Avatar 2 nearly had a Na’vi space battle, but James Cameron scapped it

James Cameron spent more time than 10 years developing ideas to make his hit sequel, 2009’s groundbreaking. Avatar — so naturally, not every idea made the cut. Cameron did in fact throw out an entire movie in order to revive the franchise with December’s Water’s Way. And with that scrapped screenplay, Cameron chucked out a truly wild action sequence: an attack on incoming earthling ships by Jake Sully, Neytiri, and a mix of Na’vi and human allies. Thankfully, there’s reason to think Cameron could return to the idea in a future sequel.

This scene is from The High Ground: AvatarThe first screenplay Cameron created as a direct sequel was titled. Avatar. Sherri L. Smith is the writer who claims that she has successfully adapted. The High Ground into Dark Horse’s newly released graphic novel prequel trilogy, the more Cameron discussed his follow-up with his Avatar writers’ room, the more driven he was to start the film later on the Pandoran timeline.

“The logical progression is to go chronological,” Smith says of development on the sequels, “So [Cameron]All that has happened up to this point is being figured out each day. The High Ground.” Which is why Water’s Way quickly chronicles the years we don’t see, a kind of prologue recap of a movie Cameron never actually put out.

Using both the 100-page screenplay and the “Pandorapedia,” a Bible for all things Avatar, Smith worked hand in hand with Cameron to adapt The High GroundIn a comic, so it could click into Avatar’s wider world. It naturally leads into Water’s Way. (“People ask, ‘Is it canon?’ I say, ‘Well it’s 100% Cameron,’” Smith says.) And one of the key moments, which spans 90 pages of the three-book series, is the Na’vi assault on the Pandora-bound drop ships commanded by General Frances Ardmore (played by Edie Falco in the movie). In Water’s WayHumans immediately return to Pandora, where they scorch the Earth. The High Ground finds the Na’vi intercepting their ships with a plan to fight back.

Image from 20th Century Studios

You can also be a comedian. The High GroundThis thrilling interlude is full of non-verbal splashpage action. As a movie it was too momentum for its own good. Cameron wanted to restore the historical and dimensional character of his cast. We see it in Water’s Way, Jake Sully and the Na’vi have a moral standard that isn’t easily sacrificed.

“[One key thing] that the Pandorapedia gets at is that the Na’vi are not warriors, technically,” Smith says. “They’re hunters, they don’t wage war. They live peacefully and kill out of necessity. So when you see these great big battles on screen or even in the book, it sort of changes the cognitive dissonance that the Na’vi are going through in having to take on human ways in order to combat humanity.”

The High Ground was enough of a thing in Cameron’s camp that design work was done to crack the sequence. Ben Procter, The Way of Water: Avatar’s hard-surface production designer, says that his team worked on “visually bonkers” space designs when The High GroundThey were in the exploratory stage and were created from biosuit designs inspired by real scientists. The hope was to get away from rigid bulky spacesuits and embrace a technology where the pressure vessel would come close to the Na’vi skin.

Sherri L.Smith, George Quadros/Dark Horse

“In a biosuit, the tension lines and folding lines of the human body are incorporated into where the strands are placed,” Procter explains. “All that beautiful motif stuff you may see in the graphic novel of diagonal bands that are crossing… Those are all meaningful, creating a network that crosses the joints in a certain way that allows flexibility. That’s a long way of saying: The suits are based on real stuff, it’s a cool sci-fi interpretation of it, and Jim likes to make things real every single time you can.”

Costume designer Deborah L. Scott says the Na’vi siege on spaceships never made its way into Water’s Way screenplay, and she’s not upset about it. Every single piece of costuming in the Avatar sequel was physically crafted for actors to wear during performance capture, in order for them to realistically interact and for Cameron’s team to understand material motion. But that caused all sorts of nightmares — even a pair of Na’vi-sized sunglasses had to be found, altered, and adjusted for use during “filming.” Creating biosuits for Jake and Neytiri would have been a huge undertaking. “It was hard enough to do the hospital gowns that fit over those guys,” Scott says.

Could Cameron wind back to the “Na’vi in space” sequence in a future sequel? Scott isn’t counting it out, and neither is Water’s WayRussell Carpenter, cinematographer. Carpenter also teases the following: Avatar 3He was also involved in underwater photography for larger aquatic action sequences. This leaves him open to a space stunt.

“Jim’s playing a very long game here,” he says. “And there are going to be aspects of this cosmology that we haven’t seen that are still to be revealed.”