"You're not leaving, are you, Jake? Knowing I'm out there. Knowing that I'll never stop. I'm coming for you. And when I do, I'll kill your whole family."
Moments pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.— Quaritch
- Recombinant Quaritch and his Recom team come across the camp where human Quaritch fought Jake's Avatar in the first movie. He's unsettled by the entire place (especially after seeing the remains of his original body within the deactivated AMP unit), and after seeing the replay from the AMP unit's camera that shows Quaritch's death in full detail, Recombinant Quaritch vows to kill Neytiri and also crushes the skull of his human self's skeleton before leaving.
- After years of peace and happiness for Jake and his family, the RDA returns in force with an entire fleet of ships. As they land, their thrusters incinerate miles of forest, and we even get a shot of several terrified animals fleeing before being engulfed by the flames. Then they unload many Amplified Mobility Platform units and their heavy vehicles for further destruction. The intent is immediately clear: humanity isn't coming back to mine for resources, they're coming to stay.
- From what we saw of Bridgehead, better known as the RDA's new stronghold on Pandora, its overall design looks like a combination of a heavily-armed military fortress and factory complex. The entire place is not only protected by 19 miles worth of defensive walls, it also had an extensive perimeter defense system made up of many huge guns and missile batteries, ready to shoot down any flying animal that gets anywhere close to the fortifications, mounted ikran and wild tetropteran alike. Then there's also the Kill Zone, which is a strip of empty earth roughly three miles wide that separates Bridgehead from the rest of Pandora which earned its name because anything that ventures into that area is automatically targeted and killed by overwhelming amounts of ordnance. And that's not counting a massive standing army within Bridgehead itself, which includes several Dragon Assault Ships. Humans aren't playing around anymore this time.
- When Spider was captured by the Recombinant Quaritch and brought back to Bridgehead (aka Bridgehead City), Gen. Frances Ardmore actually put him in some kind of high-tech Mind Probe interrogation machine to find out any information about Jake and his family's whereabouts. Spider was practically screaming "I DON'T KNOW!" repeatedly and his nose was bleeding until Recombinant Quaritch slammed his hand on the stop button.
- The entire sequence with the Akula, a ferocious mosasaur-like Sea Monster that chases after Lo'ak through the reefs relentlessly, in a sequence similar to when Jake was hunted down by a Thanator in the previous film. The scene brings out everything we fear about the deep ocean. Not only does Lo'ak has to struggle to survive against the beast in an unfamiliar environment that limits his survival options, his air is also slowly running out, and the only way to avoid drowning is to swim up to the surface and leave himself vulnerable...
- Kiri having a seizure while underwater is just as horrific as it sounds especially considering that the bioluminescent life appears to seize with her.
- In the climatic battle on the sinking ship, Spider spots Neytiri — a woman he's known and trusted since childhood — and appears to be about to run out to her when he sees her fighting with a human soldier, whom she easily overpowers and rather savagely kills. The sight of this causes Spider to hesitate and stay hidden, and it's honestly hard to blame him. While we know Neytiri isn't some monster and is acting out of grief for her murdered son, for one of the first times we see a Na'vi in a more sinister light and this the moment where Neytiri goes absolutely berserk (as in Berserker Asura-levels of pure rage): in this case, being not just a hissing, snarling, ten feet tall alien with glowing eyes and sharp fangs, immensely faster and stronger than any human, and with superior senses, but one who up to that point was shown to be stern yet compasionate, now fueled with revenge and pure blistering hatred that are completely beyond human comprehension, making Neytiri seem less like a grieving mother and more like a rabid wild animal. All in all, it's a genuinely unsettling glimpse at what it would be like to be a human faced with a Na'vi who wants you dead.
- This gets even worse later on when Quaritch holds Kiri hostage and threatens to kill her if Jake comes any closer. Neytiri responds to this by taking Spider hostage and holding a knife to his chest, threatening to kill him to hurt Quaritch. At one point she even slashes his chest to prove that she wasn't bluffing. It's quite unsettling and Quaritch eventually stands down and lets Kiri go, unable to see his own son killed in front of him.
- And to really sell it, there's the fantastic motion-capture effects that really highlight the characters' facial expressions, making Neytiri's animalistic rage (especially when that screaming and snarling of hers make her face look downright demonic) that much more horrifying.
- A deleted extended cut makes the scene even more tense, since Neytiri doesn't let go of Spider at the same time Quaritch lets Kiri go. Instead, she almost looks like she was going to kill Spider out of grief anyway. Had Jake not been there to calm her down, who knows what would have happened to poor Spider.
.- The tulkun hunt, which is based on real-world whaling practices, is nothing short of brutal. The whalers specifically target mothers and calves because they're easier targets, deafen the pod with depth charges and use ultrasonic cannons to disorient them, whilst shooting them with explosive harpoons until they drop from exhaustion. Did we mention that the tulkun are fully sapient and the RDA is well aware of this fact?
- Even worse, it is later implied that, offscreen, they killed Roa's orphaned calf before they left, simply to make a point (to both the tulkun pod and the Metkayina) that no-one was safe.
- This gets confirmed in a deleted extended cut of this scene, where Scoresby uses the harpoon gun to kill the calf as well after the mother is dead and the boats have surrounded her body.
- Even worse, it is later implied that, offscreen, they killed Roa's orphaned calf before they left, simply to make a point (to both the tulkun pod and the Metkayina) that no-one was safe.
- The first fight between Jake's family and Quaritch's recoms, which takes place in the forest during the night. The scene almost looks like it was ripped from a Vietnam war movie. Just look at it from the recoms' perspective. You're all hunkered down, are minutes away from getting flown out of there and all you have to do is watch a bunch of kids. Unbeknownst to you, the kids already called for help. Their mother is already watching you and their dad already took out two of you without making a single sound. It doesn't help that the dark environment is limiting your view and that the rain is at least partially muffing any nearby sounds. Suddenly, one of your comrades gets shot in the head by an arrow, which kills her instantly and causes a bit of panic. You try to shoot in the direction the arrow came from, but just then the kids use this opportunity to try and escape by any means necessary, causing even more chaos for you guys. One of your other comrades try to stop one of them, but she also gets an arrow straight in the shoulder, so it's pretty clear that trying to stop them is too risky. Eventually your commander has a good idea to take out the archer, so he orders one of his men to flank Neytiri and almost manages to kill her before he gets shot in the spine with an arrow from another Na'vi. You probably start to wonder how many Na'vi are you actually fighting. After a small chase, you end up with only one prisoner for the cost of 5 of your people. Not exactly a great trade, with all this in mind.
