The upcoming Avatar 2 is finally arriving after over a decade of development, and the James Cameron sequel has an opportunity to avoid the original movie’s “white savior” problem by focusing on the Na’vi and their culture. Released in 2009, Avatar was a space-set adventure movie that saw Sam Worthington’s army veteran infiltrate an alien civilization to help a human army exploit their natural resources, only for the hero to side with the native Na’vi and end up protecting them from greedy corporations.
Directed by Aliens helmer James Cameron, the original Avatar was a massive hit with audiences worldwide, holding the record of the biggest box office haul in cinema history for some years after its release. However, while the movie’s groundbreaking visuals were universally praised, many critics complained that Avatar’s plot was a derivative collection of familiar “white savior” themes.
The fact that the original film was told from the perspective of a human protagonist rather than one of the native Na’vi led to a lot of this criticism, with reviewers dismissing Avatar as little more than “Dances With Wolves meets The Smurfs.” Defenders of Avatar noted the movie’s adamant anti-war message, coming as it did at the tail end of the Bush presidency (an administration that increased American intervention overseas). Fans of the series may have commended the movie’s simple pro-environment, anti-capitalism message, but many detractors felt James Cameron's Avatar story didn’t focus enough on the Na’vi and failed to make their civilization and society believable. Fortunately, Avatar 2’s new locations will be able to fix this story issue by placing the Na’vi’s culture and lives front and center throughout the action of the sequel. The second movie will focus primarily on the Na’vi instead of human leads, re-balancing the issue many critics had with the original.
Avatar 2 concept art recently released by producer and longtime Cameron collaborator Jon Landau offers a glimpse of the Metkayina villages, a coastal community whose dwellings are perched above the surface of Pandora’s water. The promising first look at Avatar 2’s locations ensures that the movie’s creators were telling the truth when they assured audiences that the Avatar franchise would be exploring much more of the Na'vi's culture and their homes going forward. It’s a step in the right direction that can help avoid the first movie's “white savior” problem by more fully developing the Na'vi and making the sequel’s action into their story, rather than a similar narrative of an outsider saving them.
The new underwater filmmaking technology for Avatar 2 developed by Cameron and team ensures that the sequel will be an immersive and visually sumptuous experience, but these first glimpses imply that the movie will also be prioritizing the depiction of Na'vi culture and civilization. Now that the first film in the series firmly established the place that humans inhabit in the fictional universe of Pandora, there’s no better time for Avatar 2 and its many subsequent sequels to center the focus of the franchise on the Na’vi and render these thinly-sketched figures into more fully realized, believable characters.
