If Avatar is an environmentalist fable, then it is a failure. And if you want to read it as such – a liberal allegory pleading for humans to respect nature and the indigenous peoples who live in a symbiotic relationship with it – then, sure, I can see how Avatar is a “bad” film. I can see how the journey of protagonist Jake Sully is a narrative badly cribbed from Dances With Wolves. I can see how the representation of the alien race (the Na’vi) is a condescending, exoticist amalgamation of Sioux, African and South American tribal signifiers. I can see how the film’s villains, Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) and Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), are a painfully obvious and reductionist representation of America’s military-industrial complex. I can acknowledge all that.

But what if Avatar isn’t an environmentalist fable at all, but is in fact its exact opposite – a celebration of technology? Then the film becomes immediately more intriguing. Consider the film’s conceit of “avatar” bodies: The character of Jake Sully undergoes a mutation in subjectivity (human-Navi) by immersing himself in alien culture, but this transformation/immersion is only possible via the mediation of technology, that is, the complex system that allows Sully’s mind to inhabit the body of a Na’vi-human hybrid.

Then consider the cinema audience watching Avatar who finds themselves in exactly the same position as Sully. On one plane the audience is inert, passive, enclosed in a dark space just as Sully’s is. On another plane, the audience is completely immersed in the world of Pandora, a space that is at once completely fabricated yet more persuasive than any previous cinematic fantasy world because of the state-of-the-art technology used to make and exhibit the film. Ignore the man-versus-technology readings of Avatar. The film is a grand expression of the relationship between spectator and screen in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, except where Rear Window’s subject was the shot/reverse-shot trope, Avatar’s subject is 3D. As if in response to those who write off 3D as just a gimmick, James Cameron’s Avatar is a bold statement suggesting the radical potentialities of the medium.

This utopian theme of technology as a medium for subjective transformations casts the whole colonialist narrative in a different light. Pandora no longer signifies “nature”. The excitement that Pandora’s alien flora and fauna engenders is not linked with an appreciation for our own wildernesses (and the accompanying idea of some pre-Western/pre-industrial purity) but that thrill that accompanies the encounter with the synthetic fantastic. The Na’vi connect to the trees, animals and each other via tendrils located at the tip of their braids. Late in the film, the scientist Grace Augustine, reveals that Pandora is a vast bio-botanical neural network. In a sense, becoming Na’vi is about “plugging in”, the way we plug into Playstations or plug into the Internet.

Preventing the colonisation of Pandora is not then about protecting “nature” but about protecting that which is artificial but organic. The relevant parallel is not then Dances With Wolves or even the Iraq War, but Second Life.

[Brad Nguyen is a co-editor of Screen Machine. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, was the film reviewer for Triple R Breakfasters and is currently based in Tokyo.]