(PatrioticPost.com)- Director James Cameron admitted in a recent interview that he cut about ten minutes from “Avatar: The Way of the Water” because he was afraid that scenes featuring guns might “fetishize” firearms.
Since the new Avatar movie clocks in at a mind-numbing 3 hours and 12 minutes, it is possible most viewers were grateful for that ten-minute cut.
In an interview in Esquire, Cameron said he struggled to find a balance between preserving the film’s necessary action and adding scenes that were more gratuitous. In doing so, he cut the “gunplay action” to “get rid of some of the ugliness” while finding a “balance between light and dark.”
Cameron also assessed how the new film differs from the 2009 “Avatar.”
He said the 2009 film features good and bad guys “seemingly equally opposed” with the good guys getting “crushed and defeated,” including “many of the heroes.”
In the new film, it isn’t “even a battle” but a “rout,” Cameron said, describing the plot as “the revenge of the Na’vi and the Tulkun.”
Cameron said in the new film, the “real challenge” and the “real defeat” that must be recovered from happens “after the battle.”
Cameron also told Esquire that some of the films he made in the past, including the “Terminator” movies, he wouldn’t want to make today, explaining that he isn’t sure he wants to “fetishize the gun.”
He said it has been thirty years since he made the “Terminator” movies, and in that time, “what’s happening with guns in our society turns my stomach.”
Cameron said he is glad to be somewhat removed from the gun problem now that he is living outside of the United States in New Zealand where gun laws are far more strict.
He noted that New Zealand quickly banned so-called “assault rifles” just two weeks after the Christchurch mosque shooting in March 2019.
