Despite taking several giant arrows to the chest in the first Avatar, Stephen Lang’s Colonel Quaritch is back in Avatar: The Way of Water. Speaking with Empire, Lang has revealed that Quaritch is now a ‘Recom,’ also known as a Recombinant, a process that involves downloading the mind of the man into an avatar. While leaving some pieces out. And it’s a process that could leave Quaritch in an existential crisis.
As Stephen Lang explains, becoming a Recom has left the gruff, no-nonsense Quaritch “incomplete,” and could result in the character becoming something much more complex than he was the first time around.
“He’s a genetically-engineered autonomous avatar. He has been downloaded with the mind, the emotions, and even more interestingly, possibly the spirit of Quaritch. Now, that’s all pretty esoteric stuff. He comes with a full memory bank up until the time he actually undergoes the DNA transfer. So there are certain things that he doesn’t have any memory of at all. He has no memory of his death.”
“It’s fair to say it, but I think it’s incomplete. If you think about it, in the original film, Quaritch was really a function. He was a colourful function – a personality-filled function, but he really was there to provide conflict. Now, he still has that function but I also think, just because of the depths of what Jim is exploring here, he’s quite a bit more than that. We’re seeing parts of him that we have not seen hitherto. That only makes sense because we don’t want to be massaging the same territory over and over again. We need to go to new places and indeed he does.”
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Edie Falco is the Real Villain in Avatar: The Way of Water
20th Century Studios
Lang goes on to reveal that, while Quaritch is back in blue, it is in fact Edie Falco’s character Ardmore, the security general at the RDA, who is the real villain in Avatar: The Way of Water.
Avatar: The Way of Water will pick up more than a decade after the events of the first film, and begins to tell the story of the Sully family, the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure.
“Edie Falco could cower a lot of people. I’m sure. She’s a tough broad, a tough cookie. A beautiful person and a beautiful piece of casting. She outranks Quaritch. It seems to me he is really trying his hardest to make it work with Ardmore, but we’ll just have to see how that works out. Back in the day, Quaritch was the right-angle, straight line guy in a very fluid and round world. Now it’s Ardmore who lives by this by-the-book doctrinaire, and sometimes you gotta throw the book out the window.”
Directed by James Cameron, Avatar: The Way of Water stars Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Stephen Lang, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Giovanni Ribisi, Dileep Rao, and Matt Gerald, each of whom will reprise their roles from the original movie, with Sigourney Weaver returning as a new character. New cast members include Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Edie Falco, Jemaine Clement, and Brendan Cowell.
Avatar: The Way of Water is due for release on December 16, 2022. A further three sequels have also been given release dates, with the multiple follow-ups scheduled to be released on December 20, 2024, December 18, 2026, and December 22, 2028, respectively.
