David Boaz makes a perfectly good point about Avatar in the LA Times today, but the headline (which he probably didn’t write) contradicts his piece: “The right has ‘Avatar’ wrong.”

Boaz’s argument is that people have overlooked the issue of property rights in Avatar. He writes:

Conservatives see this as anti-American, anti-military and anti-corporate or anti-capitalist. But they’re just reacting to the leftist ethos of the film.
They fail to see what’s really happening. People have traveled to Pandora to take something that belongs to the Na’vi: their land and the minerals under it. That’s a stark violation of property rights, the foundation of the free market and indeed of civilization.
Sure, the Na’vi — who, like all of the people in lefty dreams, are psychically linked to one another and to all living creatures — probably view the land as their collective property. At least for human beings, private property rights are a much better way to secure property and prosperity. Nevertheless, it’s pretty clear that the land belongs to the Na’vi, not the Sky People.
Conservatives rallied to the defense of Susette Kelo when the Pfizer Corp. and the city of New London, Conn., tried to take her land. She was unreasonable too, like the Na’vi: She wasn’t holding out for a better price; she just didn’t want to sell her house. As Jake tells his bosses, “They’re not going to give up their home.”

And so on. I have no problem with this, as far as it goes. But it’s at least worth noting that as far as I can tell, the Na’vi don’t actually, you know, believe in property rights, at least not the way we do. One gets the sense that the Na’vi are not only hyper-communitarians but have little to no concept of property (much like the Indians who sold Manhattan, I suppose). But whatever, he’s certainly right that there is some kind of collective right which could be described as a property right being violated by the evil homo sapiens in the movie.

Even so, Boaz doesn’t actually disagree with conservatives. We conservatives are “just reacting to the leftist ethos of the film.” Um yep. Boaz goes on to write:

Despite its magnificent 3-D special effects, it features a tired plot and merely serviceable dialogue.
But conservatives have focused on the ideas that the film embodies. In National Review, Frederica Mathewes-Green mocked its dreamy vision of “the apparently eternal conflict between gentle people with flowers in their hair and technology-crazed meanies.”
Ross Douthat in the New York Times called it an “apologia for pantheism.” John Podhoretz in the Weekly Standard complained that it asks “the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency.” Lots of conservatives complain that a movie about American soldiers invading another planet and killing people is an allegory about the Iraq war. And many agree with Bolivia’s socialist president that “Avatar” is anti-capitalist.
They all have a point. The film is a perfect souffle of left-wing attitudes.
But conservative critics are missing the conflict at the heart of the movie. It’s quite possible that Cameron missed it too.

So Cameron missed the point in the movie he made and conservatives were responding to what Cameron actually intended in the movie. And Boaz agrees that the plot is “tired” and the dialogue “merely servicable.” And conservatives got it wrong . . . how?

I’m all for plucking what gems you can find in popular culture, but I’m not sure Avatar is exactly a candidate for libertarian movie of the year.

(Meanwhile, behind The Standard’s Tholian Web, you can find John Podhoretz’s counter to left-wing Avatar’s defenders).