A freelance film critic has been mercilessly mocked for accusing Avatar: The Way of Water of 'cultural appropriation', claiming director James Cameron only cast white actors to 'cos play' as aliens 'of color' in the blockbuster hit.
Freelance film critic Kathia Woods, who has contributed to Buzzfeed News and The Philadelphia Tribune, made the comments on Twitter.
'At some point we gotta talk about the cultural appropriation of Avatar and white actors are cos playing as poc. It's just a mess and so not necessary & no amount of visual effects/CGI is gonna erase that. Bad lace fronts/dry synthetic braids. Jesus fix it,' she said.
Cos play is the act of dressing up in costume to portray a specific character.
Actors Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana in Avatar: The Way of Water, which premiered last week
Freelance film critic Kathia Woods claimed the film was guilty of 'cultural appropriation' and that white actors 'cos played' as 'people of color', even though their characters are blue Indigenous aliens
Woods has now made her Twitter account private, but many seized on her comment as a woke take gone too far.
'James Cameron didn't even try to find native blue people to play these roles smh,' joked Free Beacon reporter Andrew Kerr.
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Share'Only nine-foot tall blue aliens can play nine-foot tall blue aliens in movies, apparently!' joked radio host Dan O'Donnell.
Woods failed to take note of the fact that not only are the Na'vi creatures depicted in the film described as 'indigenous blue humanoids' living on the planet Pandora, some are indeed played by black actors in the film.
Zoe Saldana is among those starring, along with Maori actor Cliff Curtis, African American star Laz Alonso, and Bailey Bass.
Woods, a freelance critic for The Philadelphia Tribune, has now made her Twitter account private
Woods was immediately mocked for her woke take on the blockbuster film
While her assessment may not have been taken seriously, Cameron's blockbuster will come to rely on other reviews and audience scores.
Cameron has already gone on record to say it needs to make at least $2billion to turn a profit.
He hasn't confirmed exactly how much it cost to make, though Variety estimates it was $350million - which would make it one of the most expensive films ever produced.
In an interview with GQ, Cameron said the movie was 'very f***ing expensive.'
In order to break even, it would have to become the third or fourth highest grossing movie ever made.
Not helping matters is a more genuine complaint of cultural appropriation that has come from Native American communities.
Director James Cameron (pictured at the premiere on December 6) said the film must become the 'third or fourth highest grossing of all time' to turn a profit
Much of it stems back to comments made by Cameron in 2009, ahead of the first Avatar movie.
He told how he'd been inspired partly by Native American communities, but in an interview with The Guardian, suggested they did not fight hard enough against colonizers.
'This was a driving force for me in the writing of ‘Avatar’ — I couldn’t help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future … and they could see their kids committing suicide at the … because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society — which is what is happening now — they would have fought a lot harder,' he said.
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