Thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar and “Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out”

I would imagine that the limited resource on earth would sell for an incredibly high price before getting depleted. Thus Earth would become a conservationist society, careful not to waste resources or produce too many humans.

It is hard to imagine that the incentive for space travel to find new source would be outraced by extremely fast usage of resources.

Plus there are asteroid belts to mine, and probably tons of them in the system that that Avatar is occupied.

From my political perspective, this is mostly a libertarian film that pit a peaceful tribe who rightfully homestead the island against a fascist corporation that was granted evil government privilege.

Though I can't help but think that most people will think this is about environmentalism and planting tree and that greedy evil free market corporation ruins everything.

There are, fundamentally, two different ways to approach science fiction, exemplified by Star Trek and Star Wars. The "Trek" style uses a "weird" setting to enable social commentary that would otherwise be either unpalatable or simply impossible. In the "Wars" style, the "weird" setting is the whole point: the reader/viewer can witness world-building on a grander scale than would otherwise be possible, and the plot can include elements that the audience would never otherwise swallow.

There's almost always some crossover between the two, but it's important to remember that each is very difficult to do well. Very few artists are skilled at both. A work that tries to focus on both, as Avatar does, usually fails.

Avatar is an excellent example of world-building, on possibly a bit too grand a scale for a movie: there are a handful of things that should have been explained away or lampshaded, but the explanations just wouldn't fit into an already-too-long movie. Where it falls flat is in its attempted social commentary.

Cameron's thinly veiled message clearly seemed to be that the corporations are out to destroy the earth and everything green causing overpopulation. The whole thing seemed kind of juvenile, especially when you consider the abundance that has been caused by corporate competition, which has in turn directly lead to decreasing birth rates in developed countries. The two factors, overpopulation and corporations destroying the earth for resources, are contradictory.

"Capitalism won when it learnt how to sell anti-capitalism."

I think I read that somewhere...

"I didn't take this movie as either anti-corporate or anti-technology."

Agreed. I think many people are reading way too much into this plot. Sometimes a story is just a story.