I’ll be the first to admit that I’m biased here.
I was in high school when Avatar came out, and all I heard was blue aliens and sci-fi. Neither interested me at the time.
Friends poked and prodded “No, you don’t understand, it’s not like that…” Yeah, sure, still aliens.
I totally missed whatever was going around with the movie when it came out.
A few years later it was on HBO and I had nothing better to do. On the shittiest box tv still working in the 2010s, I finally watched Avatar. Then I watched it again. And again.
Luckily HBO was running marathons of it or I think I would have torn my hair out. I promptly bought the extended cut with extras and interviews.
I went back to the same friends and told them a piece of my brain was missing and replaced with Pandora. They rolled their eyes and I got a lot of I-told-you-sos.
As much as I tried to talk about it, read the books, get all the information about it that I could, nothing really helped that hollow feeling in my chest.
Later on, after Way of Water came out and I was compulsively refreshing its page on Reddit, I realized that most people hadn’t felt that before Avatar.
As a kid, I was a nerd with SEVERE anxiety who lived through books and video games instead of living my life, that sensation was all too common. I felt it every time I finished a book, a game, a series that I loved…
It was awful.
In no way did it ever stop me from searching out new media.
I cried over Spirited Away, not because of the story or Chihiro or anything like that, but because I would never exist in that world, would never experience it.
Avatar felt about the same as that. Maybe worse, but I wasn’t a kid anymore and I handled it better. Slightly.
I’d been through this all before, many, many times, and I while wouldn’t say I was used to it, I knew what it was and how to deal with it.
When I read about people cutting their teeth on Avatar with that world-ending, post-narrative depression, I genuinely pitied them. Avatar is too intense a world to feel that from for the first time.
Notice I said “world,” not “story”?
Issues
Look, even die-hard Avatar fans admit that the story is a rehash of one that’s been told an infinite number of times.
Guy winds up in new culture. Falls for girl. Becomes head honcho. Wins girl. Wins against whatever conflict culture couldn’t win before him. Fin.
It’s another rehashing of the Hero’s Cycle.
Pocahontas is often brought up.
Indigenous Representation
There’s a lot of not-great noble savage and white savior tropes.
The Na’vi are primitive yet live in perfect harmony with the world and never “mess up” anything the way real people do. They are technologically paused at hunting, gathering, and wooden tools, and have a great spiritual connection to the entire planet.
The “noble savage” has been used again and again to infantilize indigenous people in media.
Jake Sully, a white dude from a different planet, has to save the indigenous people from his own by “becoming” one of them. He also ends up “better” at being a Na’vi than most Na’vi, and ends up a figure from their histories and leading a clan.
A “white savior” swooping in to fix all the problems his people started and the indigenous people can’t seem to fix themselves is, again, super infatilizing. It takes agency away from them with the added issue of making it seem like this one white person is making up for everything the rest have done so now we don’t have to think about the racial problems anymore…
Plot
I’m mentioning issues, but let’s quickly summarize the plot to refresh.
Paraplegic Marine, Jake Sully, is shipped off to the planet Pandora to pilot his dead twin brother’s avatar, a human-alien hybrid created to instill trust in the native Na’vi.
A mouthful, but I think the movie does a pretty good job of info-dumping without overwhelming us.
Or maybe I’ve watched it too many times? Also a possibility.
Battled-scarred chief of security Quaritch welcomes Jake to the deadly world of Pandora.
Jake is unwelcomed by the scientists, notably, Grace Augustine, lead of the avatar program.
Jake tries out his avatar body and gets to run and really move for the first time since he lost the use of his legs.
And then he wakes up in his old body again, jarred back to the reality that his avatar state is, literally, a dream.
Grace takes the newbies—Jake and Norm—for their first real taste of the planet. Jake gets into it with a Thanator, gets cut off from the group, and lost in the jungle.
Neytiri watches him from afar. A sign from her deity, Eywa, stays her hand when she is about to kill him.
Blundering through the jungle at night, Jake is hunted and attacked by a pack of viperwolves.
Neytiri reluctantly saves him and he trails after her like a lost puppy until another, bigger sign from Eywa shows up.
She takes him back to the Omaticaya Hometree where her parents, the tribe’s leaders, decide to keep him around to teach him. Neytiri is unwillingly made his teacher.
He wakes up from his first night with the Na’vi to the scientists hovering over his link bed.
Grace finally warms up to him as a way back to the Na’vi, but Quartich makes him a deal: spy on the Na’vi and scientists and get his legs back.
Jake dives into the world, led by Neytiri, and learns that it is as beautiful and complex as it is deadly. He falls in love with the planet, the Na’vi, and her.
