Sigourney Weaver was in Paris this week to honor Harrison Ford at the Cesar awards. While the actress, who played Dr. Grace Augustine in Avatar, was on the talk show ‘Le Grand Journal’ she was asked regarding her involvement in Avatar 2. Interestingly enough, it sounds like she and Cameron have already discussed her potential involvement in a sequel, and it sounded like she would indeed be in the film.
You can see the footage from that interview here, including Sigourney’s comments on Avatar 2 here.
Let’s pause for a second and issue a spoiler warning. If you haven’t seen Avatar and plan to, hold off reading what follows because I’m going to discuss plot details related to Weaver’s character in the first film. One last mention of SPOILER.
Ok, so Augustine definitely died at the end of the original Avatar. What then, would her role entail? Since Pandora’s Soul Tree is capable of housing the memories and individuality of those who die, I assume this is the process through which Weaver will reprise the role? But will it be a voice, a phantasmal neural upload of Grace that interacts with Worthington’s Jake via dreams, or a physical Na’vi body with Grace’s consciousness piped back in. Wouldn’t that be kind of cool? Characters resurrected through the avatars via the living network of Pandora?
Forgive me for briefly geeking out there, but if Cameron does delve further into the living network ideas and the afterlife concepts, maybe there will be a more original flavor to the sequel. I think he did a great job with the first, but pushing Avatar 2 in a direction that further explores how Pandora interacts with it’s inhabitants could be really cool.
Eitherway, I’d be more than happy to see Sigourney back in the world of Avatar. What do you all think? Any ideas or theories about how she might return?
Augustine gets downloaded into a Na'vi teenage male. But it isn't really Augustine that gets downloaded, because the download is a composite of Eywa and Jake Sully as well as Augustine. Eywa picks a male because he approximates the Jake Sully psyche, which Eywa chose in the original film. This teenager is all kind of mixed up, not really knowing who he is and his clan knows this. He does strange things, like matrix algebrae, uses latin nomenclature to identify Pandora biota, sings Beetle tunes and makes gunpowder to blow things up. He can get the girls because his strange ideas make him a pretty good hunter (i.e. “a good catch”) but he's not really happy because he keeps looking for Ny'tiri without really knowing who she is. Also, Jake Sully really isn't Jake Sully anymore, because he has also passed through the eye of Eywa and bits of Eywa are embeded in his personality. Part of the next movie can deal with getting these two together, Jake and the downloaded Na'vi, to figure out what is going on, but there should be more about the alien-ness of PAndora from Jakes point of view (which really didn't come through with the original – just re-hashed noble-savage myths) and the influence of human culture on Eywa from the Na'vi point of view.
What is going on is that Eywa has all this additional information from a downloaded Augustine on human science that wasn't in its biological memory to begin with. Being a biological computer, it figures out that it needs to get into outer space if it is going to “protect the balance of life” on Pandora – because Eywa knows the humans are quite capable of returning to Pandora. So it needs to protect the balance of life in its solar system. It can also, probably, access the memories and knowledge of all the other scientists that stayed behind on Pandora, people like Max Patel who run the MRI-like machines the link the avatars. Maxi is obviously an expert on biological memory (human and Na'vi brains) and the properties of superconductor materials, like unobtainium, needed to run the equipment. Eywa will figure out that it can use unobtainium, and the flux vortex at the tree of souls – a magnetic field of some sort – to launch it's own form of spacecraft – but it needs human knowledge and expertise to do the math first. These spacecraft would have to be heavily biological in composition (see the old DC comics IronWolf concept), fitting in with the liberal, green, noble-savage ethos of the original AVATAR movie.
AVATAR was a great film – I really enjoyed it. I think Cameron is truly a great artist. And one cannot argue with $2.5 billion in reciepts. But it is going to be really difficult to move it into sequels without abandoning the noble-savage myth. Don't get me wrong – I am really glad that the Hollywood First Nations eventually found a homeland – an entire planet! But this story might have been a little more enjoyable if I didn't have to occasionally push aside all that blatent faux Hollywood Indian yipping and yapping and warpaint at play in the fields of the lord portrayal which has no basis in reality here on earth, let alone a planet in another solar system.