Rooting for the Survivor: What Epic Films Teach Us About War
- Frazer Macdonald Hay
- 7 days ago
- 3 min read
By Frazer Macdonald Hay
About halfway through Avatar: Fire and Ash, it occurred to me that I was rooting for someone I would never be.
This is not a complaint about the film. It is doing precisely what epic stories have always done, and doing it very well. The unease lies elsewhere: in how instinctively we accept the perspective it offers. Entire villages burn. Creatures fall from the sky. Bodies accumulate in the background. Yet our emotional investment remains firmly fixed on the survival of the leader and his small circle.
The hero lives. The rest provide context.
Fire and Ash intensifies this familiar arrangement. The Sully family’s grief is carefully foregrounded. Neytiri’s rage is understandable, even righteous. Jake Sully’s struggle to hold together leadership and loss is treated with seriousness and care. Meanwhile, countless others (warriors, villagers, animals) appear briefly, often beautifully, and then die. Their sacrifice gives weight to the story without demanding attention of its own.
This is not a flaw. It is the grammar of myth.
Epic narratives, from Homer onwards, have trained us to identify upwards. We follow kings, generals, chosen figures. Their companions die heroically, which grants those deaths meaning. The wider mass dies anonymously, which spares us the trouble of grief. A handful of named losses stands in for thousands of unnamed ones. The emotional economy is efficient and time-tested.
Cinema perfects this economy. We are invited to feel sorrow, outrage, even moral clarity, but only within strict limits. We mourn the son, not the platoon. We grieve the elder, not the hundreds of homes reduced to ash. The camera knows where to linger and where not to.
What makes this worth noticing is how readily we go along with it. No one in the audience imagines themselves as the background casualty. We are not the sea creatures hurled into battle at someone else’s command. We are not the villagers who never return. We are certainly not the unrecorded dead whose names never trouble the script. We are the leader, or at least close enough to him to matter.
Statistically, of course, this is implausible.
In reality, most of us would inhabit the margins of such stories. We would be among those told to follow, to flee, or to fight with only the vaguest sense of strategy or outcome. We would be brave, useful, expendable, and swiftly forgotten once the decisive confrontation had been resolved.
The discomfort deepens when one notices how easily this narrative migrates from cinema to politics. Nations, like films, tell stories through leaders. Wars are framed as tests of resolve, destiny, or moral clarity rather than as systems for managing mass loss. The survival of those at the centre becomes proof of legitimacy. The deaths below are regrettable, but necessary.
History, written later, tends to cooperate. Leaders are named, photographed, remembered. The fallen are aggregated. Memorials list numbers. Occasionally, names, if space allows.
This does not require cynicism or malice. It requires only habit.
Over centuries, we have learned to see conflict from the vantage point of those least likely to pay its full price. The hero’s wound matters because it heals. The crowd’s wounds do not, so they remain out of focus. We leave the cinema relieved: the leader survived. Order, of a sort, is restored.
One can imagine a more realistic version of the epic. It would end abruptly. The hero would be injured or dead off-screen. The village would be gone. The camera would linger not on victory but on the aftermath. There would be no swelling music, only administrative silence. Eywa, regrettably, would be unavailable for comment.
Such a film would not perform well.
Which may explain why we prefer the version we are given. Epic stories are not designed for accuracy. They are designed for reassurance. They tell us that loss is meaningful, that leadership redeems devastation, and that survival at the centre justifies destruction at the edges. They allow us to experience the emotional charge of conflict without confronting its true distribution.
We cheer not because we are cruel, but because cheering is easier than counting.
The strange thing is not that we believe these stories, but that we recognise them instantly, and feel comforted when they end as expected. The hero stands. The survivors gather. The dead recede into background detail. The credits roll.
Somewhere behind us, the battlefield remains.
