The real hero of the ‘Avatar’ sequels is a whale named Payakan

The Way of Water jumps forward 16 years, and finds the human-turned-Na’vi Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his princess bride Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) as parents to a quartet of unruly children, including the mischievous young Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) and the moody teenager Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), a son destined to play second fiddle to his more responsible older brother, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters). Encroaching human corporations force the Sullys to re-locate from the citadel in the floating mountains to a beachside village inhabited by the tattooed, Polynesian-inspired Metkayina Clan, or the Water People, whose chieftains—the stern but understanding Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and the mistrusting and pregnant Ronal (Kate Winslett)—teach them the ways of their tribe.

The Metkayina characters, with their lighter shades of blue and finned arms, serve as the gateway for the sequels’ aquatic musings, especially the tribe’s relationship with an intelligent species of whale known as the Tulkun. These creatures aren’t treated as animals, but as human beings with their own cultural stories and individual personalities, each of whom forms a bond with a respective “brother” or “sister” in the coastal tribe. They have songs and stories, and perhaps most importantly, ancient laws that speak to a deep-seated pacifist morality. When we meet the young bull Payakan, he’s been outcast from his Tulkun tribe, owing to having fought back against human whaling ships—which, in turn, led to reprisal and further death against his kin. For the Tulkun, this is reason enough to banish him, which leads to his close-knit bond with Lo’ak, a fellow outsider.

The story of the Metkayina and the Tulkun is wrapped up in the series’ already complicated approach to indigenous ethnicities, starting with the first film’s mish-mash of African and Native American tribal stereotypes. The intent is virtuous—Jake joins the Na’vi to defeat his own colonial factions—but the optics are, at very best, contradictory, leading to numerous mixed and nuanced responses from Indigenous viewers. Cameron began shooting the first Avatar in Wellington, New Zealand in 2007, the home of digital effects studio Wētā FX, responsible for the franchise’s revolutionary CGI and performance capture technologies. Principal photography would continue on both sequels (and initial scenes of a planned fourth film) in 2017, leading to Cameron eventually securing New Zealand citizenship earlier this year. In short: he’s spent a lot of time in the country and around its people, so it’s no surprise that New Zealand’s indigenous Māori culture has, for better or worse, become a staple of the Avatar world.

As the series goes on, Māori beliefs around death—the way the Wairua, or soul, lives on after the body and travels to the Hawaiki, a spiritual homeland—become an increasingly important basis for Na’vi rituals, which Cameron transforms into science fiction. It’s a beautiful bastardization, leading to some of the most resplendent-looking, albeit perturbing, scenes in major Hollywood blockbusters. The issue of this alien representation becomes further complicated when taking casting into account; while the actors playing the Metkayina hail from various backgrounds, New Zealand’s Curtis is the only actor of Māori descent to embody a major character inspired by his people. On one hand, Cameron’s transhumanistic approach to storytelling imagines a world where people can be free of their bodies, and be more closely connected by their souls, but on the other hand, the designs in The Way of Water are still rooted in the very same colonial gaze the movie’s heroes so boisterously refute. Winslet's Ronal, while performed with blistering emotion, is perhaps the last bastion of this sort of broad cultural caricature by a white actor—the kind that would’ve involved skin-darkening make-up just a few decades ago. She skirts the edges of offense and acceptability with her broad, made-up-but-clearly-inspired-by-real-cultures alien accent, and slips past being labeled a racial tourist—à la Emma Stone or Scarlett Johansson—based on the Metkayina being fictitious. (The other white actors, like those playing Jake and his sons, are technically embodying Caucasian humans—either wholly or in part—so there’s at least an in-world explanation for their casting, despite their accents inviting similar questions).

And while Fire and Ash features a slight refutation of this approach—it affords Neytiri, in her moments of grief, complicated feelings about her own family’s human lineage, and their connection to her colonizers—the series’ cultural kaleidoscope remains its overarching M.O. This is perhaps why animal characters like the Tulkun are so pivotal to the Avatar series working as well as it does, in spite of these discomforting optics. Whales have a sacred place in Māori tradition, and have been seen as guardians for their seafaring journey to Aotearoa (the pre-colonial and oft-reclaimed name for New Zealand) centuries ago, while their bones and flesh have long provided utensils and food. In recent years, whales have even been bestowed with legal personhood by tribal leaders.

This sense of symbiosis forms the basis for the deep connection between the Na’vi and the Tulkun, which Cameron aestheticizes through melodramatic conversations between the likes of Lo’ak and Payakan. The young Na’vi speaks to his aquatic sibling in a rudimentary sign language, but we often see these scenes through Payakan’s eyes, stretched with fish-eye lenses and colored amber to match the whale’s enormous pupils. Payakan, in return, speaks in whale calls that Lo’ak comes to understand—and which the audience reads in subtitles. After the initial delight and surprise of witnessing these chats, they start to feel like a natural fixture of the series’ drama. 

In the third film, Fire and Ash, the Tulkuns’ culture is explored further, through the presence of gigantic tattooed whale elders clad in robes and piercings, who gather to hold court. Payakan’s reprisals against the human invaders are the topic of this trial, which emanates—from the sagely Tulkun matriarchs—as vibrations on the ocean’s surface, imbuing the drama with booming importance. The Na’vi at large respect the Tulkuns’ decisions to remain isolated and avoid violent conflict, regardless of how trigger-happy characters like Jake and Lo’ak might feel. And although the Tulkun and other sea creatures eventually come around and join the revolution—leading to some of the most rousing action scenes in any major blockbuster (including a particularly gnarly dismemberment)—they do so on their own terms. Despite the series beginning with the story of a white savior, the sequels’ tales of animals fighting back never involve condescension toward the Tulkuns’ way of life. It’s through the testimony of other Tulkun characters, like Payakan, that this peace-loving species is convinced to fight, without consulting or conspiring with the more war-ready Na’vi, further justifying the series’ view of their autonomy and traditions. They are, as the characters often note, their own people. 

Cameron, who was born in Canada in 1954, has always felt split as a filmmaker between the contrasting militarism and hippie spirit that defined Hollywood and the American zeitgeist in the 1960s. The former, rah-rah sentiment most takes hold in films like Aliens (1986), his big U.S. Marine-centric sequel infused with sentimentality surrounding motherhood, while The Abyss (1989) became the first time he would combine extraterrestrials and the ocean depths to craft a conservationist fable. These warring instincts are on full display in the Avatar films, which—like his Terminator movies—capture machinery in fetishistic fashion, like the slow turning of enormous gears and tank tracks. However, this technology is usually destroyed or repurposed, aiding the side of indigeneity and nature in the thematic battle for collectivism and peaceful coexistence. This is the nexus at which the Tulkun are born; although made from flesh and blood, they’re filmed (or rather, rendered) with the same sense of humongous weight as any bit of construction or military equipment, and they eventually use their bodies as projectiles and melee weapons to hammer the human colonists into submission. 

In granting the Tulkun not just human personality, but the virtues of cinematic heroism, Cameron transcends the narrative trappings of the traditional Hollywood action-adventure, wherein individual humans seize victory by exerting power. While the climaxes of both sequels feature skirmishes between individual heroes and villains, battles are won when all human (and humanoid) characters cede control to the natural world, allowing hyper-intelligent space whales like Payakan to reclaim their peaceful existence in a larger ecosystem. That they do this by wreaking havoc on human colonizers is just the icing on the cake.