Gregg Easterbrook, who normally hides excellent op/eds in his TMQ column for ESPN about the week’s NFL games (with the odd college comment), has this time hidden a review of Avatar therein. He makes some strong points about the movie’s anti-capitalist banalities, such as:

The mineral is an anti-gravity substance that floats. Midway through the movie, we learn there are entire mountains of it floating above Pandora. So why not mine the floating mountains, where no Pandorans live, rather than go to war with the natives? The clichéd super-heartless corporation that wants the mineral is depicted as obsessed by profit. War is a lot more expensive than mining! If profit is what motivates the corporation, war is the last thing it would want. . . .
No organization would entrust a project costing trillions of dollars — a town-sized facility has been built five light-years away — to a single individual with unchecked power. You’d worry that the single individual would commit some huge blunder that wiped out your trillion-dollar investment, which ends up being exactly what happens. I found the colonel with absolute authority a lot more unrealistic than the floating mountains.

[An aside: The only industry I can think of where individuals are routinely given control of a huge budget that they can waste without supervision is the movie industry. Is Cameron writing what he knows?]

Easterbrook also points out that the film is as anti-military as it is anti-corporatist, and his final paragraph on the subject has cured me of wanting to see the film even on DVD:

What does “Avatar” build up to? Watching the invading soldiers — most of whom happen to be former American military personnel — die is the big cathartic ending of the flick. Extended sequences show Americans being graphically slaughtered in the natives’ counterattack. The deaths of aliens are depicted as heartbreaking tragedies, while the deaths of American security forces are depicted as a whooping good time. In Cameron’s “Aliens,” “The Abyss” and his television show “Dark Angel,” U.S. military personnel are either the bad guys or complete idiots, often shown graphically slaughtered. Cameron is hardly the only commercial-film director to present watching evil U.S. soldiers slaughtered as popcorn-chomping suburban shopping mall fun: in the second “X-Men” flick, U.S. soldiers are the bad guys and graphically killed off. Films that criticize the military for its faults are one thing: When did watching depictions of U.S. soldiers dying become a form of fun?

People worldwide have already paid James Cameron and his American corporate masters over $1 billion for the fun of seeing Avatar.