Because Avatar is about as subtle as a brick to the face.
Back in 1989 James Cameron released The Abyss. It was a film about a crew of deep see drillers sent on a rescue mission to a sunken nuclear submarine, while accompanied by a team of Navy SEALS who have secret orders to retrieve the sub’s nukes. Then aliens show up.
The film was a box office disappointment, earning just short of twice its budget, typically considered the point at which a film breaks even. But over the years it would gain something of a cult following who praised it for its innovative special effects, complex characters, and heartfelt antiwar message.
And in many ways The Abyss is Cameron’s precursor to Avatar. Both films are best known for their revolutionary special effects, Avatar pioneering many CGI techniques, and The Abyss being shot largely underwater. But both films were also panned for being derivative, Avatar of Frontier stories and The Abyss of disaster movies. Fans of both have to concede that both films are incredibly unsubtle in their message. And even their Rotten Tomato scores are pretty similar.
The biggest difference is that The Abyss is a cult classic, while Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time. Which opens it up to far more criticism.
Criticisms like how the Na’vi are every Noble Savage and Magic Native American trope rolled into one. The movies’ use of the controversial Gaia Hypothesis. And of course, their incredibly unsubtle ecological, anti-capitalist, anti-military, anti-colonialism message, which condenses these complex issues into little more than two dimensional stereotypes.
And the changing political landscape didn’t help people accept the message.
As unsubtle as The Abyss was about being anti-war and anti-nuclear-weaponry, it had the benefit of an audience that grew up with the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction. People might have rolled their eyes but they all agreed that we shouldn’t nuke ourselves back to the stone age.
In comparison, both Avatar films came out during a pushback against the moral certainty of Center Left Boomer politics. A time when people began to understand that “saving the environment” came with actual, tangible, costs and that non-Western cultures had their own unique problems. A time when it was becoming increasingly apparent that all the good intentions in the world didn’t matter if all your ideas were dumb. And that even assuming people who claimed to have good intentions actually have them is an assumption.
For instance, are the dipshits throwing soup at classic paintings to “save the environment” genuinely well intentioned or just doing it for attention?
This pushback against the Left would eventually coalesce into Donald Trump winning the presidency twice, the ramifications of which are still being decided. But it also meant that when Avatar came out it was seen as technically impressive and absolutely gorgeous, but kind of cheesy and simplistic.
Like a bad episode of Star Trek but with the budget of a small 3rd world nation.
Star Trek had many great episodes. The one where Captain Janeway devolved into an amphibian and gave birth to mutant babies wasn’t one of them.