Avatar has eclipsed Star Wars as a family saga

The whole concept of Star Wars being a family-driven story — “the Skywalker Saga,” as the main nine “episode” movies were rebranded toward the end of the sequel trilogy — has always been a little more tenuous than filmmakers let on. Yes, the twist revealed at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, that Luke Skywalker is actually the son of much-feared galactic fascist Darth Vader, shifts that trilogy into a story about a son redeeming his father, rather than the tale of a plucky orphan (or a child suffering for his father’s sins).

There’s a neat thematic counterpoint, too, in Vader’s origins, with Anakin Skywalker corrupted in part by his fear and anger over his mother’s death, then redeemed by his own son’s compassion. The sequel trilogy attempts to build out another reversal, with Vader’s grandchild, Leia and Han’s son Kylo Ren, serving as the conflicted bad guy.

But most of the best-drawn relationships in the Star Wars movies are pointedly not about family, or at least not about blood ties. Luke’s true father-figures in the original trilogy are his mentors Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda, who he learns from and, in Yoda’s Last Jedi phrasing, grows beyond. Over in the prequels, Anakin and Obi-Wan have a rich, complicated student/teacher closeness in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, as Obi-Wan struggles to strike the right balance between fatherly advice and brotherly support (and squabbling) with his “very young apprentice.” In the first two installments of the sequel trilogy, Rey works well as a nomadic nobody, antagonized but intrigued by Kylo Ren, and finding a brief father-figure of her own in Luke. It’s such a great conceit that Rise of Skywalker plot-twisting her as Emperor Palpatine’s granddaughter feels like a panicked echo of the previous movies, not an organic development.

Both within the universe of the movie and metatextually as a story decision, that plot misstep emphasizes the importance of Star Wars characters defying their lineage. That is, it’s important within the universe for Rey to rebuke her Palpatine heritage, even though that blood tie makes her more superficially “important” to the broader lore than when she thought she was the abandoned spawn of junk traders, and writer-director J.J. Abrams clearly felt it was important to echo that dynamic from Return of the Jedi.

In that film, Luke rejects the idea that he should follow in his father’s footsteps and become a Sith lord, rejecting his lineage. He does this with a phrase that sounds affirming of his family (“I am a Jedi, like my father before me”) but he’s actually empowered by his friends and mentors, even when he doesn’t always take their advice. Luke’s wisp of a relationship with Vader is salvaged by his belief in something greater than his seeming familial destiny. Deciding to save and honor his father without following his path works great in the movie; it just doesn’t make much of a case for a rich family saga.

Image: Lucasfilm/Disney

Like the Star Wars trilogy, Avatar makes a second-movie pivot into family matters. Like Star Wars, the first movie focuses more intently on a hero’s journey, as Jake Sully, a disabled soldier, gets a chance to inhabit a synthetic avatar of the alien Na’vi race while on a mission to assist with the colonization of the moon-world Pandora. He eventually sides with the natives and becomes a full-time occupant of a Na’vi body, as well as the partner of actual Na’vi Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña).

The sequels jump forward in time, with Jake and Neytiri raising a family together in the interim. Three of their children are natural-born Na’vi, though they carry the mark of their father’s alien DNA. A fourth adoptee is the biological child of Grace (Sigourney Weaver), a human scientist who died in the first movie. A fifth, of sorts, is Spider (Jack Champion), a human kid born in the scientist camp of Pandora, who tries his best to keep up with his adoptive Na’vi siblings. (He reads as a very close cousin, or perhaps son-in-law.) Suddenly, a story about a guy challenged and changed by native culture is a story about a family blended from several different directions.

As a writer, Cameron is not especially less corny than George Lucas in terms of mechanics. What makes both The Way of Water and Fire and Ash work surprisingly well, long after the novelty of Pandora itself has worn off, is how convincingly Cameron and his co-writers depict a complicated family dynamic.

Image: 20th Century Studios

Not every Sully family member gets equal screen time in the sequels, and there are stretches where many of the siblings don’t have much to do. But the presence of this complicated blended family feeds back into Jake’s relationship with his newfound Na’vi identity and his lingering instincts as a human soldier. His mantra “This family is our fortress” isn’t just lip service; Jake Sully arguably has no actual friends, just a dedicated partner and a miniature platoon of child semi-soldiers.

The kids’ individual relationships with their dad have an uneven, lived-in quality that’s far removed from Star Wars’ formalized, symbolic family connections. Jake Sully isn’t a totemic father figure whose fate haunts his children from afar. He’s an up-close-and-personal dad who encourages his kids, yells at them, loves them, and screws up on the regular. Similarly, his kids exist in the present. Their relationships are with parents they must live with, not blood relations whose invisible lineage looms over their fates. That makes it easier to see the Avatar children coming into their own.

And, crucial by comparison to Star Wars, where motherhood is largely equated with death and/or sacrifice, Avatar’s Neytiri both defies and conforms to fierce-mother stereotypes. She goes positively feral in her efforts to save her daughters at the end of Way of Water. But Fire and Ash finds her unmoored by grief and unforgiving toward Spider, the human child whose life her eldest son Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) helps save in the previous movie, dying in the process. The characters are CG-enhanced, but the rawness of the motion-captured performances feels tactile. The Avatar series leans heavily on spectacle, and has some of the most spectacular fantasy action sequences around. But some of its most impressive effects work is dedicated to keeping the actors’ emotions on faces whose details are heavily modified by computers.

Image: 20th Century Studios

The interconnected (and sometimes overly busy!) ensemble of the Avatar sequels lacks the easy-to-scan Hero’s Journey archetypes that Star Wars writers and directors have labored to maintain, but the tradeoff for that lack of instant iconography seems worthwhile. There’s impressive unity in how many of the Avatar characters’ motivations derive from their positions in the Sully family, whether it’s younger son Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) fighting to prove himself to his father, Kiri’s frustration with her parents’ decisions regarding Spider, or the gulf between Neytiri’s parental instincts and Jake’s hybridized Na’vi/military-guy approach.

These depictions of parent-child struggles don’t make the Avatar trilogy inherently superior to the Star Wars movies. They do, however, mark a crucial point of separation between the most influential modern sci-fi/fantasy franchises — and more importantly, they establish Cameron’s movies as more complex than the reskinned Dances with Wolves they’re still sometimes described as. The Skywalkers have become both an eternal selling point and a major weakness for Star Wars, exerting a pull on both viewers and creators that the franchise’s overseers have only recently seemed interested in resisting.

If two more Avatar sequels do eventually materialize, it’s possible they’ll resurrect Star Wars’ Skywalker obsession in taller, bluer form: Why does everything on Pandora connect back to the Sully family?! But Cameron has done the work to actually construct a family saga, rather than gesture toward one. The world of Pandora isn’t as vast as the Star Wars galaxy, but its richer family story has a lot more depth.