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It’s almost possible to feel a little sorry for Colonel Miles Quaritch, the main villain of Avatar. Imagine: first you’re sent light years from Earth to hang out with 14ft blue space hippies, then you’re suddenly dead. Then you’re resurrected as one of the 14ft blue space hippies. And now, according to James Cameron, you might just be starting to realise that the giant tree-hugging freaks you’ve spent two films trying to erase are your kind of people after all.
Speaking to Empire in an interview last week, Cameron revealed that the Quaritch we will meet in the forthcoming Avatar: Fire and Ash (although still played by Stephen Lang) is no longer the same person we first saw stomping through the rainforest in the original 2009 film. Yes, he’s a “recombinant” – a lab-grown Na’vi reboot of a man carved out of granite and patriotism – but he’s also going through a full-blown existential wobble after discovering in the last instalment that he has a human son, Spider. “Quaritch is undergoing an identity crisis,” said Cameron. “His interest in the biological son of his biological precursor form is all about trying to define, ‘Am I a completely new person? Am I bound by the rules and the behaviours of the person whose memories and personality I was imprinted with?’ It’s a true existential dilemma for him in the philosophical sense.”
Cameron also asked: “At what point does he cross that line and realise he’s more Na’vi than he is human? He could connect, he could plug in – Jake wants him to. I don’t want to tell you where it goes, but we’re gonna see all this play out, because Jake would rather have this guy on side.”
Given Cameron is planning at least five (possibly seven!) of these films, it is perhaps inevitable that some of the main characters will oscillate between hero and villain over the course of the journey. But do we really want to see Quaritch sanded down from a human tank? Is the saga’s main villain really about to turn to the good side? And do we really want him to?
It wouldn’t be the first time Cameron has flipped a character’s entire persona mid-saga. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 was a time-travelling death robot in the first Terminator film and a leather-clad babysitter in the second, while Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor followed a reverse trajectory from terrified waitress to the most intense mum who ever lived. And yet both those arcs made sense: the T-800 would always manifest according to its most recent programming, while it’s hard to avoid becoming a battle-hardened maniac when you’ve just experienced the apocalypse on fast-forward.
But Quaritch may be the most villainy villain in the history of genre movies: a walking embodiment of humanity’s desire to punch nature in the face; a totem of the military-industrial super-complex. And to be honest, we kind of liked him that way. Now what? We’re suddenly meant to cheer for a bloke we once watched Neytiri skewer to his own power-loader like a human shish kebab?
This impending redemption arc also raises the question of whether other key players might find themselves undergoing full personality transfers before the seven-movie series is up. For what film-maker, given 1,200 minutes to play with, wouldn’t choose to spin the entire saga’s moral compass like a fidget toy? Neytiri may decide she has always secretly loved rampant space colonialism. Spider could announce he’s joining the RDA for the dental plan. Norm Spellman might run off to start a Pandora-themed gastropub. Probably none of them will mind you – because unlike Quaritch, they know who they are. The recombinant, on the other hand, has room to become something else because he isn’t really Quaritch at all. He’s a man with the memories of the villainous human from 2009’s Avatar, but almost none of the biology, context or identity.
Perhaps this is the reason the RDA’s resurrected attack dog seems to be interacting with the new volcano-dwelling Na’vi tribe in all the early footage we’ve seen from Fire and Ash. If there’s a reason Cameron keeps hauling him back from oblivion – and we really have to believe there is – it’s because Quaritch is the narrative cipher the saga can still reshape. He’s the one character who can plausibly stand between the species rather than fully belong to either one. Which means he might hold the key to whatever future Pandora is heading toward – not the tidy ending where the humans pack up and go home, nor the absolutist fantasy where the Na’vi win every fight for ever, but something messier, stranger, and shared, dancing together among the floating bioluminescent jellyfish.
