Can Avatar Really Convince Kids to Go Green?

James Cameron's Avatar creation

Much has been said about James Cameron’s Avatar – it’s the highest grossing movie ever made, raking in $1.859 billion worldwide in just 41 days and has already been showered with awards including two Golden Globes and nine Oscar nominations.

Importantly though, Avatar has a message for audiences to take away which is absent from rival big-budget Blockbusters. Notably, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was enjoyable but soulless. In amongst the stunning visuals of Cameron’s space epic is a core environmental message that is impossible to ignore.

Avatar’s race of blue aliens, the Na’vi, manage to live in harmony with nature on their moon Pandora, a harmony which is obliterated when humans descend on the mineral-rich planet to exploit significant deposits of “Unobtainium”. The lines are drawn pretty damn clear as Avatar’s human hero decides to reject humanity by choosing a life of simplicity among the nature-loving Na’vi.

The question is whether Avatar will make its audiences, especially younger viewers, sit up and take notice of the green message it takes such great pains to spell out?

There is no subtlety to Cameron’s story. Na’vi = good, Humans = bad. Being in touch with nature = Utopian, exhaustive extraction of mineral reserves = catastrophic. Avatar is blunt, so blunt that at times it borders on the patronising, and risks being ignored for lecturing rather than trying to educate.

Captain Planet - Not taken very seriously by kids

Kids who grew up in the late 80s and early 90s may remember Ted Turner’s environmental cartoon Captain Planet, a ridiculous enterprise which failed because of its insistence of smashing the green message over the heads of kids with such force that in the end it simply became boring.

Fox’s animated feature FernGully: The Last Rainforest similarly painted an overly simplistic picture of environmental problems which failed to capture the imaginations of kids.

The difference with Avatar is that despite its faults, it comes through the clunky script and jarring plot devices and still manages to emerge as rousing entertainment. When the gung-ho humans start their ethnic cleansing of the Na’vi, it is a genuinely moving and awe inspiring moment, which goes beyond the dripping visuals and uplifting score, it’s the morals behind the dazzling effects.

I am indebted to Alice Thompson who succinctly captured my feelings on Avatar better than I ever could as she wrote for The Times:

Avatar isn’t Star Wars, Apocalypse Now or even The Lord of the Rings: it’s not a classic. But few films manage to change perceptions. The Sound of Music rehabilitated the Austrians, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner ridiculed racism, Philadelphia maybe changed our views about Aids, Kramer vs Kramer tackled divorce. Avatar… could do the same for global warming.