Zoe Saldana...
... sweet jesus.
My thoughts on Avatar: the script is pure garbage. James Cameron must have incorporated every speculative fiction trope imaginable. It is so predictable that you can literally guess the entire story about ten minutes into the movie and it is a lazy mashup of much better sci-fi, fantasy and adventure films.
The depiction of the 'natives' is really condescending and cliched. If you've ever seen Chimamanda Adichie talk about the dangers of a single story, you'll immediately recognize that Cameron knows a single story about natives everywhere and the result is that there's no complexity and the characters are completely one-dimensional. It is reductive, dull storytelling.
But I think people should still watch it. It's an unbelievable experience to sit in an IMAX theater and be immersed in this incredible world that he created. And please, don't criticize a movie you haven't seen. You're only borrowing arguments from people who have seen the movie.
And then there's a movie called Collapse that I also think people should watch. It's the complete opposite of Avatar -- just a man in a darkened room speaking straight to the camera, talking about how civilization as we know it is going to collapse in our lifetime.
At first you think, who is this nutter and why should I listen to him? And those are good questions because he's kind of a nobody. His name is Michael Ruppert and he runs a website/newsletter called From The Wilderness, the contents of which look like they should be scrawled in shit on the walls of a public toilet. He's also a 9/11 truther.
But when he starts to speak, you realize that he has a staggering amount of knowledge and he's been right many times in the past. He just wants to give the world a warning, but people mock him and refuse to listen to what he has to say, as salient as his points may be. The title of the movie begins to take on a second meaning, in that it's not just about the end of civilization (which Ruppert believes is inevitable and unstoppable and he can only tell us what it's going to look like), but also about what decades of worry and exhaustion can do to a person. The man in the movie is completely alone, with only his dog by his side, and he looks like he hasn't slept in 30 years.