[COLUMN] Avatar Proves It's James Cameron's World, We're Just Living In It | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

NOTE: This piece contains some broad spoilers for the latest Avatar film, Fire and Ash. If you’re looking for a recommendation, it’s fine. It’s a mess of a movie. It has some incredible sequences and bold dramatic choices, but the nature of the film means that it structurally feels quite repetitive of The Way of Water. Still, it is an incredible piece of spectacle and if you are going to watch it, it is absolutely worth seeing in the best, biggest format.

There is a remarkable tension in James Cameron’s Avatar movies, a tension which threatens to boil over in Fire and Ash.

On one level, the Avatar movies are remarkably straightforward blockbusters with impressively linear plots and clear meat-and-potatoes understanding of concepts like set-up and pay-off. For example, early in Fire and Ash, the young human Spider (Jack Champion) ignores the warning that the oxygen supply on his mask is getting low, vowing to change it in a few minutes. Naturally, there follows a high-stakes action set piece in which Spider’s dwindling air supply becomes a point of tension.

Similarly, the Na’vi Ronal (Kate Winslet) has been quite visibly pregnant for both The Way of Water and Fire and Ash, two movies that were originally conceived as one single movie, so inevitably the climax of the movie features an incredibly tense and emotional beat in which Ronal gives birth at the worst possible moment in the midst of massive carnage. For the most part, the Avatar films signpost where they are heading, and then they go there. The gun placed on the mantle in the first act is inevitably and reliably discharged in the third.

This sense of reliable familiarity is somewhat compounded by the sense that the decision to split The Way of Water and Fire and Ash in two led Cameron to tread some water. Although there are obvious differences in scale between the two movies, both The Way of Water and Fire and Ash lead to two massive sea-based battles involving whaling fleets and the coastal tribe. It does feel a little narratively repetitive, which is a surreal thing to say about movies that are so gigantic that each one is an event.

This leads to a set of common criticisms of the Avatar films, likening them to “Fern Gully in space” or “Dances With Smurfs.” There are certainly valid criticisms to be made of the films’ handling of indigenous stereotypes and archetypes, but to criticise the films for their run-of-the-mill plots is to miss the point. It’s not a problem the Avatar movies don’t hinge on big twists, wry subversions or surprise reveals, just a reflection of how “plot-brained” modern pop culture discourse has become.

It is actually a good thing that these movies are so easy to follow, and not just because it’s nice to have a big seasonal blockbuster that can appeal to both grandparents and grandchildren that might not be easily sold on something like Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. The very simple story structure and rhythms of the Avatar films give director and creator James Cameron considerable leeway to indulge his more distinct and idiosyncratic sensibilities.

After all, it’s tempting to wonder what the difference is between a film like James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash or Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine. These are both big movies within big brands with huge budgets and an avowedly populist sensibility. Setting aside the difference in terms of craft – in that the Avatar movies look good – the big difference is that while the Avatar movies are undoubtedly four-quadrant crowd-pleasing spectacles, they are also bespoke and personal.

The Way of Water might be a gigantic science-fiction spectacle, but it is also drawn from Cameron’s own life. As Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) uproots his family to move them to an ocean culture half-way across the surface of Pandora, it’s hard not to think about Cameron moving his own family to New Zealand to make the Avatar sequels. Jake’s journey in The Way of Water, and his relationship to his children, evokes Cameron’s experience getting notes on parenting from his own kids.

By Fire and Ash, Jake and his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have created a blended family, including their biological son Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), the abandoned human child Spider, and the mysterious Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), who was a miracle born from the womb if the Na’vi avatar created for scientist Grace Augustine (also Weaver). This feels drawn from Cameron’s own life, which includes a large family that includes children from his and his wife’s previous marriages and another that they took in and later adopted.

Given how much of Fire and Ash leans on the character of Spider, and the tension that exists between his adoptive father Jake and his biological father Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), there is a solid reading of the movie that Fire and Ash is effectively a film about co-parenting with the single worst guy you know while trying to make it work for the sake of the kid. Amid all the special effects and mythology, it’s a solid emotional hook into the story.

For all that these are fairly straight-down-the-middle blockbusters that hit all of their marks, there is a surprising emotional depth to them and their focus on the Sully family. Fire and Ash allows Neytiri some genuinely complicated emotions, as she grieves the loss of her eldest son, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters). Neytiri is allowed moments of resentment towards Spider, the son of her enemy that she took into her home, and towards her children’s mixed race status, which marks them as outsiders.

