From my new movie review in Taki’s Magazine:
Avatar’s Unsightly Valley
Steve SailerDecember 28, 2022
… The fundamental problem with James Cameron’s Avatar franchise, which has made a respectable but not overwhelming return this month with its first sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, is that, xenophobic as this may sound in the current year, its 10-foot-tall alien heroes are ugly.
These days, we are constantly lectured about how our instincts about who is and who isn’t good-looking are deplorable social constructs. But still…Cameron’s Na’vi are hard to look at for three solid hours.
In this sequel, the natives of Pandora comprise about 95 percent of the movie because the human (a.k.a. American, a.k.a. white) bad guys have transitioned into Na’vi themselves through genetic engineering or virtual reality or whatever in order to better hunt down the leader of the Pandorans, Jake Sully. He used to be a human himself, but in the first film he transitioned via species-affirming care into a big blue space monkey for reasons that no doubt were explained in detail in the 2009 original—Cameron is a hard sci-fi guy, not a fantasist, so he comes up with technical explanations for everything—but which I’ve completely forgotten.
Read the whole thing there.
