# Avatar 2 was Bad

Dec 27, 2022

Spoliers below the line, and this probably won’t make sense if you didn’t see the movie.

I don’t understand how the budget can be so high for movies like this, and the plot and characters be so terrible. Feels like ChatGPT wrote it. The movie is beautiful and the world building is epic, which is why the story upsets me. For reference, I loved Avatar 1, and thought there was so much potential here.

So get in losers, we are going to fix Avatar 2: Titanic Edition.

Kept most of the plot devices, the 3.25 hour length, and a good subset of the characters, but wrote a story that would make people feel something, and included an epic battle scene I’d love to see on screen at the end of Act 2.

The humans are back, same setup as the movie. We diverge 10 minutes in.

Act 1:

Open with the same guerilla “attack on train” scene, except Jake Sully is killed in action. You have to kill him, there’s no way to top his first story arc. This is fundamentally a movie about the relationship between two brothers. The same two brothers in the movie; the useless little kid and fish nature girl can go.

A favored “warrior” older brother, and a “pushover” younger brother. The older brother, proud son of a marine, wants to continue everything in his fathers image. He becomes leader of the Omatikaya, and is furious about his father’s death and vows revenge. Continue guerilla warfare attacks on the humans, continue the Na’vi way of life, continue as if nothing changed.

The younger brother is also crushed by his father’s death, but instead of blaming the humans, he blames the framing of the conflict. The Na’vi were the aggressors, they attacked the train, the humans just defended themselves.

There’s some ritual to become a Na’vi warrior man, the older brother went through it years ago, but the younger brother refuses. He denounces the warrior way of life, denounces the Omatikaya, and denounces his father for leading the train attack that got him killed. He is exiled from the forest tribe, and goes on a Simba style adventure.

Act 2:

The younger brother wanders off deep into the forest and ends up at the water tribe people. The water tribe people learned from the whales to be pacifists. Cue same scenes about learning the ways of the water people, meeting the exiled whale (get it, they are both exiles, but one for wanting to fight back and one for not wanting to fight enough)

Same pretty princess water girl but put a bit of damn effort into this romance. Make me care. The girl and brother bond over the loss of one of their parents, she only has her father left. Then in the height of the romance scene, she explains that the humans are killing the whales, and that her father will do nothing about it, since the water tribe people are pacifists. The younger brother is very troubled by this, as he’d come to view the Omatikaya as the aggressors, and most humans he was exposed to were the nice science humans.

Back in forest land, the older brother is planning a large strike on the human city center, a cluster of high rise apartment buildings, in revenge for the attack on Hometree in Avatar 1. Neytiri tries to talk him out of it, saying it’s not what his father would have wanted, but he reminds her that he is the leader and persists. Cue intense realistic action scene of a Na’vi attack on a hypermodern city center, humans screaming and crying. Thousands of deaths. At this point, the audience realizes the older brother has lost the plot.

Act 3:

The attacks on the whales pick up, because the humans need lots of magic whale juice to save the lives of the humans injured in the high rise attack. The princess confronts her father about maybe reconsidering their old pacifist ways, at first he blames the influence of the outsider, but she stands up for this as her idea. They have to fight back, but in a way that they can be okay with. They build nets and other non lethal weapons. The younger brother learns of his older brothers attack and is angry. This is not “the way of water”

Cue the climactic battle scene. Humans are sending out a massive navy to hunt the whales at scale. Older brother is planning to take it out. Boats headed toward the water people, the forest people approaching from the back, the water people approaching from the front. One massive boat in the human navy, don’t worry James Cameron you can still have your Titanic 2 scene.

The water people, led by princess girl and her reformed father, show dominance in the battlefield (with the help of the whales of course). They work to pacify both the humans and the Omatikaya. The big fight scene is the younger brother vs the older brother while the big navy boat sinks around them. Epic dialog during the fight:

OB: The humans are a cancer on this planet, they must be destroyed. That’s the only way they’ll listen.
YB: OUR FATHER WAS HUMAN!!!

The younger brother gains the upper hand, older brother begs to be killed with honor, younger brother refuses. His heart turns, and they work together to capture and jail the remaining humans involved in whaling.

End scene is a recognizably human political council with 9 ft tall blue and green Na’vi sitting next to 5’9” humans, figuring out the aftermath of the attack, the Na’vi explain how smart the whales are and why the whaling is so bad. The final part is thematically the denunciation of absolutes, realizing we are all nuanced beings with many different objectives, and the black and white solutions are never the right ones. Both human and Na’vi have complex and sometimes conflicting desires, but we can all strive for better understanding of each other.

A story about two brothers driven apart and brought back together, a story about a romance across tribes, a story about the similarities of all life, and a story about needing to adapt for modern times. Not some weird Avatar 1 repeat with lines that made no sense about “the way of water”

This would have been a good movie, not just a 3 hour ad for Avatar 3, and a needed story for our time.