museums and anthropological theses like so many other indigenous people.

Still, James Cameron has harnessed an updated Pocahontas-like storyline (i.e., white man meets natives, white man saves natives) with his own protean imagination, creating a rich and densely packed eco-system that neatly mirrors contemporary concerns about the environment.

If the recently completed Copenhagen gab-fest was the official, multi-lateral response to climate change, Avatar represents Hollywood’s equally verbose and inchoate interpretation of events. Both are equally dramatic, large-scale and essentially hollow: preachy posturing dressed up as sincerity and concern. Indeed, Cameron’s film is an apt companion piece for Copenhagen’s climate-change agenda. It is an uncompromising account of resource exploitation and environmental degradation that leaves the viewer infuriated and aggrieved until the Navi strike back.

The audience’s sense of relief and triumph is palpable when the corporation’s jets are downed and the threat to the planet is overcome. We, the audience, are complicit in the lie — since we all know that commercial interests will invariably prevail.

However, no one can deny the extraordinary imaginative brilliance that underpins Avatar. Through the planet Pandora, James Cameron has conveyed the essential interconnectivity of all eco-systems. His beautifully rendered Navi people stalk their way through a landscape that is lush, vividly hued and nourishingly networked.

And just as the paraplegic Jake falls in love both with the alluring hunter-princess as well as with her people and their inextricable ties to the land, so do we.

But all of this shouldn’t disguise the fact that there are real Pandora’s being destroyed and real Navi peoples being displaced in our world today, without the succor of benevolent earth goddesses. A stunning cinematic achievement as it is, Avatar remains simply that: just a movie.

Yes, of course it will raise consciousness about the need for conservation and indigenous rights. But the 162 minutes we spend in the cinema won’t help save any rainforests or prevent tribes from being driven off their land. There are real Jake Sullys in the world today fighting for such causes, but just watching the movie doesn’t make us one of them.

Avatar lulls its audiences into passive activism. We think that we have done our bit for Mother Earth at no cost to ourselves beyond the price of an admission ticket. It’s a little more complicated than that, people.

We may be convinced that we have experienced the degradation that peoples or countries in similar situations have suffered when the truth is we have felt nothing remotely close to this. We emerge from the cinemas with assuaged consciences, imagining that we have somehow helped to make the world a better place, when all we have done is simply enrich the already omniscient forces of global entertainment.

Climate change and environmental destruction are real. Movies like Avtar are not. The latter is a fantastic piece of art — but it shouldn’t make us complacent about the former.



Karim Raslan is a columnist who divides his time between Malaysia and Indonesia.