Avatar: Has Cameron Trumped God?

It's 2154, and mankind finds itself on another planet, continuing with the same old capitalist greed and desperate pursuit of wealth. This time, since our planet has apparently been sucked dry, we're at it on somebody else's. The humans clash with the 'primitive' indigenous people of 'Pandora', failing to understand why not everybody gets their desperate 'need' to consume, over-indulge and improve things that don't need improving. Naturally, they're baffled as to why this indigenous tribe won't sacrifice their livelihoods so these narcissistic men in suits can reach their ridiculously high expectations for their annual profits.

It's basically a Western/Sci-Fi mash-up, but instead of 'cowboys' and 'Indians' it's 'Humans' (Americans) and 10ft tall blue people (the Na'vi). Humans show up inside giant weapons and attempt 'diplomacy'. They offer the Na'vi the chance to live as humans do with roads and technology, in true British colonial style, disregarding the fact the Na'vi are happy with their natural, modest and sustainable way of life. What's important to them is the tree that happens to sits above precious resources the humans have their eyes on. The tree is life to them, and home to a deity that, unlike the invented gods of our world, actually plays a part in their reality.

So the humans bomb them and a whole load of death and destruction happens. It's at this point, with every innocent being that perishes, we really get to know how unnecessary all the killing is. If one side would just stop, nobody need die. But the humans push, their weak attempt at 'diplomacy' fails and they push until the whole place is on fire and then they push some more like a fat, demented child desperately trying to get candy from a piñata. There couldn't be a more appropriate moment for a film that assaults capitalism, corporations so desperate and possessed by profit that they don't care about things like human rights and respect for living beings, including their own kind.

This part reminds me of companies like Shell and, the company I've worked for part time for every year I've spent in education, Pizza Hut. The pressure from desperate-to-please-shareholders management trickles down to the bottom, where the waiting staff have to precisely memorise 1001 rules, and even the best waiters that customers love have to drop their own intuition and follow the carefully researched procedures on how to wait tables. In fact, I'm reminded of almost every company that exists in the capitalist world. An exception being Google, whose slogan (and secret of success) is 'Don't_be_evil'. This enables them to 'waste time' on projects that might not generate a profit and improve things for the benefit of its users rather than to boost revenue. I hope this mantra catches on soon. All of this echoed through my mind as I watched corporate honcho, Parker Selfridge, whine about the millions of dollar bills he could be making if the Na'vi would just give up everything they know because he wants them to.

Besides pacifism and the evils of corporate greed, there's one more (probably unintentional) message. To all those religious people out there who say "there has to be a god because look how beautiful our world is" - I just saw a world a hundred times more beautiful than ours. Contrary to common misconception, creativity is intelligence, and this kind of suggests humans could have done a better job designing our world, from plants and animals, right through to the lousy humans that inhabit it. In fact, we have done a better job - watch Avatar and see for yourselves what's missing in this world.