In preparation for this post I went through and watched the entire Avatar franchise, which took about nine hours to start to finish. The first movie made in 2009 introduces us to Jake Sully, the protagonist, an ex-marine who agrees to take the place of his identical twin brother in the Avatar Program on the planet Pandora. 

The Avatar Program’s objectives are field research as well as forming diplomatic ties with the native people, Na’vi, with the overarching goal to better manage reseource negotiation. The Avatar Program is funded by the Resources Development Administration (RDA), a group which is mining Unobtanium. The RDA has a private military organization, Sec-Ops, to protect its interests; Sec-Ops personally is mainly staffed with ex-marines and other military soliders. Due to Jake’s ties to the US Marines he is tasked, secretly, with gathering military intelligence on the Na’vi in order for the RDA to gain more access to the Unobtanium. 

Jake’s personal relationship with the planet evolves as he gets closer to the Na’vi, specifically Neytiri. He struggles with understanding the Na’vi way and their connection to Eywa’eveng, the name given to the planet by the Na’vi. To begin he views the planet in the way he was briefed, a hostile, hard to survive place with extreme economic potential. Yet the Na’vi experience Eywa’eveng, the Na’vi’s name for Pandor, very differently. Eywa’eveng means Eywa’s child, Eywa is the sacred deity to the Na’vi people, she is a living consciousness that is within everything. She is also known as the Great Mother, which has a similar feel to the idea of Gaea or Mother Earth on our planet. The Na’vi operate on the idea that you take care of your mother and she will take care of you. 

Avatar is an interesting movie to view with a ecocritism lense. While I do believe that the intentions of the movie were to promt an internal look at our own world and how we are using and abusing the resources within it, I feel there are some problamatic points within the franchise. For one it is hard to ignore the usage of indigenous culture and practices by a white man who seemingly employed little indigenous input and actors. This fact is not unnoticed by the indigenous community. One such example of this is a post on X by Yuè Begay, a Navajo artist, “Our cultures were appropriated in a harmful manner to satisfy some (white) man’s savior complex. No more Blueface!”. This isn’t to say that white people shouldn’t and can’t make movies about the current ecological status of our world, but if they want to include an indigenous framework behind their ideas then they need to include voices from those communities.

In reading Professor Deidre Pike’s “Waking up from Avatar” I was introduced to “Bambi-like misanthropy”. This introduction led me down an interesting path analysing the structure of a classic tragic hero in which the need for a villian becomes necessary, for without the villian the storyline lacks a driving force. Analysing Avatar through this structure creates a different tone to the movie as it highlights an oversimplification to environmental disasters. Joseph Meeker wrote that within the media there is “a collective image of the tragic hero facing the ecological crisis as tragic heroes have faced other crises”, that is to say with machine guns, bombs, and hand-to-hand combat. Yet the solution to the ecological crisis is not so simple. Especially considering the negative effects bombing and artillary has on the environment.

The problems that face the planet of Pandora may have direct parallels to the problems that we face here on Earth, the solutions brought to Pandora have no credence here. The environment is a drastically complex place and the solution to our problems will likewise be complex and they most certainly will not be solved as quickly overnight with a gunfight.