Reverse Pocahontas Guilt Trip

Rating: 6/10 (20 December 2009)

A visually brilliant if not stunning work, but let down by having a highly derivative plot line - almost a cliché - being basically a ''Reverse Pocahontas Guilt Trip'' - (i) Reverse Pocahontas - because the main protagonist fell in love with a native girl and who then went native (in Pocahontas its the native girl who fell in love with the foreign invader and went abroad). Yawn - haven't we been there & done that before? (ii) Guilt Trip - James Cameroon basically spent US$200mil filming a thinly disguised apology to the Taleban here. Switch ''Navi'' with Mujaheedin, switch Pandora with Afghanistan and the plot survives almost identical - as a thinly-disguised apologia rooting for the local insurgents combating highly-armed foreign invaders against huge odds in an asymetric contest. Its like Rambo - except that Stallone refights Vietnam to make Americans feel good, but in the Avatar it seek to make America's conscience feel bad.