The Religious Connotations are Worrisome

Rating: 6/10 (22 December 2009)

Thinking about it more carefully, what I disliked the most were the religious representations of the movie, and how that appeals to the minds of those with insufficient critical skills.
There's a deity, Eywa, which is some sort of brain, whereas the trees are the connections like synapses. So everything is interconnected through some sort of energy. And the deity is real, it provides not only wisdom but it also joins the fight when the tide turns. And it heals people. Or it doesn't, but it's still all for the better. And because they're one with nature, they're horrified when the tree is felled, because there's a supernatural meaning to it. And there are even initiation rites.
And I'm here thinking that initiation rites have such potential for physical and emotional abuse; that healing people with energy is a deeply dangerous idea; that holding hands in prayer is utterly useless for all practical purposes; and that accepting that a woman has a "connection" with God, or Eywa, is so supportive of every other religious leader out there.
"It's a tribe, and it's a movie", someone will say. But it's in fact a kind of utopic tribalism, an idea that will be attractive to many people - it has been for most of the history of mankind - but that is seriously outdated for the societies we're hoping to build, one in which we accept each other's cultural traits and deal with our many flaws. There is no tribe out there that is perfect in every way and about to be victimized by evil foreigners. There isn't. The tribes of the world are nothing like that, they're definitely not noble like that. In fact, they're based on fraudulent religious power and authoritarian political power. Tribalism and its tenets have no place in our world, and it worries me to see it so glorified on the big screen.
(Another poor message: Everybody in the tribe holds hands in prayer, right after an attack. They're lost and frightened, and it takes a foreigner to instill them courage! The deity didn't do that, their own people didn't do that, in fact there was some in-fight, so it took the most recent member of the tribe, with a "human" mentality, to lead them into victory. Sure, the human asks for cooperation of the tribe members and specially of the alpha-male, but he's the leader. How boring, we've seen that so many times. If the tribe itself had decided to fight back, and if Jake had simply joined them... I would have liked that. It would be less of a blockbuster, but more mature).
Therefore, stunning visuals aside, the morals of the film are so flawed that I'll give it only 6 stars out of 10.