Climate Change going to the movies - Avatar

Just been reading about James Cameron's Avatar film coming out in December... which I'm now pretty excited about. 12 mins of 3d Harry Potter film at the IMAX left me wanting to see more, I was even excited about going to see Scrooge from its 3D trailer. But, I think seeing Avatar in 3D will be more to the point.

What I didn't know though is it's environmental themes:

The eagerly anticipated teaser trailer for director James Cameron’s Avatar film premiered today — treating viewers to a lush alien world with bizarre occupants and a growing conflict between races.

In taking a peek at the rough plot line available on Wikipedia, it’s fairly evident that Cameron is drawing upon environmental issues past and present here on Earth. For instance, his alien race — the Na’vi — live in a lush rainforest world and have learned to “live in harmony” with nature. Then along come humans — which encroach further upon the Na’vi lands seeking valuable minerals. Remind you of the European displacement of North American Indians? In an interview, Cameron said that one of the major themes he wanted to base his story on was how “advanced civilizations supplant indigenous cultures, in either actively genocidal or more unpremeditated ways.” (ecorazzi)


Of course most of the initial talk will be about the 3D aspect, and I'm not expecting this to be a deep meditation on our relationship with nature, neither is this kind of story going to turn anyone into an activist. But it all helps keep these themes in the cultural sphere, and to get them away from 'environmentally themed' film labels.
So all in all, I'm looking forward to finding out what this film has to offer. (& yes, I admit I was pleased to read that there's a love story in here too - Cameron may be the director of Aliens, but he also created Titanic, let's not forget...)

Further down the ecorazzi blog I spotted one of the funnier lines I've read about a global warming movie:

“What we have here is a movie that combines the politics of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth with the torture porn tendencies of the Saw series (specifically cribbing plot points from Saw 2). In short, The Chaos Experiment stinks. It boggles the mind that this idea ever made it past the screenplay stage.” — Richard LaFashia Jr., Examiner.com

One not to look out for then. whilst I'm on the subject of climate change in the arts, reading this Sunday morning has taken me to the pages of a couple of new art 'manifestos' from the more apocalpytic end of the green arts scale.For someone who was completely in awe of McCarthy's vision in The Road, the Dark Mountain Project looks worth keeping an eye on. Although a browse should be followed by reading Monbiot's conversation with it's creator, Paul Kingsnorth. Just so that you don't give in completely to the idea that we're all doomed. And I'll be keeping an eye on GreenPunk.net mainly to see if they do anything interesting beyond creating a manifesto...

So climate change is teetering on the edge of being a mainstream topic for film and arts (not that internet manifesto's mean that, just that that's how it feels as a whole). People have been saying for ages that it's overdue. Not just because of the hope that it can help create movement and action, but because it's set to be the major conflict of our time (to put it mildly) and we're gonna be faced with the very difficult task of understanding why we have let it happen. Artists and storytellers will certainly be needed.