Director James Cameron says audiences don't have to look to the stars to find resonance for his sci-fi blockbuster "Avatar," which returns to theaters Friday with nine more minutes of footage.
They can find a big, oozing parallel right in the Gulf of Mexico.
"The BP mess is a classic example of how our energy policies, or lack thereof, are going to hurt us," Cameron recently told the Daily News. A symptom of the same corporate greed that drove the fictional RDA Corporation to pillage the planet Pandora in the film, he said.
Cameron had a close-up view of the environmental devastation in the first few weeks after the April 20 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion. In early June, the 56-year-old writer-director-producer convened with a group of 25 experts who came up with a suggestion of a method to plug the leaking wellhead that had been spewing one million gallons of oil a day. After ignoring his group's report, BP successfully adopted an almost identical method two months later.
"Lots of technologies were offered to us. They were thoroughly evaluate by a team of industry engineers," BP spokesman Robert Wine responded by email. "We did have some contact with James Cameron. His technologies were not suitable."
But Cameron said the the oil giant has been running roughshod over the EPA, Coast Guard and scientific experts since the early days of the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history. He points to the use of the toxic dispersant, Corexit - BP says it weighed the risks and had government approval - and the company's blockade of outside inspection of the wellhead site.