James Cameron nearly ended Avatar: Fire and Ash very differently – until a moral crisis

Late in post-production, the director called back the cast after deciding the final act no longer felt right

Avatar: Fire and Ash wasn’t supposed to end this way.

“When you watch the film, you probably think, ‘oh, absolutely – he must go and fulfil his destiny,’” James Cameron tells The National. “But actually, I did all that in post-production.”

The realisation came years into his famously intensive process – the stage at which Cameron and his team of hundreds were turning months of performance-capture work into the intricately animated epic that's now in cinemas across the Middle East.

Movie reviewAvatar: Fire and Ash is a deeply political epic for the present moment

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Working in the editing room, he was mapping out the film’s climax, in which the people of Pandora unite in a final confrontation with the colonial forces occupying their world.

But as he watched it back, the director came to an uncomfortable conclusion: the final act he had written all those years earlier was wrong.

The problem was not technical, but moral. For Cameron, Avatar has always been less about spectacle than about the consequences of power, extraction and resistance. The films are built around a belief that confronting colonial violence requires more than simply reversing its winners and losers.

That belief was undermined by the climax as it stood. In the version originally written, Jake Sully – a former Marine turned Na’vi leader – would unite Pandora’s remaining clans and arm them with automatic weapons, setting the stage for a gun-heavy final showdown. Revisiting the sequence, Cameron realised it echoed a familiar historical pattern.

“At a certain point it just hit me – this maps to colonial history,” he says. “Arming the tribes and pitting them against each other is actually the wrong thing. That was part of the North American genocide of indigenous people. I can’t have Jake doing the same thing.”

Sam Worthington as Jake Sully, one of the lead characters of the Avatar franchise. Photo: 20th Century Studios

That reckoning did not begin in the editing room.

In 2010, months after Avatar became a global phenomenon, Cameron travelled to Brazil’s Amazon region, where he was invited to sit with leaders of the Kayapo people along the Xingu River. They were facing the proposed construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam – a project that would flood vast stretches of land and permanently alter their way of life.

The parallels with Pandora were not abstract. The Kayapo saw in Cameron’s film a version of their own story: resources extracted in the name of progress, consequences borne by those with the least power to resist. They asked him to help make their case to the wider world.

Cameron spoke publicly alongside them, warning that the damage would be irreversible. “The defining battle in human history is happening during our lifetime,” he said at the time. “If we mess this up, we’ve messed it up for all time.”

The dam was built anyway. Completed in 2019, Belo Monte reduced large sections of the Xingu River by as much as 85 per cent – a reminder of how little even global attention can slow the machinery of state-backed development.

But for Cameron, the episode did not register as futility so much as urgency. If direct intervention could not halt the machinery of capital, then stories – vast, immersive, impossible to ignore – remained his most effective tool.

Avatar would not stop a dam from being built, but it could change how millions of people understood whose lives are treated as expendable in the name of progress. And if those stories helped audiences recognise themselves in the Na’vi, Cameron believes, they might also learn to recognise the humanity of those fighting similar battles in the real world.

That conviction – that storytelling can still shape how people see the world – is what keeps him returning to Pandora.

Oona Chaplin plays Varang, the leader of an opposing Na'vi clan. Photo: 20th Century Studios

To get the final act he now knew was right – best left undisclosed until audiences have seen the film – Cameron had to rethink more than a single scene. He stripped material out, called the actors back, and reworked the climax around a different set of values.

“The actors were excited about it,” he says. “They were like, ‘oh yeah, that makes sense.’”

For Sam Worthington, who plays Jake Sully, that constant revision has become part of the experience of working on Avatar. “Jim is like a painter in that regard,” he says. “With most conventional movies, you get the script, you set a period of time, you film it, and you’re done.

“But we started Avatar: The Way of Water and this [film] at the same time back in 2017 – because they’re ultimately one story. And all the way through that process, it was like this. He’d call us up like we were doctors on call.

“I’d get a call saying, ‘hey man, can you come in? I want to try something out.’ He never really stops painting. You never really leave Avatar.”

Cameron agrees. “I’m not precious about what I wrote,” he says. “I’m constantly second-guessing it. I see the entire post-production phase as kind of a rewrite.”

James Cameron called the cast back for more filming after moral concerns over his original ending. Photo: 20th Century Studios

That process of revision is inseparable from the film’s moral hesitation. Avatar: Fire and Ash does not offer a single protagonist in the traditional sense, nor a single ethical trajectory to follow. Instead, its characters embody competing responses to trauma, loss and occupation – from Jake’s reluctance to lead others into violence, to Neytiri’s consuming grief, to Varang’s belief that power can only be reclaimed through destruction.

“Almost, the hero is a set of values, in a funny way,” Cameron says. “The family represents that. You’ve got different characters struggling with identity, with grief, with hatred – and you see where those paths can lead.”

That refusal to anoint a single moral authority carries through to the film’s most difficult question: when, if ever, violence is justified.

“I don’t have all the answers,” Cameron says. “I don’t profess to be Gandhi or some great philosopher. But I do struggle with the issue of when armed conflict is justified.”

The dilemma is embodied most clearly through the Tulkun, an intelligent, whale-like species that has remained peacefully non-violent throughout its history.

“The Tulkun have a pacifist mentality, which works right up until the moment you’re going to be exterminated,” Cameron explains. “That pacifism was based on their history, which didn’t involve a massively superior invading force.”

Zoe Saldana as Neytiri in Avatar: Fire and Ash. PA

Cameron, 71, is also acutely aware of how fragile any long view can be. Avatar was conceived as a story told across multiple films, but each instalment has to stand on its own. Sixteen years into the saga, and three films deep, he is conscious that these are also among the most expensive movies ever made – projects that must rank among the highest-grossing films in history to justify the next.

With each chapter taking years to complete, there is no certainty about how long the runway lasts.

“I was holding out. I was playing a longer game,” he says. “I was holding out for movie four. And at a certain point I thought I might never get to movie four. Now, let me tell the right story now.”

In a franchise that so closely mirrors the world we live in – where similar struggles continue to play out among indigenous communities globally, not to mention in Gaza and Ukraine – it is impossible to know what moral questions the coming years will demand.

The ethical dilemmas at the heart of Avatar: Fire and Ash are not theoretical, and Cameron is acutely aware that their meanings shift as circumstances change. What once played for many as allegory now lands against a far less settled global backdrop, as the injustices he has been working through on Pandora increasingly echo those unfolding in real time.

“I’m not sure the film offers so many answers,” he says. “I leave the moral debate for downstream.”

For now, that debate continues – on screen and beyond it.

Avatar: Fire and Ash is in cinemas now across the Middle East