Avatar: An Allegory for Colonial Era Africa?

James Cameron’s latest epic AVATAR arguably represents the greatest shift in filmmaking since 1999’s THE MATRIX. While it won’t break any grounds on story or character development (it’s been compared to Disney’s POCAHONTAS and FERNGULLY: The Last Rainforest), visually it truly represents a leap forward that’s pushed the film genre to the limits of technical possibility. Not since the early-80’s have grown men and women been so excited about a 3D movie (Jaws 3D anyone?). The comparisons to Pochahontas are inevitable: stranger from a faraway land comes with company to abolish the natives and profit from minerals, only to change his mind when he falls in love with one and instead fights to save them.

However, from a purely literary perspective, the movie falls squarely in the ‘Lost World‘ sub-Genre of speculative fiction. And that begs comparison to the first novel to ever be classified as such and the first english fiction novel to be set in Africa, King Solomon’s Mines.

King Solomon’s Mines by Henry Rider Haggard was also a contemporary breakthrough when it was published and went on to become critically acclaimed but only after the author struggled to find a publisher for being ‘a complete novelty’. While the story of Solomon’s Mines isn’t an exact parallel to AVATAR, it does feature similar elements and themes like the ‘native’ heroine befriending and saving the lives of our protagonists, and people from a distant land coming to pillage the ‘lost world’ for minerals and resources. Unlike many contemporary novels of the time which are now critiqued for blatant disrespect and negative portrayals of native cultures, Haggard diverged by showing duality, black Africans as heroes and heroines. His novel was also among the first to depict an interracial relationship, between the characters of Foulata and Captain Good.

King Solomon’s Mines has been adapted to film no less than five times in the 20th century and once in 2004 starring American actor Patrick Swayze. While I doubt Cameron was directly influenced by the actual novel or film, the ‘lost world genre’ itself owes a lot to this book, it’s characters and ideology. Other novels that are associated with the lost world genre include Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, Michael Crichton’s Congo and Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

Jame’s Cameron’s AVATAR was released on December 16th, 2009 in the United States and opens Internationally this weekend.