Avatar (2009) Review: -100/10

Name: Avatar
Genre: Action, Adventure, Science Fiction
Released: 2009
Cast: Giovanni Ribisi, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Zoe Saldana

TL;DR: Avatar (2009) rates -100 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Avatar is a white savior film wearing the costume of environmental progressivism, and the combination is more offensive than either element alone. James Cameron spent a quarter billion dollars to make a film where an indigenous culture, spiritually connected to their world, physically superior to humans, with thousands of years of accumulated wisdom and a direct neural interface with their planet’s ecosystem, can’t defend themselves without a human man arriving to lead them.

Official trailer

Rating-100 / 10

The Na’vi are spiritually connected to their world, physically superior to humans, carry thousands of years of accumulated wisdom and share a direct neural interface with their planet’s ecosystem, and apparently they still needed Jake Sully. James Cameron spent a quarter billion dollars on a white savior film wearing the costume of environmental progressivism, and the combination is more offensive than either element alone.

My rating: -100. The combination of massive resources, massive platform, and a story that treats its indigenous inhabitants as props for a white man’s search for authenticity gets the most negative rating in this series. The visuals are revolutionary. The story is a moral failure executed with technical excellence.

Avatar makes me want to throw things at the screen. Cameron built the most gorgeous alien planet I can think of and then handed it to Jake Sully, a Marine who shows up, learns the local customs, and is soon better at them than people who’ve lived them their whole lives. The glow-in-the-dark forest is lovely. It doesn’t make the plot one bit easier to swallow.

The White Savior Structure

The white savior narrative has a set structure that Avatar follows beat for beat.

An outsider arrives in an indigenous community. He’s initially an agent of the colonizing force. He learns the culture. He becomes better at the culture’s practices than the people who have lived in it their entire lives. He falls in love with a woman from the community, the chief’s daughter. He’s accepted as one of them. When the colonizing force attacks, he leads the resistance.

He saves the people who have lived there for generations from the people who look like him, and the film seriously expects me to cheer.

This is Dances with Wolves transplanted to space. It’s also The Last Samurai, The Last of the Mohicans, and a dozen other films in the same tradition. Cameron was repeating a structure critics had already picked apart, at a moment when that conversation was well established, and he did it on a scale and with a budget that took it to the largest possible audience. Avatar is the most expensive and widely seen white savior film in cinema history, and that makes me angrier than any of the films it copied.

The damage the structure does is to the Na’vi. Despite everything Cameron created to make them extraordinary, the bioluminescence, the neural interface with the natural world, the accumulated spiritual practice of their relationship to Eywa, the physical capability that makes individual Na’vi more formidable than individual humans, they’re passive recipients of Jake Sully’s leadership. Their wisdom exists for him to absorb. Their culture exists to be the context for his transformation. Their survival depends on his choices.

For Writers The white savior structure fails because it centers the wrong protagonist. Avatar’s actual story, the story of a people defending their home against colonial extraction, belongs to Neytiri. She knows the world, has the relationships, has the most to lose, and has the most invested in the outcome. The moment you center Jake instead of Neytiri, you’ve made the indigenous culture a setting for someone else’s development instead of subjects of their own story. Before you write your protagonist into a community that isn’t theirs, ask whose story this is. If the answer is someone already in that community, write their story. The outsider can provide a perspective. Making them the hero is the choice that produces the problem.

The Visual Achievement and Its Waste

Pandora is among the most completely realized alien worlds in cinema history. Cameron and his team spent years developing the ecology, the bioluminescence, the textures and behaviors of a world that’s not Earth while remaining comprehensible as a biosphere. The visual effects work that created Pandora was revolutionary at its release and directly advanced the state of CGI world-building in ways that the entire industry benefited from.

This makes the story’s failure more acute. Cameron built an extraordinary world and then gave it to a story that treats its inhabitants as background for a white man’s spiritual awakening. The world deserved characters who were subjects of their own story in it. The extraordinary craft invested in making Pandora real was invested in service of a narrative that asks the audience to experience it through an outsider instead of through the people who belong to it.

The Na’vi’s bioluminescence, their neural interface with the ecosystem through their queues, their spiritual relationship to Eywa, all of it is more interesting than Jake Sully, and the film knows it. Cameron spends more time on Pandora’s wonders than on any human character. Yet the story keeps insisting that the perspective, the decisions and the arc that matter all belong to Jake.

