The unsung heroes of sci-fi movies aren’t as harmless as you might think

Spoilers follow: Avatar 2: The Way of Water is a film about the forgotten beauty of nature. Plants are our friends, whales are our soulmates. Everything is connected. Only a certain whaler and his right arm no longer from about the 130th minute of the blockbuster.

A scene like this would be more likely to be expected in Piranha 3D 2. The arm stump sticking out of Avatar 2:
Like lightning and vulgarly, the amputated extremity flies through the air, pursued by a fanning fountain of blood. The level of violence in the eco-sci-fi film is otherwise on a family-friendly Marvel level. The tent pole-sized Na’vi arrows pierce through faceless victims. Plus a fight here, a broken nose there.

But then this arm so out of place, so bleeding, so radical, it must mean something. We have answers that lead via a vengeful whale to an environment that functions like an immune system.

What exactly happens in Avatar 2’s arm scene

That Water people Metkayina fights the whalers, led by Jake Sully (Sam Worthington). They, in turn, are aided by Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) and his navigated badass squad. The battle splits into several sub-fights in which everything is at stake for those involved.

One of them: Tulkun hunters against Tulkun, that is the marine-biologically correct term for the noble whale creatures. Our protagonist is the Tulkun Payakan, soulmate of Lo’ak (Britain Dalton). His opponent: The hunter Mick Scoresby (Brendan Cowell). For minutes, the film builds the arm-down scene on. Payakan wraps around Mick Scoresby’s hunter’s boat with powerful curves and the steel cable that was actually supposed to fix him. Payakan dives down with a bang, soft whaling arm gets caught between hard boat wall and unyielding whaling rope.

30 heavy tulkun tons (that’s how much a normal humpback weighs) press against Mick Scoresby’s biceps for a long second. Then a juicy cut and, well, the arm waves at its former owner. All coincidence?

There is clearly a revenge story behind the arm scene

We don’t see the tulkun directly after that, but I imagine he turns off with a hysterical, somewhat mirthless laugh. Or smiling contentedly like Uma Thurman at the end of Kill Bill, released from her thirst for revenge.
“You may go, but the severed limbs stay here!”

Because, flashback, the Tulkun and the tulk novice still had a score to settle, which Payakan settled on an “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” basis. The animal is missing about two-thirds of a fin, which it lost when the hunters attacked it. They wanted to siphon valuable, rejuvenating glandular fluid from him. We learn this through a vision that Sully’s son Lo’ak downloaded via Payakan’s uvula.

Tulkun loses a fin while hunting Tulkun – in return, he rips off the arm of the chief Tulkun hunter: That is at least one poetic bracket that director James Cameron puts around his plot.

But that alone is too small for me and James Cameron probably too.

After all, why should the Avatar creator keep us banging our heads off about the Tulkune’s high level of intellectuality if we don’t turn the Arm scene into one tangible, personal revenge story allowed to interpret? Exactly, there is no reason speaking against it.

Tulkune make small talk about the offspring of their acquaintances, they compose songs! Of course, they are capable of complex negative feelings. For example revenge. And if years of pent-up hatred aren’t behind this extremely sophisticated amputation procedure, then I don’t know what is.

Pandora hates people: The (even) deeper meaning behind the arm scene

I don’t want to exaggerate, but actually the entire value system of Avatar and Pandora can be explained by the arm scene. Pandora’s defensive awareness of nature plays a major role in the film. Hatred of humans is built into almost everything that grows on Pandora by default. His Flora and fauna react to the earth invaders like a virus. The whaler just gave Payakan an extra reason and awakened his barbaric Tulkun energy. It became something personal.

So the arm scene illustrates 2 things about the world of Avatar: (1) Don’t fucking mess with the oh-so-pretty tattooed Tulkunen. (2) It’s best not to mess with Pandora and its residents in the first place. Whether plant, Na’vi or animal.

Avatar 2: Is this the best blockbuster of the last 13 years?

In the current issue of the FILMSTARTS podcast on the screen, moderator Sebastian, editor Pascal and our guest David Hain talk about “Avatar 2: The Way Of Water”. All important questions will be clarified. Was it worth the wait? Is the mega blockbuster just technically convincing or are the emotions there too? And what do Nazi zombies on the dark side of Pandora have to do with it?

The screen love is the weekly cinema and film podcast of our colleagues from FILMSTARTS.

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