James Cameron recently discussed how he wants to steer clear of the pattern of action movies fetishizing weaponry with Avatar: The Way of Water. The director highlighted how he wouldn’t produce The Terminator in the present environment when discussing his prior action flicks in an interview with Esquire Middle East.
While guns are a big part of action movies, Cameron thinks it has become problematic to depict shooting scenes in the current political context. That’s due to all the controversy surrounding access to weapons by citizens, and the increasing number of mass shootings in America and other countries. As Cameron puts it, a director of action films shouldn’t fetishize the use of guns and must instead be critical about the message they are spreading with their movies. In Cameron’s words, “I look back on some films that I’ve made, and I don’t know if I would want to make that film now. I don’t know if I would want to fetishize the gun, like I did on a couple of Terminator movies 30+ years ago, in our current world. What’s happening with guns in our society turns my stomach.”
While James Cameron’s The Terminator series and his follow-up to Ridley Scott’s Alien both feature protagonists who solve all of their problems by shooting them, we’ve grown more cognizant of the risks associated with having unrestricted access to guns. Making action movies that fetishize firearms and getting away with it is much more difficult. Cameron removed a significant action scene from Avatar: The Way of Water because of this. As Cameron discloses:
