<http://www.metafilter.com/88197/Even-better-without-special-effects#2897157>
an excerpt --
<snip>
Furthermore, Cameron constructed Navi culture to be completely reality-based. The glowing tree and the interconnectedness of all things is not their quaint unenlightened religion. It's an actual, real, objectively verifiable physical thing. Grace says, "I’m talking about something real and measurable in the biology of the forest...It’s a network -- a global network. And the Na’vi can access it -- they can upload and download data -- memories." In other words, the pinnacle of our civilization and our history, the global communications network called the internet, grows naturally on Pandora. They didn't need to learn about mining, semiconductors, Maxwell's equations or the like, because what we managed to do with that they had already.
But it's not a function of religion, it's a biological fact. So who is more quaint, humans with their unprovable religions that they ignore when it's convenient or the Na'vi personifying the very real giant neural network that constitutes their whole world?
So Cameron has eliminated the casting of the Na'vi as being in need of civilization. They don't need it, they don't want it, and what they already naturally have is in many respects better. So the audience now understands that it isn't simply - stubbornness of fear of change underlying Na'vi rejection of humans gifts to them. It's that the Na'vi simply don't need what the humans are offering.
[...]
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Here, the writer inadvertently reveals his argument's weakness.
Cameron's Na'vi have no need of human tech because Pandora's eco-system magically provides many of the capabilities and life supportive services of a techno-sphere. Of course you won't invent flight if you can soar on the backs of giant birds. And of course you won't see the value of telepresence and telecommunications if your eco-system evolved a neural net along with handy, USB-like interfaces in your tail for literally plugging into the world around you. It's also convenient to have animals on-hand who're strong enough to challenge the significant might of marines armed with the stuff Lockheed's dreams are made of.
This is one of the cheats of the Avatar script, which more than a few people are mistaking for an eco-critique (see, for example, writer Rudy Rucker's glowing review and the reactions of eco-design guru John Thackara and his fellow travelers). The Na'vi's disinterest in humanity's imported tools is easy to understand, because all the problems usually addressed via technological means (How do I talk to people who are far way? How can I travel more swiftly?) have been pre-solved by a natural world which incorporates an integrated tech.
Contrary to the reviewer, I don't see this as an upending of the Dances With Wolves, Pocahontas, Fern Gully storyline but a continuation -- indeed an amplification -- of the archetypes those movies deployed.
An amplification, because the Avatar script significantly ups the ideological ante. The Na'vi are worthy of our admiration, and of defense against human interference, because of their improbable perfection (not so perfect however, that a White guy still isn't needed to decisively tip the scales towards victory). Not only their moral perfection but their absolute material self sufficiency -- supported, as I wrote earlier, by an eco-system which includes an integrated data network.
It would have been much more interesting if the back story (which mostly serves as a vehicle for Cameron's next-gen FX) presented both Na'vi and humans with real moral dilemmas. That is, if the Na'vi could indeed have benefited from and used some of the tools the off-worlders offered but had to weigh those benefits against the price demanded and the implications for their established traditions. I can also imagine a reverse scenario in which humanity, enchanted and intrigued by Pandora's evolved world-net, attempt to bio-engineer something similar at home, dramatically changing our species in the process.
But then, such narrative investigations would be closer to real speculative or transreal fiction and too far removed from the well-established nature boy adventure genre Avatar comfortably, competently and profitably occupies.
.d.