Avatar: The Danger of a Surface-Level Allegory

  When I first finished watching the movie Avatar, my first reaction was that while it was a good movie overall, I felt somewhat unsatisfied by it. It certainly excelled in some areas, like its visual effects, but at the end of the day, it did not resonate with me as much I expected it to. While I at first expected my cynical feelings toward it to decrease with time, I eventually figured out the real flaw I had subconsciously found in the movie. Avatar is a movie that tries too hard to be an allegory for real-world issues without putting any thought or creativity into the way those issues were portrayed.
  The overall message of Avatar is that colonialism is harmful, and the symbolism throughout is nearly inescapable. For instance, the alien race being exploited for their resources takes clear inspiration from portrayals of Native Americans in both their design and overall ideology, and most of the villains' monologues sound like they are reading an excerpt from a history textbook about the motives for imperialism. I would take less issue with this obsessive adherence to historical accuracy if the movie was a work of historical fiction, but its setting on another planet makes these similarities seem more unoriginal than meaningful. Furthermore, aspects of this analogy are completely undermined by the outer-space setting. For example, the "oppressed native" role in the movie is taken by an alien race that possesses superhuman strength, agility, and durability. However, this completely undermines the metaphor being presented, because one of the most important aspects of the injustice of colonization was that humans were doing it to their equals: other humans. While a similar anti-colonialism message can still be presented by Avatar's premise, it does not reach the same emotional complexity as the real situation. This highlights the movie's critical error: it creates an allegory by simply moving a social issue into a pre-constructed setting, rather than constructing a setting around a social issue. Other instances of the movie's setting getting in the way of the allegory being presented is the titular Avatar program, where human scientists and soldiers control the bodies of some of the aliens in order to enter their tribe. Even though this is an interesting premise, it weakens the story's message because it makes the idea of accepting other people's differences nearly nonexistent. When the characters have the ability to switch between the "races" in conflict at will, it promotes an idea that they are completely separate groups that have distinct advantages and disadvantages, rather than equals who should accept each other. The movie's resolution, where the human main protagonist permanently transfers his mind into an alien body, is the most egregious example of this idea, because the character's decision to become a different species than his own is treated as positive. Even though the humans were portrayed as the imperialist faction in the movie, the message would be much more potent if the protagonist stayed with the aliens, but remained human. This is because it would show that both groups were equals, like they were in real life.
  Overall, the message of Avatar, while undeniably positive, fell flat for me because it seemed like so little thought was put into it. The story could have been a fresh new take on an existing social issue, but it instead repeated a generic story of the evils of colonialism underneath a flashy CGI facade. It was underwhelming not because of its message, but because of its lack of effort in presenting that message.