Annalee Newitz compares Avatar and District 9:
Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it’s like to be a Na’vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He’s becoming alien and he can’t go back. He has no other choice but to live in the slums and eat catfood.
Sharpest analysis of Cameron’s epic I’ve seen yet (link via Words and Steel via Abbyjean).
I still return to the reports of cringe-inducing dialogue (and I still plan on seeing it, I hope in 3D). Movies don’t dwell in their language to the extent that novels and stories do. But poor dialogue forestalls suspension of disbelief, dropping us out of the story into analyzing the limits of its vision. Cameron needed a team to make his visuals three-dimensional; why not his script?
