Chapter One: Dreams of Flight
In James Cameron’s dreamworld of stereoscopic sight, he’s always centered the act of seeing. Just watch the opening and closing shots; first, as the camera plunges through a magical rainforest wreathed in fog, a spectacle that mind-melds the film’s point of view with our own. And last, in a close-up of newly reopened eyes, breaking the fourth wall as they gaze right at us. It’s the visual equivalent of “I see you,” the Na’vi phrase of deep, spiritual bonding. Avatar has always been a conduit for radical, transportive empathy––Cameron doesn’t want us to walk in his character’s shoes, he wants us to fly in them.
Crossing floating mountains and jungles that glow, Avatar (2009) can hit your system like an audiovisual intoxicant, a shared dream that harkens back to the very origins of cinema itself, when we still went to the theater to discover something exhilarating and new. Traveling to Pandora recalls the Cinema of Attractions from early film, where the price of a ticket served up travelogues of far-flung destinations normally beyond reach. It conjures up the showmanship of Georges Méliès, whose A Trip to the Moon (1902) was a precursor to Cameron’s love of techno-trickery and trompe-l’œil visuals, the kind of ecstatic imagery fit for stories meant to sweep us off our feet.
At its best, Avatar can have the feel of an opiate, as though the cartoon-big mushrooms sprouting on Pandora’s forest floor have us tripping, a journey to an undiscovered country as dreamily overgrown as Brobdingnag in Gulliver’s Travels. It’s what Michael Mann meant when, in his note for why he awesomely included Avatar on his list for Sight and Sound’s 2012 poll of filmmakers and critics, he exclaimed that it “stones and transports you.”
Cameron pulls just as readily from the mythopoetic titans J.R.R. Tolkien, George Lucas, and Hayao Miyazaki, who remade classic myths into richly personal narratives with zeitgeist appeal. With a cosmology of his own, Cameron’s project isn’t far from what Wes Anderson imagined when he remarked Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) could start a religion—an idea reinforced by Guillermo del Toro when he praised his buddy Cameron, saying “there are very few Americans that have created a full mythology.” With action films about transcending the boundaries of love, time, race and death, Cameron is a final practitioner of a certain kind of popular art, where myth, emotion, and epic spectacle are effortlessly intertwined.
All the better for a story so nobly, naively aspirational, where the blue, nine-foot-tall Na’vi embody Cameron’s deep love of nature and interconnection. That theme has never been more emotional than in the destruction of Home Tree, the towering sanctuary of the forest-dwelling Omatikaya. As a sequence, it’s long been compared to the falling of the Twin Towers, but the film’s outpour of heartache is more spiritually connected to Tolkien, for no author has so dearly loved everything that grows, and likewise saw in nature the animism of the divine.
In a moment when our media is often poisoned by irony, the earnest emotion of the Avatar series seems almost revolutionary, a New Sincerity for a global audience. We begin with a hero falling in love, transition to the perils of parenting, and end in the afterlife. Sons inherit the sins of their fathers, and fathers remain clueless in how to show love for their sons. Despairing mothers turn to religion to cope with the death of a child, and a fae girl sees God. There are also dinosaurs with the head of a hammerhead shark and lagoons with glistening fairies, and everyone is a cat. The Avatar films are deeply silly and completely serious, and I’ve cried at them all.
Chapter Two: All the Best Pandorans Have Daddy Issues
It’s no wonder that Avatar became the sun around which Cameron’s lifelong interests began to orbit; in one series he can be ethnographer and zoologist, tech-maverick and mariner, dreamer and dramatist. With Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)—the end of one trilogy and the potential beginning of another—he made the darkest, most complex, and personal of the three. Cameron has long been accused of a certain cognitive dissonance in his work, with films that are aggressively masculine but virtually all love stories (“I came across time for you, Sarah”), and foregrounds women in a way atypical for Hollywood. There’s the tug-of-war between his intense environmentalism and a boyish desire to fetishize gatling guns and flamethrowers, a divide that was never more obvious than in the battles on Pandora. With Fire and Ash, he’s interwoven those contradictions into a daring family saga, this time using Pandora as a backdrop for the struggles of marriage and toxic parenthood through the crucible of war.
While Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) were warriors in Avatar, they’re now parents of four. Jake dotes on his ethereal daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), trusts his dutiful son Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), and pays little mind to young Tuk (Trinity Bliss). But it’s his relationship with his rebellious teen son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) that causes the most strife, a tense dynamic that strikes at the heart of how many children have never felt seen, or seen, by their fathers. Cameron has admitted that these dynamics were born from his own family life as a father whose disciplinary tactics met resistance at home. And as the villainous RDA, the “sky people,” return with plans to colonize Pandora, the Sully family is pushed to the brink.
Avatar may have been a Manichean conflict, but the sequels complicate and scramble, and the action revolves around parents and children and the difficulty of knowing how to rear them. Both sequels—but especially Fire and Ash—sweat under narrative load, what some have called messy. The grievance is fair, but for Cameron it’s the cost of having an ensemble as dense as the leaves on a Pandoran tree, who each suffer familiar hardships exaggerated by wartime; Tuk keeps getting captured, Lo’ak triggers deadly shootouts by disobeying dad, and Spider gets taken by the RDA twice––riffing on every parent’s nightmare that their children will get into trouble the second you take your eye off them.
Responding to that pressure, Jake runs his family like a military unit. Neytiri pleads, “This is not a squad, it is a family,” and pushes against Jake’s bravado as a pater familias whose every word demands obedience. Jake ignores her and pays the price––the more he tries to hold his family together, the more fractured it consequently becomes. As a parent, he’s arrogant and unlistening, and constantly pressures Lo’ak to follow orders, to obey. But just like every kid under a domineering father, Lo’ak continues to rebel. We all become our parents, and the tragedy is that Jake can’t see it: he and his son are more alike than either realize. In Avatar, Jake ignored military command to continue helping the Na’vi, while Lo’ak mostly ignored his father to rescue his siblings and help his whalefriend Payakan. But all he gets is scorn and belittlement, further pushing them apart. Lo’ak loves his father and may even want to be him; that confusing mix of anger and admiration is a tension all too common between sons and their fathers.
For Jake, his strident parenting makes sense: after all, his family is now in interminable danger. Most of us don’t grow up in the fire of war, but the premise speaks to a core parental dilemma: when to toughen your kids and when to nurture them. Many choose wrong. His combination of macho-masculinity, military programming, and love of Na’vi spiritual tradition served him well in Avatar, empowering him to resist his human foes. But in living out those same contradictory qualities on the homefront, he frequently inflicts pain on his family, and sets a harmful example of violence, strength, and discipline above love, empathy, or mindfulness. It’s the same dramatic engine Sarah Connor faced in raising John in Terminator 2 (1991), who’s quicker to check her son for bullet wounds than to give him a hug.
We feel that in the earliest scenes of Fire and Ash, as Jake insists on the necessity of firearms to resist the invading sky people, violating the Na’vi rule of using no metal. But he just as often acts as a missionary for the holy power of their living planet, repeatedly hoping to convert his enemies by telling them to see. By Na’vi standards, that makes him a kind of cafeteria pantheist, a zealot who only visits tribal ceremonies on the holidays.
Lo’ak feels those dissonances most, and during an emotional low, he holds a rifle to his skull. It’s a shocking scene, one unusually grim for an expensive studio blockbuster, and it shows the tragic fallout of a father whose seemingly good intentions blind him from the emotional inheritance he leaves his children. Consider that when we first meet present-day Lo’ak in The Way of Water (2022), he’s already raiding a trove of guns, at once disobeying his dad while desperately trying to earn his respect. When Neteyam asked his brother if he even knew how to use one of the plundered weapons, Lo’ak’s answer speaks volumes: he brags, “Dad taught me.”
