Space Operas and Human Folly—Pandora, Perelandra, and the Fall of Man

I’m old enough to remember when James Cameron’s Avatar was a surprisingly controversial topic of discussion. My Evangelical Tea-Party supporting family regarded the film with relative disdain, ignoring it in theaters and disregarding its knee-jerk, manipulative form of liberal white guilt. To this day, I still meet conservative film buffs who brag that they’ve never watched it.

The release of its immediate sequel 13 years later raises curious questions, though. The film is being dropped on a world more deeply inundated with fanatical progressivism, special effects blockbusters, and hundreds of sequels. Avatar: The Way of Water feels quaint in that sense, with Cameron dedicating over three hours of screen time to propagandizing the evils of whaling (the humans return to Pandora because they want to mine the chemicals from inside whale brains that can make rich people immortal). 

My general apathy going into the film has evidently been unrewarded, though. Despite an egregious price tag in excess of half a billion dollars, the film has managed to turn a profit. It is about to become the seventh film in history to break $2 billion internationally at the box office. James Cameron certainly knows something I don’t, given that he’s made three of the most successful blockbuster films of all time (I should add that Avatar: The Way of Water is a good movie—if one that feels inconclusive with five sequels waiting in the wings).

That doesn’t mean James Cameron’s version of progressive prognostication isn’t out of step in 2023. His Obama-era progressive values are just the air we breathe now. He has nothing new to add that society didn’t learn from Star Trek IV, the one with the whales. If anything, his ideas are subversive to the modern progressive filmgoer that prioritizes anti-heteronormativity and radical diversity. The movie has actually gotten some faint praise from conservatives for its pro-family stance.

Twitter has been replete with indigenous activists accusing Cameron of racism for coding his blue alien creations after native tribal cultures and not casting non-white actors. Former Feminist Frequency writer Jonathan Macintosh even went as far as to accuse the film of toxic masculinity, saying that its central character should have gone to therapy as opposed to embracing “protector masculinity” by trying to shield his family from conflict during an interstellar space war.

Regardless, the most interesting element of the new film comes from one of its newest characters. Set years after the first film, original protagonist Jake Sully has been fully embraced by the Navi culture, has taken a wife, and built a family of four children, two of whom are adopted. One of them is a curious miracle child named Kiri, who is immaculately conceived from the stasis avatar body of Sigourney Weaver’s character from the first movie and has a curious connection to nature and the mother goddess deep within the planet.

Kiri doesn’t complete her story arc in this film. It abruptly ends shortly after she reveals to her father that she can feel the Gaia-like force deep within the planet, and accidentally short-circuits her brain by attempting to connect her neural tail to a memory tree. Her powers will play a major role in the third film, whatever that looks like. The implications are fascinating, as she essentially serves as a feminine messiah figure for her planet that continues to be attacked by sky demons. She is a divine feminine answer to humanity’s patriarchal messiah, and the vicious colonialist culture he played a part in creating.

What struck me in my viewing was a comparison I haven’t heard anybody else make, a similarity between Avatar to a series of books that have become much more popular in the decade since the first film, C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy.

The Space Trilogy—comprised of Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength—was a relatively unknown and underappreciated work in the great Christian apologist’s bibliography until quite recently. The majority of Lewis’s popular works are pedestrian and accessible works like Mere Christianity and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Shy of his masterpiece Till We Have Faces, The Space Trilogy is regarded as one of his most remarkable literary feats—a sprawling philosophical space opera, drawing from medieval cosmology and contemporary science fiction authors like Olaf Stapledon, that depicts Christianity philosophy as it might be understood by alien species who also have a connection to what we call God.

The books have taken off in right-wing circles in the past two years mainly because the third book in the trilogy is becoming popular as a work of prophetic dystopian fiction, given that Lewis ends the trilogy by returning his space opera to Earth to explore the ways that humanity and creation are occupied by the forces of corruption and evil, personified by the evil science corporation N.I.C.E., as it attempts to manifest scientistic dark forces on Earth. It is the masterpiece of the trilogy and essential anti-modern reading.

The first two books though are more relevant to Avatar: The Way of Water, as they similarly follow a befuddled human named Ransom as he is dragged into space and forced to explore vibrant and strange new worlds, meeting alien peoples, and becoming changed by their superior cultures— respectively Malacandra (Mars) and Perelandra (Venus).

The trilogy’s second book is a retelling of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, following Ransom’s attempt to stop a demon-possessed scientist from repeating Earth’s creation myth among a new species of two green humanoids, the Adam and Eve of a Perelandrian new civilization. Thanks to his intervention, this works, and the aliens are able to mature into creatures capable of fully living in sync with their creator, understanding his will, and growing more wondrous and more beautiful in light of it, creating an unblemished and uncorrupted future for their peoples.

Curiously, both Pandora and Perelandra stand as rebuttals to modern humanity’s corruption, but from entirely different angles. Cameron is a thoroughly modern man; the sins he identifies are political—colonialism, pollution, etc. Being an Oxford-educated philosopher and literary specialist, Lewis has a more sensible and resonant understanding of people, and his depiction of creation undefiled does more to stir the imagination.

And yet, both writers identify the salvation of their imaginary worlds as a prospective outsider, a kind of messiah. Kiri is seemingly the avatar of the mother goddess, a representation of a perfect pantheistic connection to nature that evil humans will never have, who will likely save her planet through her ability to connect to her world, control its creatures and powers, and obliterate mankind’s colonial ambitions.

Ransom is also an avatar of sorts, obeying the will of a God he struggles to understand but in service of humanity’s connection to nature, preventing the corruption that destroyed humanity’s connections in the first place. But he isn’t a strict messiah so much as a corrective, preventing his own people’s corruption from spreading and thus protecting the pureness of Perelandra—much as Jake Sully does in the original Avatar. 

The Bent One, the fallen angel Lucifer, rules over Thulcandra—the Silent Planet, Earth—and has destroyed its telepathic connection to creation. He speaks through scientists and politicians to spread himself infinitely across creation, unsatisfied, unfulfilled, and eager to destroy goodness and beauty in other worlds (much like the World Economic Forum). In doing so, he created the great cosmic mistake of human history, which will eventually be overwritten and begin the transformation of humanity into God’s perfect uncorrupted creatures.

“I see no more than beginnings in the history of the low worlds and in yours a failure to begin. You talk of evenings before the day has dawned. I set forth even now on ten thousand years of preparation. I tell you that when the last of my children has ripened and ripeness has spread from them to all the low worlds, it will be whispered that the morning is at hand.”

Both Avatar and The Space Trilogy show us alien worlds grazed by humanity’s corruption but to very different ends. Only a messiah can save Perelandra and Pandora, but they are radically different saviors—the messenger of God or the messenger of progressivism. 

The original Avatar is a masterpiece of an action filmmaking, and its sequel is even better in some respects—but it is also a precarious ode to anti-humanism that rejects original sin and posits that humanity’s greatest sin is violence against the world, all while upholding Gaia-worship and noble savage cliches as a positive alternative to the cartoonish evils of European colonialism.

It must be said that no filmmaker speaks these themes more clearly and sincerely than James Cameron, who decided nearly two decades to turn the Avatar franchise into his career-defining magnum opus. He has no way to speak these themes, though, without being manipulative and cliché, drawing on archetypes and cliches that devalue humanity in its quest for salvation. He joins the bent one in spreading his own form of corruption.

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