Saturday, January 16, 2010

Eywa Saves

Due to a unique social situation, I was in the position of seeing Avatar again. The literary demerits of the script became all the more evident with a second viewing (I would not survive round three); but tasteless as it may be to admit, I feel vindicated in my review. FroPoCon/PoMoCon matters aside, the theological fruits are there for the picking: "Eywa has heard you! Ewya has heard you!" shouts Neytiri, a native. She is shocked that Jake Sully's kneeling petition, his Judeo-Christian gamble that Eywa might not be merely the "sum total of all living things," (as one bookish earthling insists), but personal and volitional, even salvific, paid off. The instinctive piety of Jake Sully teaches these natives something about their deity that the natives did not previously understand. As a result, their deity intervenes at the darkest hour to save them from certain destruction, which is to say, the Na'vi graduate from Pantheism. The film, weak as it may be in many aspects, teaches something about missions. There is enough actual anti-Christian rhetoric in Hollywood that Christians need not imagine it when it's not really there.

urgent update: Vatican attempts to refute millinerd. Don't be alarmed. They're just trying to get back at me for New Moon.