James Cameron’s elastic world-build creates endless possibilities for its sequel Avatar: The Way of Water brings viewers back to the alien world of Pandora and prepares them for a journey that will spanning avatar 3, 4and maybe 5. Part of Cameron’s motivation was working with actors he loved; although the characters played by Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang both “died” in 2009 (we’ll get to that). avatarboth return in new forms in the sequel.
Weaver’s new character, Kiri – Jake Sully’s teenage Na’vi daughter – becomes the central mystery of Pandora’s past, present and future. Lineage questions tend to be fun pursuits for franchise storytelling — think Star Wars obsession with Luke Skywalker or Rey’s parents, or game of Thrones‘ endless teasing about Jon Snow’s mother. And the Avatar series is no different, either avatar 2 raises the burning question: who is Kiri’s father? The film’s contextual cues and Weaver’s own commentary shed light on what will likely be a key question avatar 3 and beyond.
[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for Avatar: The Way of Water.]
years after the events of avatar, The way of the water sees Jake Sully and Neytiri happily connected and caring for a blended family. Along with their three biological children (two sons, Neteyam and Lo’ak, and a young girl, Tuk), they now care for a human surrogate son, Spider, and Kiri, born from the avatar of Dr. Grace Augustine (Weaver). while she is in suspended animation. The notion that Grace’s comatose Na’vi body fathered and gave birth while floating in an avatar holding chamber is, uh, a tough nut to crack. And Cameron doesn’t really crack it! Instead, Kiri’s conception and roots blossom The way of the water‘s strangest plot.
In case you don’t remember the end of the now 13-year-old avatar: Grace is mortally wounded during the final battle against the human invader Col. Quaritch (Lang) and the human military, and to save her life, Jake and Neytiri attempt to transfer her consciousness to her avatar body using the power of the Soul Tree. Except it doesn’t actually work. But before Grace walks over, she says to Jake, “I’m with her” – a reference to Eywa, the deity of Pandora that the Na’vi believe connects all living things. The Ultimate Bummer: While Quaritch’s personality was saved for later cloning, either nobody on the human side cared enough about the scientists to give them a full download of consciousness, or the scrappy human faction on Pandora wasn’t equipped to give her help, so there is no Grace Brain fills in an avatar clone The way of the water. Oh well.
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Based on what the audience and Kiri witness The way of the water, it is reasonable to conclude that Grace’s spirit missed the Avatar boat and instead flew through Pandora’s neural network. Over the course of the film, Kiri — who is not just a giant nerd who loves the great outdoors, but seems to possess a supernatural connection to Pandora’s ecosystems — bonds with the underwater equivalent of the Tree of Souls and “meets” her mother ( Weaver again without CGI) for the first time. The face-to-face encounter ends in one of the film’s most shocking moments: as Kiri is thrown back into her body, she suffers a near-death seizure.
But how did Grace’s avatar get pregnant? The end of avatar, now overshadowed by Weaver’s human self-appearance, suggests asking who Kiri’s father is – like the Na’vi kids do in the film! – maybe the wrong question. Contrary to the Christian notion of Jesus’ immaculate conception, Kiri seems less like the embodied child of the god and closer to the Greek god Gaea, a walking incarnation of the world itself. If Grace’s “soul” had been channeled into the synapses of Pandora, it would have Eywa, more of a genie in the machine than the machine itself, can easily be sent back into Grace’s avatar form.
Kiri’s untapped power comes into focus late in the film as Clone Quaritch and the Tulkun hunters chase the Sully children across Pandora’s oceans. Up to this point, Cameron has illustrated Kiri’s connection to Eywa with a delicate flair – she just loves plants and sometimes steers animals around a bit! She could look at the sand all day! Highly understandable for us beach kids who could stand in the sea for eight hours, but then Cameron ups the ante: During the action sequence, Kiri begins wielding the plants and sea life like weapons. Kiri is an X-Man (X’vi?) and we can only imagine what that means for Jake Sully’s endless war against the Sky People.
That’s all to say that one of the movie’s burning questions will never provide a secret answer from the characters like in Star Wars or Game of Thrones. The Sully brothers can contact Kiri about a potential Grace/Dr. Norm Spellman’s mysterious parentage, but Eywa’s power transcends the typical birds and bees. (Or Tulkun and Ikran in Pandora’s case.) The mystery speaks to Cameron’s true vision for Avatar: spirituality, biology and technology are all intertwined and blurred by the living moon of Pandora. Kiri lives, Eywa goes and avatar 3 through 5 Promising to be somehow even weirder and wilder than The way of the water.
