‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’: James Cameron removed the action scenes not to romanticize firearms

At three hours and ten minutes, “Avatar: The Sense of Water” exceeds the length of the first chapter by half an hour and by far the normal length for most films. Despite being a much longer running time than normal for a feature film, James Cameron, the mastermind behind the project, has revealed on several occasions that ‘Avatar 2’ originally had more scenes which he decided to cut, some of them for story development reasons and some for their own ethics, as is the most recent case you explained.

Both in the first film and in the sequel we have seen that in Pandora, in addition to the Na’vis and the incredible creatures, there is time for humans, who usually bring destruction, war and weapons, the latter causing Cameron some concern. As revealed in an interview with Esquire Middle East, the director cut some of these scenes with violence and action because he didn’t want to idealize weapons or make a fetish of them: “I cut about 10 minutes from the action-focused film with gunfire. There has to be conflict, of course. The violence and the action is the same depending on how you look at it, that’s every action director’s dilemma and I’m known I watch some movies I made and I don’t know if I would like to make that movie now. I don’t know if I would fetishize a gun in our world today like I did in a couple of “Terminator” movies over 30 years ago. What’s happening with guns in our society makes my stomach turn. I’m happy to live in New Zealand, where they banned all assault rifles two weeks after a horrific mosque shooting a couple of years ago.”

It shouldn’t be an easy task deciding which parts of a film to cut out, since everything was recorded for a reason, but when the final runtime is too long to reach a cinema, there are parts that need to be sacrificed. That’s why what Cameron was looking for in the final cut of “The Sense of Water” was a balance: “I had a bit of a crisis of faith while we were cutting the film. It was too violent. I wanted a balance between the beauty, the epiphany, the spiritual aspect of the film and the action, and I thought it became too sinister.”says Cameron in the interview.

Change of mentality

Whatever Cameron is concerned about, the director has made it clear in his statements that the role of weapons in his work will be limited to what is necessary and will be far from idealization, something that represents a notable change from some of his projects. Focusing on a couple of titles, Cameron is responsible for some of the most legendary action scenes with weapons in cinema, such as the “Terminator” saga or the violent “Rambo: Cornered Part II (Rambo 2)”.a film he co-wrote and in which the protagonist killed more than seventy people at gunpoint, machine guns or whatever lethal Sylvester Stallone had at hand.