Quaritch, sensing his shifting loyalties, tries to pull him out, but Jake asks for more time.
He becomes a full member of the Omaticaya clan and consummates his romance with Neytiri, only to wake to bulldozers destroying a tree sacred to their people. He fights back and stops them, but Quaritch recognizes him and pulls the plug on the avatar program.
Jake is allowed one last chance to convince the Omaticaya, he comes clean about the entire operation to destroy Hometree and his willing part in it, but also how he came to love the world he was betraying.
They take him and Grace hostage, and Quaritch bombs Hometree. Neytiri’s mother, Mo’at, frees the two before the ruins of their home falls down on them. Neytiri’s father dies in her arms.
The Omaticaya flee to the Tree of Souls, a direct link to their deity, and Jake and his human friends escape from custody. Grace is shot in the process and is severely wounded.
Jake, knowing the Omaticaya are going to be bombed again to destroy any chance of them fighting back, bonds with a legendary creature from their history to restore their faith in him.
He returns to the Omaticaya under the Tree of Souls as a figure from their legends and they accept him back. He begs for help saving Grace.
Mo’at connects her and her avatar to the Tree to try to save her, believing Eywa might permanently fuse her consciousness to her avatar. Grace tells Jake that she feels Eywa, that she’s real, but passes away.
Jake rallies the Omaticaya, then sets out to spread word to the other Na’vi clans as well. They form a resistance at the Tree.
Before the battle with the humans, Jake connects to the Tree and begs Eywa for help against them. Neytiri tells him that their goddess doesn’t take sides.
The human forces set their sights on the Tree of Souls and the Na’vi and their avatar and human allies defend the tree with Jake leading the charge.
The humans begin to gain the upper hand, and the Na’vi suffer heavy losses. When it looks like all is lost, and Neytiri is about to make her final stand, swarms of creatures burst from the wilds to assault the humans.
With their forces distracted, Jake takes out the bomb carrier and saves the Tree, but Quartitch won’t admit that it’s over.
He finds where the avatars are keeping their human bodies and tries to kill Jake’s unconscious form. Neytiri puts up a fight, but neither she nor Jake alone can stop Quartich.
He smashes the glass of the link trailer and lets in the toxic air, suffocating Jake’s human body and making him lose consciousness as an avatar.
As Quaritch is about to kill Jake’s avatar, Neytiri finally puts an arrow through his chest, but Jake is suffocating in his human body. Neytiri finds and attaches a breathing mask to him, saving his life and seeing his human form for the first time.
The human forces taken out, and with the planet itself fighting now, the Na’vi send the antagonistic species back to their own planet, letting a few scientists and avatar drivers stay.
Jake relinquishes the legendary creature back to the wild and becomes leader of the Omaticaya.
In the final scene, he and his avatar body lie connected to the Tree of Souls. Neytiri gently takes his air mask away and kisses his cheeks. The camera focuses in on Jake’s avatar and his Na’vi eyes open.
Credits roll.
Hero’s Journey: The Re-hashening
It’s not a bad story, as far as these things go.
It’s the hero’s journey, told time and again. It has its quirks, like the mentor also being the love interest, and allowing Jake to stay in the new world—but every story does.
Can you imagine how boring our media would be if we only wrote to diagrams?
As someone who always wanted the hero to stay in those magic-filled worlds (another reason Spirited Away devastated me, “What do you mean she leaves that all behind!?”), Jake getting to stay, to become part of the world, resonated.
I get that going back to the old world is a message about finding meaning in your life as it is, rather than pursuing childlike fantasies. I get that it’s a metaphor for growing up and rising out of old mindsets that previously held the character back.
That doesn’t mean every story has to have it.
Every once in a while, we can have a story that has the ending we want. Something to live vicariously through. Allow ourselves to dream of, imagine, and exist in a better, more magical world.
Some of them can end with everything we can’t have in reality.
A beautiful world, people we love surrounding us, and the evil defeated.
And it’s not like the story of Avatar was without loss and sacrifice.
Eytukan, Tsu’tey, Trudy, Grace. Hometree.
There were narrative sacrifices for the eventual resolution.
And with a film that cost so much, put so much on the line in terms of a capitalist return on investment, it had to have a “good” ending.
It’s really no surprise that the formula was familiar and the ending was “wish fulfillment.”
Setting
The true draw was the world, not the story.
The bioluminescent jungles, the floating mountains, Hometree, and the Tree of Souls. That was what we wanted and came back for again and again.
That was what the movie’s budget was spent on, not their “unknown” actors or storyboarding the plot. The world, the setting, the visuals, were literally where the money was at.
