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Talk of this film's racist undertones is sophistry; the interesting subtext here is about institutions. The film depicts a future social order that completely lacks an independent politics; the only institutions that appear to have survived are corporations (we get to know an intergalactic mining corporation pretty well) and a semi-autonomous but powerless scientific establishment. Then there's a military that occupies itself exclusively with facilitating commercial endeavors, a situation which in part resembles first wave European colonialism. The people with power in the film are the corporate stooge and the general, but it's occasionally easy to forget that the general, whose official title is "Head of Security," isn't a politician.

Indeed, he sounds all too obviously like a Bush-era politician when he speaks to his troops: "We can’t wait. Our only security lies in preemptive attack. We will fight terror with terror." What's the point of this? I think the thesis is admonitory: the contemporary concern about special interests interfering with the democratic political process may be a distraction. In Cameron's view, a greater threat posed to the future by the market system is the alignment of commercial and military interests to the exclusion of politics altogether. And where would this alignment leave the individual, the citizen? Damned to consuming the "Lite beer and shopping channel" of Jake Sully's scorn?

The film's most harrowing line is at the beginning, during the funeral scene: "Your brother represented a significant investment." Pretty bleak. But then again, so is sleeping in the forest.