James Cameron’s Avatar franchise is going up in flames in its third installment. The first trailer for Avatar: Fire and Ash debuted online on Monday, taking us right back to Pandora and right back into war. The trailer includes our first look at some of the new elements of the series such as the new Na’vi tribe known as the “Ash People,” and creatures we haven’t seen before. At the same time, the plot is getting more entangled than ever, and is clearly driven by the characters we’ve come to know over the previous two installments. Avatar: Fire and Ash hits theaters on December 19th.
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The last Avatar movie ended quite dramatically in 2022, so this trailer gives us a bit of a status update on each of our main characters. After her decisive action in Avatar: The Way of Water, it seems like Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) is struggling to return to her peaceful ways, as Jake (Sam Worthington) warns her that she can’t go on living “in hate.” Meanwhile, it seems like their son, Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) is feeling displaced, as his family has left Neytiri’s tribe while struggling to integrate with the reef clan.
The leader of the Ash People, Varang (Oona Chaplin), seems to be set up here as a foil for Neytiri, even threatening her and denouncing her goddess in the final shot. We’ve heard from Cameron that the Ash People have been driven to desperation when this movie begins, and they’ll be the first Na’vi to be introduced as antagonists, in a way. He told Empire that Varang is earnest in her love for her tribe, but that doesn’t necessarily make her actions righteous.
“She will do anything for them, even things that we would consider to be evil,” he said. “One thing we wanted to do in this film is not be black-and-white simplistic. Or blue-and-pink simplistic… We’re trying to evolve beyond the ‘all humans are bad, all Na’vi are good’ paradigm.”
That’s clearly on display in this trailer, even as human characters continue to flood the screen with destruction and mayhem. There are even a couple of shots that likely show us “Recombinants” — the minds of dead humans who have been uploaded permanently into artificial Na’vi bodies. We know that Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) will be back in this installment, and that humanity will renew its assault on Pandora. At the same time, characters like Spider (Jack Champion) and the rebellious scientists add to Cameron’s hope for a more complex story.
Avatar: Fire and Ash hits theaters on December 19th. In the meantime, the previous two installments are streaming now on Disney+.
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