Worse, what prompted Lo’ak’s near-suicide came from Jake’s slip that he blames his son for the death of Neteyam in the climax of The Way of Water, a battle that began because Lo’ak saved Payakan. It’s a heinous admission, particularly when Jake previously declared, “a father protects, it’s what gives him meaning,” a sentiment Neytiri later throws in his face when she admits she blames him, and not Lo’ak, for their son’s passing. Jake can’t have it both ways; if he’s the family’s grand protector, responsibility flows up, not down.
Jake finally accepts Lo’ak on his own martial terms, as Lo’ak helps convince the whalelike Tulkun to fight. To his Marine mindset, it’s what finally lets him see his son. Jake’s fatherly love is conditional: Lo’ak is only worth what he brings to the battlefield. Even his terms of endearment are in the syntax of military jargon; he needs his “wingman.” Many felt frustrated when Lo’ak and Jake’s relationship backslid from The Way of Water, when they briefly saw eye-to-eye—but many fathers and sons have shared fleeting moments of mutual understanding only to relapse into a baseline of enmity. So much of growing up is accepting that your parents have a limited vantage through which they can see you, and it’s up to you whether to let them.
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Cameron risks his characters seeming ugly and human, like us––and stages trials of faith that test the moral core of who they truly are. Neytiri clings to her love of Eywa (the Na’vi’s living deity) in the wake of her son’s death, while Jake’s faith is rooted in soil and stone. Jake begs his rival Quaritch to accept the light of Eywa and see, but all Quaritch sees is the new villain, the sultry fire-witch Varang (Oona Chaplin). She has beliefs of her own, and rebels against Eywa for letting a volcano burn her Mangkwan village. Questioning who God saves is the splintered cross of all religion, and Varang’s wrath towards Eywa’s selective salvation is one of the film’s many examples of heroes who use their faith to justify any action.
These ideas explode in Fire and Ash’s most intense sequence, when Jake guides Spider into the woods to kill him. Thanks to Kiri’s forest-magic, Spider can breathe Pandora’s air, and the sky people hunt him as a cure for their oxygen-dependent lungs. In a clear allusion to the Binding of Isaac, Jake’s conviction in his violent heart is tested; after seeing Quaritch and the Mangkwan have joined forces, he becomes convinced sacrificing the boy is the only way to stop the human’s colonizing Pandora. In the Bible, God tested the limits of Abraham’s devotion. In Fire and Ash, Jake’s desperate plan initially sounds like a coldly utilitarian bit of calculus, but listen to his words in the moments before he’s about to cut Spider’s throat:
“Great Mother, are you here?”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Guide my hand.”
“Please don’t do this.”
“Give me strength.”
“Just stop. Please. Stop. Please.”
“Don’t look at me. Please don’t look at me. Forgive me, son.”
“I’ll be good.”
“May your spirit go to Eywa.”
“I promise.”
“May your body return to the forest.”
“Please, Dad.”
“To preserve the great balance, may the ancestors welcome you.”
A lot of damage is done in the name of belief. Varang may command her warriors to self-immolate in kamikaze assaults, but it’s Jake, our hero, our surrogate, our avatar, who comes inches from killing a boy who might as well be his son in the name of his god.
The question of violence smolders through Fire and Ash, and we feel every trigger-pull and explosion. The Way of Water had a cautious view towards violence, which saw Neytiri go on a reckless killing spree and nearly execute Spider. The Tulkun, revealed to be wiser and more intelligent than humans or Na’vi, are pacifists who deeply believe that “killing only leads to more killing.” Fire and Ash sees Cameron embrace the necessity of violent resistance, as long as it’s the right kind––Jake reluctantly resumes the mantle of Toruk Makto to rally the disparate forest and ocean tribes into a grand army simultaneously to protect Spider to a final stand for their survival.
