[Cinéma] Avatar, the return to the big screen of James Cameron’s woke saga…

When it hit theaters in 2009, Avatar was considered by many to be a real revolution in terms of its technical prowess. Filmed entirely in catch performance [« capture de mouvement », NDLR] on green and blue backgrounds, the movie by James Cameron projected us into the XXIIe century on the planet Pandora where former marine Jake Sully was recruited by a powerful company to infiltrate the Na’vi people and seize their energy resources. By linking his mind to that of an avatar, a biological body resembling Na’vi capable of surviving in this unbreathable atmosphere for a human, Jake Sully gradually familiarized himself with the natives and ended up embracing their cause against the invader from heaven…

Thirteen years after this postmodern reinterpretation of Dancing with the wolvesthe rest is coming to our screens. Avatar, the way of the water took into account the past years. Jake Sully, nicknamed Toruk Makto, became a heroic figure in the resistance against humans and started a family. What he doesn’t know is that Colonel Quaritch, his old enemy, is back. Killed ten years earlier, his mind and memory were transplanted into an avatar. Motivated more than ever to hunt down Jake Sully, Quaritch will set Pandora on fire and push our hero to find refuge with his family with the peoples of the sea. A false good idea that may well endanger these populations, hitherto spared…

Whether Avatar 2 fills us with breathtaking special effects and video games ad nauseam, we have to admit that this sequel does not add much to the first film, except that we learn how this whole military operation is financed by humans. A poverty screenplay highlighted by the filmmaker’s self-quotations: Abyssbut above all titanicto which the final shipwreck refers us.

Basically, the ideological discourse has not changed: we are entitled to this kind of false narcissistic bad conscience of the Western white man who enjoys representing himself both as the greatest rottenness of creation and as the savior of the oppressed (neocolonialism?), Cameron not seeing that this saving posture is precisely what makes possible the abuses he claims to denounce… For him, the salvation of Western man can only pass through posthumanism (the fact of take on an avatar), by the condemnation of one’s own civilization and by the inevitable interbreeding. Which, paradoxically, does not prevent him from celebrating tribalism, ancestral traditions and indigenous cultures: in this case, an often laughable gloubi-boulga (paroxysmal in the character of Spider) between Amerindian, African and even vikings (!). A potpourri of stereotypes that speaks volumes about Cameron’s genuine regard for each of these peoples – some viewers are sure to cry leveling and “cultural appropriation”. But all this, one suspects, is not intellectualized by the filmmaker. Which idealizes without nuance the primitive man, inevitably uniform. Either the myth of the “good savage” in harmony with Gaia… The spirituality of the Na’vi is treated in the same way: a kind of pantheism new-age which draws as much from Taoism (“the way has no beginning or end”) as from Christianity (“you return to the earth”).

Finally, Cameron initially pretended to defend a model of society almost matriarchal and pacific while it is the warrior chief that he values ​​in the last place. Vertical and virile values ​​that he would undoubtedly not fail to reprove concerning his own civilization…

Recently, the director has been very vocal about standardized superhero films, but unlike him, these offer positive archetypes to the youth and refrain from distilling in the latter the poisons of self-hatred…

2 out of 5 stars

[Cinéma] Avatar, the return to the big screen of James Cameron’s woke saga…