James Cameron et al seem to have turned round critical opinion on Avatar: The Way of Water at amazing speed, now that a few people have actually seen the movie. A few months back the sequel was being pilloried, now some people seem to think it’s going to be the greatest thing since the invention of mech-armour. But wait until they pull off their next cosmic trick. Yes, according to producer Jon Landau, the Na’vi are coming to Earth!
“In movie five there is a section of the story where we go to Earth,” Landau told io9. “And we go to it to open people’s eyes, open Neytiri’s eyes, to what exists on Earth.
“Earth is not just represented by the [evil, Pandora-scrubbing human corporation] RDA,” he added. “Just like you’re defined by the choices you make in life, not all humans are bad. Not all Na’vi are good. And that’s the case here on Earth. And we want to expose Neytiri to that.”
We can only assume this means that Neytiri and co are going to travel across the cosmos to mankind’s home planet, which could make for the weirdest fish out of water fantasy flick since Arnold Schwarzenegger’s execrable 1970 Hollywood “acting” debut, Hercules in New York. Will the 10ft tall blue space elves be paraded before mankind like the horrific “human zoos” of the 19th and 20th centuries? Or will they arrive on Earth as free allies, with the horrors of the RDA presumably banished to recent history? What on Pandora could have taken place in the intervening three movies to lead us to such a bizarre eventuality?
To be honest, none of this matters. For there is an unwritten rule that science fiction franchises that originate off Earth should never, ever return to the home planet, because the results are usually excruciating. Remember the totally misleading teaser trailer for David Fincher’s Alien 3 that suggested a visit to this end of the solar system was on the cards? In the end, the closest the final movie got to Earth was introducing a load of English character actors with proudly regional accents, and it was still rubbish. By the time the saga eventually did bask in the warmth of our own true sun in the godawful Alien vs Predator any fans of the long-running franchise would probably have preferred the prospect of being impregnated by a chestburster to sitting through more than five minutes of Paul WS Anderson’s terrifyingly bad entry.
Other examples of returning to Earth being a Very Bad Idea include the entirety of 1986’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the really tedious one about the blimmin whales that spends most of its run-time with the crew of the Enterprise bumming around contemporary San Francisco looking for aqua parks. Then there’s the end of Battlestar Galactica’s 2004 remake, a finale so pointless and dispiriting that we all just wanted to be back in a Viper shooting down Cylons with Starbuck and Apollo in season one. They really should have learned from the original show’s final discovery of Earth in the short-lived, utterly appalling Galactica 1980, a 10-episode run that proved the crew of the legendary space cruiser really were better off being miserable in space.
Our advice to the Na’vi would be not to head to Earth any time soon, especially given that we know from the first Avatar movie that it has probably devolved by the 22nd century into an environmentally devastated, lawless hellscape. Surely the whole reason Cameron invented Pandora is that its lush, verdant, psychedelic forests are perfect for generating head-spinning, eye-popping 3D dreamscapes, in a way that we can only assume a trip to 22nd-century New Malden wouldn’t.
So please, Neytiri, stay where the xenon-tinged air is sweet and the six-legged beasties are always welcoming, at least when they’re not trying to eat you. Faced with the prospect of meeting the locals on a hurricane-ravaged winter’s night in dystopian future Chicago or kicking back in the gorgeous, warm and luxurious oceans of Pandora while making swishy mischief with other impossibly beautiful extraterrestrials, we know where we’d rather be.
