Beware plot spoilers

Even more than an anti-capitalist film--which it clearly is in its simplistic way--Avatar is a film with serious reservations about corruption of warrior values within the military-industrial complex. Quaritch--Stephen Lang--has Miles as his first name, the Latin word for soldier, which makes him potentially a representative of all soldiers. He is a man in love with death, in particular the death of other living creatures. Quaritch carries large knives with him in his military exoskeleton--it's probably worth remembering that General George Patton always wore pearl-handled revolvers in his tank, and that Patton is, as portrayed by George C. Scott, very much the movie archetype to which Cameron is referring back, and who won his spurs in colonial conflict. Aliens--for which he made his cast read Heinlein's Starship Troopers--was a film in which the military life was viewed--not uncynically but with considerable respect; here we notice from the start such negative attitudes among Quaritch's command as their complete lack of respect for a crippled former comrade.

It is not just because of our liking for the Pandorans that we cheer when the military--engaged in a mission that is specifically linked to Iraq by Quaritch's "shock and awe" language--gets its collective arse kicked. Quaritch is specifically seen as demonic in that he tempts Jake with the restoration of his legs. The battle in which he is defeated, and the fight in which he is killed, are also set pieces full of money shots; this is an American film in which we cheer the defeat of a U.S.-style military machine by armed insurgents. The progressive intelligentsia should remember how deeply the film is hated by the Christian and neo-conservative right in America.