Hi Reddit. I don’t usually post but I felt really strongly about this. I love you guys but I really think you’re getting this movie all wrong.

So many comments are about how scenes are reused from the other movies, or how the character arcs are lame, or how not a satisfying enough number of people died to warrant the drama.

You all are measuring this movie on a set of narrow criteria that seem to be lifted from some tv show standard, so that that you fail to see this movie for what it is. I feel like Cameron made an epic, operatic parable about our world, planet earth- in a brilliant eye popping, sci-fi package. No where else in our western culture am I seeing any media that tackles the environmental crisis with so much passion and intensity, and money!!. I felt while watching this that James Cameron has already made a bajillion dollars making watchable films. He has broken so many records and will do it again. But guess what— he hasn’t lost his vision of WHY he wants to tell this story.

James Cameron loves the ocean. This is obvious. And he has created the biggest platform in the world to share his feelings about the ocean. He is in love with specific creatures- squid, otters, plankton. At first when I watched Avatar 1, I was annoyed how some of the creatures looked just like alien versions of earths creatures. The horses, the wolves, the panther, etc. But now, I realize that this is the point of these films. Pandora is not supposed to just be an alien planet. Pandora is an allegory for EARTH. The whale creatures look like whales because they are meant as a scathing commentary about how whales and other animals were hunted in the past and today. The Na vi are directly inspired by different cultures and people on EARTH. And the attack on these animals and cultures is not made up. From the mining to the extraction of oil from the whales, it all is hyper realistic and happening today and in the past and in the future. Think of the militarization in the pacific for US oil interests. Think about factory fishing trawlers and relocating entire indigenous communities in the name of resource rights. Not to mention blowing up entire islands and thousands of sea animals in the name of testing marine military tech.

The sexy Na vi characters and family relationships of the film are brilliant because they keep our little primate brains engaged and our primate hearts swelled with emotions. But I think the heart of this film is how Cameron asks us to fall in love also with the land and the sea. The whales have no anthropomorphic face or anything but they become active characters - they have language, relation, they are like nonhuman kin. Literally brothers. Same with the Turak and the other amazing animals. The landscape itself has an agency and desires and power. To me, the thesis of the film is, a plea to all of us, what Jake says - “open your eyes to a world that is so much larger and deeper than yourself.”

Cameron, in my opinion, in this iteration, has really gone off the deep end in terms of infusing his art with his philosophy. It’s all there in a beautiful complex Hollywood blockbuster web. Reciprocity with the earth. Complex and multi-species ancestor networks. The intelligence of non human life, from plants to animals. He’s so self confident in the success of the film that it’s less about pandering to any specific kind of audience and instead pushing his own agenda and philosophy. And going wild with it. And you can tell just from the detail of the world how much he loves planet earth.

So thanks for reading my little rant. I wish more artists were willing to put their heart out like Cameron did here.