So have you never heard of the West India company? Because that's basically what this was

And the humans had been there for a quarter century already

Edit: To clarify, it's mentioned in the script and the source book that the company wanted to exploit the Na'vi as a source of cheap labor... at first.

Point being that it's about colonialism more than corporations, though the part that corporations play in colonialism is (rightfully) ragged on.

Just to add onto what Khuutra said, any history class on empirialism will show how driving a force coporations were in the expansion.  How do you think explorers (and thus, conquerors) were financed?  Hint: It wasn't only through royalty.  This remains true from the early exploration of the 1500s to the exploitation of Africa and India in the 1800s.

Also, about their focus on Hometree, it was stated early on in the movie the tree was on top of the largest unobtanium deposit within 100 clicks (presumably miles).  It took them 3 months during the movie (and who knows how long beforehand) to reach Hometree.  Going anywhere else would have taken much longer.

It was a bit hazing on the security forces, but it seems like they were part of a Military unit, the "Hired Mercs" comment kinda threw me off for a sec, but after watching it again, it seems that the Governmental Agency on Earth is providing the defense forces to protect the corporation to do their thing....that is colonialism, imho.

While I understand and agree with what you're saying, I also strongly sympathise with Mafoo.  It often seems implied in media that because corporations want to be profitable, they will always descend to immorality/violence/raping & pillaging.

Aside from generally painting business people as immoral jerks, which seems unfair given that they're as individual as anyone else, it also carries the message that--from a business standpoint--such tactics make sense.  As Avatar demonstrates, there's a hefty potential downside to calling in the mercs.

And while I don't begrudge Avatar, or any other individual work, from having villainous corporations, it does seem to be an archetype that's pervaded popular culture without much to counterbalance it.  You don't often see heroes who've come from the business world, or if they do, it's usually that they're escaping it or fighting against it.  And that's too bad given that, in reality, so many of us will wind up in business.

As Mafoo pointed out, all of this amounts to reinforcing an idea that seeking monetary success is bad.  Which... I don't think is a great message, really.

This is a fair point, but approaching colonialism without this perspective would be disingenuous, or even dishonest. That's just what the corporate role in colonialism has historically been.

So the way companies were 600 years ago and the way they act today should be the same?

I could have made the same movie, but used the Catholic Church instead. I could have raped and murdered the people as I drove to there resources, and then said "this is how it would be done, because this is how the Catholic Church did it in the 1200's."

The world has changed. While it's true that Apple could probably make more money if the US invaded a 3rd world country and enslaved it's people so they can mine minerals and make Mac Book Pro's, I don't think that's a business decision that Steve Jobs, or the shareholders are looking into.

The world has become educated, and in doing so, it has made ever educated human on earth more sympathetic to those who are not like them, unless your a corporate executive. This is the message of Hollywood at the moment.

I just watched District 9, and it's another example of this.

Yeah, that was somthing that I felt wanting in Avatar too.  I found it less distracting in District 9 because it felt more plausible in context, and the feeling was very much that the corporate actions were frowned on when disclosed, as well as the contemporary setting coupled with a plausible position of discrimination made more sense.

In Avatar, I just felt Cameron played rather shamlessely to popular steroptypes, something he's been guilty of in the past, and by doing so rendered the whole film more on an analogy rather than something genuinely trying to explore the real implications of his created situation - i.e. how might we behave with enough progress to travel to another star vs let's just drop behaviour from the past and stick in into this future setting.  As a result the more interesting SF elements such as the networked planet, became mere maguffins, there for plot points but totally unexplored in the narrative, and for me diminished the film as a true SF film for me.

In the end, while a good film with amazing visuals and a few fantastic sequences, it rather wasted its setting to simply retell by analogy what would be better handled in another way.

I wouldn't hold your breath, though for anything better.  Expensive films for the most part mean a lot of consideration for the character of the average Joe in the streets and their predisposed biases, and then pandering to them rather than actually trying to edcuate and change them.

Occasionally you'll get a situation where a Kubrick get's to make something like 2001 or Ridley Scott a Blade Runner or a David Lean a Lawrence of Arabia, but mostly expensive films mean lowest common denominator plots and characters.

World's changed and we're more educated, eh?

Can you tell me the last time we had some good, old-fashiond colonialism in its first stages?

(here is a hint: it wasn't 600 years ago)

When and what are you referring too?

I'm not really sure! I don't have a comprehensive knowledge of colonial history, because there's so much of it. Even if we ignore things like the second Sino-Japanese War or the Algerian War, there's still the Anglo-Zulu war which took place in the 1890's.

Colonialism is dying, but it's not dead. It's not going to be dead for a long time, and its current fall from its former position is a result of a concerted international effort to decolonialize on the part of all major nations in the wake of World War II. Remember Hong Kong? Wasn't released from British rule until 1997.

The thing about colonialism in a modern context is that there's international pressures, including human rights organizations and the more humanely minded major world powers, that keep colonial efforts in check - in theory, anyway. The world has become hostile to colonialism on a large scale (we don't tend to look at southeast Asia much anymore, though some of us are still pissed off about Tibet) because it results in the death of cultures and the suppression of human rights.

That's not going to be the case for a place like Pandora, which exists under no international treaties except those which govern all of space, has no standing under human rights charters, and is invisible to the majority of the public because we can't afford to bring more than a few thousand humans there ever (according to Cameron, the cost of taking something to Pandora is ~$1 million per pound). The setup created in this sci-fi universe is exactly like that which lead to exploitative colonization by the British Empire in Africe i the 19th and 20th centuries.

My point being here is that we're making a concerted effort to lessen colonization in the world today, but those efforts exist under current circumstances and may change in the future, and would not extend beyond the power base of the constituent nations who push for decolonization.

I guess I'm trying to say

I don't see a return to colonization as unrealistic