Will Quaritch, the square-jawed representative of military-industrial destruction befriend the Na’vi in James Cameron’s forthcoming Avatar: Fire and Ash? And if so, what other unlikely character about-turns should we be prepared for?
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t’s almost possible to feel a little sorry for Colonel Miles Quaritch, the main villain of Avatar. Imagine: first you’re sent light years from Earth to hang out with 14ft blue space hippies, then you’re suddenly dead. Then you’re resurrected as one of the 14ft blue space hippies. And now, according to James Cameron, you might just be starting to realise that the giant tree-hugging freaks you’ve spent two films trying to erase are your kind of people after all.
Speaking to Empire in an interview last week, Cameron revealed that the Quaritch we will meet in the forthcoming Avatar: Fire and Ash (although still played by Stephen Lang) is no longer the same person we first saw stomping through the rainforest in the original 2009 film. Yes, he’s a “recombinant” – a lab-grown Na’vi reboot of a man carved out of granite and patriotism – but he’s also going through a full-blown existential wobble after discovering in the last instalment that he has a human son, Spider. “Quaritch is undergoing an identity crisis,” said Cameron. “His interest in the biological son of his biological precursor form is all about trying to define, ‘Am I a completely new person? Am I bound by the rules and the behaviours of the person whose memories and personality I was imprinted with?’ It’s a true existential dilemma for him in the philosophical sense.”
