One extended Avatar: The Way of Water scene has Jake and Neytiri going full Rambo

The new collector’s edition of Avatar: The Way of Water in 4K comes with plenty of deleted and extended scenes, but one in particular stands out.

Things get much darker in the ‘Parents From Hell & Standoff’ extended scene, which sees main characters Jake Sully and his Na’vi partner Neytiri absolutely massacring the remaining RDA forces on the sinking whaling ship and Miles Quaritch’s Recom team. The scene was already violent and tense enough in the final movie (big Terminator 2 and Titanic energy from James Cameron here), so it’s fascinating to see that the filmmaker and his team actually toned it down quite a lot in order to avoid veering into borderline R-rated territory.

Even more shocking is how Neytiri behaves in this iteration of the scene versus the final cut. It puts so much more strain on the relationship between her and Spider, and it takes a bigger intervention from Jake to actually deactivate the situation. Considering that Neytiri remains one of the saga’s ‘heroic’ characters and will reportedly have an even bigger role in future installments, it was wise not to go this dark with her even if her oldest son had just died and the RDA are humanity’s worst.