What did you see in Avatar?

Did you watch Avatar? You would say, Is that a question! Who hasn’t? Well true, one of the biggest box office hits and Golden globe award winner, you have to be blind to miss it! Well that truly is worth a thought, can’t it be somehow made available to the blind! I mean those who are literally blind not those who choose to turn a blind eye. Oh! Well, but this is stirring away from the plot of this post, so we can give it a thought later.

Did you know that it has come under fire from various interest groups and nations! There is a whole bunch of them starting with the Church, who is against the movie because it is supposed to propagate ideas of worshipping nature. Now, since when do we have the liberty to decide what should aliens worship? It’s their choice, their land, they can pray anything they want. For that matter even on Earth we have various faiths that believe in worshipping some form of nature or the other. If the church is worried that suddenly people might start praying trees in their backyard. They can chill, for that’s not going to happen. Had we earthlings been that sensitive, the issue of global warming wouldn’t have aroused!

That brings me to the second group. A certain section believes that the film overdramatized the possibility of environmental catastrophe on earth. Well this statement itself is so guilt ridden. If environmental catastrophe hadn’t been real would we have been equally scared to see its visualization? We can easily digest a movie that is based on assumptions of doomsday theory but are reluctant to see that probably the doomsday (environmental catastrophe) is man- made.
Then there are loads of others like feminists, anti-smoking groups etc. Now even China has a problem with this movie. Chinese believe the imperialist themes of the movie that shows the natives, being forcefully evicted from their homes by industrialists, is a parable for Chinese people whose dwellings have been forcefully razed to make way for new constructions. I don’t get this one. Shouldn’t they be happy that even if that is the case their plight is being projected in front of the world. Well, who am I to say anything in this.

However, I left the theater on a sad note, because it made me realize how much forest cover we might have lost for want of industrialization. And was it warranted ? How many animals did we render homeless, how many plants have gone extinct. For once it was a movie that projected man as the evil and probably that is what has made many uncomfortable. We are ‘ok’ with movies that depict aliens as the evil who come in spaceships to take over our planet. We are the heroes, why should we have a problem. But the moment we see on screen what we have been doing to our planet. A dying planet, the only place where we can survive, we are all jittery. I hope for once we open our eyes and make a conscious effort to recycle, reuse, plant more trees and use resources judiciously. Stop pushing the issue under the carpet and raise to the occasion.