James Cameron’s long-awaited self-proclaimed masterpiece was released in 3-D just before Christmas, a time when I was both broke and frantic to finish even the modest, scaled-back holiday planned for my family, so needless to say, I didn’t really have three hours or a spare $8.50 to see the flick (the extra is for the 3-D glasses I guess, although they ask you to give them back as you exit). I went today because once again, I felt like the pressure of real life was getting to be a little bit insane (or I was) and I needed a break.

Nothing like three hours and a jumbo popcorn in a dark theater to take your mind off of yourself.

Movies are the only drug I can still abuse in good conscience.

My expectations were that the special effects would be spectacular and the story a bit less so, but I didn’t care. I’ll see anything with aliens or monsters in it, and I make no apology for this addiction. It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to have aliens or monsters in it.

Avatar, like its recent distant cousin District 9, surprised me. I was moved, and not for any of the reasons I expected. Yes, the special effects are convincing and wonderful. Sigourney Weaver isn’t capable at this stage of her life of being anything other than fabulous, and she was that, as expected. But I found the story—which has gotten a C- from various critics—completely fascinating. 

Sci fi movies with monsters and/or aliens tend to reflect the cultural fears and obsessions of the era in which they are made. So 1950s Sci Fi is filled with fear of the other (in the form of aliens); perceived in real life as encroaching communism or unfeeling totalitarianism. During the 50s the McCarthy hearings had people looking for Communists under their children’s bunk beds, a tone that is definitely reflected in films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Them!, and I Married a Monster From Outer Space.

By the 1970s we were beyond all that, and dazed and confused by the haze left by Woodstock, we began to like our aliens a bit warmer and cuddlier. Now (in the movies) the aliens were coming to save us, or at least to show us a better way, their way. Movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET warmed us up for Starman (by John Carpenter no less!), a movie in which the alien in question is basically a thinly disguised Jesus.

But that didn’t last too long. By the time Starman was made, aliens were already getting ugly and scary again, and the Alien trilogy took their perceived menace to new heights, introducing the notion that 1) aliens are female and they are BITCHES, and 2) everything else (aka: us) is a militiarized nightmare.

For me, this trend reached a comic peak in 1997 with Independence Day, a loopy enjoyable film in which Bill Pullman, playing the President of the U.S., views a captured alien in a cell under Area 51 and discovers (from the alien himself) that, “They’re like cockroaches! They roam the galaxy, stopping at each planet to strip the natural resources and kill all the inhabitants before moving on!”

I laughed out loud when Pullman uttered this line and before I could stop myself said:

“Oh my God, they’re US!”

In both District 9 and Avatar the aliens have become a cross between fierce and wonderful, and in both films our salvation lies not so much in considering that they might be us, as in realizing that we are them. The aliens have become the good guys. It isn’t enough to simply respect or understand them, we must become them if we are to save ourselves. To keep an authentically human self, we must become the other.

Humanity in this new milennia of Sci Fi is now depicted as the maurading horde with cockroach armies, bent on rape, pillage, and destruction at any cost. This is a complete reversal of the setup of the 1950s, and it reflects very vividly our not-very-submerged fears that we are becoming our own worst enemy—and what a massive, horrifying enemy we are! We are alienated from the best part of what it means to be human, and our only hope is to stop fighting the other and merge with an older, wiser version of what we once were.

The aliens in both movies are thinly-disguished inhabitants of the real-life Third World; cultures that existed for thousands of years before ours, but now are under siege from corporatism and military exploitation. While we may debate the morality of such things in the political arena on an intellectual level, in the realm of our collective imagination we are scared to death of our own aggressive stupidity.

Avatar speaks eloquently to a culture (ours) that is busy destroying the very best of itself before the eyes of the world—branding as ‘other’ anything and anyone we want to dominate and then killing them and taking their stuff. It’s not admirable. In fact, it’s terrifying. And sadly it’s really happening.

At one point in Avatar Sigourney Weaver’s character tells the corporate dweeb she works for that he has it all wrong, that the elemental treasure he is trying to militarily wrest from the native Navi people of the film is not what is truly valuable. The real treasure, she pleads, is the Navi’s intuitive connection to all other living things, their bond with the natural world. It is this bond that makes the element our military covets so powerful. It’s hard to watch that moment in the movie and not think of the diamond mines in Africa, or the oil fields in the Middle East or the opium poppies in Afghanistan.

Predictably, the corporate dweeb ignores her.

Lots of moments in the plot are predictable in that way, but it doesn’t spoil the movie. At least, it didn’t spoil it for me.

Now, if only reality could have a happy if unlikely ending too.

Life isn’t a video game, but if it was, I probably could have kept my 3-D glasses.