I haven't seen it, and I'm not in any rush to, but I wonder if there's any possibility (and I'm sure others are raising this elsewhere, I'm just not paying attention) that what's really happening here, and in movies like The Last Samurai and Dances With Wolves, is simply a variation on the old trope "Outsider comes to show the way / solve the problem."
Because I was thinking of your post earlier today, after I first read it, and thinking about you, and suddenly that led me to think about HP, and that it's the same thing, just without any real racial element: outsider comes and leads the way. Star Wars episode IV. Blazing Saddles, with the races reversed. LotR, even: Frodo and Sam are just a couple of Hobbits, not like warriors or anything, but they go and destroy that ring. Dune, though that example clearly brings the racial element back into it.
Not defending Cameron and shitty film making (the piece of wood Kate was clinging to was certainly big enough for Leo to grab onto as well!), just wondering the extent to which the racial/colonial element here is an unintentional side effect of the outsider genre.
It's very much that old trope, and in some instances it works - I think it works in the narrative of Avatar but the film's messy when it comes to how things actually play out. (And kind of an annoying example of the genre. I mean, hobbits aren't essentially a part of this trope because they're not leaders, but they're also unlikely heroes - a better example in LOTR would be Aragorn, maybe.)
The race stuff seems pretty intentional, though, as it's actually referenced (by the villains especially).
Because I was thinking of your post earlier today, after I first read it, and thinking about you, and suddenly that led me to think about HP, and that it's the same thing, just without any real racial element: outsider comes and leads the way. Star Wars episode IV. Blazing Saddles, with the races reversed. LotR, even: Frodo and Sam are just a couple of Hobbits, not like warriors or anything, but they go and destroy that ring. Dune, though that example clearly brings the racial element back into it.
Not defending Cameron and shitty film making (the piece of wood Kate was clinging to was certainly big enough for Leo to grab onto as well!), just wondering the extent to which the racial/colonial element here is an unintentional side effect of the outsider genre.
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The race stuff seems pretty intentional, though, as it's actually referenced (by the villains especially).
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