My opinion on what will happen in the sequel, based on my knowledge of pulp sci-fi, and of sequels:
We’ll discover that the Na’vi are not native to Pandora (with is obvious to anyone looking at them), but instead were implanted there by a cruel and ancient alien race. This race will return, the Na’vi will team up with the humans to defeat them, and in the end, humanity will learn to adapt Pandoran biotechnology to turn Earth into a paradise.
Well, the issue of what the humans will do could be avoided by simply having all events in the sequel happen within 12 years of the first movie’s events.
Though I’m fond of the idea that the humans return and it turns out that Pandora is just a baby planetary intelligence and now that gas giant is really pissed off.
I think this argument (as it pertains to another thread) is some sort of race to see who thinks they’re coolest by thinking the least of humanity.
Arguments like “sure, the humans will come in and kill them all to take their resources! look what [insert country] did to [insert colony] [insert number of centuries] ago!” are just silly. First, of course, society has changed a lot in the last few hundred years. It used to be acceptable to colonize and massacre and torture your way across the world, but modern western society does not tolerate that sort of thing, and the trend has only been working one way. It’s very unlikely that we’re going to regain our brutal ways and disregard for life over next century or two.
And we’re not talking about a group of humans here - we’re talking about AN INTELLIGENT ALIEN SPECIES. A lot of people think (now) that first contact will probably be the greatest, most world-changing moment in humanity’s history, and the people in this thread think we’re just going to regard them as (as someone in the other thread said) animals, or some random expendable natives of a faraway land? The public will want to know everything about the Na’vi. Religions will probably pop up using them as a centerpiece. News about the progress that the scientists working to learn about them would be in widespread demand. This will unify the interest of all mankind in a way that nothing before in history has. So in order to think “duh, they’ll nuke them”, you have to assume that their modern society will somehow unlearn all the progress we’ve made in our current society about respect for life, and you have to think that somehow the discovery of (probably the only) intelligent life out there is no big deal and we’ll treat them like run of mill natives of some faraway land during the early colonial days.
No, the corporation is going face massive outrage and punishment over what they already did, the government will void their contract, and possibly their equipment (since interstellar travel is so difficult and rare) to some other corporation who can attempt to mine the resources peacefully. Unless unobtainium is absolutely critical to the existance of humanity (and we have no evidence of that, just that it’s very commercially valuable) then more effort is going to go into the science and communication with the new world than the exploitation.
Yep…but, unfortunately, the new high bidder for the contract turns out to be Weyland-Yutani. :smack: On the plus side, no nuking. Down side: that’s because the bio-weapons division is getting involved. Double :smack:
Seriously, though, I think the situation with Pandora and the Na’vi might be closer to the end of the Congo Free State than, say, the start of the conquistadors’ road trips in central America. Aided by the fact that Pandora’s a long way away from easy human reach; and they still have a number of human sympathizers who stayed behind after the others were expelled, and they’re going to have ten-odd years of being able to broadcast the details of the assaults against the Na’vi and the internet tree(s) back to Earth before they can expect any nukes or robot skull-crackers to show up.
the title of the movie Avatar and how it ended seems to suggest there will be no sequel and I don’t see any point for sequel.
It’s like asking (during the Connery run) in the next Bond movie, will Blofeld shoot Bond or will he tie him to another slow unguarded easily escapable death trap. If Blofeld were real, the former, but he isn’t, so the latter.
Even with that said, there are plenty of plausible in-universe reasons why humans won’t nuke the Navi. It’s expensive, the people back home won’t stand for it, or Pandora itself has a defence to meet that threat.
Great. Now anybody who wanders into the thread after the title was changed won’t have their spoiler experience, uh, spoiled.
Title? 
I mean, granted it’s implied that you can’t have another beyond the last Airbender, but still … 
What the pro-nuke advocates seem to be skipping is that maybe highly radioactive unobtainium isn’t all that useful to us.
Maybe I missed something, but it appeared the entire operation on Pandora was a private enterprise, including the security forces. They were more analogous to Blackwater than to the US Marines. I don’t think that even in the future, private companies and their security forces would have access to nuclear weapons. Hell, in the movie they don’t even have access to most heavy conventional weapons; they had to use industrial explosives for their makeshift bombing mission.
