Creating content
The hardest thing to watch in Avatar: The Way of Water (spoiler alert)
Day 28 of 100-day Creator Challenge
Just another warning: “…there be spoilers.”
I’ve gone to see Avatar: The Way of Water in 3D with my daughter for a second time now.
We went on New Year’s Eve the first time. But I actually hadn’t seen the first one, and she forgot what happened in the first one as she watched it with her dad a few years ago. So we watched the first one in the weekend, and went again. The beginning of the second one made a lot more sense, though I still have some questions about the characters.
I’ve heard some critics saying that it was too long (3 hours 12 minutes), and that it could be cut in half without losing any plot in the story. But we didn’t even notice the time. We were marvelling at the CGI and all the beautiful underwater scenes and creatures.
Rating for the movie is PG-13 with additional description: sequences of strong violence and intense action.
Violence can only be expected with a movie where there is war between the two races. I had no problem with this.
But the scene I found the hardest to watch was the Tulkun hunt. It wrenches my heart.
A mother Tulkun protecting her calf was separated from the herd as an easy target. The calculated attack tactics of the humans was painful to watch. An elegant and intelligent giant of a creature slaughtered just for a vial extracted from her brain that evidently stops human aging. In slaughtering the mother, the calf also died.
It reminded me of Greenpeace footage of whale hunts which probably inspired the whole scene.
It reminded me of images of elephant carcasses left to rot after the ivory tusks have been extracted.
It was still hard to watch the second time.
It just made me think how horrible us humans can treat other creatures and not honour the great mother.
