There is a moment from 2025 that I keep returning to because I remember the person I was when I watched it. James Cameron appeared at Meta Connect with Mark Zuckerberg, talking about the future of three-dimensional cinema, headsets, immersive storytelling and the possibility of bringing films into spaces where the image no longer feels trapped behind a rectangle. The partnership between Cameron’s Lightstorm Vision and Meta had actually been announced in December 2024, with Cameron describing the technology as a genuine inflection point, and by Meta Connect 2025 the collaboration had become tangible: an exclusive three-dimensional sequence from Avatar: Fire and Ash was being shown on Quest, alongside the promise of a much larger future for this kind of cinema. I remember watching Cameron speak and feeling an enormous, uncomplicated positivity about where everything might be going. We were already expecting our child, I believe. Life itself seemed to be opening. Technology seemed capable of becoming beautiful again rather than merely intrusive. Cinema seemed to be expanding rather than contracting. Avatar was returning. Cameron was still there, still stubbornly building impossible things, still talking about the future as somewhere worth travelling toward. I had spent years arguing for Avatar in essentially those terms anyway: not simply as a franchise I happened to love, but as a kind of artivism, a vast popular mythology about reconnecting ourselves with life, other people and the living world rather than treating everything around us as inventory. That is how I've described the project in the past: a reality-based paracosm drawing upon the living world and First Nations cultures, using spectacle in the service of a broader ethical appeal about how we treat ourselves, one another and the planet. So seeing Cameron standing there discussing another technological threshold did something to me. For a little while I genuinely felt that humanity might choose the good future.
And then there were the Windtraders.
Even before Fire and Ash arrived, there was something almost impossibly appealing about them. The Tlalim were explicitly conceived as the bright presence entering this darker chapter of Pandora: airborne nomads crossing immense distances in living vessels, with Deborah L. Scott describing them as upbeat, colourful people whose arrival has the excitement of a travelling circus coming into town. Their existence promised another expansion of Pandora rather than another narrowing of it. After forest and ocean, suddenly there was the sky itself: not merely something to fly through on an ikran, but somewhere a culture could live, travel, trade, sing, carry histories and encounter distant peoples. Cameron described the Windtraders as unusually unrooted for a Na’vi people, moving across Pandora rather than belonging to one fixed territory, and said that they were part of a longer design stretching through films three, four and five. They seemed to embody one of the foundational pleasures of Avatar: the suggestion that the part of Pandora we have seen is absurdly small, and that every mountain range on the horizon could contain another civilisation, another ecology, another form of music, another understanding of existence. Cameron has described his desired effect as giving us a glimpse through a keyhole into a much greater reality that continues beyond the edges of the film. The Windtraders may be the purest expression of that idea yet because they themselves move toward the horizon.
Simon Franglen gave them music worthy of that promise. I was fortunate enough to speak with Simon in person and in interview form, and I still maintain that “The Windtraders” is one of the most beautiful pieces written for a modern blockbuster: soaring, exultant, celebratory music that seems to contain upward movement inside its composition. It does not merely accompany flight. It sounds like the emotional condition of being carried somewhere. The soundtrack sequencing has become almost painfully symbolic to me now. “The Windtraders” is followed by “Caravan At Night,” and then by “Mangkwan Attack.” Arrival, journey, destruction. The album itself preserves the trajectory in three titles. Franglen went astonishingly far in establishing the Tlalim as an actual culture rather than visual decoration, developing instruments that could plausibly exist aboard their vessels and having physical versions made so performers could genuinely use them on screen. That degree of invention is exactly why their brief journey affects me so much. You can sense the enormous amount of civilisation existing behind what we are being allowed to see. For a few extraordinary minutes, Fire and Ash stops being primarily a story about war and pursuit and becomes the Avatar film I could happily have watched for three hours: the Sullys travelling with these people, eating with them, hearing their songs, moving through unfamiliar territories, watching Pandora alter beneath them, meeting communities scattered across the world, learning what the Windtraders carry and why they travel, letting the immense geography of this invented moon slowly reveal itself. I wanted the long journey. I wanted the digressions. I wanted to remain aboard.
Then it burns.
The Mangkwan attack the caravan, the serenity collapses, the Sully family is scattered and Fire and Ash becomes the harsher story its title promised. The sequence is not a minor accident inserted simply to propel the plot. It is deliberately violent rupture: fire entering a culture associated with openness, travel and celebration, destroying the vehicle through which we had only just begun to experience this new part of Pandora. I understand why Cameron did it. Avatar could not continue indefinitely by repeating the structure of discovery, initiation and ecstatic communion that defined the first two films. The introduction of Varang and the Mangkwan was a deliberate refusal to make every Na’vi society morally interchangeable. Cameron wanted contradiction within Pandora itself, and Sam Worthington has since spoken about the unusual freedom these films retain to take creative risks rather than being completely governed by studio or fan expectation. I respect that impulse. I would rather Cameron make the third film stranger, angrier and more morally unsettled than manufacture a perfectly calibrated reproduction of the previous two. History may ultimately be kinder to Fire and Ash precisely because it was willing to contaminate the utopian surface of Pandora and show a people who have experienced catastrophe and responded not with greater communion but with alienation, violence and domination.
