Vaderisnothayden said:

Octorox said:

I had one problem with Avatar, and that was that I thought the quick acceptance of Jake as the leader towards the end of the movie dumbed down the Navi culture. He didn't even have to apologize, all he had to do was tame this dragon and suddenly they were all over him, personally I don't really think Jake should be able to master that culture and become the leader just like that. Cameron wanted us to see the Navi as a complex culture with a different way of life than our own and I think that scene really made it seem as if Jake was "superior" to them. I thought they had reason to distrust Jake and he was, in many ways, using them. I think rather than the "this is our land" speech (is it really his land?) we should have seen some sort of apology and Jake should have been accepted into their culture and fought with them but not suddenly the leader of all the Navi. Just my two cents. Otherwise I really enjoyed the movie.

Yeah, that's an old racist stereotype that goes white-guys-are-superior-and-make-better-non-whites-than-the-non-whites-themselves.

Yeah that's kind of what I was getting at, but I was a bit hesitant to put it in racial terms. (I prefer to use cultural or ethnic groups rather than race, as I'm a bit hesitant to lump all people of a certain "race", including caucasians, into one cultural unit.) It probably didn't help that I read a similar article before seeing the movie which kind of skewed my mindset.