Featured Image Credit: 20th Century Studios. Warner Bros. Pictures.
Topics: DC Comics, Gal Gadot, James Cameron, Film and TV, Entertainment
Rachel Lang
Topics: DC Comics, Gal Gadot, James Cameron, Film and TV, Entertainment
When it comes to girl power, James Cameron reckons his Avatar character Neytiri absolutely trounces DC Comics' Wonder Woman, and he's got a pretty good reason as to why.
Cameron sat down with fellow filmmaker Robert Rodriguez for one of Variety's Directors on Directors interviews.
Cameron chatted about the long-awaited follow up to 2009's Avatar, and revealed what makes it stand out.
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"Everybody’s always talking about female empowerment," the Titanic director said.
"But what is such a big part of a woman’s life that we, as men, don’t experience? And I thought, 'Well, if you’re really going to go all the way down the rabbit hole of female empowerment, let’s have a female warrior who’s six months pregnant in battle.'"
In Avatar: The Way of Water, that is precisely what we get.
In the follow-up film, Neytiri hunts while she’s pregnant and another female character goes into battle while heavy with child.
"It doesn’t happen in our society — probably hasn’t happened for hundreds of years," Cameron said.
"But I guarantee you, back in the day, women had to fight for survival and protect their children, and it didn’t matter if they were pregnant.
"And pregnant women are more capable of being a lot more athletic than we, as a culture, acknowledge. I thought, 'Let’s take the real boundaries off.' To me, it was the last bastion that you don’t see."
The iconic director then rounded on DC and Marvel in their depiction of women.
"Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel — all these other amazing women come up, but they’re not mums and they’re not pregnant while they’re fighting evil," he said.
Well, he ain't wrong there.
Mothers or expecting mothers are often portrayed as fragile creatures, whereas in reality even the birthing process is the ultimate fight for survival.
Of course, this point of view is no surprise from Cameron, who has been at the helm of countless films boasting badass women in spades.
From Ellen Ripley in Aliens to The Terminator's Sarah Connor, he's no stranger to creating female characters with true grit that don't baulk in the face of danger or responsibility.
Even Titanic's Rose, a pampered rich girl who is exposed to the poorer sections of society for the first time while on-board the ill fated vessel, grows, changes, and goes from strength to strength throughout the movie.
So, it's no surprise that the Avatar universe is no different.
Avatar: The Way of Water opens in theatres December 16.