A movie can still be about the environment and be original. And political bias almost always makes a film formulaic. It saddens me whenever politics comes before art in a film.
The environment is only a hot topic for one side of the political spectrum in America. Which means the other half of the country isn't going to be as emotionally involved. And if Al Gore and James Cameron want to create 'awareness' for the environment among those who aren't already aware (the right wing), demonizing the military and presenting patriotism as xenophobia isn't going to win these people over. It's just preaching to the choir.
The end result is that it's a waste of both art and politics.
The environment is only a hot topic for one side of the political spectrum in America. Which means the other half of the country isn't going to be as emotionally involved. And if Al Gore and James Cameron want to create 'awareness' for the environment among those who aren't already aware (the right wing), demonizing the military and presenting patriotism as xenophobia isn't going to win these people over. It's just preaching to the choir.
The end result is that it's a waste of both art and politics.
As for delivering an environmentalist message - what if the problem isn't that "the right wing" aren't aware of certain environmental dangers but that they are and just don't care to do anything about them for whatever reason (whether out of personal gain or a refusal to believe the evidence)? Avatar already starts from the premise that humans strip-mined Earth into an uninhabitable sh*thole and have had to resort to colonising other planets for their natural resources, which definitely reads as a blunt metaphor for how America's military-industrial complex goes after other nations' fossil fuel reserves to prop up an industry that profits from those same finite resources at the expense of the world's environment (to say nothing of the implications of disappearing coal resources within the U.S. itself). In this context, making the military (and also the corporate stooge they serve) the villains simply makes narrative sense (and is driven home by Rodriguez's military character defecting out of righteous anger and becoming sympathetic in the process, emphasising that the problem isn't necessarily with the individual troops but with the higher-ups they serve - this was also the point of Aliens where the only human villain was the corporate stooge overseeing the operation).
Going back to what I said before about being unbiased - unfortunately, things have gotten to the point where taking care of the environment, which should seem like a completely bipartisan issue considering how it affects literally everyone, has become way too partisan for anyone's good. You can complain about how Avatar is too biased for its own good and won't "win over" anyone on the right because of that, but how much of that is the movie's fault? Does it have an obligation to dilute itself into even greater mediocrity for the sake of appealing to an audience that still isn't guaranteed to respond favourably to its message? Al Gore tried playing nice about the topic and we still had to deal with Manbearpig jokes for years afterwards. I'm not even sure how you'd even begin to make a film about addressing environmental issues without directly addressing the various connected sociopolitical issues - you can complain about Avatar being unoriginal (and, to be fair, it is), but that can't be helped if it has to go over the same anti-corporate/anti-military ground as other films have been doing for decades in order to make its point. Holding out for some magic "original" film that'll address the same problems without investigating and criticising the same causes is a very questionable line of thinking that's liable to result in a film that's even less effective in addressing environmental concerns than Avatar was.
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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0
I really just want you all angry and confused the whole time.