What’s the Exchange Rate on Genocide When Extinction Is the Alternative?

James Cameron’s Avatar franchise has already made several billion dollars across three films, built stunning worlds at unprecedented scale, and delivered emotionally resonant stories about family, loss, and cultural identity. The character work—Neytiri’s feral grief, Varang’s traumatic rejection of spiritual dogma, Jake navigating life as a cultural traitor—demonstrates genuine moral complexity.

Meanwhile, the meta-conflict underpinning the entire franchise remains stubbornly, frustratingly shallow.

Three films deep, Cameron still isn’t asking the hard question his own setup demands: What do you do when saving your species requires destroying someone else’s world? Instead the Na’vi are spiritually pure indigenous people defending their world against faceless corporate exploitation. And that’s why the franchise is continually criticized as Pocahontas in space and Dances with Wolves on an alien moon—because the moral lines drawn with a fucking Sharpie.

The Resources Development Administration exists solely as Evil Corporation™. No nuance, no human stakes beyond quarterly profits and shareholder value. Corporate executives calculating extraction timelines, military commanders gleefully deploying overwhelming force, but we never see why Earth needs Pandora’s resources beyond abstract greed. Unobtanium in the first film. Amrita (whale brain juice) in the second and third. Valuable MacGuffins that keep the conflict safely in “bad people want valuable thing” territory.

The Na’vi embody the noble savage archetype without any nuance whatsoever. They’re an indigenous people who are naturally wise, spiritually superior, living in perfect harmony with nature. They’re not a culture with their own complexities, contradictions, and moral failures—they’re a moral lesson for corrupted humanity. Their spiritual connection to Eywa is literally, objectively real in the universe of the films, which means their worldview isn’t just different, it’s correct.

Which not incidentally makes questioning them heresy.

The two species in conflict are categorically two-dimensional. The framework hasn’t evolved past that, and I have to ask why?

Because Avatar: Fire and Ash proves Cameron is fully capable of moral complexity when he deploys it. Varang—leader of the Mangkwan Ash People and the franchise’s first genuinely complicated Na’vi—has legitimate trauma. A volcanic eruption destroyed her people’s home when she was young. They prayed to Eywa for help. Help didn’t come. Her people faced starvation and extinction. So Varang rejected the spiritual framework that supposedly governs all Na’vi life and led her clan in a different direction: fire worship, tactical pragmatism, and whatever it takes to survive. She’s not arbitrarily evil. She’s the hero of her own story. She saved her people when their goddess abandoned them. That she uses hallucinogenic drugs to make her warriors fearless, that she’s described as taking pleasure in violence, that she teams up with Quaritch—none of this negates the fact that she had actual reasons to become what she became.

Her people aren’t starving anymore, so by her own metrics, she succeeded. 

It’s great character work, and Varang proves Cameron understands trauma produces divergent responses, survival can justify terrible choices, and moral clarity dissolves under pressure. Neytiri operates beautifully in similar territory—grief and PTSD after losing her son, capable of breathtaking violence when her family is threatened, never domesticated or softened by motherhood, dangerous and devoted in equal measure, complicated rather than archetypal. Even Jake exists in moral ambiguity the films touch on but never fully explore as a cultural traitor who chose the Na’vi over humanity, who lives in the body of his enemies’ creation, who killed members of his own species to protect his adopted people. 

The capability for complexity exists, but Cameron doesn’t apply it where it matters most—to the central conflict that defines the entire franchise.

He already demonstrated that familiar story frameworks don’t limit thematic depth. The ecological themes, the consciousness questions, the interpersonal relationships, and Eywa’s neural network as manifestation of interconnectedness versus extraction all elevated the films. That depth is tangible and real. But it’s depth in worldbuilding and spiritual philosophy, not in the human-Na’vi conflict itself. The RDA were always cardboard villains. In a single film establishing a world, that worked because the thematic architecture compensated. Three films later, with Varang demonstrating Cameron knows how to give antagonists legitimate grievances and complex motivations, the continued refusal to apply that same craft to the humans becomes a deliberate pattern.

