Avatar? Astounding.

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't seen Avatar, do not read this post. See the film -- IN 3D -- before proceeding.

Aradhna and I saw James Cameron's latest blockbuster yesterday at Chadstone. Above the indescribable visual effects, GI-Joe-goes-New-Age plot and dizzying action sequences, I was struck by the film's raw indictment of the Cheney/Bush era's 'military superiority = moral righteousness' dictum -- especially as it was nearly ten years in the making, cost around $300 million and follows, in Titanic, a film greeted with critical and box office success that made Cameron a household name and allowed him to rightfully proclaim himself 'king of the world' at the 1998 Academy Awards.

Then again, maybe this king is taking maximum advantage of his throne with this subversive sci-fi masterpiece.

I put off reading about 'Avatar' before seeing it; its blatant political message surprised me. However, in an interview with Agence France-Presse, Cameron said he saw the movie 'as a broader metaphor, not so intensely politicized as some would make it, but rather that’s how we treat the natural world as well'. He went on:

There’s a sense of entitlement — 'We're here, we're big, we've got the guns, we've got the technology, we've got the brains, we therefore are entitled to every damn thing on this planet.' That's not how it works and we're going to find out the hard way if we don't wise up and start seeking a life that's in balance with the natural cycles of life on earth.

This ethos is brought to shameful life by a cold-blooded corporate type who leads an (American) effort to extract an extremely valuable plutonium-like resource from a sacred site on Pandora, the bucolic moon of an unnamed planet, in the year 2154.

A massive military presence accompanies the extraction efforts, led by a psychopath named Colonel Miles Quaritch who pumps iron, spouts non-stop jarhead jargon and is 'happy' to have a massive scar running across his skull to remind him of the 'savagery' of Pandora's indigenous population, whom he's content to destroy at will. For my money, this colonel rivals George C. Scott's maniacal general in Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove. The film states these soldiers are guns for hire but the army's massive firepower and military mindset is a note-for-note smackdown of disgraced neo-con theology espoused by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in their heydays.

The parallels with Cheney/Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq are blatant, as is the flagrant disregard of protecting innocent lives in the United States' use of drones to drop bombs on 'terrorist cells' in Afghanistan that turn out to be weddings or schools. I'm a proud US ex-pat, but watching Quaritch get his what for is about as satisfying an on-screen moment as I've ever seen.

You know what? Regardless of its reverberating politics, it's still very true that Avatar, as the New Yorker's David Denby stated in the first line of his review, 'is the most beautiful film I’ve seen in years'.