Notes on Avatar

Hey spoilers... but really they don't spoil the movie:

• My first reaction to the movie was a hatred for the 3D glasses. Yeah, yeah, so cool but really I think the huge screen was cool enough and don't care if things look like they are floating in front of me. I don't think anyone even unconsciously stops thinking they are in a movie theater because of special effects. A good story can do that but smell-o-vision can not.
• The movie plot is a clear cut and paste archetype: Dances With Wolves, The Last Samaria being the examples that come to mind: a warrior, usually wounded in order to represent their spiritual crisis, leaves his home country to a wilderness frontier place where he encounters a foreign, primitive seeming culture which adopts in order to learn about the new-coming invaders. The warrior learns to respect the "primitive" culture and to understand that it is a sophisticated society with great spiritual lessons. The old culture rears its ugly head and the warrior must reject his old culture in order to help his new family... usually this results in a defeat that is a moral victory since the sophisticated spiritual culture did not betray their values even when faced with destruction. The wounded warrior generally survives the destruction and acts as a social critic... I mean truth teller about the spiritual deadness of his home society.
  
• My general reaction to the wounded warrior adoption plot is that you don't have to go to Japan to find a society which is spiritually based... you just have to go to a decent church. I'm sure that if Japan made a movie like this the wounded warrior would be adopted by a Christian missionary because the unfamiliar nature of the society would mask the imperfections found in all human societies. Really if there is some kind of spiritual truth which that foreign society was tapping into... that spiritual truth can be found in the country, city and suburb. If there is a God He is God everywhere, not just special places.
• Though I very much in favor in living a life which is spiritually based and not controlled by consumerism and vice (I believe there is a natural relation between the two). I really liked Jake's assessment of tempting the tree people out of the tree "We have nothing they want, what are we going to give them... Bud Light? Yeah right."
• I really liked Sigourney Weaver's character... though it was strange (and I'm sure no accident) that she was the only one of the tree people with large boobs. Still I like that kind of tree hugging liberal (and they love it when I refer to them that way).
  

Alright I've already posted plenty. I need to write my TPA.