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Avatar Commentary

In: Film and Music

Submitted By francoise
Words 580
Pages 3
Avatar is an American science fiction film written by James Cameron in 2009. The film is set in 2154 on Pandora, a moon in the star system, inhabited by the Navi, a blue-skinned species of natives. Physically, they are stronger and taller than humans and they live in harmony with the nature.

Humans intend to exploit Pandora’s reserves of a precious mineral, but that threatens the existence of the Navi and the Pandora ecosystem. Humans have two solutions to achieve their goal: the first one is to improve relations with the natives to convince them to leave their forest and the second one is the war. Thus, scientists grow Navi bodies modified with human DNA, called Avatars, that are controlled by mentally-linked human operators in order to get in touch with the Navi. Jake Sully is one of these avatar operators and succeeds to be a member of the natives and consequently he becomes to be a spy. Indeed, he delivers key strategic information to the human militaries and moreover he discovers that the Navi will never leave their forest owing to their way of living in harmony with the nature. While humans decide to begin the war against the natives, Jake Sully develops strong attachments to Pandora and its inhabitants so he decides to change ends and to fight against the human attack.

After a short summary of this film, I am doing some commentaries of it. This science fiction film isn’t so unreal to the contemporary world. In the film, the war begins owing to a precious mineral, which is very expensive. Indeed, nowadays humans are able to make war in order to get petrol, land or money and they don’t realize that some men and women die or they can destroy the earth. For instance, United States, Europe and Russia have enough nuclear missiles to explode 10 times the planet. The economic science explains these phenomena and I am presenting two theories:

According to the Marxist theory of war, all modern wars are caused by competition for resources and markets between great imperialist powers. Indeed, these wars are a natural result of the free market and class system. Part of the theory is that war will only disappear once a world revolution, over-throwing free markets and class systems, has occurred.

Rationalist theories of war assume that both sides to a potential war are rational, which is to say that each side wants to get the best possible outcome for itself for the least possible loss of life and property to its own side. Given this assumption, if both countries knew in advance how the war would turn out, it would be better for both of them to just accept the post-war outcome without having to actually pay the costs of fighting the war. This is based that wars are reciprocal and consequently all wars require both a decision to attack and also a decision to resist attack. Rationalist theory offers three reasons why some countries cannot find a bargain and instead resort to war: issue indivisibility, information asymmetry with incentive to deceive, and the inability to make credible commitments.

During this film, we can see that some humans aren’t so bad with the behavior of the hero Jake Sully, who decides to protect the natives against human attack after to be firstly a spy.

In conclusion, we can say that this film is a criticism of our society.

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