It has taken us so long to get Avatar 2—and will continue to take us so long to get next year—that it makes sense the sequel will deal with the fact that the first film’s protagonists, Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), have been off-screen long enough to have a lot of kids.
We’ve known for a long time—literally four years—that Avatar 2 will introduce the family the duo have made for themselves in the 13 years it’s been since the original James Cameron sci-fi adventure. Now that Jake is permanently Na’vi-fied after the events of the original film, he and Neytiri will have three biological children, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), and Tuktirey (Trinity Bliss). But as revealed by Empire Magazine today, they will also have a human adoptive son, as Avatar 2 tries to explore the lingering racial divides between humanity and Na’vi after humankind arrived on Pandora and were, in general, massive colonialist assholes about it.
Too young at the time of the first movie to be dumped back to Earth, the young boy Miles, also known as Spider (played by Jack Champion) was taken in by Jake and Neytiri and raised as their own. Or, rather, the former did, to the chagrin of the latter. “Jake took him in but Neytiri always saw him as one of the people who destroyed her home and killed her father,” producer Jon Landau told Empire. “So you have all these dynamics playing out.”
“This time around, we’re taking Jake and Neytiri and building the most universal theme of all around them. Which is family. Jake comes from the human world, Neytiri from the Na’vi world. So, they’re like a modern mixed-race couple, raising kids who perhaps feel they don’t belong to one world or another.”
So much has happened since Avatar briefly dominated the pop culture space upon its release it’ll be interesting to see what the state of its world is when the sequel finally drops—especially in the general attitude about humans after at least a few of them used their Avatar technology to forgo human form and integrate into the Na’vi. Na’vi society otherwise might have accepted human transplants like Jake, but it’ll be interesting to see how it navigates dealing with one of the few actually human remnants left on Pandora at this point. Sounds like: not well!
Avatar 2 hits theaters in December 2022.
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