As I said, the story could have been worked out a bit better, but hey, I know, it’s an action movie. Funnily, the story reminded me a bit of the theme also addressed in “Dances with Wolves” and “Pocahontas”, invader meets indigenous, starts admiring their ways and falls for one of their women, eventually becoming one of their own. Also, the Na’vi themselves, their looks and language, reminded me of American Natives, maybe no coincidence. More importantly, the movie addresses an environmental theme that is really actual and makes you reflect. The Na’vi are a people close to nature, and believe in an interconnectedness of all beings on their planet, an idea quite similar to James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, and to some of the Indian religions. This, for example, becomes clear when Neytiri has to kill some wolflike creatures that were attacking Jake; the kills could’ve been prevented if he behaved otherwise, and the unnecessary kills are therefore regretted by Neytiri. The difference between the Na’vi and the humans is the most prominent in the movie and serves to provide us a look in the mirror. The bulldozers destroying the Na’vi holy places are not different from the ones destroying most of our rain forests, and the greed that drives the humans to destroy a foreign planet for an almost unobtainable ore, is no different from the greed for oil and minerals that destroys so much nature today. While most of all being an enjoyable action movie, this is a message that it quite strikingly puts forward and hopefully one that at least some of the million spectactators will bring back home…

Nice trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRdxXPV9GNQ