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There are a lot of reasons to look forward to James Cameron’s upcoming Avatar: Fire and Ash. The first two movies have been massive blockbuster spectacles that have audience away, and there is no reason to believe the next film (which is on the 2025 movie schedule for December) will be any different. But Cameron is also promising that Avatar 3 will do more, including telling a story that Hollywood all too often gets wrong.
The movie’s subtitle Fire and Ash is, in part because the story will shift locations, and introduce a tribe of Na’vi who live around volcanic activity. However, the director tells Empire (via Collider) that the subtitle is also about how, according to the film “The fire of hate gives way to the ash of grief.” Cameron says that Hollywood films don’t portray grief properly, and that’s something he hopes his movie will get right. He explained…
I think what commercial Hollywood doesn’t do well is deal with grief the way human beings really deal with it. You know, characters get killed off, and then in the next movie everybody’s happy again. I’ve lost a lot of people, friends and family members, over the last six or eight years, and it doesn’t work that way.
While grief is certainly a topic that is dealt with often in movies, it’s hard to disagree with where James Cameron is coming from. In a franchise, a tragic event that takes place in one film is usually only dealt with in that title. Meanwhile, future sequels focus often on different things, and thus the grief is never addressed again.
In Avatar: The Way of Water the Sully family lost one of their own, when Jake and Neytiri’s son Neteyam dies at the hands of the humans. Rather than the new film simply moving on, it’s clear that Fire and Ash will see the main characters continue to deal with the grief of the loss.
But it’s also how the characters will deal with that loss that will be different. Cameron says that grief won’t turn anybody into a ball of superheroic rage, as it often does in movies. Also, Fire and Ash won’t be the only movie to deal with grief, as that part of the story will continue in the other two Avatar movies that are planned. The director continued…
It also doesn’t make you so mad that you’re going to become an army of one and gun up and kill all those motherfuckers, which is another Hollywood trope. It makes you just kind of depressed and fucked up. I’m not saying our movie’s depressed and fucked up, I’m just saying that I think we deal with that part of life quite honestly. The [Sullys] journey continues in a very naturalistic, novelistic way. I’ve sort of thought of this next cycle, meaning 3, 4 and 5, as how they continue to process the things that happen to them. Now, of course, they’re not human, but this is a movie for us, by us, right? Science-fiction is always just a big mirror of the human condition
I certainly can’t disagree with Cameron that most Hollywood movies, while they can handle grief well in the moment, often move on too quickly. But int he real world, this isn’t something that most people don’t do when they lose somebody as close as a son. To be fair, most Hollywood movies do this because they’re trying to tell a different story and a movie simply can’t do everything at once.
I’m certainly intrigued to see how this all fits together in Avatar: Fire and Ash. If Cameron can make the grief of the characters central to them going forward, and show how that it changes them over a matter of years, we could be in for something special when Avatar: Fire and Ash arrives later this year. We already know there will be a significant time jump in Avatar 4, and those themes in a sci-fi story could be surprisingly powerful.