The Noble Savage - Done in Blue

Rating: 6/10 (3 January 2010)

Ah yes, the notion of the Noble Savage. It is a very romantic notion. One that has been portrayed over and over again for centuries and has become the virtual gospel truth for all leftists: The indigenous culture is always superior.
While this is a gratuitous assertion, it none-the-less seems to find immediate acceptance in otherwise rational people, such as college professors, philosophers, and now - movie audiences. Like most gratuitous assertions, under the rules of logic, it could be equally gratuitously dismissed: The native culture is almost never superior to the conquering culture. The American and Australian Aborigines, the stone-age peoples of Borneo or Africa were not superior to the prevailing European, Asian or even Middle Eastern cultures that overtook them, in any measurable way, except in the non-quantifiable asserted "quality" of their inter-personal relationships within their own society, and, to any objective observer, their primitive cultures were vastly inferior. The truth is - they lived short, brutal, disease-ridden, hunger-plagued lives.
Anyway, the movie was swell: Lots of gee whiz computer generated special effects, animations, loud (My daughter sums it up correctly. We pay the extra to feel our seats shake.) battle scenes, the obligatory oh-so-evil corporate and military types facing off with the unbelievably noble, loin-cloth-wearing, practitioners of a tree dwelling culture. The blatant anti-capitalist, anti-military bias of the movie wasn't so swell, and nearly ruined the experience.
Outside of the ham-fisted political message, it was a good ride; well worth the price of admission.