People have been told not to see the movie Avatar: The Way of Water because it has been said to have “racist.”
Fans had to wait a total of 12 years to go back to Pandora in the long-awaited sequel to the movie that holds the record for the most money made at the box office around the world.
The movie has already proven to be a commercial and critical success. It made $1 billion at the box office and got a 78% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 92% audience score. Both of these things show how well the movie did overall.
On the other hand, a lot of people have said that the movie “misses the point” and is racist.
You can watch the trailer for Avatar: The Way of Water down below.
Since Avatar: The Way of Water came out in theaters, people have been talking about it on different social media sites.
Others are upset about the decision to cast non-indigenous actors in the roles of the Na’vi. Some people have criticized this for encouraging the idea of a white savior story.
People have decided not to see the movie because of what the director, James Cameron, said about where the story came from.
Hey y’all, Avatar is terrible. Racist, cliché, half a plot yet still full of holes and dangling threads, and entirely too long,
claimed one person.
In a letter, someone else expressed their anger, saying:
Avatar 2 was f****** trash. It was super racist. Super cringy. Way too long. It’s full of stereotypical bulls***.
Fans are generally unhappy with how the franchise seems to be pushing the “white savior” story.
The “white saviour” is a common movie trope in which a white main character saves non-white characters who are in trouble.
The white savior is usually a character who feels like an outsider in his or her own society and steps up to lead non-white minorities to save them from their plight to make themselves feel better.
In the movie Avatar, the main character is Jake Sully, who is played by Sam Worthington. Jake is a war veteran who was in a wheelchair before he joined the RDA’s Avatar Program. Jake got hurt in the battle.
Later, when Jake sees how greedy and violent the RDA is on Pandora, he betrays the RDA and joins the Na’vi. He gets the natives to fight against the humans and leads them to victory in the end.
In the sequel, Jake has risen through the ranks to become chief of the Omaticaya clan, and the RDA has returned to Pandora to start preparing the planet for human colonization. This happens as the number of people on Earth keeps going down.
Once more, the Na’vi’s future depends on him and what he decides.
Critics also have a problem with the fact that almost all of the actors who play the Na’vi aliens in Avatar: The Way of Water are not indigenous or white.
One fan explained:
I am still flabbergasted at the overwhelmingly white cast for Avatar 2 like…
It’s not unexpected but it’s just so tone-deaf and racist that I can’t NOT be appalled like Kate Winslet, what the f*** are you doing over there?
In the meantime, a 2010 interview with director James Cameron about the first movie that was recently found is also causing trouble.
Cameron spoke about where he got the ideas for the movie, and this is what he said:
I felt like I was 130 years back in time watching what the Lakota Sioux [Native American people] might have been saying at a point when they were being pushed and they were being killed and they were being asked to displace and they were being given some form of compensation.
This was a driving force for me in the writing of Avatar— I couldn’t help but think that if [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future… and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation.
Because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society—which is what is happening now—they would have fought a lot harder.
Cameron’s comments were met with negative feedback, which led to movie reviews being posted on different social media sites.
One person shared:
Do NOT watch Avatar: The Way of Water
Join Natives and other Indigenous groups around the world in boycotting this horrible and racist film.
Our cultures were appropriated in a harmful manner to satisfy some man’s [white] saviour complex.
No more Blueface! Lakota people are powerful!
Avatar was a White savior story at its core and James Cameron said the Lakota should have “fought harder” with the foresight that their descendants would all be suicidal. I won’t be seeing the new one. It does nothing for Native Americans but suck oxygen for itself at our expense https://t.co/A1Lp5rw66f
— Brett Chapman (@brettachapman) December 17, 2022
Cameron has responded to the criticism by saying that he understands why people are upset about the Avatar movies and that those reasons are “valid.”
He said,
I think the important thing is to listen and to be sensitive to issues that people have.
The people who have been victimised historically are always right. It’s not up to me, speaking from a perspective of white privilege, if you will, to tell them that they’re wrong.
I have to listen. I have to say, ‘Okay, if that’s what you’re feeling, that’s what you’re feeling.’ And it has validity. It’s pointless for me to say, ‘Well, that was never my intention’.
Even though there has been criticism, three more Avatar movies are set to come out, and the fifth and final one is expected to come out in 2028.
Cameron also said in an interview that he has already shot scenes for the third and fourth Avatar movies because he doesn’t want the younger character to get older between movies.
