Avatar: The Way of Water: James Cameron on the importance of pregnant warriors

Last Updated on December 16, 2022

The release of Avatar: The Way of Water is nearly upon us. Director James Cameron recently chatted with Robert Rodriguez for Variety’s Directors on Directors series about the Avatar sequel, and Rodriguez brought up the pregnant Na’vi warriors. Both Zoe Saldaña’s Neytiri and Kate Winslet’s Ronal are depicted as pregnant in the movie, which Cameron says takes female empowerment to the next level.

Everybody’s always talking about female empowerment. 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.” It doesn’t happen in our society — probably hasn’t happened for hundreds of years. 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.

James Cameron continued: “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. Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel — all these other amazing women come up, but they’re not moms and they’re not pregnant while they’re fighting evil.” Kate Winslet told Entertainment Weekly that she was thrilled when she learned that her character would be pregnant in the Avatar sequel. “I don’t know a single pregnant woman who found out she was pregnant, sat down, and did nothing,” Winslet said. “You just become kind of bionic; you feel like you are absolutely superhuman. And so for Jim to really harness that quality and ability and put it into its Na’vi form, it was just amazing. I loved that so much.“

Our own Eric Walkuski reviewed Avatar: The Way of Water and found it well worth the wait, if only for the pure theatrical experience it delivers. “Strictly in technical terms, Avatar: The Way of Water is a visual marvel; cliches such as ‘a feast for the eyes’ don’t do it justice,” Walkuski wrote. “Cameron and his team have painstakingly thought through every imaginable fragment of Pandora’s ecosystem, and there isn’t a frame in the movie that isn’t brimming with intricate detail. We’ve become so desensitized to CGI in movies that we’re hardly capable of genuine wonder anymore; one digital environment blends in to the next, and motion-capture characters have ceased to blow us away. At the risk of sounding trite, The Way of Water pulls off the impressive feat of wowing us again, offering up a steady stream of “how did they do that?” splendor and once again transporting us to an alien world that looks all too real.” You can check out the rest of Walkuski’s review right here.

Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, Avatar: The Way of Water tells the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive,  and the tragedies they endure.  Avatar: The Way of Water will hit theaters on December 16th.