In another parallel to Tolkien, the Tulkun change their minds and rally to war, after learning that one of their kin had been mutilated by the sky people. It’s the same sequence of events that leads to the March of the Ents in The Two Towers, who confer by Ent Moot only to discover their own kin have been felled: “Many of these trees were my friends, creatures I had known from nut and acorn.” Cameron, like Tolkien, tries to differentiate the moral ideal of nonviolence from fighting for existential survival, the rare just cause of bloodshed. It’s an ugly business, and for a series known for its bleeding heart moralism, it accepts the high cost of self-defense. It speaks to the film’s knotty ethics that multiple societies act out of desperation rather than simple, unchecked greed, with varying levels of moral justification.
Despite the bloodshed, it’s Neytiri who finds a spark of hope inside the eye of the final battle’s hurricane. She begins Fire and Ash in a dark place; she resents Spider for his “pink-skin” and admits to vile prejudices against her own interspecies children. It’s only after she’s gone undercover as a crimson-painted Mangkwan to break Jake out from Bridgehead prison that she experiences her moment of change. As she washes the tribal colors in the river, she watches the red pigments stain her hands, a haunting echo of Lo’ak’s hands covered in Netayam’s blood in The Way of Water. From then on, she accepts Spider as the son he’s always been. But her arc truly ends later, as Ronal (Kate Winslet) is about to give birth. She rushes to help the delivery, a great coming together of maternal care superseding antagonism and war. Ronal passes during childbirth, but Neytiri was still able to bring a new life into the world after living with so much death. It’s a heartening end to Fire and Ash’s gauntlet of challenged convictions, as each character grasps for a new understanding of who they really are.
Chapter Three: Reputation
It doesn’t matter that Cameron dares to deepen and expand his storytelling, Avatar is Avatar and that means people will snicker––they’ll say it’s beautiful but boring, the dialogue sucks, the performances are uneven, and the plot is just a variation of Pocahontas (1995), Ferngully (1992) and Dances with Wolves (1990) in space. If they wanted a killshot, they’d say it’s an uncomfortable blend of ‘60s counterculture with ‘90s liberal politics, eye-rollingly tree-huggy and thuddingly obvious in its commentary on colonial military power. There’s that word unobtanium, and we once more see indigenous people reduced to the noble savage, making Avatar potentially guilty of the racism it professes to critique, and The Way of Water and Fire and Ash are just more of the same. And there has never been––and never will be––the faintest glow of cultural impact.
But for all the complaining that the Avatar films are recycled, they are actually proudly, deliriously weird. It’s a pop-surrealism hidden behind a veneer of familiar storytelling so slick and surefooted you never quite notice that the films are about a planetary hive mind, and that embarrassingly hot aliens with tentacled ponytails called kuru sync their consciousnesses with six-legged wolves and tropic-tinted dragons that do battle with mecha that wield bowie knives. Teenage boys befriend depressed whales who spread revolutionary fervor, you commune with your ancestors via tendrils of glowing wisteria, and when you make love, you fuck tentacle-on-tentacle.
Cameron’s laser-brained enthusiasm goes a long way, and though there are methods to his madness, I hold it against no one if Avatar doesn’t click. But I wonder, has anyone regurgitating those comparisons watched these movies? Pocahontas ends with John Smith rescued by Pocahontas herself, while Dances with Wolves isn’t about a white savior so much as white failure, where a handsome hero flees civilian life for a native tribe he is helplessly unable to save. These are stories of small victories within big defeats, and outside of the most superficial elements (a caucasian man learns to hunt with a tribe and falls in love with an indigenous woman, and so on), they are different in form and function.
More rewarding is to see how the Avatar films are also westerns, albeit of the space-fantasy type, about colonizing invaders who displace indigenous tribes to plunder fertile frontiers. The Way of Water begins with a spaceship called the Manifest Destiny destroying the verdant terrain it lands on, and a time jump to the Sully family has them pulling a train heist. Fire and Ash characterizes the Tulkun as metaphors for an indigenous society as much as they represent the killing of the buffalo, a point reinforced in a climax that hinges on their genocide––quick profits to further expand human reach.
