”Avatar: The Way Of Water” is not only breaking box office records, it’s also breaking cultural norms. The movie’s director, James Cameron, sees the pregnant body as more “athletic” than we acknowledge and he used the franchise to bring the idea forward.
Wonder Woman, step aside, there’s a new and better female empowerment character in the block, and she’s blue.
James Cameron – On the Significance Of Having A Pregnant Warrior In “Avatar: The Way Of Water”
James Cameron believes that his latest Avatar installment adds to the female empowerment space in a way that’s never been done before.
Actually, I think it’s been done before. Do we remember Jessica Alba’s character in the fourth installment of “Spy Kids”? She completed a mission just moments before entering labor and drove herself to the hospital even when she was in labor. So maybe James Cameron should do some fact-checking? Nevertheless, it was cool to see a pregnant female warrior in a hit movie.
“Everybody’s always talking about female empowerment,” Cameron, 68, told Robert Rodriguez in a recent conversation for Variety’s Directors on Directors series. “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.’ “
James Cameron – Says Pregnant Women Used To Fight For Their Survival
Continuing on about Kate Winslet’s character, Ronal, in the movie, 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.”
Cameron then shared his belief that “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,’ ” he added. “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.”
Previously, Cameron had criticized Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman for not breaking from an image that was created as far back as the 1960’s.
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