Avatar: Highest Grossing Movie of All Time ... & RACIST?

But she said the film, which so far has the second-highest worldwide box-office gross ever, still reminded her of Hollywood's "Pocahontas" story " "the Indian woman leads the white man into the wilderness, and he learns the way of the people and becomes the savior."

"It's really upsetting in many ways," said Lee, who is black with Jamaican and Chinese ancestry. "It would be nice if we could save ourselves."

Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of the sci-fi Web site io9.com , likened "Avatar" to the recent film "District 9," in which a white man accidentally becomes an alien and then helps save them, and 1984's "Dune," in which a white man becomes an alien Messiah.

"Main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color ... (then) go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed," she wrote.

"When will whites stop making these movies and start thinking about race in a new way?" wrote Newitz, who is white.

When will SF critics stop seeing everything as being about race, and start thinking about literature as literature?

Intelligent people have been discussing how literature reflects and influences our society since the beginning of literature.

The white man's burden:

http://www.wsu.edu/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/kipling.html

Actually... There are a couple of contradictions in Avatar if you want to think that Cameron was supposed to keep the thing left of center all the way.

One is that the idea of a "tree of souls" is not compatible with evoloserism; another is that the Na-vi are not multicultural and do not tolerate outsiders well. That might be excused if you assume that the demoKKKrat party sees the Na-vi as a potential new victim group the way they view slammites now, despite the known slammite agenda to ultimately rid the world of all non-slammites. Logic does not really figure into that sort of equation.