“The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them. In other words, they can choose either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man’s fantasy.
At the same time as Avatar is making money all around the world (it generated $1bn after less than three weeks of release), something that strangely resembles its plot is taking place. The southern hills of the Indian state of Orissa, inhabited by the Dongria Kondh people, were sold to mining companies that plan to exploit their immense reserves of bauxite (the deposits are considered to be worth at least $4trn). In reaction to this project, a Maoist (Naxalite) armed rebellion exploded.
….
The Indian prime minister characterised this rebellion as the “single largest internal security threat”; the big media, which present it as extremist resistance to progress, are full of stories about “red terrorism”, replacing stories about “Islamist terrorism”. No wonder the Indian state is responding with a big military operation against “Maoist strongholds” in the jungles of central India. And it is true that both sides are resorting to great violence in this brutal war, that the “people’s justice” of the Maoists is harsh. However, no matter how unpalatable this violence is to our liberal taste, we have no right to condemn it. Why? Because their situation is precisely that of Hegel’s rabble: the Naxalite rebels in India are starving tribal people, to whom the minimum of a dignified life is denied.

So where is Cameron’s film here? Nowhere: in Orissa, there are no noble princesses waiting for white heroes to seduce them and help their people, just the Maoists organising the starving farmers. The film enables us to practise a typical ideological division: sympathising with the idealised aborigines while rejecting their actual struggle. The same people who enjoy the film and admire its aboriginal rebels would in all probability turn away in horror from the Naxalites, dismissing them as murderous terrorists. The true avatar is thus Avatar itself – the film substituting for reality.”

Most comparisons mentioned Ferngully and Dances with Wolves (and indeed some scenes are almost lifted wholesale from these movies); it seems to draw on a tradition as well of some of the more ‘progressive’ Westerns like Broken Arrow, which sought to mediate between the two communities of White settlers and soldiers and the native Amerindians. But unlike earlier cases, where the hero either failed in reaching a settlement or achieved some sort of compromise between the two warring groups, here he decides to fight, in a manner reminiscent of De Niro’s character in ‘The Mission’. While one can make a number of criticisms about Cameron’s political message and some of the ham-handed symbolism; certainly the debate has moved on in terms of whom our sympathies are meant to be with. Anupama Roy, talked about the fantasy of mimicry and control in fiction like Master’s ‘The Deceivers’ and how the colonial Anglo-Saxon hero’s superiority and knowledge (as well as the dynamics of the plot) required him to adopt brownface and ‘go native’ for a while to neutralise the threats posed by the natives or that emanated from native society. Inevitably, this initiated a crisis of identity, whereby the hero was in danger of losing his ‘colonial self’ and going completely native. Part of his muscular colonial (and Christian) strength was the ability to overcome this and re-integrate properly back into Colonial society having accomplished his mission. This crossing over was vital because it not only gave him the knowledge of both societies and therefore validated his choice to return to the one that was superior but because it also underpinned the morality of the narrative structure for the audience. Here though, this is completely reversed as the moral choice is presented as losing one’s identity so completely as to actually cross over and become a member of another species and the relative positions of the natives and the intruders/colonialists have been reversed as well. Despite the weakness with which this is done, Cameron deserves some credit for this, though it is very much in line with the transformations that have been happening in such themes within films over the last few decades.

I dont agree with this view. this is an old story on which even Hrishikesh Mukherjee made a hit movie in 1973 Called Namak Haram .
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070434/
The storyline of Avatar is exactly the same (no change ) , and the theme express the same “universality of Goodness” which is beyond any race, caste, creed or religion. what avatar does is that it adds species in this list .

For me, the genius of this film lay not in the archetypes and symbols it simulates but the skill with which it simulates them; its answers seem stupid because it doesn’t attempt to give any to begin with. It represents the rupture in the final Scene, and Baudrillard must so be chuckling in his grave.