Avatar: Fire and Ash wasn’t supposed to end this way.
“When you watch the film, you probably think, ‘oh, absolutely – he must go and fulfil his destiny,’” James Cameron tells The National. “But actually, I did all that in post-production.”
The realisation came years into his famously intensive process – the stage at which Cameron and his team of hundreds were turning months of performance-capture work into the intricately animated epic that's now in cinemas across the Middle East.
Working in the editing room, he was mapping out the film’s climax, in which the people of Pandora unite in a final confrontation with the colonial forces occupying their world.
But as he watched it back, the director came to an uncomfortable conclusion: the final act he had written all those years earlier was wrong.
The problem was not technical, but moral. For Cameron, Avatar has always been less about spectacle than about the consequences of power, extraction and resistance. The films are built around a belief that confronting colonial violence requires more than simply reversing its winners and losers.
That belief was undermined by the climax as it stood.
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