There is a great conflict at work Avatar: The Way of Water, and it’s not the confrontation between humanity and the big blue alien cat-people named Na’vi, or the tension between the characters who want to communicate with the planet Pandora and those who want to tear it apart to exploit its resources. These two battles are important parts of the story. So are the tensions between fathers and sons and between the different ways of life of the various Na’vi clans. Individual characters are also torn as they try to navigate between their immediate desires and what is best for their families, communities, or future.
But there is a conflict that ties all these threads thematically and conceptually. It’s more abstract than most of them and harder to spot than the obvious battles fought with words and guns. But it comes up in many ways throughout the three-plus-hour story, and it’s most underlined at the end of the film, when director James Cameron and his co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver bring it squarely to the fore. What really ties the film’s many storylines together is the tension between respecting the past and letting go.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for Avatar: The Way of Water.]
The first avatar Put that idea squarely at the heart of the story. Early on, human Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), wounded in battle, bids farewell to his original body, initially temporarily. His consciousness is shifted into an avatar form, a Na’vi body created with his twin brother Tom’s DNA. (He also has to say goodbye to his brother at the same time—he’s accepted into the Avatar program when Tom dies.) As Jake bonds with the local Na’vi and finds freedom and company on the planet Pandora, he questions his loyalty and has she let go of his sense of duty to his planet and employers, to give up his military service and human connections to become a full Pandoran. His crisis of conscience over what his people are doing to Pandora takes center stage avatarbut his decision to let go of the past and embrace his future as Na’vi ultimately feels fulfilling and final.
The way of the water makes the relationship between past and future much more complicated. First there’s Jake, who is being hunted by his former employers who are obsessed with killing him – putting his Na’vi companion Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), their children and anyone who protects them at risk. Jake willingly left his humanity behind in the first film, but throughout the sequel he is haunted by his human past and the way it haunts him. More than any other character in the film, he’s sure of his connection to his past life – he wants to escape from it entirely, but feels that’s not an option. This connection between his human life and his Na’vi life also emerges in more subtle ways, such as the way he treats his family like a small military unit under his command, giving them orders and expecting his children to “” Sir,” and the focus on military discipline and protocol in their upbringing, to the point where a relative finally complains that they are his family, not his squad.
The theme is much more pronounced with his most direct foe, Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a cloned version of foe Neytiri who was killed in the first avatar. Original Quaritch gruffly informs his clone offspring via a recorded video message that they are not the same person – but Clone Quaritch, who has Original Quaritch’s personality and almost all of his memories, visibly struggles with the idea throughout the story. He is stunned to stumble upon the remains of his original human body, and he becomes obsessed with revenge. He crushes the skull of his former self in a flashy public statement for his own squad, showing them he has no attachment to his former human body – but then spends the entire film completing his mission on behalf of Original Quaritch’s son, Spider endanger (jack champion).
The connection between Clone Quaritch and Spider is the most visible expression of the past versus future theme The way of the water. Spider — a human child who wants to be Na’vi so badly that he paints his body with Na’vi stripes and hisses like a wet cat when angry or defensive — insists he has no connection or feelings for Clone Quaritch has . And clone father similarly shouldn’t be beholden to the son of his original self and tries to pretend he isn’t. But both are at war with themselves over the connection they feel, and both act against their better judgment and sell their own security and future to help each other. Neither of them can fully let go of the past they never had together or the connection between them.
The theme runs through the film in various small ways. When Neytiri learns that she must leave her people behind to protect her children, she angrily rebels and gives a speech about the impossibility of giving up her traditions and extended family to start a new life elsewhere. Her adopted teenage daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) is of mysterious origins and spends the film fending off inquiries about her parentage and pondering it privately. Then the past catches up with Kiri and even communicates directly with her. Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), Jake and Neytiri’s troubled son, is so burdened by the way he feels that he has failed Jake, that he is turning away from the family and any possible future as a model son gives up what he thinks Jake wants. But these supposed mistakes gnaw at him until he no longer moves in his own direction, but only comes to terms with the past.
And when Lo’ak finds a mate to be comfortable with, it’s a tulkun – a sane Pandora whale – burdened with his own past and unable to see a future. The Tulkun, Payakan, is an exile among his people for reasons that have left him guilty and lonely. His story colors the Na’vi’s perception of him so thoroughly that they cannot see who he really is, only what they think his story says about him. Payakan is burdened by his past choices. The Na’vi can’t let go of it, so they let it endanger its future.
Dealing with story and internal conflict is a common theme in any story with complicated characters – it’s a relatable idea since we all have to navigate our own story while figuring out who we are, who we want to be and if we are can find a way to get there. But it is particularly notable as a subject in The way of the water because so many of these characters are in denial about who they were, who they are, or what they want. And so many of them spend the movie going back and forth between making decisions, taking action, and then either doubting it, or backing out, or just holding back on the choice. Clone Quaritch is the most visible face for this theme, with his constant “I’m not really your father unless I am, unless I don’t care unless I do”. Spider is a close second, reflecting his father’s internal debate.
All The way of the water‘s characters fight similar internal battles, and it seems a particularly appropriate top-level theme for a film that is itself so explicitly about moving from the past to the future, and from a closed story to an open-ended one . It’s pretty clear that the Avatar films are following in the footsteps of so many other recent film franchises, gradually passing history from the original generation to the aspiring younger one. This idea has been a cultural obsession for long-form American storytelling for more than a decade, with everyone from Captain America to the original Ghostbusters to the third Star Wars trilogy transferring narrative assignments from old characters to the newcomers. Like the plans for avatar 3 – and possibly avatar 4 and 5, depending on box office earnings – becoming clearer, it seems more and more like Jake and Neytiri are stepping down and letting their kids run the show. (How Spider works in it remains to be seen — whether he’ll morph into the show’s Kylo Ren by aping the villain, or attempt to turn his father to the light side of the Force, like Luke Skywalker.)
That’s enough for the moment The way of the water emphasizes the need to accept change, whether that means letting go of the burdens of the past or embracing them and finding a way forward that respects them. The film doesn’t have a clear message that urges people to either abandon their personal story or embrace it fully. Different characters find their way forward in different ways, depending on what they need to hold on to the most to feel complete. For some, that means accepting difficult family ties. For others, it means letting them go.
And in the film’s final scenes, Jake and Neytiri let go of someone they loved but found a kind of temporary peace with their grief, in a culmination of the idea that connected all the main characters. In the voiceover, Jake talks about how Eywa, the spirit of the planet Pandora, remembers all of her children and nothing is really lost. There is a funeral and a ceremony where the bodies of the dead are brought back to Pandora.
But while it’s a solemn and sad occasion, the authors set out the message that the past is always with us as long as we choose to remember who we loved. Jake taps into Eywa’s memories, reliving and finding solace in a meaningful moment with the dead. He can’t escape what happened, but he can at least take steps to find emotional balance in the midst of it. And while avatar 3 will surely return to him by trying to put the past behind him and Quaritch tries to make him suffer for it, they took every step to resolve their inner struggles to the end. Different characters inside avatar 2 Take different messages from their story and struggle with them in different ways and with different degrees of success. But they all find ways to advance – and that becomes a central focus for the film more than any other battle fought on screen.