‘Avatar’ and the Myth of the Noble ‘Blueskins’: Part One

With the success of James Cameron’s Avatar, audiences are once again being assaulted by Hollywood’s assumption of self-hate and false politically correct “truths” about who America is today and what we were in our past.  Of course we shouldn’t be surprised, a look at James Cameron’s past films with military characters like Aliens and The Abyss show a similar disdain for the military.  His scientists are always good and noble, but his military types, whether official or the contractor type as in Avatar remain uneducated, redneck killers.  After all this is a film that lying propagandist, so-called “filmmaker” Michael Moore has declared, “a brilliant film for our times.”

I much prefer the balance of say the great 1951 black and white classic The Thing, where James Arness’s murderous, but very smart alien runs amok in an isolated Arctic research station.  That is until captain Ken Toby and his wisecracking Army Air Corps crew and few common sense scientists manage to fry said killer alien’s ass with a makeshift electric chair.

The Thing’s military guys get all the really good lines, too.  In level headed response to the naive head scientist’s crazy insistence that “…our lives do not matter.  Knowledge, that’s the only reason to live, it knows far more then we do.  We can learn from it.  Just think we’ve split the atom.”  Toby’s co-pilot responds wryly, “Yeah, and that sure made the world happy didn’t it.”   But what do I know?   I love westerns and military films; only the rare common sense science fiction film like The Thing or a grand adventure like Star Wars captures my fancy. (more…)