"'Avatar' confuses people because it's got all this cool eye candy and all this cool action, and if they're starting to feel something in the middle of that, it's kind of OK. Unless you're a hard right-wing pundit, in which case it's OK, and the whole movie's ridiculous and fatuous and stupid. It's high-quality left swill, is how I would position the film."
-Film director James Cameron, who despite the massive success of "Avatar" has had to field loads of complaints and criticisms from people who have called his film "anti-American" and "a liberal PC revenge fantasy." Admittedly, "Avatar" does contain deep-seeded lessons about environmentalism and conservation, but he doesn't buy into the idea that his film is trying to bring down capitalism (considering the amount of money that "Avatar" has made worldwide, he's probably just fine with the free market).
It's nothing new for Cameron, who has spent a career crafting massive spectacles that have been met with confused reactions. "The two 'Terminator' films were tough enough that even if there was a soft, gooey center there, the films still were hard-ass, so it was OK," he explained. "But 'Titanic,' it was kind of like I took the hard-ass part away, and I left the soft, gooey center and a lot of people loved it. But it was also easy to attack, especially after the fact. There was this revisionist sense that if you were a guy, you didn't like 'Titanic.'"
Despite the criticism, Cameron isn't done with the "Avatar" universe just yet. He's working on a prequel novel and is working out the details with Fox about making a sequel.
