The Movie Avatar

From the choices I was presented with, I chose the movie Avatar to watch and compare to our current unit. The plot of the movie Avatar begins with a man named Jake Sully; he’s a paraplegic Marine that went with a crew to the moon, Pandora, to obtain natural resources that are highly abundant on said moon. Sully is tasked with taking control of a Na’vi “avatar” to convince the Na’vi that they should leave their land so the Marines can mine the resources without harming them. Whiles in his avatar, Sully quickly falls in love with a real Na’vi, allowing him to see that they are peaceful and they love their beautiful land. Sully tries to tell the Marines they should leave the land alone and let the Na’vi be, but they ignore him and want to continue

The Marines and the Na’vi fight until finally, the Na’vi were able to drive the

Marines back to Earth. Sully and multiple others stayed on Na’vi to live out their lives, ending the movie.

The way this movie relates to manifest destiny is because both manifest destiny and the movie involve a specific group of people thinking that land owned by others, is entitled to them, and they are willing to take it by force. There are many examples of this movie being tied to manifest destiny and the Marines taking land, some of which are how Pandora is referred to, how the Na’vi are portrayed, how the Marines are trying to force their culture onto the Na’vi without regard to them, and finally how the Marines try to forcefully take the land from the Na’vi.

The first example of how Pandora is referred to, is shown when Colonel Quaritch refers to Pandora as the “Frontier”. Which is very popular terminology that is used when referring to the western part of the United

States during the time of manifest destiny. The Marines came to Pandora fully expecting to be able to take

The third example is how the Marines came in forcing human culture onto the Na’vi without any regard to them. Much like the Americans who just waltzed onto Native American land and began to teach them

English and how to be “civilized” since they didn’t meet the Americans definitions of such. The Americans paid no mind to how the Native Americans culture worked and frankly, they didn’t care. They just wanted them to integrate into their society without trouble, giving up their customs. This is exactly what the Marines did, using the avatars they first studied the Na’vi’s culture, but then quickly gave up trying to learn and went to more direct means of obtaining the land, like fighting.

Which leads to the fourth and most important example, how the Marines forcefully took the Na’vi’s land. The Marines came to Pandora hoping that the Na’vi would just give up their land easily through small negotiations here and there, but when the Na’vi refused, they decided to abandon the plan and begin destroying the Na’vi’s land. The Marines gave no consideration to the Na’vi until they decided to fight back and tried