The Times‘ Dave Itzkoff has a cool front page piece on the controversies swirling around Avatar in which I hold forth on, among other things, the use of allegory in Cameron’s films:

Ms. Keegan said that it was possible to read “The Terminator,” his breakthrough 1984 movie, as an anti-technology polemic, an anti-war film or a modern gloss on the birth of Jesus.

“Or,” she said, “ you could just watch it as a movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger stomps around like a robot.”

The also story quotes sci fi site io9’s editor, Annalee Newitz, who wrote one of the sharpest cultural critiques of Avatar I’ve read yet.