If there must be reference points, look instead to John Ford. Sean Fennessy pointed to Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), relating the film’s depiction of the British arming indigenous groups to Quaritch gifting guns to Varang’s ravening army; the reborn Quaritch takes on the role of Ethan Edwards from The Searchers (1956), a man who becomes what he believes he hates. Just as Ethan quests for his kin that’s “gone native,” Quaritch bears a son housed with the Sully clan who dresses in a Tarzan (1999) loincloth and dreads. Both are close cousins to One Battle After Another’s (2025) Colonel Lockjaw, a movie with more than one debt to Cameron’s work. In all cases, there is an existential impossibility of resolving their racism with their paternity, and they end their journeys alone or dead in the wilderness.
Jake Sully is a savior only in that he believes himself to be one; it was Eywa who saved the planet, not him. While he tamed the dragon Toruk and led the Na’vi to battle, Eywa scanned his memories to discover the true threat we possess. On Earth, we killed our Mother. It was only by witnessing the ravaging of our planet that Eywa broke her laws of omniscient watchfulness and divinely intervened, summoning hordes of her creatures to cast the sky people out of paradise. It’s as if the aliens in The Abyss (1989) followed through on their threats and drowned us in an avalanche of sea, a Biblical judgement from on high. To put it another way: Jake didn’t save the Na’vi, he only showed their deity that we deserve to die.
In fact, it’s always been sneakily subversive, and often overlooked, that the highest-grossing movie of all time is not of one man saving another race, but of a human abandoning his. Jake Sully doesn’t simply defend the “other,” he becomes it. Every cinematic gesture in Avatar connects our experience to that journey of alterity, from how Cameron cuts to screen-enveloping tunnels of psychedelic light when Jake jumps to his avatar host (another centering of seeing), to the way Pandora itself is expressively engineered around Jake’s arc, and, thus, our own. Cameron’s massively popular film has tricked millions of people into rooting for their species’ extinction.
It is exactly this crisis that Quaritch couldn’t overcome, pulled between the two halves of his identity. Jake repeatedly pleads with him to change sides, but he’s one to talk; eventually, the resurrected Quaritch is a more attentive, caring father to Spider than Jake ever was to his sons. Sure, Quartich arrests Spider and throws him in jail (twice), but then dads are always a little awkward making plans with the kids. Quaritch not only “brochta burger” to Spider, he giddily confesses he’s proud of him, that he’s an amazing kid, that he has guts, smarts, and the heart of a lion. It’s everything Lo’ak would ever desire to hear, the son who, when alone with the great, sad whale Payakan, excitedly pointed to the star nearest Earth––his dad’s home.
Quaritch may have embraced the progeny of his “dead man’s memories,” but he already rejected his humanity and doesn’t even seem to know it. While tripping, Quaritch confesses to Varang that he no longer honors the chain of command––he obeys only himself. That evolving identity is made more explicit when he shows up to a strategy meeting in Mangkwan regalia, nearly nude and marked red. Some have been disappointed at Quaritch’s bathetic jump to nowhere, his “Disney death.” But it’s a gesture reminiscent of the ending to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), when the pain of resolving competing identities cuts too deep, so he leaps.
To help cohere those winding arcs, Cameron uses repetition between films to bind his trilogy together. We may think of Lucas’ everlasting “it rhymes,” but Tolkien did it first, and better. The first half of The Fellowship of the Ring intentionally recreates the structure of The Hobbit, with Frodo’s journey foiling Bilbo’s through a parallel structure of episodic cliffhangers between moments of safety. Each adventure involves mountains with hidden doors, a respite at Rivendell, and a return home with very different ends. It’s how Tolkien shows us his Middle-earth has begun to darken––with the mischief and delight we remember in slow fade. One of the most common criticisms of the sequels is how The Way of Water restages sections of Avatar while Fire and Ash echoes both, but each foil further dimensionalizes new shades of difference between Jake, Quaritch, and their families.
