Is the main villain of Avatar about to become a good guy? All signs point in this direction film

IIt’s almost possible to feel a little sorry for Colonel Miles Quaritch, the main villain of Avatar. Imagine: First you’re sent light years away from Earth to hang out with hippies in 14-foot blue space, and then you suddenly die. You are then revived as a hippie in a 14-foot blue space. And now, according to James Cameron, you may just be starting to realize that those giant, tree-hugging nerds you spent two movies trying to erase are your kind of people after all.

Speaking with Empire in an interview last week, Cameron revealed that the Quaritch we’ll meet in the upcoming Avatar: Fire and Ash (although Stephen Lang still plays him) is no longer the same person we first saw stomping through the rainforest in the 2009 original film. Yes, he’s “recombined” — a new, lab-created Na’vi version of a man carved out of granite and patriotism — but he’s also going through a complete existential wobble after discovering in the final installment that He has a human son, Spider. “Quaritch is going through an identity crisis,” Cameron said. “His interest in the biological son of his previous biological form is about trying to determine, ‘Am I a completely new person? “Am I bound by the rules and behaviors of the person whose memories and personality I have imprinted?” It is a real existential dilemma for him in the philosophical sense.

Cameron also asked: “At what point is he going to cross that line and realize that he’s more intelligent than a human? He can connect, he can connect — Jake wants him to. I don’t want to tell you where it’s going, but we’ll see it all happen, because Jake would rather have this guy by his side.”

With Cameron planning at least five (possibly seven!) of these films, it’s perhaps inevitable that some of the main characters will oscillate between hero and villain along the way. But do we really want to see Quaritch fall out of a human tank? Is the main villain of the saga about to turn to the good side? Do we really want him to do that?

This wouldn’t be the first time Cameron has upended a character’s entire personality midway through the saga. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 was a time-traveling death robot in the first Terminator film and a leather-clad babysitter in the second, while Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor followed a reverse path from terrified waitress to the most adorable mother who ever lived. However, these two arcs make sense: the T-800 will always emerge according to its latest programming, while it’s hard to avoid becoming a hardened battle geek when you’ve just faced the apocalypse in fast-forward.

But Quaritch may be the most evil villain in movie history: a living embodiment of humanity’s desire to punch nature in the face; A totem of the military-industrial super-complex. And to be honest, we liked it that way. Now what? Suddenly we’re supposed to root for a guy we once watched Neytiri charge into his power loader like a human shish kebab?

This impending redemption arc also raises the question of whether other major players might find themselves undergoing full character crossovers before the seven-film series concludes. Which director, given 1,200 minutes to play with, wouldn’t choose to spin the moral compass of the entire saga like a fidget toy? Neytiri may decide that she’s always secretly loved rampant alien colonization. Spider could announce it has joined the RDA for the dental plan. Norm Spellman may run away to start a Pandora-style gastropub. Maybe none of them would mind – because, unlike Quaritch, they know who they are. The recombinant, on the other hand, has room to become something else because it’s not really Quaritch at all. He’s a man who carries memories of the evil humanoid from the 2009 movie Avatar, but remembers almost nothing of biology, context, or identity.

Maybe that’s why RDA’s revived attack dog is interacting with the new Na’vi tribe inhabiting the volcano in all the early footage we’ve seen of Fire and Ash. If there’s a reason Cameron continues to rescue it from oblivion — and we have to believe there is — it’s because Quaritch is the narrative code that the saga can still reshape. He is the only character who can reasonably stand between the two types rather than completely belonging to either. Which means it may hold the key to whatever future Pandora is headed toward — not the neat ending where the humans pack up and go home, nor the ultimate fantasy where the Na’vi win every battle forever, but something more chaotic, strange, and common, dancing together among the floating bioluminescent jellyfish.