That’s certainly my favorite part.
The plot was a means to an end, and that end was making sure as many people as humanly possible would be willing to go back and watch it again and again for the world.
Actors
That’s not to say the actors didn’t sell it.
Sam Worthington as an empty-headed marine wasn’t a hard pill to swallow by any means. CCH Pounder was regal and intimidating as the spiritual leader. Sigourney Weaver grounded the movie with her performance of a sardonic yet deeply caring scientist.
Zoe Saldaña still gives me chills as Neytiri. It’s rare to see women get to physically express their anger, their rage in movies.
There’s an often-referenced interview with Elizabeth Olsen who was told to turn down her facial animation by Joss Whedon in the Avengers movies that comes to mind…
But Saldaña doesn’t hold back, in her performance or voice. She screams, she contorts, and she is never “too much.”
If there was an actor that made the movie, it was her.
It’s her who introduces us to this place, this magical world of Pandora. It’s through her that we see how the Na’vi live with the planet, not in conflict with it. She’s the one who teaches us to love this place by her own love for it.
Fixing Tropes?
This is part of that noble savage trope; an indigenous, physically attractive woman that teaches the protagonist to live in harmony with the world. But you can’t blame the actor for that.
Cameron could have done this movie without the trope. He could have made the Na’vi aware of these kinds of technology before the humans arrived, and still choose not to use it.
They could have known about farming and metalwork and chosen not to use them because their current technology was superior.
It isn’t stated in the movie, but in the supplementary media, Cameron says that Eywa gave the Na’vi three laws that inhibit their society from certain activities. No wheels, no metal, and no stacking stones.
This has led some people to believe, in addition to other details in the supplements, that the Na’vi, as old as they are in the canon, are actually older still, and were once technologically superior to humans, and also that Eywa is some kind of biologically based A.I.
It’s… a lot.
But that theory, if true, infantilizes the Na’vi instead of bringing them beyond the tropes. If the ancestral Na’vi had to put measures in place to keep them from changing the “wrong” way instead of carrying the truth of the matter through the generations, it takes agency away from the entire species.
I’ll be honest and say I hope the “manufactured hive-mind” theory isn’t true.
Noble Savage
I think it would have been better to let the modern Na’vi come to the realization on their own. To choose, rather than to be forced, to live as they do.
That would take away the “ignorance” of the trope, even if it doesn’t fix it.
Then there’s that “noble” part to consider.
The Na’vi are wise and never lash out without plenty of due cause. Before Jake calls for a war party, we only see them attack the RDA as retaliation for violence against them, living in peace away from human influence.
In the supplements, it is mentioned that, like all cultures, the Na’vi do fight and even war amongst the clans. They aren’t spiritually perfect beings that transcend the pitfalls of humanity.
That’s… a start.
The problem I see is that Eywa isn’t open to interpretation. She’s real, she’s there, and the Na’vi can, in a sense, communicate with her, meaning how they understand and revere her is uniform despite the varied cultures of the clans.
Without nuance in their guiding principles and religion, it leaves them disappointingly homogenous in that respect.
Why not have each clan focus on a different aspect of her and her tenants? That would lead to better conflicts than over territory in a massive world like Pandora with relatively few Na’vi.
We could see some morally grey characters and clans that are as ruthless as the wild and actively attack the humans to defend their people against the threat.
We could see infighting amongst clans with how they react to the humans, some wanting to trade and make alliances with them, others wanting their absolute destruction and refusing to settle for any less, and everything in between.
Maybe even clans siding with the humans for a chance at taking out old rivals or promises of territory. Or maybe even because destruction and annihilation are as much a part of nature as creation and life.
Make them varied and imperfect is what I’m saying.
White Savior
Then there’s Jake’s character.
What do we do about the white savior?
Well, for one thing, as much as I love Worthington in this role, they could have cast a person of color for it, maybe even an indigenous person whose culture had the same thing happen to it on Earth as the Na’vi are suffering on Pandora?
It would give him a stake in the game, so to speak, make him empathize with the Na’vi in a way we hadn’t seen in the soldiers and even the scientists.
That would also give him a chance to share what happened to his people, to give the Na’vi a look at what could happen, and maybe even some weaknesses in the colonizing efforts. Basically, one indigenous culture learning from and helping another.
But he still can’t just show up and be the special, deity-sent hero. An outsider can’t be the one to save the Na’vi.
Maybe instead, just like Quaritch gave him a chance to spy for something he couldn’t say no to, the Na’vi give him the same chance: spy on the humans for them. This could be some operation long in the making, something Grace and the other scientists are in on with the Na’vi at the forefront.
