I, like most people, don’t watch the Avatar movies to think. I go to marvel at the technical display, to giggle at the clumsy dialogue and utterly sincere execution of tropes, to clap with glee each time I’m shown a new alien life form or bioluminescent plant. It’s a simple pleasure. Pandora is like AMC: we come to this place for magic.
We certainly don’t come to this place for meaningful experiences. The plots of these movies seem now largely interchangeable. The emotional beats barely register, and when they do, it’s usually not for good reason. It occurred to me while watching Avatar: Fire and Ash that these movies are the spiritual successors to the sci-fi novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s, manyof which share the same strengths and weaknesses. They’re tired cliché stacked upon tired cliché as an excuse to hang out somewhere. Given the location on offer, it’s a shame that James Cameron keeps insisting on subjecting us to all this plot.
It is a recurring thought that Avatar would be better, more interesting, without the humans. Given that these movies aim to be explicitly anti-imperialistic screeds, that the presence of human avarice is necessary to what the franchise is doing, that suggests a problem. They’re flat, they’re boring, and the actors portraying them are in the unenviable position of delivering dialogue written by Cameron, who at least acknowledges that writing is not a strength.
Ideas, though. The man has ideas. The world of Pandora feels alive because it has been so thoroughly built out. There’s a moment of blessed brevity in Fire and Ash when a scientific explanation gets cut off, but I’m willing to bet Cameron has a dissertation on the subject in a binder in an office somewhere in New Zealand. It’s the kind of thoroughness that you can, for better and for worse, feel in the end product.
The exhaustive attention to detail makes it all the more strange that Avatar’s racial politics are so muddled. Maybe “politics” is wrong; Avatar is clearly intended as anti-imperialistic, pro-environment, and pro-“I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”. These are all admirable. Its racial praxis is a disaster. James Cameron is evidently a smart, thoughtful guy, but the whiffs just keep on whiffing. Walter Chaw’s scathing review over on Film Freak Central goes into great detail about this. I don’t agree with everything he says—“check in on your minority buddies” assumes a monolith that the box office numbers don’t back up—but it’s hard to argue with the larger points. Avatar as a series reinforces the idea of the mystical, naïve native. It invests most of its character development in the two white men who were swapped into Na’vi bodies. It appoints one of those two white men the savior of the species.
I’ve been thinking particularly about Varang, the new villain. She lives on the side of an active volcano, in an ash-covered tent only Georgia O’Keefe could do justice. She and her tribe feel notably different, the first ignoble Na’vi we’ve seen. She’s murderous, violent, impulsive, and seems incredibly smart. Self-sufficient, at least. Resourceful. Brimming with agency. She lives on the side of a volcano because an eruption burned down her tribe’s section of the jungle. Despite all her prayers, the great spirit of Pandora, Eywa, never sent help. Hers is a story of faith spurned.
I love that. It’s the kind of idea that only emerges when writers fully engage with their worlds. It makes everything about Pandora feel more alive, and it starts the work of filling in the gaps around some of the stereotypes Avatar otherwise uncritically trucks in. Varang experienced a profound violation of her beliefs and came out the other side having made a decision. That she calls guns “thunder” is boring, but it’s easier to stomach because she is a full, complex character.
Then, halfway through the movie, she is stripped of her agency. She becomes human/Na’vi hybrid Miles Quaritch’s crazy girlfriend, little more than a background character. Instead of a defined individual with her own interests, Varang regresses to a tall and blue version of Pom Klementieff’s character Paris from the Mission: Impossible franchise. That alone is not inherently a problem; Paris is one of the best parts of Dead Reckoning - Part One. But Paris is never more than a fun supporting character. Varang promises so much more in the early stretches of Fire and Ash. To strip her of that depth is to leave both her and the Na’vi as a whole poorer.
The problem with Avatar, to me at least, isn’t that Cameron draws the Na’vi from Native American and other indigenous cultures, right down to that little apostrophe. The idea that certain stories can only be told by certain people is not one I agree with. I do, however, think it is incumbent upon anyone stepping outside their realm of expertise to do the work. The issue as I see it is that Cameron pours all of his attention into the two human characters. The Na’vi are offensive and patronizing caricatures and they’re poorly realized characters. Cameron cares a great deal about Pandora, about the mythology and biology and technology of this reality he has created. In that context, he clearly cares tremendously about the Na’vi as a people. But he isn’t making a Planet Earth-style documentary. He’s telling a story. And it clears from the choices he makes in that context that he doesn’t care all that much about the Na’vi as individuals.