I agree entirely. Rather than the “one white man to rule them all” theory that some here express, I feel it is exactly the opposite. Here is this man… this classic, American man…. jaded, military, incredibly transparent and shallow. And he finds a better way. He finds something his soul has longed for, in a species that could not be more different than his own.

Thank you for commenting, and I hope you’ll stick around.

Then again, I have been inspired to resume my journey bringing this to the isolated humanity we all live with now.

Love your review..

This movie doesn’t give the white man an out: he has to do more than any Na’avi to prove himself. It also doesn’t, in my opinion, caricature the plight that Native Americans went through, but makes the similarity in treatment burn through the film. I actually had participatory emotional responses to the film, which alone is good because I usually don’t, and the immersion into the Pandoran world simply brought more out of me.

I left the movie changed, maybe not completely, but like I’d had a vision of something that I might be able to plug into, or at least come to understand after my own fashion.

You could throw the entire plot out the window, for all I care. Take the white people out of it. Just give me what the Na’vi have — that profound, we’ll-never-see-it-on-this-planet (native or not) connection, and let it transport me somewhere other, somewhere that is home. These people have/had something that N.A.s can’t hope to touch because the way our planet functions is nothing like Pandora. And that’s what takes it to the spirit realm, for me.

I understand your feelings, despite my own purely ignorant upbringing. I spent my childhood feeling I’d been born in the wrong time and race; I daydreamed constantly of being native American. But though I was reminded of that historical wrongness and the plight of our natives, this movie takes it to a whole other level. Outside of plot trappings, this movie is so far from Dance with Wolves that it should speak to all races. I hope you will see it. I hope you will understand what I mean. Similarities, yes. Same-same, no.

The second issue I have is the whole “one white man to rule them all” sort of tone. I grew up around the American Indian Movement,I cut my teeth on radical (!!!) Native American tribal papers. The names of Anna Mae, Leonard Peltier, Russell Means, John Trudell, and Dennis Banks were said around our dinner table on a nightly basies. Wounded Knee and Alcatraz are images I will never be able to wipe from my brain To say that I have tasted and seen and experienced the bitterness and stark reality of that fight that continues even now is an understatement. The whole patronising double standard of Dances with Wolves., Pocahontas, etc etc is an old problem that it sticks with you.

Being as I do work with spirits and know what it is to deal with the Fae, I may see it. It’s a great deal to think about. The healing has to come sometime. At what point do we say oh well, these horrible things happened, but here is this new shiny and we’ve given it a Hollywood ending with lots of marketing bucks behind it so it goes down a bit easier. It will depend how my ancestors react to it – because I have to listen to them just as much as I do the other spirits.