But I cannot shake the emotional consequence of the choice. The love is interrupted. The voyage is interrupted. Wonder itself is interrupted. Something arrives carrying music and colour and possibility, and almost immediately something else arrives carrying fire.
That image has lodged itself inside the way I currently experience the wider world. I do not mean that Cameron somehow made Fire and Ash as a direct allegory for every crisis surrounding us in 2026; the film had been in production for years, and The Way of Water and Fire and Ash were developed and produced as parts of the same enormous undertaking. The parallel is mine. But it is difficult now to watch that caravan rise into the sky without feeling the ache of recognising a civilisation that seems perpetually capable of approaching beauty and then setting fire to the vessel carrying it. We develop astonishing technologies and immediately wonder how they can be weaponised. We connect billions of people and then discover increasingly efficient methods of making them despise one another. We inherit a living planet of incomprehensible abundance while constructing systems capable of exhausting it. We produce art capable of extending human sympathy beyond tribe, nation, species and even planet, and then return to screens filled with cruelty, tribalism and annihilation. Cameron himself has become openly preoccupied with humanity’s existential danger. Discussing his Hiroshima project, he described the present international situation as precarious and connected it to the continuing nuclear threat; in the same interview he worried that cinema itself is being economically compressed toward safer, cheaper and increasingly mediocre forms. So perhaps the peculiar ache I feel watching Fire and Ash is not entirely separate from the moment into which the film arrived. We are living through a period in which journeys keep feeling as though they are being cut short.
That is probably why I keep thinking about my own reaction in Los Angeles. I remember watching the film and experiencing, beneath my admiration for the craft and the audacity and the sheer scale of the thing, a strangely simple longing: could we not have stayed with them longer? Could we not have travelled? It almost embarrassed me because I understood perfectly well that a story needs disruption. Of course the peaceful caravan cannot simply drift across Pandora for three hours while everybody has a lovely time. But another part of me rejected that logic entirely. Why not? Why have we become so accustomed to assuming that serenity must merely prepare the audience for catastrophe? Why must wonder continually justify itself by becoming endangered? One of Cameron’s greatest gifts in the first two Avatar films was his willingness to spend enormous stretches of extremely expensive blockbuster running time simply allowing people to discover things. Jake learns to inhabit another body. He runs. He touches plants. He falls in love. He flies. The Sully children learn another people’s language and customs. Lo’ak swims with Payakan. Kiri lies underwater and looks at light. These are not interruptions before the movie gets back to business. They are the business. The sensation of existence becoming larger is the central dramatic event.
The Windtraders awaken precisely that sensation in me. Their vessels seem designed around surrender to movement. They do not conquer distance; they are carried through it. Their culture is mobile without seeming frantic. They suggest that a life can consist of travelling through an enormous reality without needing to own every place one enters. Simon’s theme gives that intuition musical form. It rises without becoming militaristic. It celebrates without needing victory. Listening to it now produces a feeling I find increasingly difficult to name because it contains happiness and grief simultaneously: happiness because human beings are still capable of imagining something this beautiful, grief because we seem so skilled at destroying the conditions under which such feelings can survive.
Perhaps this is also why my response to Avatar has always exceeded ordinary fandom. I never wanted Pandora merely because Pandora looked nice. The first film’s deepest fantasy was that another relationship with existence might still be possible. Jake’s transformation is physical, but the deeper transformation is perceptual. He moves from a civilisation that categorises the living world according to utility into one where relationship itself constitutes reality. “I see you” is therefore not a cute alien phrase. It is the entire argument compressed into three words. To see another being completely is already to make exploitation more difficult. That proposition is almost unbearably hopeful. It says human beings are not biologically condemned to remain what our worst institutions encourage us to become. We might cross over. We might learn. We might choose differently. That is the future I felt while watching Cameron at Meta Connect in 2025. Our child was coming. Avatar was coming. New forms of cinema were coming. The future did not appear as an approaching disaster. It looked like a place we might actually want our children to inherit.
A year later, I am more guarded about that feeling. But I am not willing to surrender it.
And strangely, Cameron himself gives me some reason not to. He has already said that Peylak and the Windtraders are part of the long game, intended to continue through Avatar 4 and Avatar 5. The current Disney dates remain December 2029 and December 2031, with the fourth film therefore presently positioned almost exactly twenty years after the original Avatar. Whether those dates survive is another question. Cameron has recently said he wants to discover a production method that can make the next films in roughly half the time and for about two-thirds of the cost, and previously raised the possibility that new technologies, including generative AI used within the production workflow, might accelerate aspects of the process. His stated concern is not replacing the performances at the heart of Avatar but finding a sustainable way to keep films of this scale possible. I increasingly suspect 2029 may become something different: an anniversary year in which the original film is allowed to turn twenty and the entire phenomenon can be reconsidered from the distance of two decades. Then perhaps 2030 becomes the threshold into the final era. A new decade. A new Avatar. Perhaps four and five become a more tightly coordinated production and release cycle once Cameron’s team has spent this period redesigning the machinery underneath them. Perhaps the final film moves deeper into the 2030s. None of this has been announced; it is simply the shape I can imagine from where things currently stand.