He’s still a marine, he’s still the person Quaritch trusts, and that’s why they ask him. He’s a double-double agent now, and his loyalties, until the end, are in question by everyone, including himself.
But the point is that he isn’t the end-all, be-all leader of the rebellion. He’s a long-awaited tool in their arsenal. A key, but not the only one.
The Chief’s Daughter
And falling in love with Neytiri? I mean, how can you resist falling in love with her in that movie? Everyone does.
But how do we avoid that “chosen one gets the indigenous girl as a prize”?
Well, we’re working on getting rid of the “chosen one” thing anyway. How do we avoid the “exotic” and “prize” aspects?
If Neytiri pursues him, it tends toward the “sexually provocative indigenous woman” and that’s not any better. It might actually be worse.
I think a less explicit romance, maybe just the hint of a budding relationship, could be better.
Jake still has to prove himself as an ally, and a person, before Neytiri starts to accept him.
Also, none of that sleeping with her and then revealing he was a double agent working against her people the entire time. That feels very… sexually deceptive, maybe?
Deception in a narrative is good, but when you add sex to it, there are different connotations and none of them are good for something that continues as a romantic and sexual relationship.
So, just the beginnings of a romance, and only after Jake’s loyalties are made crystal clear.
But, who then is the hero? Who becomes Toruk Makto and leads the disparate clans of the Na’vi in a final stand against the human colonizers?
Neytiri, of course.
Chosen One
She should be the hero of the story. She should be the leader of her people. She should be the savior, not Jake.
Her ancestor was the last Toruk Makto. She already has the lineage. She knows and understands more about her world and people than Jake ever could. It should be Neytiri to lead them.
Give her the coming of age ceremony, give her the ultimatum and push, give her the realization that she has to be the one to ride Toruk to save her people (better still, have her people waiting for Toruk Makto to rise before they act, then have her realize someone has to become Toruk Makto).
The RDA destroying Hometree is still the catalyst. Her father handing her the bow and the clan would be a transfer of power, not just responsibility.
She unites the clans, she leads the Na’vi against the humans, and she sends the aliens back to their homeworld.
Deus Ex Machina
What about Eywa in the final battle?
When Eywa “hears” them and sends the wildlife in reply, it is later called an “immune response” in Way of Water. That was a great way to put it and the perfect way to explain what happened.
Throughout Avatar, we are slowly introduced to Pandora, the entire planet, as a functioning organism. The tree roots are like neurons, everything can mentally and physically connect to other organisms on the planet. Eywa is, essentially, the planet-organism’s consciousness.
In that sense, she and the planet aren’t just nature as a concept, but a singular entity made up of infinite smaller ones. Not a hivemind, but more like the hive gives sentience to the mind.
That makes her “response,” sending the animals in to defend herself, easier to parse.
I’ve read an article that called it something along the lines of American individualism at its worst, the idea that even nature should fight for itself.
I get that. They weren’t wrong. We can’t use nature as a plot device to magic problems away. Not in real life, and we shouldn’t in stories. It’s a dangerous mindset to propagate.
“Who cares about human-made environmental collapse? Nature will fix itself.”
I’d love to say people aren’t that stupid, but I’ve heard that second sentence verbatim and without irony.
But Pandora is different.
It’s not “nature” in our planet’s sense of it. It has a consciousness, a mind. It is a singular entity, not the concept of collective natural forces.
Pandora, as Grace compared, is a brain. A brain thinks. A brain responds. A brain can fight back.
If that still isn’t enough to justify the “immune response,” fair enough.
So what if we go back to that “Jake is a key” concept?
Why not have our trump card be a fusion of human and Na’vi knowledge that sends the whole world down on the RDA? Maybe that can be Jake’s role in the battle while Neytiri leads from the front?
Why don’t we have Mo’at call on her connection to Eywa, coupled with previously unrealized human technology (or maybe human biology) to make the immune response? Concoct a vaccine, so to speak, using Jake?
Maybe there’s even a suggestion of him potentially giving his life in the process, allowing penance for his betrayal? But he miraculously survives (potentially Grace taking his “place”) and can be accepted back into the fold.
Conclusion
I think that might help the issues with the story. Maybe not all, maybe I didn’t properly fix the harmful tropes it has, but hopefully, I’m on the right path here.
I love Avatar. I love the world, I love the Na’vi, I love the cultures, I love the nature, and yes, I love the story. Because a story isn’t just a plot, it’s the characters, the setting, and a million other facets that make up, in this case, the movie.
And because I love it, I want to fix the places it falls short or is broken.
This will never be the movie, it’s just a fun little thought experiment, but it lets me consider what could have been.