These aren’t the kinds of emotions that characters – and especially heroes and especially mothers – are often allowed to express within the confines of a crowd-pleasing spectacle. Other four-quadrant blockbusters would hesitate before allowing a mother to express her anger towards her adopted son or to voice frustration at what her husband passed down to their children. However, these moments do not make Neytiri evil or villainous. Instead, they grant her depth and complexity.

This clean structure and personal emotional core gives the Avatar movies a sense of clarity that allows Cameron a lot of room for his own surreal digressions. Cameron’s been stewing on ideas related to Avatar since he was a teenager, and one can see traces of it in his early doodles. Some observers might complain that Cameron has given decades of his life to Pandora, but the truth is that art is not a service industry.

This is what Cameron wants to do, and that passion shines through in a way that is absent from any of the Terminator sequels that the director has half-heartedly endorsed or promoted. The Avatar movies may not be masterpieces. They may not be Cameron’s best work. However, it is strange to hear complaints about those movies that pit them against other projects that Cameron would have to be convinced to make at gunpoint. These movies are his, and Cameron bleeds into them.

Cameron’s digressions within an otherwise linear and familiar plot are the best parts of these movies. The Way of Water and Fire and Ash seem to have been split into two separate movies primarily so The Way of Water could devote its entire second act to exploring the underwater ecosystems of Pandora and introducing supporting characters like Payakan the Whale, but those are unironically the best parts of The Way of Water. “You the man, Payakan!” shouts Lo’ak early in Fire and Ash, and he’s correct. Payakan is the man.

There is an endearing strangeness to Cameron’s Avatar movies, reflecting the filmmaker’s distinct sensibilities. Much like the best parts of The Way of Water are the digressions into Pandora’s aquatic environs, Fire and Ash really comes to life with the introduction of Varang (Oona Chapman), the leader of a new tribe of Na’vi who have forsaken the values and culture of the rest of the species, living as marauders and raiders, committing acts of violence and savagery.

As in the original Avatar, the portrayal of Varang and her people veers into the broad clichés evoking historical portrayals of indigenous populations in popular cinema. This clan are truly “savages.” They are animalistic and brutal. They cannot be reasoned with. They kill without reason, targeting civilians and traders. They even rip the braids from the heads of their victims, evoking tales of Native Americans scalping their targets, ignoring the role European settlers played in encouraging it.

The most interesting strand of Fire and Ash focuses on the relationship between Quaritch and Varang. Quaritch is a former marine who has been reincarnated in a Na’vi body, and who works for the human forces seeking to colonize Pandora. He has specifically been tasked with hunting down Sully. In furtherance of this end, he strikes up an alliance with Varang, who effectively inducts him into her tribe. The two become allies and then become lovers.

This is very obviously a parallel with the arc between Jake and Neytiri in the original Avatar, where Jake was a marine sent by Quaritch to infiltrate Na’vi society, only to fall in love and betray his oath. That is itself part of a long rich tradition of colonial and postcolonial fantasy, stories about European settlers who are embraced by indigenous communities so completely that they basically become part of the tribe, often taking a lover along the way.

This trope was particularly prevalent during the 1990s, with movies like Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves or Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. It is perhaps too much to describe these as “white savior” narratives, given that these stories inevitably build to the displacement of the indigenous population by the settlers, but they at least served to exculpate the white members of the audience by presenting a white protagonist who was not complicit in genocide.

Cameron is in some ways a product of that same wave of 1990s Californian liberalism that informed Dances with Wolves or The Last of the Mohicans. There is a decidedly “New Age” sensibility to the Avatar movies that feels of a piece with Chris Carter’s work on The X-Files or Michael Piller’s stewardship of Star Trek: Voyager, and reflected in Cameron’s other interests like environmentalism. Tellingly, both Cameron and Costner both advocated on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

Avatar feels like a concept firmly rooted in the 1990s. If nothing else, Spider is an extremely 1990s-coded character. Cameron himself has acknowledged that the series evokes familiar tropes like “the noble savage.” It’s not unconscious and it’s not subtle. As such, the original Avatar is part of that storytelling tradition, and arguably even more of a “white savior” narrative given that Jake was actually able to lead the Na’vi in a successful war against the human colonists.

