Amelia PLUMRINGLETS

Avatar, The Way of Water seems bent on reminding us to protect the environment by presenting good people in tune with nature fighting with bows and arrows pitted against bad people with machine guns and much othrr even more heavy duty war-tech. Unfortunately running counter to this vaunted intention, this film comes across as earnest New Age tree-hugger-friends-of-the-earth propaganda that should be dismissed with snarky one-liners. Kingsley Amis, who never got to see Avatar, offers one of these. His response when asked by his son what he thought about humans making whales into soap was: "It seems a good way of using them up". Of course, if we are to believe the premise of this film - that whales are superintelligent beings, capable not only of demonstrating compassion for other species (but not all species, and not the vast tonnage of fish it must inhale in order to live) but also of composing songs expressing a deep kinship with mother earth - we'd condemn such a callous and philistine sentiment. However, without necessarily endorsing the slaughter of whales to make us soap, there's no reason to believe this kind of asinine codswallop. Bach is still probably a better composer than a sci-fi Leviathon which is presented as lovingly saving lives while also swallowing up whole schools of smaller fish without any apparent sense of lament.