{"id":200786,"date":"2025-12-19T21:12:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T21:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/200786\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T21:12:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T21:12:09","slug":"avatar-has-eclipsed-star-wars-as-a-family-saga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/200786\/","title":{"rendered":"Avatar has eclipsed Star Wars as a family saga"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Cameron\u2019s high-tech magnum opus Avatar is now a trilogy. The sequels The Way of Water<\/a> and Fire and Ash<\/a> have turned the story of ex-soldier and alien convert Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) into a decade-spanning epic with a litany of related characters<\/a>. With any modern sci-fi trilogy comes inevitable comparisons to Star Wars<\/a>, and one longtime rap against Avatar movies in general is that their characters lack the immediate iconography, recognizability, and overall cultural impact<\/a> of Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Princess Leia, and so on. The Avatar series does, however, have the whole of Star Wars beat on one specific, important ground: It\u2019s a much better story about family.<\/p>\n

The whole concept of Star Wars being a family-driven story \u2014 \u201cthe Skywalker Saga,\u201d as the main nine \u201cepisode\u201d movies were rebranded toward the end of the sequel trilogy<\/a> \u2014 has always been a little more tenuous than filmmakers let on. Yes, the twist revealed at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, that Luke Skywalker is actually the son of much-feared galactic fascist Darth Vader, shifts that trilogy into a story about a son redeeming his father, rather than the tale of a plucky orphan (or a child suffering for his father\u2019s sins).<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a neat thematic counterpoint, too, in Vader\u2019s origins, with Anakin Skywalker corrupted in part by his fear and anger over his mother\u2019s death, then redeemed by his own son\u2019s compassion. The sequel trilogy attempts to build out another reversal, with Vader\u2019s grandchild, Leia and Han’s son Kylo Ren, serving as the conflicted bad guy.<\/p>\n

\"A
\n Image: Lucasfilm\/Disney<\/p>\n

But most of the best-drawn relationships in the Star Wars movies are pointedly not about family, or at least not about blood ties. Luke\u2019s true father-figures in the original trilogy are his mentors Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda, who he learns from and, in Yoda\u2019s Last Jedi phrasing<\/a>, grows beyond. Over in the prequels, Anakin and Obi-Wan have a rich, complicated student\/teacher closeness in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, as Obi-Wan struggles to strike the right balance between fatherly advice and brotherly support (and squabbling) with his \u201cvery young apprentice.\u201d In the first two installments of the sequel trilogy, Rey works well as a nomadic nobody, antagonized but intrigued by Kylo Ren, and finding a brief father-figure of her own in Luke. It\u2019s such a great conceit that Rise of Skywalker<\/a> plot-twisting her as Emperor Palpatine\u2019s granddaughter feels like a panicked echo of the previous movies, not an organic development.<\/p>\n

Both within the universe of the movie and metatextually as a story decision, that plot misstep emphasizes the importance of Star Wars characters defying their lineage. That is, it\u2019s important within the universe for Rey to rebuke her Palpatine heritage, even though that blood tie makes her more superficially \u201cimportant\u201d to the broader lore than when she thought she was the abandoned spawn of junk traders, and writer-director J.J. Abrams clearly felt it was important to echo that dynamic from Return of the Jedi.<\/p>\n

In that film, Luke rejects the idea that he should follow in his father\u2019s footsteps and become a Sith lord, rejecting his lineage. He does this with a phrase that sounds affirming of his family (\u201cI am a Jedi, like my father before me\u201d) but he\u2019s actually empowered by his friends and mentors, even when he doesn\u2019t always take their advice. Luke\u2019s wisp of a relationship with Vader is salvaged by his belief in something greater than his seeming familial destiny. Deciding to save and honor his father without following his path works great in the movie; it just doesn\u2019t make much of a case for a rich family saga.<\/p>\n

\"Luke
\n Image: Lucasfilm\/Disney<\/p>\n

Like the Star Wars trilogy, Avatar makes a second-movie pivot into family matters. Like Star Wars, the first movie focuses more intently on a hero\u2019s journey, as Jake Sully, a disabled soldier, gets a chance to inhabit a synthetic avatar of the alien Na\u2019vi race while on a mission to assist with the colonization of the moon-world Pandora. He eventually sides with the natives and becomes a full-time occupant of a Na\u2019vi body, as well as the partner of actual Na\u2019vi Neytiri (Zoe Salda\u00f1a).<\/p>\n

