For decades, the director has been lauded for his strong female characters in his films whether it’s Sarah Connor in the Terminator films, Ellen Ripley in Aliens, and now Neytiri in the Avatar films, who will be portrayed as a pregnant hunter and warrior in the new sequel. In a recent interview with Variety, Cameron discussed how he wanted to break boundaries with Neytiri by portraying her as a pregnant warrior in The Way of Water. He also said that his new film bests the MCU and DCU in terms of female empowerment. “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,’” he said.
“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. And pregnant women are more capable of being a lot more athletic than we, as a culture, acknowledge. He continued, “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.” While it may sound like Cameron was being boastful in his comments, it is fair to say that Neytiri will break ground in the new film by being portrayed as a pregnant woman since it is something that we’ve never seen before in action and science-fiction films. Obviously, Marvel and DC still have great female representation and empowerment without or without the comparison, and Neytiri’s groundbreaking position in Avatar: The Way of Water does not lessen the power of the two comic book franchises. Also Read: Zoe Saldaña Says Avatar 2 Opens Up About Neytiri Struggling With Her Identity Avatar: The Way of Water is set to arrive in theaters tomorrow in North America. You can check more details about it here.
