[Zhihu question]
Why does Avatar 2 feel so much less enjoyable?
Because Avatar 2 could have gone down a wonderfully over-the-top dark path, but sadly, Cameron didn’t make that movie.
Avatar 2: The Way of Water — the over-the-top dark version — could go something like this:
After driving back the Earth’s forces at the end of the first film, Eywa realizes that humanity is bound to regroup and return with an even larger invasion force. By then, even if Eywa pulled off another ”’all-Pandora animal mobilization”’ like the one at the end of Avatar, there would be no chance of repelling the invaders from Earth again.
In the first film, Pandora’s opponent was nothing more than a band of mercenaries working for a commercial company — basically a rabble. If the people of Earth got serious, how could Pandora’s indigenous inhabitants, who still relied mainly on cold weapons, possibly stand against a civilization that had already mastered interstellar travel?
Judging by the gap in civilizational development shown in Avatar, Pandora, Eywa, and the Na’vi actually have no chance whatsoever. The people of Earth would only need to be a tiny bit more serious than they were in the first film, and they could wipe everything on Pandora off the face of the universe with one casual gesture.
…But is that really how things are?
Eywa’s worried brow slowly relaxed, and a faint smile appeared at the corner of her mouth: “People of Earth, since you’ve forced me this far, I suppose I’ll have to show you what I’m really capable of.”
What exactly is Eywa?
She is a gigantic neural network made up of all the plant neurons on Pandora. In other words, she is actually a highly advanced, extraordinarily complex supercomputer. Eywa’s true power goes far beyond what she displayed in the first film.
It turns out that Eywa, the ”’goddess”’ of Pandora and its true hidden ruler, has always had more than enough power to turn Pandora into a high-tech world.
Perhaps in Pandora’s ancient past, Eywa once used her unimaginable computing power to build a high-tech civilization resembling Earth’s later one. That civilization eventually collapsed, and may even have come close to destroying Pandora.
After the catastrophe, Eywa learned her lesson the hard way and decided to rewrite the shape of Pandora’s civilization. In the end, she developed the ”’low-tech”’ model we see now — one that values balanced development and harmonious coexistence among all the planet’s forms of life.
In other words, Eywa isn’t incapable. She simply doesn’t want to.
Pandora’s ”’backwardness”’ isn’t forced on her at all. It’s simply Eywa’s choice.
But now Earth’s threat is imminent, and the terrifyingly powerful side of Eywa is forced to bare its fangs:
“People of Earth, you want to play with high tech? Fine. I’ll play along. Just watch me use your own methods to beat you into submission, then press your head down and tell you: it’s not that I can’t play with all your fancy toys. I just know they’re bad for you, so I chose to become what I am now.”
And so the goddess suddenly transforms, and the Valkyrie makes a magnificent entrance—
Right after the people of Earth withdrew at the end of the first film, Pandora’s civilizational form underwent a world-shaking transformation under Eywa’s forceful direction.
Earth’s technological path is ”’steel-and-electronics”’ technology: all kinds of spacecraft, machinery, planes, artillery…
But the high-tech form of Pandora under Eywa’s direction is utterly different from Earth’s civilization. Eywa herself is an unimaginably huge living organism, so her path is ”’biochemical-and-genetic”’ technology.
Eywa doesn’t need to mine ore, smelt steel, or build planes, artillery, and missiles. All she needs to do is manipulate gene sequences and ”’give birth”’ to all kinds of biological weapons.
Pandora’s high-tech form would probably look something like this:
That’s right: the technology Pandora should have in Avatar 2 was actually designed for Cameron long ago by Yoshiki Takaya in Bio Booster Armor Guyver!
Cameron should have bought the rights to Bio Booster Armor Guyver before starting production on Avatar 2.
If it were filmed according to this concept, Avatar 2 would be an evolved version of Alien, a Starship Troopers 2.0 — a grand collision between Earth’s ”’steel-and-electronics”’ technology and Pandora’s ”’biochemical-and-genetic”’ technology.
Steelpunk versus biopunk!
Come on — doesn’t that sound thrilling, satisfying, and worth looking forward to? ^_^
Huh? Maybe the third film really is going in this direction?
Who knows?
That’s all.
By: Zhichao Wei
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