James Cameron’s Avatar series is renowned for many things: its billion-dollar box office sales, beautiful and groundbreaking CGI, and its elaborate ecology and worldbuilding. Its writing and character work are far less renowned. Despite the long runtime of each movie, and their continued reappearance every so often culturally, I always had trouble remembering the names of any of the characters. And given online discourse, such as Jacksfilms’ video where he goes around asking people to name a single character in the original film, it seems I’m not the only one.

For the protagonist, Jake Sully, I only remembered his name after the second film. Unlike with the colonel, this wasn’t because the character was vastly more developed. I was making a concerted effort to remember because of the jokes about how unmemorable he is. And forget any of the side characters. I still don’t know who the kid with dreadlocks is, or the names of any of Jake’s children. Maybe it’s because the characters in the franchise have less personality than most cereal mascots.

The Colonel had this same problem. In the first film, he just seemed like a generic military antagonist. Despite giving him a new blue body, the second film did not improve significantly upon his character. His traits remained wanting to hunt down Jake Sully and not much else. The Colonel even became a widespread meme on the internet for a while, but I still didn’t remember his name. Nor did the internet. The memes just called him the “Staring Avatar Guy”.

The third film, though mostly following the same plot trajectory as the previous two, did improve the colonel’s character. They gave him a budding romance with the ash people’s chieftain. Seeing the colonel teach her how to use weapons and the two of them bond over this was a step up from his mustache twirling appearances in the first two films. Also seeing his continued affection for that one kid with dreadlocks, gave him some more depth. If I were James Cameron, I note that giving a character more than one trait does wonders for their memorability.

The Colonel’s name is Quaritch, by the way.

I think.

Featured Image Credit: Avatar: Fire and Ash | Avatar.com