Avatar 2 Perfectly Reversed Another James Cameron Movie Story (& Shows How His Career Has Changed)

While Avatar: The Way of Water’s Tulkun hunting subplot might seem entirely original, the storyline secretly riffs on an earlier James Cameron movie’s plot. James Cameron has a handful of consistent obsessions that show up throughout his oeuvre. From Titanic to Avatar: The Way of Water, to The Abyss, to his disowned directorial debut Piranha: The Spawning, it is clear that the visionary director is fascinated by water and how the immensity of the oceans can be captured on-screen. Judging by the Avatar movies, The Abyss, and Aliens, it is also fair to say that extraterrestrials hold a certain fascination for him.

However, while Avatar: The Way of Water’s ending marries these two career-long obsessions for Cameron, there are some subtler instances of the director’s interests making their way into his movies. The Terminator and its sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day feature a lot of high-tech futuristic weaponry, as does Aliens. What viewers might be more likely to miss is the fact that The Way of Water’s lengthy Tulkun hunting sequence also highlights some impressive military technology. Since these weapons are wielded by minor villains, it is easy not to notice that the framing’s focus on them echoes Cameron’s earlier gun-heavy movies.

Avatar 2’s Tulkun Hunting Story Mirrors Aliens

Aliens and The Way of Water both focus on humans hunting aliens

Similarly, Avatar: The Way of Water’s entire Tulkun hunt plot mirrors the story of Aliens although the 2022 sequel takes a more sympathetic view of its alien characters and a far dimmer view of their human attackers. In both The Way of Water and Aliens, heavily armed human space travelers try to trap an alien species to exploit them as a resource, only to pay with their lives. However, while the planned Avatar movies might prove that the Tulkun have a dark side, in The Way of Water they are firmly depicted as the victims in this scenario.

Aliens is more complicated since, while the Xenomorphs aren’t actively hunting down the movie’s human characters, their attackers also aren’t aware of what they are doing. The humans hunting the Xenomorphs in Aliens don’t realize this is the sole objective of their mission and they aren’t too happy about it when they learn the truth. The Way of Water’s Tulkun hunters have no problem attacking and killing the Pandoran creatures, even separating a baby from its mother to kill both animals. In contrast, the human characters of Aliens may have turned down their mission if they knew its real purpose.

Avatar 2’s Tulkun Plot Changes Its Perspective

The Tulkun are the heroes of their story instead of the monsters

The biggest difference between Aliens and The Way of Water’s alien hunting storylines is that Aliens doesn’t take place from the POV of the Xenomorphs. However, The Way of Water technically isn’t told through the Tulkun perspective either, with the Na’vi mediating most of their screen time. Although viewers do hear from one Tulkun, Payakan, he is a lone outcast for most of its runtime and his subplot still focuses on his Na’vi friend, Lo’ak. As such, there is an argument to be made that neither movie centers the POV of its alien victims over its human/ Na’vi characters.

That said, no matter who the Avatar franchise’s real protagonist is, The Way of Water’s human characters are portrayed much less sympathetically than the protagonists of Aliens. The most likable Tulkun hunter is Jermaine Clement’s conflicted Dr. Ian Garvin, and his role is more than overshadowed by Brendan Cowell’s outright sadistic Captain Mick Scoresby. More broadly, the human characters are much more complicit in the Tulkun hunting than the heroes of Aliens are in procuring Xenomorphs for Weyland-Yutani. Ripley, Newt, the android Bishop, and Hicks are portrayed as heroes, while many of the rearming Colonial Marines are at the very least likable.

Avatar 2’s Tulkun Plot and Aliens Share A Primary Theme

Aliens and The Way of Water both have a dim view of corporations

While The Way of Water might be much less forgiving of its human characters, both Aliens and the Avatar sequel share a common theme. The two movies are about human corporations being more vicious and inhumane than any of the aliens that they hunt, as Ripley delicately noted in one famous quote. The fact that Payakan the Tulkun is falsely portrayed as a killer for defending himself against human hunters reflects this, with his role in the massacre essentially amounting to a Xenomorph’s reaction when heavily armed humans enter its lair and begin attacking the alien and its family.

Both movies posit that the corporations trying to extract resources from these aliens are the ones at fault rather than the species themselves. If Aliens didn’t make this clear enough when Ripley noted that the Xenomorphs wouldn’t betray each other for the sake of profits, The Way of Water offered an even more blatant, less ambiguous retelling of the same story. Here, the human hunters were entirely aware of their unethical work, the Tulkun were completely harmless and defenseless, and the corporation’s decision to attack them was undeniably indefensible as a result. It is a more direct revision of the same plot.

Avatar 2’s Tulkun Storyline Highlights Cameron’s Biggest Career Shift

Cameron’s career has seen him change allegiances in human/alien conflicts

Throughout his career, James Cameron has gotten a lot less veiled in his metaphorical storytelling. Payakan the Tulkun is initially introduced as a classic movie monster, but Cameron soon reveals that his community treating him as a killer outcast is unfair and inaccurate. While Avatar 3 promises villainous Na’vi, this depiction of the Tulkun aligns them with real-life endangered species like killer whales to make it clear that they are unambiguously heroic compared to the villainous humans. Thus, The Way of Water offers a more sympathetic portrayal of its aggrieved alien species than the original Avatar.

In Avatar, the Na’vi were mostly harmonious but occasionally unfriendly and close-minded. This in itself was a much more empathetic take on an imperiled species than Aliens, wherein the Xenomorphs were portrayed as unthinking killing machines that still didn’t deserve to be exploited for profit. As Cameron’s career has progressed, his aliens have grown less monstrous as their human attackers have become less relatable. As a result, each subsequent movie nudges viewers closer to the idea that, when corporations are allowed to hunt a species for profit, they become the real villains of stories like Avatar: The Way of Water’s Tulkun subplot.