I don't think there's universality at all in Avatar's story. It represents Cameron's perspective on indigenous cultures, commerce, technology, the environment, nature worship and so on. Some people of course share that perspective. Others clearly don't, and have been quite vocal about it.

I think they doth protest too much. But it's to be expected among the more ideological. With that crow, challenges to one's worldview aren't taken lightly.

Which is funny because in many respects Avatar has a back-to-Eden theme.

That does it. I'm going back and politicizing ALL my scripts. I could use the publicity!!!

I think a backlash was inevitable. The content of the film is pretty irrelevant - it's got massive publicity and interest groups can use that to boost their own status (for a little while).

(Personally, I think the likes of Schlussel are reading way too much into Avatar. The message didn't seem to be that sophisticated (Nature Good. Man smash Nature. Man bad. Nature will get revenge!) and the references to US "imperialism" seemed to me to be pretty tokenistic and undeveloped. The likes of Chomsky and Chavez have little reason to worry about any competition.)

Can't we just hate AVATAR for being a completely mediocre movie?

The message isn't new or anything. We've seen this story before. Did people flip out this much over Dances with Wolves?

It attacks religion because the Navi are represented as creatures whos religion revolves around something real (they worship their planet and nature) as opposed to imaginary invisible creatures whom nobody has ever seen.

In the words of Jack Nicholson: "You cant handle the truth!" :)

So this Debbie Schlussel lady, she likes it when a nation invades another and abuses their natural resources to death, to the point where they destroy the land, and the people in it? How conservative is that?

Is she all for the destruction of our planet and its natural resources? What a fruitcake!

I think Dances With Wolves was given a pass, so to speak, by the ideologues b/c there are also "bad" natives in it. It added some complexity to the white-native relationship.

Debbie Schlussel is dumb. Plain and simple.

Avatar is a superficially liberal movie (environmental themes, profiteering mercenaries as the heavies, clumsy references to the Iraq War) with a couple of ideological blind spots and contradictions that can be traced through centuries of literature about white colonists' romances with indigenous people and exotic lands.

It's basically a white guilt movie: it poses white people/imperialist powers as the problem, but fails to imagine a solution to that problem that doesn't also depend on a white hero. These stories pander to the "correct" audience, but that's often praised as a feature (get those white sci-fi geeks in the seats) when it's really a deeper bug.

The conservative complaint that this represents some sort of attack on the U.S. military is bizarre projection. Those people aren't stupid. They know exactly how to make noise.

This post by Gerry Canavan rounds up some of the more interesting critiques of Avatar on race/sex/imperialism grounds while adding an interesting question about a war between science fiction and fantasy.