In Defense Of Avatar

anti-technology?

If you see the alien race, the Na'Vi as a straightforward stand-in for aboriginal races in our own history, then you probably see the protagonist's (Jake Sully) side-switching as going to the side with less technology. Their world, Pandora, provides them with everything they need; they have no need for traditional types of technology. So the comparison is apt from that perspective. However, Pandora also has capabilities beyond the technology of the humans in the story such as cross-species communication and even mind uploading & transference. Cameron specifically and repeatedly provides hints of a biological basis for these capabilities. I.e. in this story, these elements are not magic, myth or fantasy. In essence, they are the technology of Pandora. So the question of which is the more technologically advanced race is not as straightforward as it might appear. Further, and more to the point, Cameron gives no hints that he's making a statement about technology itself.

anti-progress?

If you see progress as zero-sum, us vs. them, at-all-costs, anything goes, pure exploitation for short-term profit, then maybe you agree with this criticism. If so, you are living in the wrong century and had better return to your past life as a nineteenth century robber baron. This is the most black-n-white element of Cameron's plot: the managers running the mining operation are cardboard caricatures, they have no motive beyond greed. They ignore the findings of the scientists--amazing biotech that surely would, in the longer run, be more profitable and more beneficial than the mineral "Unobtainium." So, you could easily spin it around and say that the mining company, through its short-sightedness, is the one standing in the way of progress. [BTW, I forget what they say Unobtainium is used for, I think to power FTL travel].

anti-corporate?

As indicated, and as in Aliens, the company is presented as dumb and reckless, running amok in deep space. However, there's no indication that Cameron means this as an allegory of corporations in general. In each story, it's an individual company, could be one of billions in a volume spanning many light-years distance from Earth. Their military wing happens to be the villains in the story, but it's disingenuous to read too much into that. It would be a more interesting story if there were some nuance to it, like say that Unobtanium was needed for human survival; but, like I indicated, Cameron keeps his story really really simple.

anti-human?

Without a doubt, by the time the climactic battle arrives, the audience will be rooting for the aliens and the small band of human protagonists who lead them. And Sully does end up becoming a Na'Vi in full. But is Cameron trying to say that humanity is too flawed, and would be better replaced by Na'Vi? Reading that much into Avatar is the height of ridiculousness in my opinion. We do see good and bad on both human and Na'Vi sides. Sully's transference to his Na'Vi avatar body is to save his life when his crippled human body is ultimately wounded beyond repair in the battle. He wins both his human objectives (get a healed body, achieve meaning in life that his brother didn't get a chance to) and his Na'Vi objectives (win "the girl", acceptance into the tribe, prevent genocide). Only if you think the essence of humanity is Borg-like (expand, assimilate or destroy) does the anti-human criticism makes sense.

"Gaianist"?

Gaia refers to the idea that the Earth, as a whole, is a living system. There's a fuzzy line between things that have lifelike qualities and those that may be said to be truly alive. Gaia, as a scientific principle first advanced by Dr. James Lovelock, makes predictions along lines like the biosphere acts to preserve itself through large-scale feedback mechanisms, some of which have been observed. In essence, it is saying that it makes more sense, and is more useful to draw that line on the side of the biosphere being itself alive, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Probably when Dvorsky uses the term, he means something much further, such as the Deep Ecology movement, which argues that pre-agricultural societies were more stable than our own, so we should go back to them. And there's a close parallel in Cameron's Na'Vi: they're hunter/gatherers, who live in sparse tribes, in ways that are intimately (literally) connected with their world. I don't get from that parallel that Cameron is saying this is the way forward, we should abandon cars and medicine and space travel and 3D cinematography. Certainly he takes the Gaia concept to a literal extreme--Pandora is more than just alive, it's effectively a conscious entity, a massive neural network connected to all creatures on it. I think that was a bit of cool, maybe even original, science-fiction world-creating. If it ends up promoting the idea that the Earth too is alive in some scientifically useful way, I don't have a problem with that, I don't think it is necessarily threatening, I think the ideas of Gaia and of Deep Ecology are distinct enough.

Maybe it needs to be pointed out that, really, that James Cameron doesn't make "message movies." Terminator was not a diatribe against artificial intelligence. Aliens was not an anti-Libertarian polemic. Titanic was not communist propoganda. Sure, you can find some elements of these themes in each of those films. Terminator is in some sense a warning that if we let our computer technology get to far ahead of ourselves, there could be dire consequences. Titanic may suggest that class stratification was too rigid in early 20th century America, if you scratch your head and think (too much) about it. Aliens definitely has a theme about the potential harm brought about by stupid corporations. I don't think Cameron means for the audience to come away thinking about the broader implications of his films. If anything, the story of Avatar can be seen as showing the stupidity of greed, short-sightedness, and bellicosity; an age-old story, but one that evidently bears repeating.