Will Avatar 2 affect Jake and Neytiri's Children
After 13 years, the Avatar: The Way Of Water trailer debuted exclusively for CinemaCon attendees. That trailer has been watched more than the modern Star Wars films and viewers have come out of it with primary questions over the main story. Now while we can't put a full picture together of what this new film will be fully about, what we can do is look at some of the elements displayed in the footage and theorise over what the war could be centred on.
The teaser trailer itself has teased plenty of new underwater and shoreside locations, but it also suggests that rival Na'vi tribes will go to war this time around, alongside the returning humans picking back up their mining operations that once became destructive for Pandora.
But amongst all of this we have some interesting developments with Jake Sully and Neytiri's new family, as the fight to keep their 4 children safe becomes a primary issue. Based on previous interviews with writers and producers on the film, this includes their 3 sons with Neteyam, Lo'ak, and Spider, alongside their daughter named Tuktirey. And because Jake Sully became one of the people at the end of the first Avatar, his children are Na'vi too, displaying their iconic blue skin, larger bodies, and being able to bond with the nature around them. However, a key difference with one of their sons, paricularly Spider, is that he is actually a human.
How Jack Sully has a human son
After seeing the trailer, many of us have questions surrounding his character. Where does he come from, and is this a concern for his parents now that the humans are back to cause problems and fellow tribes are at war too?
Well Spider is not their biological child and his real name is aparently Miles Socorro, born in the colony that housed the humans in the original film.
Here there was of course all the scientists like Grace, the soldiers and RDA execs, but during that time there also must have been children born and Spider is apparently one that has been adopted by Jake and Neytiri. According to revealed details, Spider was too weak to make the journey back to Earth after the original war, and Sully himself adopted the child, gave him the nickname Spider, and raised him as one of the family.
And this is where problems and conflicts can arise in Avatar 2, whether it be from within the family itself, or with how the other Na'vi tribes respond to this. Maybe when we come back to Pandora, we realise that over the years the connection between the tribes has become fragile due to both species becoming ever-more entangled, and therefore those who are only faithful to the Na'vi have become all the more tense from it. After all, the Pandora natives have always been quite anxious and distrusting of the humans who have continued to cause problems and rip apart their natural land.
And maybe, when they make a revisit, this completely seperates the clans and makes them more against human settlers within. It was in the first film that Jake and Grace had to earn their trust and betray their own kind to become apart of the people. Jake also had to abandon his old body and become a Na'vi for the rest of time, via the tree of Eywa.
And maybe now the humans have a greater incentive to come back and fight, because on top of needing the planet's valuable resources, they also probabaly don't like the fact that the Na'vi are joining with humans that have grown up and couldn't make the trip back to Earth originally.
They may feel like their own people have been taken captive by the Navi's, similar to how Miles Quaritch misread their actions before and didn't listen to Jake or Grace in multiple situations. It's characters like Jake and his son Spider that are obvious targets in this current landscape, and they are potential incentives for this new war, building in a growing hatred from the Na'vi towards humans and from the humans themselves who hope to fight back much harder. It's Spider's presence in this new film that suggests the blurring of the lines between both species, continuing on from Jake's physical transformation into a Na'vi in the previous storyline.
Is Miles Quaritch Alive
How the humans will aim to fight back harder in Avatar 2, we get a great sense of this through the re-apparance of a character we once thought had died. Colonel Miles Quaritch had a quite brutal death in the first movie, taking multiple massive arrows from Neytiri.
But after director James Cameron confirmed that he would be returning for all the planned films, and as the central villain, it made us wonder how he will be back to potential force forward this new war. The exact reasons have been kept under wraps, but now in the Avatar 2 trailer, we see that a Na'vi has the same haircut and tattoo that Quaritch had in the first movie.
How did he return?
Well, maybe the RDA had enough time to plug his mind into a Na'vi body even though his human body is no more. We did see Jake using the tree of Eywa to put his mind into a Na'vi body at the end of the first film, so what's not to say that a decade later, the humans have advanced and found a way to make this happen in an alternative way.
For all we know, the RDA might also now be able to create copies of important people in their ranks, and this would lead to a more complicated war for Jake and his family. They'd have to do more then just survive and fight back this time, because they'd have to actually prevent this kind of tech from being used and upgraded even further.
And with this version of Quaritch, being the same one or a clone, realising that he has to become one of them to take them down, it makes for a much more threatening opposition. We'll have to see, but all the smaller details like the return of Quaritch and the human child of Jake and Neytiri, make the landscape of a new war all the more interesting, yet all the more scary for Jake's family too.
The Na'vi and Human War
What really grabs my attention about the potential conflicts of Avatar 2, is the more internal ones within the Na'vi tribes. This provides for a more interesting story long term and you can really introduce us to new clans that hold differing positions. Cameron is a filmmaker that reflects our world in his stories, and doing something like this, could reflect the divergence of cultures and countries on Earth.
By showing those internal conflicts on Pandora, Avatar: The Way Of Water could give us a much deeper look into that world's culture and avoid repeating the same plot. That movie did also tease that there was a lot of this world still left to discover, especially when we see Jake asking the help of other clans on the planet.
So now in the sequels if we see a greater on-screen relationship between them through a conflict, it would make the stakes all the more necessary. Avatar 2 really has the world and factions to create a storyline that is much more personal when it comes to the family bonds they've teased, yet more universal too in the way tribes get along with each other.
And over time we could see a story where all these different tribes eventually have to come together. It can be a film that introduces more of the culture, more of the characters involved and a more detailed war in the process. One that's not just Humans vs the Na'vi, but this time with one that has blurred the lines between the two.
Again, there is of course the skepticism surrounding how viewers will react to Avatar 2 after so many years, and the way that James Cameron and his team can prove people wrong, is for one, by not repeating the simplistic war that the first film centred on, and two, build on a story that is fresh for this world and one that emotionally captures the characters involved.
The new trailer showed us that this may in fact be the case and that's a postive sign considering that Cameron has 4 films lined up with the Avatar franchise. We all know that the technology is going to be groundbreaking and the teaser alone sold me on that, but it's in the story that Cameron can really prove the doubters wrong this time around.
He can pull this off, having done so many times in the past, and it will be really intriguing to see what the extent of the Na'vi civil wars will be and the current dispute between them and the humans in Avatar 2. Only time will tell, and I'm sure the second trailer will focus more on the story elements that people are hungry to know about.
But what do you think the war will be about in Avatar 2 and what other details from the trailer did you pick out that suggest where this story is going.
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