What I find more interesting about these two polar opposite ideologies is that each side’s gripe completely and totally offsets the others. For example:
LIBERAL BLOW HARD: I liked Avatar’s special effects, but found the way that Cameron insinuated that people of color can’t survive or even continue to exist without the leadership of white men to be rather racist.
OTHER PERSON: You mean, until the white man decided to trade in his white skin for blue, right? That part, the part where the white guy decided that the colored people were better than he was, seems like it might suggest a different line of thinking.
Granted, the liberal (or conservative) in question won’t acknowledge the validity of your point, but it’s worth a shot anyway, if only for the Avatar equivalent of the chicken-or-egg problem that might ensue.
The funny thing is that, in pre-production, I know Cameron and his producers spent a lot of time determining what color to make the Na’Vi. The conversation probably went something like this:
JAMES CAMERON: Let’s see, if we make them red, people will think that the Na’Vi are like American Indians. If we make them yellow, people will think that we’re making a statement about Asians. We can’t make the Na’Vi black, brown or white, because that will allow for people to think that we’re making some racial statement, which we’re not. What colors aren’t actively associated with any ethnic groupings of humans?
JON LANDAU: Green and blue.
JAMES CAMERON: I like blue better.*** Let’s go with that. No one can have a problem with a group of blue natives outside of Gargamel, right?
*** Cameron has actually come out on the record saying that one of the major reasons that the Na’Vi are colored the way that they are is because he likes the color blue.
However, the most entertainingly over-the-top response to Avatar comes from a non-profit group at the University of California, San Francisco who told the New York Times (read the article) that one element of Avatar was “like someone just put a bunch of plutonium in the water supply.” 
There are many aspects of Avatar that I could potentially see as offensive to different groups of people. Mothers of Tweens might be upset at the violence included in the film; arbitrators might feel strongly about the fact that no one ever bothered to ask the Na’Vi if they’d mind if the RDA corporation took some unobtainium before the RDA’s military might began a regiment of ethnic cleansing; watching an American corporation put more value to a natural resource than human or Na’Vi life may have also struck a nerve with certain members of society; and fans of gravity and other laws of physics might have had some problems with the liberties that Cameron took when creating a range of floating mountains on Pandora.
But the non-profit group at hand didn’t seem to have an issue with any of these elements of the film. Nope. The Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco (CFTCREUCSF) has a problem with the fact that the character of Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) smokes and once asks for a cigarette.
That act—and that act alone—was enough for CFTCREUCSF’s director, Stanton A. Glantz, to state that “this is like someone just put a bunch of plutonium in the water supply.”
The reason for Glantz and the CFTCREUCSF’s mind-bogglingly criticism of Avatar is the belief that children watching the film will be so overcome by Augustine’s love of her cigarettes that they will leave the theaters and instantly develop a taste for Camel Lights. Me? I think it’s slightly more likely that the kids will leave theaters wanting to commit mass genocide than smoke, but who is to say.
As Gregg Easterbrook observantly pointed out on espn.com: are we “supposed to believe that showing smoking in the movies is bad because viewers are impressionable, but glorifying violence on screen is fine because viewers are not impressionable?”
I can’t lay claim to knowing how many children, if any, will take up smoking because of Avatar’s presentation of it—lord knows that many people have been inspired to do many things because ‘Signourney Weaver’s doing it’—but I would have to assume that it is significantly lower than the number of broken bones and injuries caused by Iron Man and The Dark Knight inspired superhero imitators.
It’s possible, though doubtful, that I too might have had problems with certain elements of Avatar. None of these took root with me though, because it’s hard to take anything that seriously when you have a 70 year old man sitting next to you in the theater, elbowing you in the ribs and asking you things like, “Hey, do you have any desire to ride one of those dragon birds? That looks like fun.”
