Despite being a smash-hit at the box office, James Cameron's Avatar has some major flaws that Avatar 2 needs to fix. There's something to be said for Cameron's ability to make a $237 million ion project (one he'd been developing since 1994) in 2009, at a time when brands and intellectual property were beginning to take over the blockbuster landscape. The original Avatar was also gambling on being able to rejuvenate the popularity of 3D, even though the format had been out of style since the '80s (where it was mostly used as a gimmick to promote trashy horror movie sequels like Jaws 3-D and Friday the 13th Part III).
As he'd done with Titanic twelve years earlier, Cameron made fools of those who doubted him with Avatar. The movie went on to obliterate Titanic's own box office record, grossing $2.79 billion in theaters and winning three Oscars. In doing so, it helped to usher in a new era for Hollywood; motion-capture acting and CGI environments were no longer the exceptions, they were now the rule when it came to tentpoles. His competitors haven't always learned the right lessons from his success, but there's no denying the influence Cameron's last two movies have had on the art of filmmaking over the past quarter-century.
At the same time, the general outlooks towards Titanic and Avatar are very different. Upon its release, the former was applauded for its qualities as an old-fashioned romantic epic, and it hasn't lost its critical luster in the two decades since (even if some of its shortcomings are more glaring now than they were in 1997). By comparison, Avatar was divisive when it first opened, and remains so eleven years later. With Cameron's preparing to release the first of a whopping four sequels in 2022, now's a good time to talk about the issues Avatar 2 needs to correct from the original film.
Avatar 2 Needs A Better Story Than The Original Avatar
Inspired by the swashbuckling adventure of late 19th and early 20th century pulp heroes like John Carter and Allan Quatermain, Avatar explores an all too-familiar story about the conflict between of a colony and the native beings whose home they've invaded, from the perspective of one of the more sympathetic colonialists. The movie also deals with concerns about the environment and takes place in a version of the 22nd century where earth's natural resources have been depleted, forcing humanity to seek out energy sources on other worlds. With its broadly sketched characters (heroes and villains), Avatar has a lot in common with '90s animated films like Ferngully: The Last Rainforest and Pocahontas, its other-worldly setting aside. But if those movies were derivative and regressive upon their initial release, that same basic narrative was all the more tired when Cameron's blockbuster came out in 2009, much less now.
The underwhelming plot is a big part of the reason why Avatar has left such a small cultural footprint since it came out in theaters. Unlike the pulp heroes that came before him, the film's Jake Sulley has failed to achieve any kind of iconic status, and few seem genuinely excited to learn where his, Neytiri, and their family's story goes from here. Audiences will undoubtedly turn out to watch Avatar 2 in droves just to see what CGI wizardry Cameron and his crew have cooked up this time, but it and the sequels to follow will need a far more compelling narrative throughline to keep moviegoers coming back for more every couple years through to 2028. Even a franchise as mega-popular as Star Wars has seen its box office diminish when it's tried to rush out too many movies without an equal amount of innovative storytelling to go with them.
Avatar 2 Needs To Avoid The White Savior Narrative
Part of what makes Jake such a forgettable hero in the first Avatar is that he embodies that all too problematic archetype known as the white savior: the white protagonist who helps non-white people in order to serve their own interests. In the context of Cameron's movie, Jake is a paraplegic former marine who replaces his twin brother in the Avatar program, which allows a genetically-matched person to operate a Na'vi-human hybrid. Like so many white saviors who've come before (and after) him, Jake is accepted much more quickly into the ranks of the story's indigenous population than other white people and excels as a member of their culture, leading him to change sides and fight for them, rather than other of his race (or, in Jake's case, his species). By doing this, Avatar diminishes the role the Na'vi play in their own salvation and portrays Jake as being a better Na'vi than the actual ones, to mention nothing of its ableist overtones.
Avatar might not be a movie about white people and literal BIPOC, but it deals with the same issues of colonialism and imperialism as infamous white savior films like Dances with Wolves and The Last Samurai, and does so from a similarly white-centric perspective. It's possible Avatar 2 and its sequels will move away from these retrograde tropes by delving deeper into Na'vi culture and shifting its perspective away from Jake's to those of his and Neytiri's kids, as well as other native Na'vi characters. The franchise is ittedly limited by its premise, which is always going to be a sci-fi allegory at its core, where the Na'vi are figurative Native people. Still, much like Star Wars has deepened its own metaphors about colonialism and imperialism by better fleshing out its non-human characters (especially in the animated TV shows Clone Wars and Rebels), there's hope for Avatar 2 yet.
How Avatar 2's Technology Can Beat The First Movie
Because he likes to push the envelope for moviemaking technology, Cameron has only directed eight feature films (not including his documentaries) over a career spanning nearly 40 years. Whenever people talk about his work, it's the tech that almost always comes up first: Terminator 2's groundbreaking use of CGI to create the shapeshifting T-1000, the photo-real CGI ocean water, smoke, and even people's visible breath in Titanic, and so forth. Avatar is no exception. The film built on the pioneering motion-capture work done by Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis in The Lords of the Rings trilogy and King Kong (themselves, expanding on the foundation Ahmed Best and George Lucas laid in The Phantom Menace) to bring the 3-meter tall, blue-skinned, Na'vi to convincing life. An equal amount of care and attention was poured into making their home on the jungle-dense moon Pandora feel as believable and immersive as possible.
Unlike its story and characters, Avatar 2 doesn't need to fix Avatar's technical qualities so much as match and exceed them. There are multiple ways for it to do that too, beginning with its setting. Unlike the original movie, Avatar 2 will take audiences deep into the oceans of Pandora, which promise to be a far more interactive and challenging environment to bring to photorealistic life than the planet's mainland, but also more visually striking. The mo-cap effects in Avatar 2 ought to be a similar step-up from the original film; as impressive-looking as the Na'vi were in 2009 and still are today, Cameron has a decades' worth of advancements in the tech to draw from and make the extraterrestrials more impressive to behold. Topping the 3D aspect of the first movie will be a taller task, yet the improvements in IMAX technology since 2009 may allow Avatar 2 to make up the different by playing even better on the biggest screen available than its predecessor did.
