In 2022, James Cameron brought audiences the sequel to his 2009 sci-fi epic Avatar. In Avatar: The Way of Water, Cameron continues the story of protagonist Jake Sully (Sam Worthington).  In the first film, Sully is a crippled marine living on a dying future Earth. He travels to the alien world of Pandora to help the militaristic Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) and corporate overseer Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) move the natives, the Na’vi, off their land so the humans can mine it. But then he falls in love with a native woman, her people, and their world, helps them successfully fight back, and ultimately becomes one of them by transferring his human brain into a Na’vi body. Way of Water takes place sixteen years later when the humans return to Pandora.

The sequel has none of the first movie’s high-action drama despite going even heavier than the first film on CGI-created alien flora and fauna. Spectacular graphics and world-building can rarely if ever make up for dull plotting. Way of Water seemed to signal Avatar’s future as yet another franchise where the brand is milked for profit while the story is neglected.

A Bore of a Blockbuster

Next time, one hopes, James Cameron will focus as much on the story he tells as the means he uses to tell it.

QuilletteAllan Stratton

Given all this, it’s surprising that audiences have turned up for the series’ third film, Avatar: Fire and Ash, in the numbers they have. Since its release in December 2025, the film has earned over a billion US dollars—profits that far surpass its production budget of around $400 million and marketing budget of $150 million. Given this, it’s likely the series will continue for Cameron’s planned fourth and fifth films, despite the fact that Fire and Ash suffers from the same uneven and overcrowded plotting that weighed down Way of Water. James Cameron is clearly still a goose who lays golden eggs.

Fantasy is part of the appeal, of course. Audiences may be returning to the cinema for the Avatar films despite Cameron’s deteriorating writing because they like the trips to Pandora. Exploring strange and wondrous worlds is part of the fantasy genre’s charm.

In addition, audiences can derive a great deal of schadenfreude from the unhappy endings Cameron metes out to the majority of the series’ human characters. Cameron, who has described himself as a “child of the 60s,” has written Avatar through a sixties-inspired view of colonial history that casts the colonised as peaceful, tree-hugging underdogs and the coloniser as predatory giants. The Na’vi are noble savages who live in harmony with nature, while the humans are greedy, gun-toting colonisers who will slash, burn, and shoot anything or anyone to make a profit or to plant their flag on a new patch of dirt. The humans in Avatar are, in fact, stupidly evil. Their greed, blind obedience to hierarchical authority, and racism are so predictable, and so unaccompanied by any honourable motives, that they are mere clichés. Each film ends with the Na’vi defeating them in the most humiliating fashion, despite the humans’ aggressive arrogance and superior technology. The Na’vi ride pterodactyl-like creatures called Banshees and shoot bows and arrows, while the humans have helicopters and gargantuan warships equipped with machine guns. Yet, at the climax of each film, the Na’vi knock the helicopters out of the sky and send the warships to the bottom of the sea. Many viewers must want to cheer as they do. There’s great pleasure in seeing these stupid and nasty colonisers get their butts kicked.

At least in the first film, a few of the human characters are not all bad. There’s the protagonist Jake Sully, as well as the scientists, Dr Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), Dr Norm Spellman (Joel David Moore), and Dr Max Patel (Dileep Rao), who have travelled to Pandora to study, not exploit it. There’s also Captain Trudy Chacón (Michelle Rodriguez) who defies her superiors when ordered to fire on the Na’vi and instead joins Sully in defecting to their side.

However, the number of sympathetic human characters has grown smaller with each new film. In Way of Water, the humans have changed their goal from mining to full-scale colonisation of Pandora. Quaritch dies in the first film but Cameron resurrects him in Way of Water, where he is joined by his new superior General Frances Ardmore (Edie Falco) and Captain Mick Scoresby (Brendan Cowell). Ardmore is a left-wing caricature of a military commander: unapologetically bullish and myopic in pursuit of her mission to secure Pandora as a human colony. She calls Na’vi “savages” to their faces, leading even Quaritch to remark, “Don’t be an ass, general.” Scoresby hunts Pandora’s sea creatures to extract valuable minerals from their bodies, killing one alien whale after another and dumping their carcases back into the water. His thick, oily Australian accent creates the impression that he is an uncultured bogan. By Fire and Ash, Quaritch, Ardmore, and Scoresby are the only human characters with meaningful amounts of dialogue and screen time. The rest of the humans are mere extras. When Quaritch captures Sully in Fire and Ash, all the humans respond by gathering around Sully’s cage and taking cell phone snaps. This is now Cameron’s view of humanity. Even in the future, when we’ve reached outer space, he expects we’ll still be taking pictures of everything with our mobile phones.

