Avatar (2009 film) and Boris Strugatsky, which are set in the 22nd century on a forested world called Pandora with a sentient indigenous species called the Nave. Various reviews have compared "Avatar" to the films "", "Pocahontas" and "The Last Samurai." NPR's "Morning Edition" has compared the film to a montage of tropes, with one commentator stating that "Avatar" was made by "mixing a bunch of film scripts in a blender". Gary Westfahl wrote that "the science fiction story that most closely resembles "Avatar" has to be Ursula Le Guin's novella "The Word for World Is Forest" (1972), another epic about a benevolent
Avatar (2009 film) added that "the Na'vi represent something that is our higher selves, or our aspirational selves, what we would like to think we are" and that even though there are good humans within the film, the humans "represent what we know to be the parts of ourselves that are trashing our world and maybe condemning ourselves to a grim future". Cameron acknowledges that "Avatar" implicitly criticizes the United States' role in the Iraq War and the impersonal nature of mechanized warfare in general. In reference to the use of the term "shock and awe" in the film, Cameron said, "We know