Is there anyone who doesn't think the space marines didn't return a week later and just nuke the surface of Pandora into blast glass?

@3, they threw that ONE line in to dull the edge of the anti-military overtones in the movie. Someone at the corporate office surely said, 'can we add that line about soldiers fighting for freedom and call these guys mercs?'

Does it matter that they're mercenaries in the film? No. Mercenaries or not, they're a military force that does exactly what our military forces do. There's no dulling that point no matter what you call them.

I couldn't help but enjoy the irony of a theater full of Americans rooting against their own military in a film. The whole time I was watching it, I was waiting for the words 'shock and awe' to pop out, and it did...

Sure, call them Blackwater, Halliburton, or KBR, but those guys are just a distraction from the atrocities our troops are committing. We get to condemn our military practices without having to condemn the troops. They're the whipping boy for our national shame.

Charles, you have permission to borrow that last paragraph for your next post.

Who knew that such a left leaning blog would complain about supposed anti Americanism in the form of an audience being against a military slaughtering indiginous peoples?

ah yes only eurowhites are sinners in history, prior to 1492 there was never any colony ever (Troy being imaginary, also Massila), there's never been any asian or Native American conquest or imperialism (mongols, tamerlane, aztecs just didn't exist, those were hollywood fairy tales) and prior to 1492 there was also no world trade. Globalism is a recent invention. Before 1492, nobody ever moved around the world, and no one ever encountered a foreign nation, or tribe. All the world's sins may be laid to the eurowhites and their descendants, because this somehow makes us putting out this nonsensical view hip and intelligent, very cool, just like when I buy "authentic" Guatemalan fabrics to display my solidarity with poor people in the third world.

I barely thought about modern political allegory watching Avatar -- I was thinking about Pocahontas, with an (even more) unlikely, Disneyfied ending that would have the Powatan driving off the British thanks to magical forest friends, or of John Boorman's "Emerald Forest", or even of a version of Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke", had that been adapted for retards, with all the corners smoothed off. I was thinking of the unbelievably shitty Star Wars sequel, "Return of the Jedi", with those godawful teddy bears tripping Imperial walkers with vines and logs.

The movie was interesting to me when the alien natives seemed realistically doomed, and instantly got stupid when they started plugging in their usb cables to the wildlife and trees, which was even marginally more magical and unlikely than the spacefaring tech to cart gigantic machinery across lightyears to mine "unobtainium". Because the humans seemed to be working for the same ubiquitous globalmegacorp from "Aliens" (which I think had a vaguely Asian name), I guess I wasn't ever thinking of them as "Americans" -- I mean, Americans, with a working manned space program...?