What’s maddening is the setup for genuine moral tragedy is already present in the franchise’s worldbuilding. Earth is a ruined husk. Humanity destroyed its home world through environmental destruction, resource depletion, and industrial catastrophe. The supplemental materials describe a planet suffocating under toxic air, where billions live in desperate poverty, where extinction is a calculable timeline rather than abstract possibility.

That isn’t corporate greed. It’s a species-level survival crisis.

Cameron doesn’t—or won’t—show it. Why? Instead of human characters on Earth facing actual desperation—families suffocating in toxic air, children dying of starvation, scientists calculating how many years humanity has left—we get corporate executives in boardrooms discussing profit margins. Instead of soldiers who volunteered for Pandora because their own families are dying and the RDA promised them a way to save their kids, we get cardboard mercenaries who enjoy violence for its own sake.

The RDA’s mission to Pandora should carry genuine moral weight. They’re not exploiting an alien world for shareholder value, they’re trying to prevent human extinction. Unobtanium isn’t valuable because it’s rare, it’s valuable because it might be the key to reversing Earth’s atmospheric collapse, to building sustainable habitats, to saving billions of lives. Suddenly the conflict has actual stakes. The Na’vi are still right to defend their home, their claim to Pandora is legitimate, their spiritual connection is real, and they owe humanity nothing. But now you’ve got genuine tragedy rather than simple villainy: two peoples with incompatible survival needs, where somebody has to lose. What is the exchange rate on genocide when extinction is the alternative? Is it acceptable to destroy one sentient species’ world to save your own? How many human lives is Pandora worth? How many Na’vi lives is Earth worth? What’s the moral calculus when survival’s a zero-sum game?

There’s no clean answer to that question, which makes it worth asking.

And that moral complexity doesn’t undermine Jake and Neytiri’s position at all. They can still be right to fight for Pandora, right to resist human invasion, right to protect their children and their world. But now their enemies aren’t faceless corporate villains, they’re desperate people making terrible choices because the alternative is watching their own species die.

Other blockbuster franchises have managed moral complexity at massive commercial scale. The Dark Knight gave you a villain with a coherent philosophical position and became the benchmark for superhero films. Dune doesn’t make the Fremen purely heroic or the Empire purely evil, and it’s doing massive box office. The Empire Strikes Back complicated the original Star Wars’ moral simplicity and exceeded its predecessor commercially.

Cameron could show Earth’s desperation in parallel with Pandora’s beauty. He could give us human characters—not corporate executives, but ordinary people—facing extinction and seeing Pandora as their only hope. He could force the audience who’s been rooting for the Na’vi to understand why the humans can’t just leave. The technical craft is there, the worldbuilding capability exists, the character work proves he knows how to do moral complexity.

And yet here we are.

Which keeps the meta-conflict shallow while the individual stories—the family dynamics, the cultural tensions, the character work on Neytiri and Varang and Jake’s children—demonstrate genuine depth. But spectacle and character work can’t fully compensate for a meta-conflict that refuses complexity. When your overarching framework is morally binary, it limits how much weight the individual stories can carry. You’re doing sophisticated character work within a simplistic ideological cage.

Cameron established this framework in the first film and still hasn’t broken out of it. But he’s got two more films in the planned five-film arc. Avatar 4 could retroactively complicate the entire franchise by finally showing what humanity is fighting for rather than just what they’re taking. Make the previous films not “good guys vs. bad guys” but the opening chapters of a genuine tragedy where nobody gets out clean. That would be a bold move: spend three films establishing the moral binary, then pull the rug out in the fourth by showing Earth’s desperation with the same craft and empathy Cameron brings to Pandora. Force the audience to sit with the unanswerable question.

Three films in, Cameron has shown he can do moral complexity in character work. The question is whether he will where it matters most. If he’ll trade exotic MacGuffins for actual moral stakes. 

If he’ll finally ask the hard questions.

It’d make the franchise not just commercially successful spectacle but genuine tragedy. The kind of moral complexity that elevates blockbusters into classics, that people argue about for decades because there’s no easy answer.

Cameron’s shown he’s capable of it. Whether he—or his investors—are willing to risk it on an audience often dismissed as needing binary frameworks is another question entirely.

All that said, I’m still a huge fan. They’re great films. They could just be so much more.

And that makes me sad.