[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Schöneboom

I never saw "Avatar" -- it was one of those times when I opted not to follow the herd. Hearing the plot later, I knew I hadn't missed much. Cameron sure knows how to press our entertainment buttons, and that's a good skill to have.

However the story itself wasn't so hot. Sure we all feel bad about the genocide of native tribal peoples in the New World, but making a fantasy about noble savages defeating the greedy modern guys doesn't actually help, IMO. It's just anesthesia for guilt.

In truth, had the humans studied their own history, they could have crushed those nice blue people even before deploying the Space Marines -- using an engineered virus fatal only to Na'avi. 90% fatalities, for ex. Was that in the movie?

I know, I'm a bad, bad human!

Least you're an honest one!

I always refer to Herbert in these cases:

And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation, creeps upon them.
And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?