The sequels jump forward in time, with Jake and Neytiri raising a family together in the interim. Three of their children are natural-born Na\u2019vi, though they carry the mark of their father\u2019s alien DNA. A fourth adoptee is the biological child of Grace (Sigourney Weaver), a human scientist who died in the first movie. A fifth, of sorts, is Spider (Jack Champion), a human kid born in the scientist camp of Pandora, who tries his best to keep up with his adoptive Na\u2019vi siblings. (He reads as a very close cousin, or perhaps son-in-law.) Suddenly, a story about a guy challenged and changed by native culture is a story about a family blended from several different directions.<\/p>\n

As a writer, Cameron is not especially less corny than George Lucas in terms of mechanics. What makes both The Way of Water and Fire and Ash work surprisingly well, long after the novelty of Pandora itself has worn off, is how convincingly Cameron and his co-writers depict a complicated family dynamic.<\/p>\n

\"The
\n Image: 20th Century Studios<\/p>\n

Not every Sully family member gets equal screen time in the sequels, and there are stretches where many of the siblings don\u2019t have much to do. But the presence of this complicated blended family feeds back into Jake\u2019s relationship with his newfound Na\u2019vi identity and his lingering instincts as a human soldier. His mantra \u201cThis family is our fortress\u201d isn\u2019t just lip service; Jake Sully arguably has no actual friends, just a dedicated partner and a miniature platoon of child semi-soldiers.<\/p>\n

The kids\u2019 individual relationships with their dad have an uneven, lived-in quality that\u2019s far removed from Star Wars\u2019 formalized, symbolic family connections. Jake Sully isn\u2019t a totemic father figure whose fate haunts his children from afar. He\u2019s an up-close-and-personal dad who encourages his kids, yells at them, loves them, and screws up on the regular. Similarly, his kids exist in the present. Their relationships are with parents they must live with, not blood relations whose invisible lineage looms over their fates. That makes it easier to see the Avatar children coming into their own.<\/p>\n

And, crucial by comparison to Star Wars, where motherhood is largely equated with death and\/or sacrifice, Avatar\u2019s Neytiri both defies and conforms to fierce-mother stereotypes. She goes positively feral in her efforts to save her daughters at the end of Way of Water. But Fire and Ash finds her unmoored by grief and unforgiving toward Spider, the human child whose life her eldest son Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) helps save in the previous movie, dying in the process. The characters are CG-enhanced, but the rawness of the motion-captured performances feels tactile. The Avatar series leans heavily on spectacle, and has some of the most spectacular fantasy action sequences around. But some of its most impressive effects work is dedicated to keeping the actors\u2019 emotions on faces whose details are heavily modified by computers.<\/p>\n

\"Jake
\n Image: 20th Century Studios<\/p>\n

The interconnected (and sometimes overly busy!) ensemble of the Avatar sequels lacks the easy-to-scan Hero\u2019s Journey archetypes that Star Wars writers and directors have labored to maintain, but the tradeoff for that lack of instant iconography seems worthwhile. There\u2019s impressive unity in how many of the Avatar characters\u2019 motivations derive from their positions in the Sully family, whether it\u2019s younger son Lo\u2019ak (Britain Dalton) fighting to prove himself to his father, Kiri\u2019s frustration with her parents\u2019 decisions regarding Spider, or the gulf between Neytiri\u2019s parental instincts and Jake\u2019s hybridized Na\u2019vi\/military-guy approach.<\/p>\n

These depictions of parent-child struggles don\u2019t make the Avatar trilogy inherently superior to the Star Wars movies. They do, however, mark a crucial point of separation between the most influential modern sci-fi\/fantasy franchises \u2014 and more importantly, they establish Cameron\u2019s movies as more complex than the reskinned Dances with Wolves they\u2019re still sometimes described as. The Skywalkers have become both an eternal selling point and a major weakness for Star Wars, exerting a pull on both viewers and creators that the franchise\u2019s overseers have only recently<\/a> seemed interested<\/a> in resisting.<\/p>\n

If two more Avatar sequels do eventually materialize, it\u2019s possible they\u2019ll resurrect Star Wars\u2019 Skywalker obsession in taller, bluer form: Why does everything on Pandora connect back to the Sully family?! But Cameron has done the work to actually construct a family saga, rather than gesture toward one. The world of Pandora isn\u2019t as vast as the Star Wars galaxy, but its richer family story has a lot more depth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"James Cameron\u2019s high-tech magnum opus Avatar is now a trilogy. The sequels The Way of Water and Fire…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200787,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,270],"class_list":["post-200786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}