Welcome back to Pandora. There’s a lot going on these days on the lush forest moon of bioluminescent ferns and giant blue space cats. We’ve had the forest tribes, the sea tribes, even the bit where Sigourney Weaver gets reincarnated as her own teenage daughter. And now in Avatar: Fire and Ash, the first full-length trailer for which launched this week, we get a full-blown theological crisis, and a planet that might be running out of breathable air.
Oona Chaplin’s Varang is the leader of the Ash clan, who look like Cirque du Soleil performers who’ve been left too close to the barbecue. She’s extremely angry and cynical because her entire extended family got flambéed by a volcanic eruption. But even more so because Eywa, the godlike neural network that can unleash planetary catastrophe at will, did absolutely nothing to help.
This sets up an intriguing wrinkle for the new movie. If the god that rules your planet isn’t mystical, ineffable and comfortingly invisible, does that make it any easier when she abandons you? And is Eywa even capable of stopping volcanoes in the first place? Can she really shut down a minor geological tantrum? Maybe not. Also, isn’t deciding you’re an atheist when there’s palpable proof that your god exists a bit like declaring you don’t believe in digital media while streaming Love Island on your phone? Who needs faith when you’ve got swishy USB-compatible tails that can plug straight into the creator? Why indulge in blind devotion when it’s far easier to just complain down the divine helpline that the floating mountains still haven’t been fitted with railings, or the banshees keep crashing into the washing line?
Either way, Varang is clearly severely annoyed, and out to take revenge on anyone who thinks Eywa rules, which apparently means teaming up with evil Colonel Quaritch and his human overlords. This brings us to the other major plot point being hinted at: are the mean old homo sapiens terraforming Pandora to kill off the Na’vi?!
There’s a key point in the trailer where we see Spider, the Sullys’ human pal, remove his mask and breathe without difficulty, which is quite an impressive feat when we’re told the atmosphere on this forest moon is a dense blend of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, xenon and methane. Jake Sully then appears to suggest that this development means the Na’vi might one day become incapable of breathing on their own planet. But then another scene sees Spider apparently plugging into a Pandoran sea creature, as if he were a native, which suggests the earthlings might be genetically altering themselves to suit their new environment (Spider is, after all, Quaritch’s son) rather than the other way around.
If that’s the case, it’s hard to know what is scarier: the idea of humans rewiring their own biology to pass as Na’vi, or the possibility that they’re quietly terraforming Pandora so the locals eventually suffocate. Either way, it’s colonialism with the dial snapped clean off. Not content with stealing the land and resources, the humans are now determined to tilt the entire biosphere in their favour.
Frankly, there is an awful lot to dig through here. If the mere trailer is this dense, watching the actual movie (which is rumoured to be even longer than Avatar: The Way of Water’s three hours and 12 minutes) is going to be like shinnying up Mount Everest, only to find James Cameron waiting at the summit with a three-hour slideshow of bioluminescent plankton and extraterrestrial religious schisms. Who’s up for the climb?