I’d have happily watched two hours of the flora and fauna with no humans in it at all. The tree roots have more personality than the hero.

The Environmental Message and Its Irony

Avatar presents itself as an environmental film. The conflict is between the Na’vi’s sustainable relationship with their world and the RDA corporation’s extractive relationship with it. The film wants to argue for indigenous ecological wisdom against corporate extraction. It makes this argument through a narrative structure that enacts exactly what it’s criticizing: taking something belonging to someone else and making it serve the outsider’s purposes.

Jake Sully adopts Na’vi culture and then takes it over. He becomes Toruk Makto, a role that belongs to the Na’vi and that they’ve been waiting for, and uses it to mobilize a people who already have their own leaders, their own spiritual guidance and their own reasons for fighting. The film argues against extraction while performing it, and I find the lack of self-awareness almost funny. The hero of a movie about taking what belongs to others walks off with the top job, and nobody on screen seems to notice.

The Fundamental Problem
The film argues against taking what belongs to others and making it serve outside interests. Its narrative structure takes the Na’vi’s story and makes it serve Jake’s development. The argument and the structure contradict each other.

What a Better Version Would Look Like

The story Avatar should have told is available in the same material.

Neytiri is the protagonist. She’s a hunter of exceptional skill who encounters a human, Jake, in the sacred forest and chooses to bring him to her people instead of killing him, as she should have. She teaches him. She falls for him against her better judgment. She watches him become something her people need while understanding better than anyone what that transformation costs. When the war comes, she fights it as herself, with Jake beside her instead of leading her.

That film would have been more interesting, more coherent with its own environmental argument, and more honest about whose story Pandora belongs to. It would also have required Cameron to resist the structural gravity of the savior narrative he’d absorbed from the films he grew up watching. The tragedy of Avatar is that he made an excellent technical film in service of a moral failure he apparently didn’t recognize as one.

For Writers Before you write any story about an outsider entering a community, ask: who already belongs here, and whose story is this? The outsider perspective is a legitimate narrative device: someone learning a world alongside the reader is a useful guide. But the outsider learning and the outsider saving are different things. An outsider who observes, learns, and acts in support of the community’s own agency is a perspective character. An outsider who arrives and leads is taking the community’s story. Check which one you’re writing before the first scene is set.

The Sequels

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) continues with the same structural problems amplified. The Sully family, now fully Na’vi-identified, faces a new threat from a new wave of human colonizers. Jake continues to make the central decisions. The water world setting generates extraordinary new visual accomplishments. The story continues to center the wrong people.

Cameron apparently intends to make five Avatar films.

I expect every one of them to be a technical wonder with the same rotten center, and I can’t imagine sitting through more of Jake Sully making decisions for a planet that was never his. The world is stunning. The perspective from which it’s shown is the wrong one.

Should you skip Avatar?

Avatar gets its -100 because it used more resources than any film before it to tell a story that treats its richest characters as props for a white man’s self-discovery.

The visuals are a real achievement, and the story’s failure stings all the more. All that craft went into a narrative that does the very thing it claims to oppose, and the bigger and prettier the film gets, the worse that failure looks. I’d sooner stare at a Pandora screensaver with the sound off.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Avatar a white savior movie?

Yes, and the problem is the structural choice of whose story to tell. A film about indigenous people defending their home from colonial extraction that centers an outsider instead of the indigenous people has made a craft decision that undermines its stated argument. That’s a storytelling failure, and the politics have nothing to do with it. The story and the argument contradict each other at the structural level.

Are Avatar’s visuals enough to make it a good movie?

The visuals justify a theater trip to experience them on the largest screen available. They don’t justify the story told through them. Visual achievement and narrative achievement are separable evaluations, and the film earns very different scores on each. The -100 reflects the narrative failure. The visual achievement would rate much higher on its own terms.

How could Avatar have been better?

Centered Neytiri. Told the story of Pandora’s defense from inside the community being defended instead of from the perspective of the outsider who arrives to save it. The technical craft, the world building, the visual achievement, all of it was available to that version of the film. Only the narrative centering needed to change.

Why was Avatar so popular?

Because the white savior narrative is familiar and comfortable for the audiences who make up the majority of global cinema. It provides the pleasures of identification with the outsider, the pleasures of learning a new world vicariously, the pleasures of redemption and belonging, all packaged in a visually spectacular experience. The structural problem is invisible to audiences who have absorbed the narrative template as normal. The comfort of the template is part of what Cameron was selling.

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