Everyone in Avatar: The Way of Water is secretly fighting the same battle

There was a major conflict at work in Avatar: The Road of Water, and it’s not about the confrontation between humanity and the tall blue alien cat people known as the Na’vi, or the tension between characters who want to bond with the planet Pandora and those who want to tear apart the planet. Crush it to exploit its resources. Those two battles are the main parts of the story. So are the tensions between fathers and sons, and between the different ways of life among the different Na’vi clans. Individual characters are also torn as they try to navigate between their immediate desires and what is best for their family, community or future.

But there is a conflict that connects all these themes, thematically and conceptually. It is more abstract than most of them, and harder to see than the obvious battles fought with words and weapons. But it shows up in many ways throughout the more than three-hour story, and it’s most emphasized at the end of the film, when director James Cameron and his co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver , directly bring it to the top. . What really connects many of the film’s plot themes is the tension between respecting the past and letting it go.

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for Avatar: The Way of Water.]

Image: 20th century film studio

firstly Avatar put that idea straight into the heart of the story. Right from the start, Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), wounded in combat, says his initial goodbye to his original body. His consciousness is transformed into an avatar, a Na’vi body created using the DNA of his twin brother, Tom. (He had to say goodbye to his brother at the same time – he was put on the avatar show when Tom died.) As Jake bonded with the local Na’vi and found freedom and friendship on the planet Pandora, he questions his allegiance and has given up his sense of duty to the planet and his masters, giving up military service and human relations to complete his mission. become a Pandoran native. His crisis of conscience about what his people are doing to Pandora is at the heart of Avatarbut his decision to let go of the past and embrace the future as a Na’vi feels fulfilled and final.

water path makes the relationship between the past and the future much more complicated. The first is Jake, hunted by his former employers who are obsessed with killing him – which endangers his Na’vi mate Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), their children and anyone who protects them. Jake was willing to leave his humanity behind in the first movie, but throughout the sequel, he’s haunted by his human past and how it torments him. More than any other character in the movie, he’s sure of his relationship with his previous life – he wants to get rid of it entirely, but he sees that as not an option. The connection between his human life and his Na’vi life also arises in more subtle ways, like the way he treats his family as a small military unit under his command. commander, gave them orders, expected his children to call him “sir,” and focused on discipline and military etiquette in their upbringing, to the point that a relative ended up complaining that they were his family, not his team.

This theme is much more apparent in his most immediate nemesis, Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a cloned version of the Neytiri foe killed in the first season. Avatar. The original Quaritch brusquely informs his cloned descendant via a recorded video message that they are not the same person — but the clone Quaritch, who has the personality of the original Quaritch and nearly all of the characters. his memory, clearly struggles with that idea throughout the story. He is shocked to encounter the remains of his original human body, and he obsess about avenging himself. He smashed his own skull in the past in a public statement to his team, showing them that he doesn’t feel attached to his former human body—but then he spends the whole movie to compromise his duty on behalf of Quaritch’s original son, Spider (Jack Champion).

The connection between the Clone Quaritch and the Spider is the most visible manifestation of the past versus future theme throughout. water path. Spider — a human child who wanted to be Na’vi so much that he painted Na’vi stripes on his body and hissed like a wet cat when angry or defensive – claiming to have no connection whatsoever. any connection or feelings to Clone Quaritch . And the cloned father shouldn’t look down on his own son and try to pretend that either. But both contradict themselves about the connection they feel, and both go against their better judgment and sell off their own safety and future to help each other. . Neither of them can completely let go of the past they never had with each other, or the bond between them.

The theme runs through the film in various small ways. When Neytiri learned that she had to leave her people behind to keep her kids safe, she rebelled angrily and gave a speech about not being able to give up on tradition and greatness. family to start a new life elsewhere. Her adopted daughter, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), from a mysterious origin, and spends the entire film fending off questions about her origins and reflecting on it privately. After that, the past caught up with Kiri strongly and even communicated with her directly. Jake and Neytiri’s troubled son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) is so burdened by the feeling that he has failed Jake that he leaves his family, giving up any possible future as a role. was the model son he thought Jake wanted. But those perceived failures dogged him until he couldn’t move forward in his own direction, he was just relying on the past.

And when Lo’ak finds a companion he’s comfortable with, it’s a tulkun — a Wise Pandoran Whale – who is burdened with his own past and cannot see the future. Tulkun, Payakan, is an exile among his people for reasons that make him feel guilty and lonely. His history adorns the Na’vi perception of him so thoroughly that they cannot tell who he really is, only what they have decided that his history says about him. Payakan feels burdened by his past choices. The Na’vi couldn’t ignore it, so they allowed it to jeopardize his future.

Dealing with history and inner conflict is a common enough theme in any story with complicated characters—it’s a believable idea, since we all have to navigate history. ourselves in figuring out who we are, who we want to be, and whether we can find a way to get there. But it is particularly notable as a theme in water path because a lot of these characters deny who they are, who they are or what they want. And a lot of them spend the whole movie going back and forth between choices, performing an action and then either guessing or taking the action back, or just stopping at the choice altogether. . Clone Quaritch is the most visible face for that subject, with the words “I’m not really your father except me, except that I don’t care, except I care”. Spider came in second, reflecting his father’s inner debate.

Image: 20th century film studio

All water pathThe characters of ‘s are fighting similar inner battles, and it feels like a particularly appropriate top-level theme for a movie that’s already clearly about moving from the past to the present. future and from a finished story to an open-ended one. It’s pretty clear that the Avatar movies will follow in the footsteps of so many other recent franchises, and gradually shift the story from the original generation to the rising younger generation. That idea has been a cultural obsession with long-form American storytelling for more than a decade now, with everyone from Captain America arrive Original Ghostbusters arrive third Star Wars trilogy shifting narrative duties from legacy characters to new ones. Like plan for avatar 3 – and maybe avatar 4 and 5depending on box office revenue – becoming more clear, it looks like Jake and Neytiri will step back and let their kids run the show. (How Spider-Man works remains to be seen—whether he transforms into the series’ Kylo Ren by imitating the villain or tries to turn his father into the light side of the Force, like Luke Skywalker.)

That’s enough for the time being water path leads to the need to accept change, whether that means letting go of the burdens of the past or accepting them and finding a way forward respecting them. The film doesn’t have a message urging people to ignore their personal histories or accept them entirely. Different characters find their way forward in different ways, depending on what they most need to cling to to feel fulfilled. For some, that means accepting tough family ties. For others, it means letting them go.

And in the final scenes of the film, Jake and Neytiri let go of the one they love, but find some temporary peace with their grief, at the climax of the idea of ​​connecting all the main characters. . During the narration, Jake talks about how Eywa, the spirit of the planet Pandora, remembers all of her children and that nothing is really lost. There is a funeral, and a ceremony where the body of the dead is returned to Pandora.

But while it is a solemn and sad occasion, the writers deliver the message that the past is always with us, as long as we choose to remember the one we love. Jake taps into Eywa’s memory, re-experiences a meaningful moment with the deceased, and feels comfortable with it. He can’t get away from what happened, but at least he can take steps to re-find the emotional balance between it. And while avatar 3 sure to come back to him trying to leave the past behind and Quaritch trying to make him suffer because of it, they finally took steps to resolve their internal battle. different characters in avatar 2 take different messages from their history, and fight it in different ways, with varying degrees of success. But they all find their way forward — and that becomes the focus of the film more than any other battle being fought on screen.