IMO what happens next is that there’s an governmmental investigation after the exiles get back to earth. Several class-action suits are launched and the company ends up tied up in litigation for a decade or so, with all mining suspended until the case is resolved. Giovanni Ribisi’s character gets the book thrown at him for exceeding his mandate, even though the former board of directors is really at fault. The financially-stressed company is absorbed into Weyland-Yutani, and renamed (Xe is already taken, however) in a transparent attempt to disassociate itself from the recent unpleasantness on Pandora. And it works, more or less. Y-T goes back, and its much more subtle and devious leadership ‘accidently’ release a xenomorph (that they stumbled on in in another system) into the local environment.
Cameron has not only been talking sequel, but says he has an arc planned out for a trilogy.
One hint about where he could be going is in these statements he made to the LA Times:
I missed in the movie that Pandora was a moon rather than a planet, but if it really is just one moon in a larger planeteray complex, then that raises the possibility that the “brain” system of Pandora is much larger than what we saw in the first movie.
Yea, many shots had the planet in the sky.
Dunno. It’d be like 2012 but set on Pandora.
sweet!
When I saw the first shot of Pandora as a whole in the sky of Polyphemus, I thought, “But wouldn’t that make Pandora inside the Roche limit?”
That being said, maybe they’ll make a movie set on Rocheworld…
On a smaller scale, I wonder if we’ll see a Pandoran get a human “avatar” to deal with other humans.
Zoe Saldana’s thinking, billion-dollar franchise: I need face-time (like how Tobey McGuire was maskless in every final battle).
Why travel? Crossbreed a thanator and Na’vi and you’re already surprisingly close.
FWIW, the question posed in the topic, spoiler or no, lacks forethought in the first place. It’s not in the Terran’s best interest to nuke Pandora; they want what’s on it and they probably don’t want it all radioactive, and having the mercs come back all full of piss and vinegar and nukes is just plain predictable and dull. Cameron is far more creative than this, and may find a way to turn the tables on Earth in a way similar to what Alessan mentions upthread in post #21.
Not sure whether they’ll go the malevolent-master-alien-race route, but I do agree that given Cameron’s track record of upping the ante on sequels in the past, there will be some greater threat to both sides of the conflict, forcing them to reconsider their distrust of one another, in what is sure to be a reinforcing anti-war allegory for how we on Earth should all learn to “get along”. The idea of a tertiary alien threat invading one of their worlds (perhaps Earth, turning the tables on humanity and making them the victims of their own invasion to which they are technologically incapable of surviving?) and having the two races join forces to fight back is one possibility. Another one, which would also continue to reinforce the environmental statement Cameron wants to make, is that Earth will be a dead husk of a world which has been strip mined and polluted to exhaustion. Humanity will seek the help of the Na’vi to find ways of restoring the environment, but a group of rogue suits/bureaucrats/mercenaries/military types looking to sabotage the peace talks will take advantage of a ceasefire between the worlds by sneaking in and taking Pandora over by force.
Either way, I foresee some kind of story arc requiring both groups to put aside their differences and combine their strengths to oppose some sort of common threat, and Jake will be front and center as an ambassador between both worlds, having to reconcile his new life as a Na’vi with his true origin as a Terran. Cameron will undoubtedly reinforce more anti-war and anti-industrial sentiments which relate to setting aside what makes us different, while also trying to drive home an environmental message about reversing the the damage being done to Earth’s ecosystems. In the same way he shocked us with Pandora’s natural beauty, I think he may shock us with a believable and prescient glimpse of Future Earth: a dark and miserable world, not quite post-apocalyptic as has been done in so many other movies, but a dismal Tale Of The Lorax world full of industry and smog, with little or no natural flora and fauna remaining.
Thanks for showing me the error of my ways. 
Yeah, damn that evil industry for making it possible for people to live longer, healthier lives than we ever did when we lived “in harmony with nature.” :rolleyes:
Seriously, I wonder how many of the people fawning over Avatar’s message have considered the industrial capacity it took to produce the movie…