One of the biggest mysteries surrounding James Cameron’s raft of Avatar sequels is whether they’ll be able to recapture the magic of the first installment, which of course went on to become the highest-grossing movie in the history of cinema, a title it still holds a dozen years later.
The narrative came in for some heavy criticism, but it can’t be denied that sitting in a theater and being introduced to the world of Pandora was an immersive 3D experience the likes of which we’d never experienced before. The first installment’s reputation has taken a bit of a battering since then, though, but Cameron has always thrived on proving his doubters wrong.
As far as we know, Avatar 2 is still scheduled to come to theaters in December of next year, and producer Jon Landau revealed the first official plot details to Total Film, which spell bad news for Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully and the rest of his newfound family.
“When you get to the reef, there’s a clan we call the Metkayina. The Sullys are no longer in the environment they know, the rainforest. They become the fish out of water. They become the fish out of water both culturally and just environmentally.”
The first of what could end up being four sequels unfolds more than a decade after the original, with Sully and Zoe Saldana’s Neytiri now raising children in the dense rainforests, before the RDA returns to the planet and forces them out on the run. Looking at Cameron’s entire career so far, we can expect Avatar 2 to change the face of cinema yet again from at least a visual and technological perspective, if not a critical and commercial one.