To give credit where it’s due, both The Way of Water and Fire and Ash make some effort to complicate that premise by exploring the long-term consequences of Jake’s actions and by exploring Neytiri’s complicated emotional response to them while affording the planet’s indigenous population a much larger say in the action that drives the film. It feels like Avatar is building to a point where Jake Sully is no longer necessary.

The sequels’ treatment of Quaritch is part of this attempt to retroactively complicate the franchise’s starting premise. In The Way of Water, Quaritch experiences many of the same wonders that Jake did on his journey to the heart of Na’vi culture, such as riding a banshee. In Fire and Ash, Quaritch even strikes up a romantic relationship with an indigenous woman. Given how these stories work, there is an expectation that Quaritch will experience the same awakening of conscience that Jake did.

Instead, Fire and Ash takes a few sharp left turns with this pairing. Pulling the same trick that he did in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Cameron effectively takes a story beat that the audience recognizes from the first film and inverts it. In Terminator 2, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s unstoppable cyborg killing machine was reimagined as the hero, flipping expectations. In Fire and Ash, Cameron plays out an epic colonial romance between a settler and an indigenous woman that is anything but redemptive.

Quaritch and Varang clearly share an attraction for one another. Quaritch welcomes Varang and her tribe into the human settlement. When General Ardmore (Edie Falco) reprimands Quaritch, Varang gets angry on his behalf. However, this relationship does not bode well for Pandora or its indigenous population. It doesn’t even bode well for Varang. In many ways, the relationship between Quaritch and Varang feels truer to the relationship between colonizer and native than that of Jake and Neytiri.

Quaritch arms Varang and her tribe, using them as proxies to fight humanity’s larger war. History is full of stories about tribes that aligned themselves with colonial powers, only to find themselves betrayed by those powers once they had served their purpose. The Iroquois allied themselves to the British settlers, only for the British to cede large portions of Iroquois lands to the revolutionaries in the Treaty of Paris without consultation, forcing the tribe to migrate North to Canada.

The relationship between Quaritch and Varang is interesting, serving as something of a commentary on the story at the center of the original Avatar and in some ways deconstructing the colonial fantasy of the white settler redeemed through the love of an indigenous woman. It is complicated by the film’s somewhat broad portrayal of Varang and her tribe, but that is part of the beauty of Cameron’s work. It is messy and contradictory. That’s what makes it compelling.

If nothing else, it is quite something to watch a series of gigantic crowd-pleasing blockbusters that seem to advocate for the extinction of humanity as a species. The first film ends with the humans exiled from Pandora, sent “back to their dying world.” There is an incredible moment late in Fire and Ash where Kiri finally manages to connect with the world-mind of Pandora itself, Eywa, attaining a level of bliss and harmony with nature beneath the oceans. Then her eyes bolt open.

“Kill them,” Kiri commands the planet’s eco-system of the human visitors. “Kill them all.” As has been noted, there is a certain bloodthirstiness humming beneath the surface of the Avatar franchise, “one of the most bellicose trilogies of movies ostensibly aimed at kids.” In an era of blockbusters that insist that villainous world leaders just need the love of their daughters or that reconciliation is only possible through confession, there is something refreshingly appealing in Cameron’s bluntness.

As much as some fans of Cameron’s early work might balk at his Avatar films, these are very clear evolutions of his themes and interests. They are spiritual companions to the Vietnam allegory woven into Aliens, only this time aligned with the aliens. The climax of Fire and Ash, as a water-based godlike alien casts its judgment upon humanity, is clearly in conversation with a similar beat at the end of The Abyss, albeit the product of three more decades of reflection.

Fire and Ash is interesting because it feels like the point at which Cameron’s clean storytelling interests are most at odds with his weirdo sensibilities, where the film’s various detours and pet interests threaten to build to a critical mass that might derail the movie around them. It is a film with higher highs and bigger swings than either Avatar or The Way of Water, but with the result that Cameron has to push the plot even harder into safer configurations to compensate. There’s a real push and pull within the movie.

Cameron’s Avatar movies are not necessarily the height of narrative sophistication. However, they are interesting and bespoke blockbusters, the work of a singular artist exploring his own interests, at a time when mainstream pop culture is becoming increasingly homogenous. James Cameron, we see you.