I've always thought 'Avatar' was a silly name for James Cameron's record breaking movie, mainly because there's already a thing called Avatar. It's obvious why he went with it - Jake Sully is not actually Na'vi, but a human using a very expensive Na'vi skinsuit that he can only use when cybernetically linked in medically-induced sleep. However, by the second movie he has been literally reborn as Na'vi, no longer human at all, and so the name is only branding. That's how it should have gone in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, but unfortunately, there are humans everywhere.
Pandora is a far more interesting planet when seen through non-human eyes. In both the movies and the video game, the military are on Pandora to bleed it dry for resources. It's a timely, if not all that subtle, metaphor for the destruction of our own planet as habitats and ecosystems are destroyed in the name of profit. That works, despite the inescapable silliness of the Unobtanium name (my colleague and major Avatar fan Eric Switzer 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:tries to escape it here), because it gives the movies a clear antagonist. Avatar is a politically subversive work where the hero defects from the US army and helps guerrilla ecowarriors defend their natural resources. But it's not the only story there is to tell, and it's disappointing that Frontiers of Pandora is retelling it.
Frontiers is, to its slim credit, reversing this story. Ubisoft knows - or perhaps was told in no uncertain terms by Cameron - that Sully's arc is special because he is unique. Even if Frontiers of Pandora had no impact on the movie's canon, as I assume will be the case, having a second Na'vi avatar running around would be a strange choice. So instead we play as a born Na'vi who was part of a human training program as a child, who was then supposed to be killed when the program was shut down. Their Na'vi instructor helps them hide in a cryosleep pod, and then they awaken years later to see the havoc the humans have wrought. Like Sully, our hero is trained in human warfare and the way of the Na'vi, so it's a good way of playing as Jake Sully without playing as Jake Sully. But here's a question - who wants to play as Jake Sully?
Not even the biggest Avatar fans would argue he is the series' most exciting character. If he were a woman there would be packs of trolls calling him a Mary Sue, but as he's male we simply call him an everyman. I can understand people wanting to dive in and experience this world for themselves - I've always found it odd that with two movies grossing over $1 billion, we act like nobody cares about Avatar. But I don't think the pull is the chance to be a Jake Sully-like, and it definitely isn't to fire regular boring guns.
Frontiers of Pandora could have been set before the RDA even arrived. Pandora is a planet with a rich history that we have only scratched the surface of. We only see the planet's history as it directly correlates to Jake's or Neytiri's story. The second movie was dominated by underwater species and shore-dwelling tribes, when the first one was centred on jungles, cliffs, and beasts of the sky. There is literally a whole world waiting to be discovered, and taking out Far Cry-style outposts full of human guards while wielding human guns is not how I want to explore it. It reduces the Na'vi to just having blue skin. With the first-person perspective, it's just a set of blue hands in a regular human video game.
We know that tribes have warred and united, we know that they have moved across continents, we know that there are large swathes of the planet we have never even seen. I know this has to be a video game - an Ubisoft video game, no less - with tangible goals and map markers and combat, and I know the point of using Avatar is the brand recognition that comes with sticking to images we recognise, but when Avatar is most valued for its spectacle, it's strange that the game seems to be reducing that down to fit inside a played out framework.
I'm still looking forward to the game, because any chance to explore Pandora is worth caring about, and mindless as it is I don't mind spending a few hours on Ubisoft's checklist style of gameplay. But it feels like a better Avatar game is out there, and hopefully this is the first step. Frontiers of Pandora doesn't use an Avatar, and I hope the next game doesn't use humans at all.