The Ideology of Avatar

I watched Avatar a week ago, and came away thinking it was a movie with great 3-D visuals and lousy 2-D characters - essentially a totally unserious roller-coaster kind of experience, not anything that anyone would take seriously. After looking at this article, which discusses "fans who say they have experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora," it's clear that audiences are in fact taking this movie seriously.

Other commentators have discussed the lousy dialogue, massive plot holes, predictability (although I'll note that, about 40 minutes into the movie, I leaned over to my wife and whispered that I was pretty sure the movie would end with Sully fighting the old colonel in the mechanical suit ripped off from Alien), and the degree to which the movie rips off FernGully: The Last Rainforest. What really bothers me about Avatar is the ideology behind the relationship between Sully and the Na'vi.

The really troubling part of the ideology is how Sully wound up leading the Na'vi rebellion. For 4 generations or whatever, nobody had been able to hop onto the larger red flying thing until Sully came along to do it (although it actually appeared easier than taming one of the smaller flying things ). The Na'vi were unable to themselves organize their clans into a larger federation, until Sully showed up. He was essentially made their chief (or at least their top general). None of this was because he had special insight into the modern attack plans of the humans, or had access to human weapons, but because, despite telecomuting into the role, he was better at being a Na'vi than the Na'vi were.

Given the seriousness with which James Cameron took this movie and the Na'vi society (he hired linguists to craft the language, biologists to figure out how all the flora and fauna would actually work), and the marked similarities between the Na'vi and Native Americans, this shows a pretty serious disdain for native cultures. It essentially suggests that, not only do the humans (Europeans/Americans) have their own culture, which is significantly more technologically and organizationally advanced, but they also, within a couple weeks of hanging around other cultures, can be "better" at the primary activities of those cultures than the people themselves are.
Despite Cameron's attempts to make the Na'vi the wiser, more heroic race, they're completely devalued by this. Imagine a "Dances with Wolves" where, after a month with the Lakota, Kevin Costner was better at riding and shooting buffalo, organized the Sioux, was made chief, and then lead them to victory over the US Cavalry, which retreated behind the Mississippi. I don't think that anyone would think that it was a particularly liberal or pro-Indian movie. Just because Avatar blew up the obviously pro-greed and militaristic humans, it doesn't mean that the underlying ideology of the movie wasn't completely disdainful of the "natives."