Director James Cameron recently returned with a sequel to the world’s highest-grossing film, Avatar. Avatar 2 is being quite well-received by both fans and critics alike, receiving a score of 78% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 93% audience score. If the ratings are to be held accountable, it seems like the director’s worries about the sequel not doing well is a thing of the past.
While the excitement for the release of the sequel was super high amongst fans and the film is now doing quite well, there are a few people who wish the blue humanoids from Pandora never returned to their screens. Continuing the controversy from the first movie, James Cameron is again being accused of cultural appropriation in his film.
James Cameron’s Avatar 2 Accused of Cultural Appropriation
A freelance film critic, Kathia Woods, took to her Twitter to express her disappointment with James Cameron’s franchise where she stated that it was time people addressed the cultural appropriation in the Avatar franchise. Woods’ main concern with the films is how white actors were playing the roles of persons of color, that is, white actors playing the alien race, Na’vi.
“At some point we gotta talk about the cultural appropriation of Avatar and white actors are cosplaying as POC. It’s just a mess and so not necessary & no amount of visual effects/CGI is gonna erase that. Bade lace fronts/dry synthetic braids. Jesus fix it.”
After Woods’ tweet caught the attention of Twitter users she became the subject of a lot of trolling. Reporter Andrew Kerr joined in with the trolls stating, “James Cameron didn’t even try to find native blue people to play these roles smh.” Turns out, the trolls and hate comments directed towards Woods were just too much to handle as even though she tweeted a response stating, “Apparently I made some people on the right mad with my Avatar tweet to the point someone email me. Thank you,” with a bunch of laughing emojis, she had to make her account Private.
However, Woods isn’t the only person who believes Cameron’s Avatar franchise has major cultural appropriation issues. An interview given by the Titanic director to The Guardian back in 2010 resurfaced where he talked about how the Lakota Sioux tribe, which inspired the Na’vi people, would’ve fought harder if they could see the future.
“I felt like I was 130 years back in time watching what the Lakota Sioux might have been saying at a point where 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 they 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.”
Thanks to these comments, indigenous voices are being raised and they demand that people boycott Avatar 2 for using their culture in a disrespectful way, blaming Cameron for having a savior complex.
How is Avatar: The Way of Water Doing?
Despite the controversies surrounding the sequel, it looks like the movie is doing fairly well for itself. Although a large part of the U.S. is experiencing freezing weather and the audience had to stay home to avoid the winter storm, Avatar 2 continued to reel in solid numbers.
Over the traditional weekend, the sequel made $64 million and through Monday the film had $90 million to its name. These numbers were higher than the initial prediction as Disney and 20th Century Fox projected that the sequel would make $56 million over the weekend and $82 million through the holiday frame. Thanks to these numbers, the sequel is now inching closer and closer to the $900 million mark making it the fifth highest-grossing film of 2022.
Avatar: The Way of Water is playing in theatres worldwide.
It looks like the one-billion club is going to become a reality, pretty soon!
Source: Fox News
