My mother refuses to go to science fiction movies...she thinks they are all silly. She hasn’t seen a single “Star Wars”, “Star Trek” or “I Dream of Jeannie” episode. She did love “Mr. Ed” however, which was basically science fiction, what with a talking horse and such...but she didn’t agree.
So when I saw Avatar I knew this was the science fiction movie to MAKE her go see. I thought she would like the beauty of the planet and not be put off too much by the violence, since she has always loved John Wayne type shoot’em up westerns where entire native american villages would be destroyed and burned. I was right...she liked it, but said she would never go see another one. (sci fi flick). “Why Mom???”. “It was just TOO much”.
Anyway, the movie is breaking all sales records, and has lots of people talking, including my Mom. Many are actually depressed by it. CNN reports that net forums are awash with dark musings on the impossibility of visiting the virtual planet, with those most deeply touched even pondering offing themselves if they can't book a ticket to a new life off-world.
It appears to have deeply affected some cinema goers who've found that life on Earth doesn't measure up to the prospect of living on utopian world Pandora. I mean who doesn’t want to live in paradise, be twelve feet tall, and have no apparent problems with obesity, crime and mediocre late night TV?
And then there is the crowd that just can’t believe that humans could be so mean to such lovely, peace loving aliens....on their own beautiful planet. These people are real “Avatards”. Obviously they have not paid any attention to human history and the awful things we have been doing to each other for eons. Why wouldn’t we do the same things to aliens?...cause jeez...they are just aliens and they have some stuff we need.
In the case of the movie, we kill and pillage the natives because they are sitting on top of huge “unobtainium” deposits, an extremely rare mineral which ironically in the future is needed to build 3-D UltraHighDef TV’s and touch screens for Apple iPads, which are as ubiquitous in the future as female hygiene products are now. (Curiously, there are male hygiene products as well, but they are not used in the same way).
Even though the film seems to focus on American’s plundering the planet Pandora, the parallels to other earth cultures past activities in this regard are not escaping the gaze of governments like China whose citizens remember being run off their land like it was yesterday.
One guy in Taiwan actually died watching “Avatar” and the Chinese stopped the movie from being shown in many cities. What really upset them was that people with the last name “Hu” were changing their names to “Toruk” by the millions. It had swamped the Chinese People Name Processing Bureau, sort of their version of the US social security system.
I think the Chinese are worried that the twelve foot tall Nav’i dudes could replace Chinese players like Yao Ming in the NBA, who is merely seven foot six inches tall. Ming, whose bones are made of calcium instead of carbon fiber could never stand up to a slam dunk from even a hybrid like Sulley, which would result in the millions that he sends to the Chinese government to be cut off.
Off course if this happened the Chinese would stop buying US Treasuries and we would all be screwed. Isn’t it interesting how interconnected it all is?....even here on Earth.
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