Underneath its gorgeous worldbuilding and dazzling special effects, James Cameron's 2009 phenomenon Avatar is a story with simple, yet powerful, themes: greed versus self-sacrifice, nature versus technology, good versus evil. Its characterizations, too, are simple, particularly the use of the Na'vi as an obvious proxy for Native Americans. But the Na'vi in Avatar don't really represent an authentic Indigenous people; instead, they're a colonizer's version of an Indigenous culture, complete with every Indigenous stereotype one can name and topped off with a decades-old Hollywood trope that has long outlived any utility it may have once had: the white savior.

Historically, Hollywood hasn't done a great job when it comes to representations of Indigenous cultures. In the classic westerns of the 1950s, Native Americans were commonly depicted as brutal savages who had to be killed by the white hero (and were often played by white actors in redface). Later decades saw more sympathetic portrayals of Indigenous Americans in movies like Dances With Wolves (1990), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), and even Disney's Pocahontas (1995), but all of these films still suffer from the same problematic white savior element.

RELATED: 'Avatar's Approach to Ableism Misses the Mark

'Avatar's Native American Stereotypes Define the Na'vi

Sam Worthington as Jake Sully and Zoe Saldaña as Neytiri in Avatar
Image via 20th Century Fox

Avatar is ultimately a less nuanced version of these movies, with the Na'vi serving as a stand-in for Indigenous Americans, made clear through the use of generic and superficial iconography. The Na'vi wear revealing clothing like loincloths that encourage viewers to fetishize their tall, lithe, perfectly fit bodies, and carrying on a disturbing tradition of hypersexualizing women of color (even more so than white women) in film. They have long black braids, the hairstyle stereotypically associated with Native Americans. And their weapon of choice? A bow and arrow, of course. Even the name "Na'vi" looks like James Cameron just rearranged the letters in "native."

Even more problematic, the Na'vi in Avatar fit the "noble savage" stereotype to a T. In contrast to the greedy, almost cartoonishly evil RDA, represented by the characters of Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) and administrator Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), the Na'vi are pure, innocent, uncorrupted by modernity. They use primitive technology, sleep in a giant tree, and live in perfect harmony with nature. In fact, they're so in tune with nature that they can commune psychically with animals by linking the neural whip in their braid directly to the creature's nervous system. Their striped skin and cat-like faces make them look animalistic, again indicating that, like the old Native American stereotype, they are somehow genetically more connected to the natural world.

Enter Avatar's Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), whose character beats bear a striking resemblance to those of Dances With Wolves' John Dunbar (Kevin Costner). Like Dunbar, Jake is a combat-wounded veteran who starts out working for the colonizers, but after spending more and more time with the Indigenous tribe over the course of a few months, he learns their ways, falls in love with one of their women (although in Dunbar's case, his love interest is a white woman who was taken in by the tribe as a child), and is eventually accepted as one of them.

Jake is More Na'vi Than the Na'vi

Sam Worthington as Jake Sully riding a leonopteryx in Avatar
Image via 20th Century Fox

But Jake isn't just accepted as a Na'vi in Avatar; Jake is better at being a Na'vi than the Na'vi themselves. After only three months living part-time in a Na'vi avatar, Jake successfully tames a great leonopteryx — a feat accomplished by only five Na'vi in the history of their people — and doesn't even have a particularly difficult time doing it. After this conquest, it's Jake who rallies the Na'vi in their battle against the RDA to save the Tree of Souls, and, magically, the wildlife join in the fight against the invaders. Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) interprets this as Eywa answering Jake's prayers for help, despite earlier telling him that Eywa would not take sides in the war. Jake, it seems, understands their deity better than the Na'vi do themselves.

The ending of Avatar even invites the implication that Jake will be the next king of the Omaticaya. When Neytiri's father Eytukan (Wes Studi) is killed in the attack on Hometree, his final wish is for Neytiri to become leader, and she and Jake have already been bonded for life, so when Jake's consciousness is successfully transferred to his avatar permanently, it's logical to assume that they'll reign together.

The white savior trope is nearly as old as Hollywood itself, and it still shows up in many otherwise great movies. It initially stemmed from an actual belief in white supremacy, the idea that other races needed a heroic white man to solve their problems for them. And make no mistake, this version of the trope still exists, but movies like Dances and The Last of the Mohicans do manage to present more well-rounded and complex portrayals of Native people. Instead, the white savior trope lives on in these movies because studios seemed to believe (and maybe they were right) that white audiences wouldn't turn out for films unless there was a handsome white man in the lead role.

In Avatar, Jake is both the white savior and the audience stand-in: through him, viewers get to experience the fantasy of being a Na'vi, living on the spectacularly beautiful world of Pandora, communing with the animals and spirits, and still being the hero of the story. Avatar is told from Jake's point of view, rather than that of any of the Na'vi, primarily because, like a lot of what comes out of Hollywood, it is very much a product of the colonizer's gaze. Mainstream film, to a significant degree, still depicts other cultures through a white lens and creates stories for a presumed white audience. Films like Avatar are not aiming for true authenticity, but rather for a version of authenticity that white audiences will recognize and accept, complete with a white hero at the helm.

There is a version of Avatar in an alternate universe somewhere that doesn't need a white savior, that empowers its Indigenous people to fight and win their own battles without the help of a colonizer who serendipitously falls in love with their princess. There's also a version of Avatar that makes a more sincere effort to represent a real Native culture authentically, or perhaps even creates a new culture that isn't such an on-the-nose allegory, rather than scrambling together everything the average non-Indigenous American knows about Indigenous culture and regurgitating it in the form of the Na'vi. It's practically impossible to create sci-fi or fantasy that is completely devoid of allegory, intentional or not, because creators will always draw on their own real-world knowledge and experience to build new worlds. But it is possible to explore themes of humanity's relationship to nature and the inherent conflict between corporate greed and environmentalism without using a generic, colonizer's version of Indigenous people to do it.

Avatar: The Way of Water premieres exclusively in theaters December 16.