T o the eyes and ears of this writer, Avatar was a labor of love; a passion project — Cameron’s biggest, loudest riff on his cornerstone themes, such as our arrogant zeal for imposing our technology upon hostile or indifferent environments (Aliens, The Abyss, Titanic), our capacity for nihilistic destruction couched in the glib euphemisms of tech- and military-speak (The Terminator, Terminator 2) and our willful, increasingly casual abuse of the world around us (The Abyss again — particularly the 1993 Special Edition, where the tub-thumping, geopolitical lecture served up by a colony of aquatic E.T.s in the finale is longer and more menacing). One of the cleverest conceits within Avatar’s script was how it borrowed climate scientist James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis — which holds that the Earth functions almost as an organism in its own right — and applied that concept to an organic neural network within a fictional moon, thereby personalizing (as Eywa) the ecosystem our species is busily plundering. It’s an allegorical touch that led Avatar’s critics to write the film off as hammeringly didactic. But shouldn’t we pause for a sec and ask ourselves why, exactly, we should shut out the things that Avatar was being hammeringly didactic about?

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock at the bottom of a collapsed mineshaft, our planet is in a monumentally shit state. In August, the World Economic Forum warned that, thanks to current logging rates, the Amazon rainforest is now “perilously close to a tipping point” that would spawn conditions “so hot and dry that local species could not regenerate.” More recently, prominent Brazilian land defender Paulo Paulino Guajajara of the Guajajara tribe was murdered at the hands of illegal loggers in an ambush on his own turf: just the latest incident in a pattern of persecution against indigenous peoples that has intensified under the rule of Jair Bolsonaro, with 153 tribal territories invaded by land grabbers in the first nine months of this year alone. In the Blu-Ray extras for the stylish and beguiling Alita: Battle Angel — yet another slice of offbeat SF unjustly drowned out by Marvel’s tedious static — Cameron says that he passed the film’s directorial reins to Robert Rodriguez because in the previous few years, problems with environmental protection and indigenous rights had worsened. Given that state of affairs, he explains, “I thought, all right … I need to keep making these Avatar movies. That may be the highest and best use of my time.”

If they’re the sorts of topics that have exercised Cameron to the point that he’s hell bent on allegorizing them in a clutch of bleeding-edge, mammoth-scale, hammeringly didactic science-fiction epics, then why the fuck shouldn’t he? It’s not as though the genre doesn’t have a long and distinguished tradition of thoroughly brazen, balls-out message movies that deliver their ten cents with all the subtlety of a tie-dye shirt at a wake. Just think of The Day the Earth Stood Still (are we really sure that nuclear warfare is such a great idea?), RoboCop (are we really sure that privatizing public services is such a great idea?), Jurassic Park (are we really sure that playing God with the natural world is such a great idea?) or Okja (are we really sure that the meat industry is such a great idea?). Just because they’re not subtle doesn’t mean they’re not great. It’s testament to the geek web’s staunch support of films that say literally the square root of fuck all that a major reason why Avatar took so much flak from those quarters was because it had the temerity to treat cinemas like lecture halls: a move that did it absolutely no commercial harm. It’s also a huge reason why geeks are dreading the arrival of the sequels — even though the climate emergency is far more pressing than it was when Avatar emerged in 2009, Victoria Falls has all but dried up… and yet the President of the United States openly mocks a witty and resourceful 16-year-old girl who simply doesn’t want the world to die. Meanwhile, the geek web busies itself with such high-minded pursuits as campaigning for the release of the Snyder Cut, which has every chance of being an even shittier version of a film that was never destined to be any fucking good in the first place.

Is it too much to ask for the geek web to stop spiraling into its own fucking navel for, like, five minutes and acknowledge how healthy it is to have other types of blockbusters out there — not just glorified cosplay marathons stuffed with semi-glorified previz? We may also wonder whether it’s too much to ask for a little proportionality: from 2021 to 2027, Cameron plans to issue a grand total of four Avatar films — the same number of movies the MCU is set to release in 2021… and yet again in 2023. Would it really kill the geek community for the spotlight to swing in Avatar’s direction once every other year for seven years? (Probably not — though you can practically hear the gnashing of teeth rolling back through time…)

We’re long overdue a change of emphasis. Our shifting zeitgeist around the above-mentioned topics strongly suggests that, far from being culturally irrelevant, Avatar was in fact always ahead of the curve — and now, its time has come. In the end, the only footprint that really counts is the one the film left in people’s hearts and minds. And with 45 million Facebook followers under its belt, plus the second-highest selling US Blu-Ray of all time (just behind Frozen) and a hugely popular outpost in Disney World that was recently tipped for expansion, Avatar has clearly amassed more than a handful of admirers — many of whom are eager to see where Jake and Neytiri (and their kids) will take us next. So, the geek web has a simple choice: either it can keep on recycling the same petty, monotonous shit for another two years… or it can grow the fuck up.

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