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I don’t know much about James Cameron’s upcoming sci-fi film Avatar. (Not to be confused with the live-action film based on Avatar: The Last Airbender, which I…did. Only briefly, though!). The tale of a paralyzed ex-Marine who can remotely control an alien being, it seems to tick off all the boxes of the things I write about here. (Is it just me, or is there something World of Warcraft-y about the alien’s planet?)
I’m interested to see if Avatar handles its “guy-in-a-wheelchair who controls another creature” story differently than other films have done.
Looks interesting. I’ve never played WoW (although the CGI in that trailer certainly does have a very “computer-gamey” look), so can’t comment on that, but it looks to me like it harks back to the pulp-era “planetary romance” type stuff (“noble savage” aliens and dinosaur-ish monsters on a jungle planet, probably with a dashing, manly explorer-hero type…)
(Sort of reminds me of 10,000 BC, which was basically an update of the slightly earlier but very similar “legendary Earth past” pulp stuff, to which this is the “… IN SPACE!” version…)
Looks like the disability plot is going to be the one that always gets done in sci-fi, though (bitter veteran with acquired impairment gets to be “whole again” through some McGuffin – in this case presumably possessing an alien body? which could have some interesting colonialism subtext, now i think about it, tho probably not intentionally) – i don’t have high hopes for it.
It’s a shame because i really do think sci-fi has the potential for doing really awesome stories about disability, but they *always* seem to go for some sort or other of “cure” angle – the only counter-example i can think of (off the top of my head) is Alien: Resurrection, and even that has a “mercy killing”/”better off dead” scene in it as well as the positively portrayed disabled character… actually, i think i really need to write about Alien: Resurrection at some point…
Anyway, i do remember hearing about this film a few years ago (when it was in development hell) and being interested in it, so if i get the chance to see it, i probably will – but i’m not expecting it to have anything other than the usual Hollywood medical model perspective on disability…