And maybe Fire and Ash needed to exist between those eras. Maybe this was always going to be the difficult middle passage, the film in which Pandora could no longer remain the uncomplicated destination of our longing. The first Avatar said another world is possible. The Way of Water said you can lose your home and learn to belong again. Fire and Ash asks the uglier question: what happens when suffering enters the world you hoped would save you? What happens when the oppressed are capable of becoming cruel, when sacred relationships fracture, when grief turns corrosive, when the people you expected to carry you safely across the sky are suddenly falling through it? Perhaps the answer cannot be to retreat into nostalgia for the earlier films. Perhaps the answer has to be the same one demanded of us outside cinema: keep building after knowledge has become painful. Keep choosing wonder without requiring ignorance. Keep travelling after discovering that the road is dangerous.
Which brings me back to that music. “The Windtraders.” I still hear possibility in it. Fire does not retroactively invalidate the flight. The fact that the caravan was attacked does not mean its journey was foolish. The existence of violence does not make openness naive. The possibility of losing something does not diminish the wisdom of loving it. Quite the opposite. One of the darkest tricks of despair is convincing us that because beautiful things can be destroyed, believing in them was childish in the first place. Avatar has never believed that. Eywa’s world contains death everywhere. The Na’vi do not achieve reverence by pretending death is absent; they achieve it by understanding connection across death. The current world may be frightening. We may be more conscious than ever of how rapidly a peaceful horizon can become smoke. But the answer cannot be to stop constructing caravans.
I want more Windtraders.
I mean that literally. I want Cameron to fulfil the promise that we will see this culture again, that Peylak’s story really is only beginning, that some future Avatar film will give us the strange privilege of climbing aboard one of those vessels again and going somewhere we have never seen. But I mean it in the other sense too. I want more human work that produces the feeling Simon Franglen’s theme produces. More art that looks outward. More technology directed toward wonder. More people stubborn enough to spend years inventing instruments for twenty-five seconds of a fictional culture because imaginary worlds deserve the dignity of detail. More parents looking at their children and deciding that the future cannot simply be ceded to whoever is most frightened, violent or cynical. More journeys that are allowed to continue.
The caravan burned.
There are others.
EPILOGUE: 2035
I sometimes picture a very ordinary evening in 2035. The saga is finished by then, in whatever form it ultimately takes. Avatar 4 arrived sometime around the turn of the decade, Avatar 5 followed after Cameron and Lightstorm finally solved whatever impossible production equation they are currently trying to solve, and there are no longer release dates stretching ahead of us. For the first time since 2009, Avatar exists primarily in the past tense. Somewhere there is an enormous definitive box set containing the five films, documentaries, deleted material, production journals, Franglen’s music, James Horner’s music, concept art, languages, maps, hours of material about creatures and clans and performance capture and miniature facial cameras and oceans and forests and skies. Something physically ridiculous and beautiful, the way those great Lord of the Rings collections once felt: an object heavy enough to suggest that somebody spent a portion of a human lifetime making the world contained inside it.
I imagine holding that set and remembering all the versions of myself who waited for these films. The person who saw Avatar in 2009. The person who waited thirteen years for The Way of Water. The person who believed humanity might somehow choose Avatar. The person watching James Cameron at Meta Connect in 2025 with a child on the way and feeling almost absurdly hopeful about the century ahead. The person sitting in Los Angeles watching the Windtraders appear and thinking, with the uncomplicated greed of someone who has glimpsed a beautiful road, please don’t end this yet. The person watching their ships burn. The person writing this in 2026 while the world felt darker than he wanted it to feel. Then all the years after that, whatever they contain.
And perhaps by 2035 the most moving thing will not be that Cameron completed five enormous films. It will be that we travelled with them for so long. Twenty-six years from the first film in 2009 to that imagined shelf in 2035: enough time for lives to begin, families to form, people to disappear, children to grow, technology to transform itself repeatedly, optimism to collapse and return in altered forms. A saga about generations will have become generational simply through duration.
I hope that when I open that box and hear “The Windtraders” again, I remember this period without bitterness. I hope the world has surprised us. I hope some of the things that currently seem immovable have passed. I hope my child thinks of the 2020s as history rather than destiny. And I hope that somewhere in those final films, after everything Fire and Ash burned down, Cameron gives us one last enormous sky, a living ship moving through it, Simon Franglen’s theme rising beneath the image, and enough time simply to travel.
No attack yet. No destination urgently demanding our arrival. Nothing burning on the horizon.
Just the caravan, still moving.