There are the parallels between Jake and his kids, with initially familiar beats evolving in new directions––Jake’s run from the Thanator in Avatar is repeated with Lo’ak fleeing from oceanic predators, and just as that led to Jake meeting Neytiri and falling in love, Lo’ak meets Payakan in loneliness; just as Jake stood in wonder when will-o’-the-wisp spirits encircled him, Kiri zens when they float around her, rejoicing at the majesty of her Eden. Eventually, she saves Spider like the tree-sorceress she is. Quaritch’s arc mirrors Jake’s, inverting his hero’s journey; he walks in Jake’s footsteps, but with each footfall becomes more twisted; when he bonds with Varang, it isn’t on dragonback but over a shared love firepower and a desire to watch things burn. It’s another anecdote sprung from Cameron’s life, who once took a date firing AK-47s in the desert with a woman he later married.
Knowing Cameron brought his family struggles into this science fantasy saga, it’s incredibly moving that he’s now staged multiple battles where parents must be saved by their children. In The Way of Water, the abduction of the Sully kids triggers the final fight, only to then see them rescue their parents from a flooding warship. Fire and Ash goes further, as Cameron allows Jake victory over his human forebears (with some help from the Tulkun); once Quaritch and the Ash arrive and the fight turns, the young fighters must not only protect their parents, but also must lead the Na’vi to victory. With the help of her siblings, Kiri uses her wyrding powers to commune with Eywa and cast the sky people out once more, as the next generation redeems the old.
Chapter Four: Do Whales Dream of Style Over Substance?
When a tangerine drake sweeps over crashing waves and Simon Franglen’s musical score is in full thunder, what do you feel? The pleasure of Avatar as a series has always been pausing for the beauty and awe of flight, of swimming with whales and eels and otters, of falling in love, of firing a super-sized arrow through helicopter cockpits, of Ikran chomping sky people to pieces mid-air, and of that magnificent Trotskyist whale, Payakan, smashing his enemies to smithereens. The producers of Avatar wanted to truncate Jake’s first flight, complaining that it took too long. Cameron fought for it, saying, “I want to see it,” and by knowing he wanted to, he trusted his gut that the audience would as well. It’s an attitude that speaks to Avatar’s desire to immerse us, what we can call its style.
It’s a question: when encountering an off-key line of dialogue, are you the kind of viewer who groans and checks out? Or do you barely notice because you’re hypnotized by the way the light bounced off that perfectly rendered leaf, or the smooth color curve of golden sunsets on blue skin? What is the power of a moment? Cameron’s greatest talent has always been in knowing how to mount his stories into feats of breathless experience, like a mechanical father and surrogate son bonding on the back of a roaring motorcycle, or Jack and Rose clinging for life on the tilting stern of the doomed Titanic. Neither is as uniquely Cameron as my favorite moment in The Way of Water, as Quaritch holds his human skull in his hands, clasping it like Blade Runner Hamlet, meditating on who he should become.
Style over substance has always been a false binary—you cannot divide one from the other. “Style” signifies nothing more than a form of expression, what David Bordwell would call the poetics of film. You cannot separate a story from the way in which it’s told, for it’s in the telling that it moves us; words, images, sounds. The best theatrical experiences have always allowed those qualities to overwhelm us—like Cameron’s early favorite Doctor Zhivago (1965), in which the visual and historical sweep serves as a conductor for war-torn romance, or art-house favorites like Jeanne Dielman (1975) or Sátántangó (1994), in which the durational element becomes an act of compelling captivity. It’s a point Cameron, whose films have always been designed as an audiovisual rush, frequently makes. At the movies, the theater screen has dominance over you, not the other way around. It’s an ethos that oddly recalls when the traditional Latin mass changed to English after the Vatican II council in 1964. Dogma purists protested the reversal of the position of the priest from one facing the altar—and thus facing God—to one facing the people, leaving God at his back. Watching Avatar on the biggest and best screens, you still face the altar.
