For a film that promised to be nothing more than yet another Hollywood blockbuster - with the added attraction of 3-D technology - James Cameron's Avatar has provoked surprisingly vitriolic reactions. Greens, Catholics, public thinkers and even international heads of state are all lining up to slug it out over the real meaning of the film. Simplistic and one-dimensional claptrap from the director of Titanic? Hell, no!
A futuristic, sci-fi eco-epic that is set on a distant planet called Pandora, Avatar features Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a wheelchair-bound soldier who works for an evil corporation bent on extracting a valuable mineral, even if it means killing off the native tribe of Na'vi who live right on top of it.
The Na'vi are 10ft tall, blue and live in perfect harmony with nature. In order to steal their mineral, Jake is linked by a neural network to an artificially created body known as an avatar and sent into their midst. Naturally, things go awry: he falls in love with a beautiful Na'vi female, goes native and leads the resistance against the evil corporation and its army of bloodthirsty marines.
You'd think no one could take this seriously. And yet here's David Brooks, the respected rightwinger and New York Times columnist, denouncing Avatar as a new version of the insidious "white messiah" myth, where the hero goes native and leads "a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilisation". He also found the film offensive because it "rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic".
Other conservatives are disgusted by what they see as the film's blatant anti-Americanism, claiming the Canadian-born Cameron is offering a critique of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. You and I may see blue people, they see subversive peaceniks - indeed, according to John Podhoretz, the neocon columnist, the film promotes a "hatred of American institutions".
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Worst of all, in his eyes, it asks the audience "to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency", which neatly ties in with the view of America's military establishment. Colonel Bryan Salas, public affairs officer for the US Marine Corps, accused the film of taking "sophomoric shots at our military culture" and stereotyping marines as thuggish automatons.
All this fire from the right should surely endear the film to the left. Wrong. Armond White, the black American film critic, declares the film is "racist" because it shows that native people can't do their own fighting and need a white man to do it for them- well, actually a white man trying to pass for blue. Hold on, does that make Avatar doubly racist?
Forget the jungle adventure angle, the film is actually about a white man trying to "assuage his racial, political, sexual and historical guilt".
White goes on to suggest the hero surrenders his life as a human being to live as an avatar because of a "guilt-ridden 9/11 death wish".
For George Monbiot, the British environmentalist, Avatar is about the war that has been waged against the native peoples of the Americas. "Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas," claims Monbiot, "the American nations were founded on them." Is it me, or has Cameron just become the Edward Said of our age?
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Evo Morales, Bolivia's socialist president, would agree with Monbiot. He has praised Avatar for its "profound show of resistance to capitalism". Obviously the God squad hasn't held back either - the Vatican has attacked the film for trying to replace "divinity with nature", while Hindus have expressed worries about Cameron's use of the term Avatar because it's so central to their beliefs.
My favourite claim has to be one posted online: "There's an underlying subtext to Avatar that's not being discussed: the planet doesn't need humanity. Humanity needs Earth to survive. But Earth doesn't need humanity to survive." How very profound.
Why are the deepest thinkers clustering about Avatar with their theories? Presumably because it has made so much money - already more than $1.4 billion (£862m) at the box office - and that means it must have an impact on the way the rest of us, shallow people, think.
But Cameron's films are something you take with a pinch of popcorn. I suggest we lighten up, sit back and enjoy. Because the whole thing is actually about people losing their homes and the collapse of the property market. Isn't it?