Everyone in Avatar: The Way of Water is secretly fighting the same battle

There’s a major conflict at work in The Way of Water Avatar, and it isn’t the face-off between humanity and the tall blue alien cat-people called the Na’vi, or the tension between the characters who want to commune with the planet of Pandora and the ones who want to tear it apart to exploit its resources. These battles form the core of the story. So are the tensions between fathers and sons, and between different ways of life among different Na’vi clans. Individual characters are also torn, as they try to navigate between their immediate desires and what’s best for their families, communities, or futures.

But there’s one conflict that connects all of these threads, thematically and conceptually. It’s more abstract than most of them, and harder to see than the obvious battles fought with words and weapons. But it crops up in many ways throughout the three-plus-hour story, and it’s underlined most heavily at the end of the film, as director James Cameron and his co-writers, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, bring it directly to the foreground. What really connects the movie’s many plot threads is the tension between respecting the past and letting it go.

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for Avatar: The Way of Water.]

Image Credit: 20th Century Studios

The first Avatar This idea is at the heart of the story. Human Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who is wounded during combat, bids farewell to his body. His consciousness is shunted into an avatar form, a Na’vi body created with the DNA of his twin brother, Tom. (He has to say goodbye to his brother at the same time — he’s brought into the avatar program when Tom dies.) As Jake bonds with the local Na’vi and finds freedom and companionship on the planet Pandora, he questions his loyalties and has to let go of his sense of duty to his planet and his employers, abandoning his military service and human connections in order to fully become a Pandoran native. At the heart of this story is his crisis of conscience regarding what his people have done to Pandora. Avatar, but his decision to let go of the past and embrace his future as a Na’vi ultimately feels fulfilling and final.

Water’s Way The relationship between the past and the future is complicated. First there’s Jake, hunted by his former employers, who are obsessed with killing him — which endangers his Na’vi mate Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), their children, and anyone who shelters them. Jake left his humanity behind willingly in the first movie, but throughout the sequel, he’s haunted by his human past and the way it dogs him. More than any other character in the film, he’s certain about his relationship to his former life — he wants to escape it entirely, but he finds that isn’t an option. That link between his human life and his Na’vi life crops up in subtler ways as well, like the way he treats his family like a small military unit under his command, dispensing orders to them, expecting his kids to call him “sir,” and focusing on military discipline and protocol in their upbringing, to the point where one relative finally complains that they’re his family, not his squad.

Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), his direct foe, is a cloned Neytirian version. Avatar. Original Quaritch informs his clone descendant gruffly via a recorded video message that they aren’t the same person — but Clone Quaritch, who has Original Quaritch’s personality and almost all his memories, visibly struggles with that idea throughout the story. He’s taken aback when he comes across the remains of his original human body, and he obsesses over avenging himself. He crushes his past self’s skull in a showy public statement for his own squad, showing them that he doesn’t feel any attachment to his former human body — but then he spends the entire movie compromising his mission on behalf of Original Quaritch’s son, Spider (Jack Champion).

Spider’s link to Clone Quaritch is perhaps the most prominent expression of this theme. Water’s Way. Spider — a human kid who wants to be Na’vi so badly that he paints his body with Na’vi stripes and hisses like a wet cat when he’s angry or defensive — insists he doesn’t have any connection to or feeling for Clone Quaritch. And clone-dad similarly shouldn’t be beholden to his original self’s son, and tries to pretend he isn’t. However, they are both at war over the feeling of connection. Both of them make poor judgment calls and sacrifice their safety and futures to be able to help their fellow man. They cannot let go the past that they have never shared, nor the bond between them.

This theme is woven throughout the movie in many small ways. Neytiri is furious when she learns that she must leave her family to protect her children. She then gives a speech on the impossible of leaving behind her traditional and extended families to begin a new life. Kiri, her adopted teenage daughter from mysterious origins (Sigourney weaver), spends the movie defending Neytiri and musing about it. Kiri is finally confronted by the past and she even communicates directly with it. Jake and Neytiri’s troubled son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) is so burdened by the ways he feels he’s failed Jake that he veers off from the family, giving up on any possible future as the model son he thinks Jake wants. But those perceived failures keep nagging at him until he isn’t moving forward in his own direction, he’s just relitigating the past.

And when Lo’ak finds a companion he can feel comfortable with, it’s a tulkun — a sapient Pandoran whale — who’s burdened with his own past and unable to see a future. Payakan the tulkun is an exile from his people because of reasons that leave him feeling guilty and lonely. His history colors the Na’vi perception of him so thoroughly that they can’t see who he actually is, only what they’ve decided his history says about him. Payakan has a heavy past that weighs him down. The Na’vi can’t let it go, so they allow it to endanger his future.

Dealing with history and internal conflict is a common enough theme in any story with complicated characters — it’s a relatable idea, since we all have to navigate our own histories as we figure out who we are, who we want to be, and whether we can find a way to get there. But it’s particularly notable as a theme in Water’s WayBecause so many characters seem to be in denial of who and what they really are. Many of these characters spend their movie trying to decide between options, taking actions, and later second-guessing, retracting, or holding off on making a decision. Clone Quaritch is the most visible face for that theme, with his “I’m not really your father, except I am, except I don’t care, except I do” throughline. Spider is a close second, mirroring his dad’s inner debate.

Image by 20th Century Studios

Everything Water’s Way’s characters are fighting similar internal battles, and it feels like a particularly appropriate top-level theme for a movie that is itself so expressly about moving from the past to the future, and from a completed story to an open-ended one. It’s fairly clear that the Avatar movies are going to follow in the footsteps of so many other recent film franchises, and gradually hand the story over from the original generation to the up-and-coming younger one. The idea of transferring the narrative from legacy characters onto the young has been an American cultural obsession for long-form storytelling for over a decade. The plans are for Avatar 3 —And possibly Avatar 4 and 5, depending on box-office returns — become clearer, it seems more and more like Jake and Neytiri are going to step back and let their kids run the show. (How Spider works into it remains to be seen — whether he turns into the series’ Kylo Ren by aping the villain or tries to turn his dad to the light side of the Force, like Luke Skywalker.)

For the moment, it’s enough that Water’s WayThe importance of accepting change, no matter what it is, includes letting go the old burdens or taking on the new ones. The movie doesn’t have a hard-and-fast message urging people either to ditch their personal histories or to fully embrace them. Different characters follow different paths to get there, depending on the things they need most to be complete. Some people have to accept difficult family ties. It may mean letting go.

And in the movie’s final scenes, Jake and Neytiri let go of someone they loved, but find a kind of momentary peace with their grief, in a culmination of the idea that’s connected all the major characters. Jake voices over the story of Eywa (the spirit of Pandora), who keeps track all her children. Nothing is truly lost. There’s a funeral, and a ceremony where the body of the dead is returned to Pandora.

But while it’s a solemn and sad occasion, the writers lay out the message that the past is always with us, as long as we choose to remember who we loved. Jake taps into Eywa’s memory, reexperiences a meaningful moment with the dead, and takes comfort from it. He can’t escape what’s happened, but he can at least take steps to find emotional balance in the middle of it. While Avatar 3 will certainly return to him trying to leave the past behind and Quaritch trying to make him suffer for it, they’ve all taken steps toward resolving their internal battles by the end. There are many characters to be aware of Avatar 2Take different lessons from their past and fight with them in different ways with different levels of success. But they all find ways to move forward — and that becomes more of a central focus for the film than any other battle being fought on screen.