There are only three exceptions to the human ugliness. Way of Water introduces marine biologist Dr Ian Garvin (Jemaine Clement)—who, like the scientists in the first film, wants to study Pandora’s animals rather than kill them—and Quaritch’s son Spider (Jack Champion) who was raised by the Na’vi after being left behind when the humans retreated from Pandora at the end of the first film. But Spider is more Na’vi than human. He speaks their language, wears their clothes, and follows their customs. There is also Quaritch, who is no longer the two-dimensional villain he was in the first film. In Fire and Ash, he helps Sully rescue Spider and even falls in love with a local woman himself. However, this all happens after Quaritch has been resurrected, which involves implanting his mind into a Na’vi/human hybrid body. His virtue, like Spider’s, stems from his connection to the Na’vi.

Thoreau and the Primitivist Temptation

Abbey’s book is just one example in a sea of recent works of literature, film, and music, which romanticize the idea of leaving society behind to live—often alone—close to nature.

QuilletteErich J. Prince

As Cameron’s view of humanity has got simpler and bleaker, he’s invested ever more effort into exploring the Na’vi. There is not only more focus on Pandora’s wildlife and ecosystem but he introduces new Na’vi tribes, each with their own peculiarities. Way of Water features the sea-dwelling Metkayina, who have turquoise skin, talk with whales, and sport tattoos reminiscent of those of Pacific Islanders. The Mangkwan of Fire and Ash inhabit a wasteland created by a volcanic eruption, wear red and white body paint, and spend their free time dancing around campfires and cutting each other with knives. Cameron is nothing if not inventive when it comes to the anthropological side of the Avatar films.

In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia argues that some artists engage in what she calls “sexual metathesis,” using opposite sex characters to express their own transgressive gender-bending fantasies—she cites Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights as an example:   

Emily [Bronte] leaps across the borderline of gender into her savage hero … My theory is this: Heathcliff is one of the great hermaphrodite sexual personae of Romanticism, a dream-representation of Emily Bronte as naturalized Byron.

In the Avatar films, Cameron seems to be engaging in species metathesis—the films are a projection of his longing to be a member of the colonised group rather than the colonisers. It may not be a coincidence that both the first and third Avatar films end with a human turning into a Na’vi. “You are one of us now,” the Na’vi tell Spider, “You are one of the people.” It’s almost as if Cameron himself wants to be “one of the people” and is attempting to do so by investing ever more of his intellectual, literary, and cinematic skills into expansive depictions of the Na’vi, while leaving the human world a near-uniform grey blob. This in turn makes the series a more marketable property. The more alien flora and fauna Cameron dreams up, the more LEGO sets, socks, and colouring books there are to make and sell.

This might also explain the sharp decline in Cameron’s writing. Jake Sully’s character has barely changed since the first film, even though Cameron has had two three-hour films to send Sully on a lengthy hero’s journey. Cameron has shifted his focus to secondary characters like Sully’s wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), their children, and Quaritch, but his cast is so big that no single character gets the time to be as developed as Sully was in the first film. Even when writing alien characters, a writer must draw on the human condition, at least until we meet real aliens. (First contact will surely have interesting consequences for literature.)

It’s ironic that a self-described child of the sixties, who seems to be developing an increasingly artistically debilitating obsession with going native, has become a cash cow for a large corporation like Disney. Avatar is unique amongst franchise films. It’s been ruined not by corporate cannibalisation but by its own creator’s idiosyncrasies. The Avatar films have become a folly, but the folly seems to be James Cameron’s and Disney appears to just be the beneficiary of his artistic decline.