Rather than style over substance, a more apt phrase is motivated style––whether the mode of expression has successfully aestheticized the story itself, a thing that depends on content as much as context. I once felt The Tree of Life (2011) was guilty of style over substance, a pretentious and anti-audience use of time. Now I can’t watch it without sobbing; the so-called substance was something I could only see after I lost enough family, and suddenly it made sense in the most heartbreaking terms. Which is to say, The Tree of Life and its floating camera that prays to the heavens didn’t change; I did.
Avatar’s you-are-really-there style becomes part of its substance. We live through Jake Sully with vicarious force, and the effect is hyperimmersive and haptic; through his eyes, we can imagine how it feels to touch lollipop ferns, or how the crags of Ikran snouts feel to the hand. But it’s deeper too, for the closer our experience is enmeshed with Jake’s, the more we then believe he’s part of Pandora’s ecosystem, the more we believe he’s falling in love, the more we believe he will defend those forests and peaks, and the more certain we are he would abandon his humanity to defend it all. That same logic informs the dendritic sprawl of the characters in the sequels, forming a mélange of moments that deliver contact highs of their adventures.
It’s why these films have so often been described as an experience, and speaks to Cameron’s mastery of large-scale digital cinema. He knows what to ground and what to embellish––it would be easy to make each frame a perfectly composed super-image. Instead, Avatar is shot as if the director were an imaginary cameraman on Earth’s most expensive location shoot, struggling to keep up. Cameron abandoned his beloved steadicam for a handheld camera that is reactive and free, emphasizing the impact of physical action over beauty shots, with intentionally “imperfect” frames. He has the discipline to blow a shot’s highlights to help create a feeling of diegetic photoreality; he lets a couple skies look just so-so, neither gorgeous nor grave. With few exceptions, any “camera setup” could have been done physically, if only the computer-generated Pandora were real. Cameron favors wide lenses to immerse his characters in the photoreal environments, then cuts to a more intimate shallow focus lens for close-ups, while always lingering on plant, animal and sky. He saves his painterly tableaus for key moments, like the gorgeous frame of Jake and Neytiri swimming through a bioluminescent stream as their romance deepens. Thus, along with a preternatural sense of how foliage, wildlife, and water should look and feel, Avatar captures the patina of reality in a way so few digital worlds ever do.
Watching any Avatar, it’s easy to forget what you’re watching isn’t actually there. That’s most felt with Cameron’s astonishing set-pieces, which use disciplined cutting patterns that show cause-and-effect between frames. Rather than indulge in show-off shots that call attention to themselves (where many makers of digital worlds go wrong), Cameron’s shots are punchy and quick, without indulging in camera moves that are elaborate or “float-y.” It’s easy to track how a loosed arrow or cresting Tulkun moves between shots, which not only makes it easy to follow the ultra-dynamic action, but also constantly re-emphasizes Pandora as a real place. It’s part of why Cameron’s finales, which usually begin with characters in chase only to wind up in a closed-off confrontation (he’s still a horror filmmaker at heart), stay thrillingly lucid where so many become digital noise.
Just look at the staggering battle climax of The Way of Water, the apotheosis of his cine-style and a masterclass of digital action. In a fan-favorite sequence, Cameron uses four camera setups to cleanly follow Payakan as he attacks RDA troops atop the Seadragon flagship. It begins with a high-angle wide shot to establish the geography, and the troops fire at Payakan from a platform above him; next, a lower angle shows Payakan’s tail about to thrash into that platform; Cameron cuts to a reverse-angle to continue that same action and shows them flying into the air; finally, a master shot of the ship in the warzone, those troops still mid-air, placing the scene into an epic cross-fold of war action. The more we key into the causal relationship of Payakan and his victims, the more we believe in Payakan period, and the more anchored this larger-than-life character is within a believable digital canvas.
