Mar 13
listen. i love these movies but i also kind of hate them.
#this is really just a place for me to put all my thoughts about avatar#i grew up with the first movie#i was 10 when i first saw it in theaters#it was mindblowing. i was obsessed for many years#lost interest as a teenager#saw the second one in the theaters in my early twenties and was dissapointed#and it made me reflect critically on the plot and characters of the films and it was really obvious how problematic they are#like come on dude you have kate winslet doing a fucking haka#was kind of repulsed by the movies for a minute#got back into the franchise through frontiers of pandora because an open world avatar game was one of my dream games as a kid#fell in love with the world again and actually felt like FOP did a better job in a lot of ways#the only piece of avatar media to really emphasise just how grotesque and disgusting the avatar program is#it’s so get out (2017) it’s not even funny#and knowing some of the shit cameron has said#like calling the lakota-sioux a ‘dead end society’#just makes me disgusted at how he’s commodified and capitalized on indigenous culture masquerading as environmental justice#while still seeing that these movies have (hopefully) inspired people to care more about the environment#i just always think back to that youtube video about how the avatar soundtrack was made#about how cameron asked horner and an ethnomusicologist (dr. wanda bryant) to make a soundtrack that drew from all cultures#he wanted it to be connected to the whole world but still sound alien#and they came up with some funky stuff and cameron hated it#they kept coming back with edits and edits#until eventually cameron just whitewashed it and made it predominantly western sounding#he colonized the fucking soundtrack#and it sucks because i actually still like the soundtrack!! like a lot!!#i had the original soundtrack on CD!!#i just think about what we missed out on and how much cooler it could have been if he’d listened to the doctor#and honestly that’s how i feel about these films#like it’s such a cool world and concept and the movies are visually gorgeous but the execution of the plot and messaging is extremely poor#these movies had so much potential and i just get sad thinking about what we missed out on from cameron excluding indigenous voices
