It’s Good to Have You Back, Spider, Man

Avatar: Fire and Ash, like the two previous Avatar movies, teems with colorful, inventive visions of space life. Above the floating mountains and bioluminescent forests are nomadic wind traders who travel on sky ships pulled by billowing creatures. The seas are home to massive space whales adorned with big piercings and holding whale trials and calf communions. Death-cult warriors ride dragons while shooting flamethrowers. Edie Falco pilots a mecha. But the most divisive and jarring and least plausible creature of all is simply a white boy with dreads. Spider, played by Jack Champion, was first introduced in 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water alongside a host of other new characters, namely Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri’s (Zoe Saldaña) ragtag brood and coastal Metkayina friends. Spider is a human boy who lives among the Na’vi; he was born, and orphaned, on the human-colonizer home base in Pandora. Spider’s arc is just as mythical and dramatically compelling as any of the other main characters’: In The Way of Water, he learns his father is Colonel Miles Quaritch, the villainous, Na’vi-hating human Marine commander who was killed by Neytiri in the first film and then reincarnated with his memories uploaded into an Avatar body to complete his mission of tracking down species traitor Sully. Spider also struggles with being the ultimate other growing up among his adopted family — smaller, weaker, unable to breathe without an oxygen mask, wholly maladapted to his environment. This difference is his dramatic fuel as a character, but it can be alienating to audiences. Spider sticks out like a sore-thumb middle finger amid the nine-foot-tall blue CGI cat people because he’s just a human actor and because James Cameron writes him as a John Connor–style li’l stinker. By acting the most like an obnoxious kid from a California suburb, i.e. the most recognizable to our daily lives, Spider threatens to jar us out of the world of Avatar altogether. It’s almost too easy to give in to impulses like annoyance and “taste” and to dislike him. ’Tis a nobler and more enlightened choice to embrace him. Which is why it’s fabulous for Certified Spider Enjoyers that Fire and Ash is Spider’s movie.

Spider, played by Jack Champion, was first introduced in 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water, alongside a host of other new characters, namely Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri’s (Zoe Saldaña) ragtag brood and coastal Metkayina friends. Spider is a human boy who lives among the Na’vi; he was born, and orphaned, on the human-colonizer home base in Pandora. Spider’s arc is just as mythical and compelling as any of the other main characters’: In The Way of Water, he learns his father was Colonel Miles Quaritch, the villainous, Na’vi-hating human Marine commander who was killed by Neytiri in the first film and then reincarnated with his memories uploaded into an Avatar body to complete his mission of tracking down species traitor Sully. He also struggles with being the ultimate other growing up among his adopted family — smaller, weaker, unable to breathe without an oxygen mask, wholly maladapted to his environment. This difference is his dramatic fuel as a character, but it can be alienating to audiences. Spider sticks out like a sore-thumb middle finger amid the nine-foot-tall blue CGI cat people because he’s just a human child actor, and because James Cameron writes him as a John Connor–style li’l stinker. By acting the most like an obnoxious kid from a California suburb, i.e. the most recognizable to our daily lives, Spider’s presence threatens to jar us out of the world of Avatar altogether. It’s almost too easy to give in to impulses like annoyance and “taste” and to dislike Spider. ’Tis a nobler and more enlightened choice to embrace him. Which is why it’s fabulous for Certified Spider Enjoyers that Fire and Ash is Spider’s movie.

For a kid born in the year 2154, Spider is a throwback. He looks, talks, and acts like a ’90s kid and functions like the over-the-top neighbor character in a ’90s sitcom. This is immensely strange and funny in Fire and Ash because this little weirdo drives the whole plot. He’s in the center of the action and makes corny little quips throughout. When Spider’s oxygen mask dies, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) uses her nascent space-Jesus powers to channel Eywa to thread her mycelium network through his body, biohacking him into a hybrid human who can breathe the atmosphere and interface with the nature of Pandora. What does he say after this miracle turns him into a new species never before seen in the known universe? “Oh yeah, I’m good on the whole air thing.” As Jake, who raised Spider, has his intergalactic Binding of Isaac moment and makes the agonizing decision to kill him in order to save Pandora, the boy just tools around in the background, clueless, saying stuff like “I gotta take a leak.” During the most climactic battle of the entire film, Spider is off to the side, narrating: “Sick! The Tulkun are fighting back!” Every single time this boy opens his mouth, he undercuts the drama building around him. Yet I think this is actually crucial to locking in the tone of the Avatar films, which balance one type of earnestness (Secrets of NIMH, harmony with nature, New Age spirituality) with another (old-school good guys vs. big baddies blockbuster, wide-eyed delight at things blowing up). Spider is the glue.

Spider’s also a gloriously guileless ’90s kid in the sense that he literally looks like a cartoon come to life from either Nickelodeon’s Rocket Power or Disney’s Tarzan. He scampers around and hangs ten and vine surfs and dances like nobody’s watching and thumbs his nose at grown-ups and calls them pendejos and gets called “monkey boy” by his crush. His full name — Miles “Spider” Socorro — even makes him sound like a Junior X Games prospect. Also, his chunky locs end up serving a narrative purpose in this film, as he evolves to grow a queue like those the Na’vi use to commune with Eywa.

After Spider gets captured and put in a laboratory for study, Quaritch attempts a peace offering so he can use and manipulate his son. “Got you a burger,” he says, pulling a tiny, completely incongruous burger out of his giant Avatar pocket with his giant Avatar hand, and Spider, defiant, slaps the burger off the table. It is one of many moments when characters essentially treat Spider like the family dog. See also: Jake and Neytiri trying to rehome him and their kids all getting upset in the process, or Jake and Neytiri literally attempting to put him down while he cluelessly sniffs around looking for a tree to pee on. 

And to those who simply think the issue is that Champion isn’t a particularly good actor: Have you considered he is the only main character (besides celebrated and seasoned performers like Falco and Giovanni Ribisi) who doesn’t have the benefit of a CGI Na’vi overlay to obscure his face and hide just how awkward the Avatar filming process is? Have you seen the conditions under which this kid has to emote?

I think audiences who are onboard for Fire and Ash have largely come around on Spider, which is the right decision. He is the purity and the folly and the goofiness and the raw Pandoran nerve endings of the enigma that is Big Jim. The rest of y’all are a bunch of Neytiris, downright speciesist against this freaky little dude. To that, I will quote Toruk Makto: “You cannot live like this, baby, in hate.”