When people say “never doubt James Cameron,” the rousing kinetics of joyously legible action are part of what they mean. In Fire and Ash, the best set-piece comes at the two-hour mark, when Neytiri sneaks into Bridgehead, igniting massive explosions around the base. Part of the excitement is seeing Neytiri in a distinctly human––or to her, alien––space, flying through metal platforms on her Ikran while dodging Varang on her tail, another example of how few filmmakers are better at merging character, setting and theme into an electrifying whole.
Yet, in Fire and Ash, a Biblical epic about mourning and tested faith, Cameron evolves that heightened but naturalistic aesthetic to embody the baroque tenebrism reminiscent of religious art. Lo’ak’s voiceover signals this shift; he says his mom sings the songcords of grief at the daily eclipse “because the light always returns,” as the camera pans to show Neytiri bathed in beams of volumetric light. These radiant pillars recur throughout Fire and Ash: we see them in Quaritch’s visit to Varang’s tent, Jake’s reunion with the great Toruk, Ronal begging Kiri to save the people, the Binding of Spider, and in the caverns above the Metkayina as they wait to attack. Likewise, Cameron brings in new virtual lenses to create bespoke effects with light, like the twinkling bokeh behind Jake as he debates with Neytiri whether they should kill Spider, heightening the visual tension of the moment.
That renewed expressionism plays out in the locations too, which are bigger and moodier, and allow a pulp-surrealism the others didn’t. When Kiri finally sees a vision of Eywa in Fire and Ash’s finale, she encounters the face of a huge auroral Water Child turning towards her. But the most spectacular example comes in the Flux Devil near the Metkiyina spirit tree, a massive skyward helix of pink-violet light that sucks in whatever is near like a hungry tornado––including all guns and metal––as spiralling streams of water, fire, and pure energy float in corkscrew around levitating rocks. If this is the end of the Avatar series, there could have been no better backdrop for the series’ final fight, turning the elements themselves into flying metaphors for violence, destruction, and the renewal that follows.
Chapter Five: Together, We See
While working on the Avatar sequels, Cameron and his co-writers (Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman, and Shane Salerno) produced a screenplay that they enjoyed, but despite rousing space battles and a strong story arc, they threw it out. It wasn’t the plot or themes that failed to satisfy Cameron, but the lack of a third aspect, what he called “a dreamlike sense of a yearning to be there,” a kind of spiritualism that penetrates the subconscious and puts the viewer into a mesmeric dream state.
They began again, and what we got is The Way of Water and Fire and Ash, as well as two more screenplays in waiting. It’s appropriate, then, that the Avatar series’ final act of seeing comes inside a realm of dreams. Like Frodo traveling to the Grey Havens, Spider has been given a rare gift––he will be the first human to connect with the grand spirit tree and commune with Eywa, letting him visit an astral plane where every person, living and dead, co-exists in celestial harmony. We quickly cut into a shot of Spider’s point of view: he’s running towards a resurrected Home Tree, resurrected like the Titanic at the end of Titanic, the camera bobbing up and down with his steps. Once inside the green citadel, he’s embraced by friends and family, who stand with the tribesmen of past and present.
As Avatar and its first sequel ended with iconic images of eyes looking right at us, it’s meaningful that Fire and Ash, possibly the end of the franchise, finishes with our eyes looking in. Spider, like us, has been made one of the people. We zoom outwards to a view of the whole planet, and we see a branching bower of lights and life that engulfs all of Pandora, Cameron’s paradise of empathetic sight, a hope that may never come to pass.
For now, we’ll have to settle for the next best thing, what Avatar was always destined to embody in the first place. If philosopher Kendall Walton is correct that the intense emotion we experience with film is an act of adult make-believe, then that’s a kind of spiritualism too; it’s a belief in something greater and more mysterious than ourselves, and as we scream, cry, and laugh with Jake and his family, we become as interconnected as they have with Eywa. And in that shared dream known as the movies, we’re flying too.