When I first heard about Avatar I was pleasantly surprised because I was working on prototyping a video game of the exact same concept. Greedy corporations with no compassion for nature or people destroy the environment and kill indigenous people to extract resources from land they occupy.
But my inspiration wasn’t Avatar, nor was it FernGully, or Dances with Wolves, or Pocahontas or any other movie one cares to compare Avatar to. My inspiration for the environmentally and socially conscious video game was real life. It was the many actual real events that I have read about or watched short videos on.
It always upset me when people couldn’t talk about anything besides making comparisons to other films because they were completely missing the point. Avatar isn’t a rip-off of FernGully or Princess Mononoke; it’s a rip-off of what is happening right now all over the world in the United States, the Amazon jungles, coasts of Somalia and the remote regions of India. Mega corporations based in the US and UK are mining for minerals and resources, just like the fictional RDA mining corporation in Avatar. And just like the fictional RDA, they are destroying the environment and harming, if not killing, the people who live in it.
I wish that Avatar wasn’t so escapist and that people after watching it could make the connection that what happens in the movie is reality and that it needs to stop, sooner than later.
With the greed of corporations driving the pollution of the planet, bit by bit, we are slowly killing ourselves. The rivers become polluted and we who drink from it or swim in it, contract diseases, which happened with me. But that is a story for another post.
In the meantime, educate your thinking with these links below.
- India’s indigenous are threatened by Vedanta’s mining (video 8 minutes)
- Amnesty International UK’s Take Action page about Vedanta in India
- Crude documentary (I ordered this and should be getting it soon)
- Amazon oil pollution by Texaco (now Chevron) and Chinese oil companies (video 14 minutes)
- Somalia pirates try to stop illegal dumping of radioactive waste
- Pollution in China photography essay
© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.
Tags: amazon, america, avatar, chevron, china, exxon mobile, india, james cameron, oil, pollution, somalia, texaco, uk, us, video games
Amen to that.
Perhaps Avatar could have been different in a way that helped people make the connection to the real world. But even with Avatar as escapist as it is, the movie does provide a foundation that more social-change-minded stories and games could build on top of.
A lot of people have seen this movie. That’s something. Now what can we do to build off the basic emotional engagement provided by the film, to tie this into the real world?