The Avatar video game is better than the movies.

I say this as someone who has dumbly adored James Cameron’s Avatar movies for a long time. The original 2009 film was my first ever midnight premiere, which I attended along with a friend who sat in the theater shirtless with his entire body painted blue. I can’t forget that experience, or the nearly three-hour bioluminescent journey that followed, and the series has kept me hooked since.

People talk a lot of shit about Avatar. They find the movies’ plots derivative, the characters forgettable, the run times almost inhumanely long. (The third movie, Avatar: Fire and Ash, is out now and clocks in at a whopping 3 hours and 15 minutes, not including previews.)

Those criticisms are fair. Correct, even. But the true Avatar sickos (hi) might ask, What if that experience could be even longer, actually? What if you could spend even more time trekking through the sprawling, glowing forests of a verdant alien moon? If that sounds appealing, boy, are you going to be excited to hear about the concept of video games.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, a game developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Ubisoft in 2023, lets you cavort around in the form of a 10-foot-tall Na’vi, the tribal species who live on the alien moon Pandora.

While the Avatar films are blockbusters that have melted the box office, the game was released to little fanfare and middling reviews, though it grew to become a sleeper hit. It has since garnered enough of a fan base that it has received significant updates in the two years since its debut, including downloadable content expansions and a free mode that switches the game’s first-person view to a third-person view, letting players bask in all their character’s big blueness. A new DLC story, titled From the Ashes, was released today, the same day as the third film of the series.

The game might be the best thing to ever happen to the Avatar series. Where the movies have their own stories to tell (family, love, that kinda thing), the game plays very differently with your own custom Na’vi.

It is a righteous ecoterrorism simulator wrapped in the most gorgeous botanical garden I’ve ever seen. Your gargantuan blue treehugger runs around a world where all the very pretty plants want to kill you. Your job is to impale puny human colonizers with your log-sized spears. By wiping out the bad guys and demolishing their camps that gush pollution into the air and water, you can allow the world’s foliage to grow back in its place. (Do not feel bad for the humans. They are sad, angry creatures, and I will kill thousands of them if it makes the pretty forest look even a little prettier.) Then spend all the downtime you want just hanging out in Pandora’s verdant paradise, bouncing across neon lily pads and running through spiral plants that go THOOOMP and shrink into the ground when you touch them.

People have written off the game as a re-skinned Far Cry, another very popular Ubisoft title, but that misses the sheer amount of Avatar details that have been pumped into Frontiers. Jennifer Bartram, Massive’s senior narrative coordinator and the game’s “lore keeper,” is responsible for maintaining consistency between the films and the game, working closely with Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment.

“They call this series not science fiction, but science fact,” Bartram says. “Everything needs to be researched and correct for the world. It really needs to have a science background, a technological background. We need to show on paper, how does this actually work? What’s the small leap or change in evolution or biology that our brain could understand that this is actually possible on a moon somewhere else in the universe?”

Sure, the same criticisms commonly applied to the Avatar movie could also be leveled at its spinoff videogame. The game is gorgeously splendid to look at, but the plot is as dense as a floating rock and the characters slip from your brain almost immediately after you meet them. It is a thrilling, action packed adventure, but maybe a bit too bloated for its own good.

But Avatar has always been more about the lush world in which the story takes place than the story itself. When you’re controlling your own experience through that world, taking all the time you like to explore, hunt, or just stare at the glowing plants, it becomes clear that Frontiers is the superior Avatar experience.

“We try to make sure that everyone gets to tell their own story,” says Amandine Lauer, the lead game designer of Frontiers of Pandora. “Lightstorm has their story and we have our story. We want to make sure that everybody has the room to share the same DNA in the same world.”

Seth Wright, who goes by Mako, is the director of operations at Kelutral, an Avatar fanclub that has grown to around 12,300 members. He has watched the first Avatar movie in theaters eight times and learned the fictional language spoken by the Na’Vi enough to be fluent. (There’s an online Na’Vi translator for the rest of us.) Initially, Mako and the community were skeptical about an Avatar game. But after playing through the base story and the DLC expansions, Mako says the game has become a staple of the fandom.

“Avatar as a franchise is really well suited to interactive experiences,” Mako says. “When you take the world of Pandora, the beautiful technical, immersive detail, and put it into a video game, I think that you are fulfilling one of the strongest points the franchise has to offer.”

Mako calls Avatar the ultimate escapist fantasy: It presents a gorgeous, alien world, grounded in a believable, but fantastical, peaceful culture. He also lauds how director James Cameron has bristled at using AI in favor of human-created technical artistry.

“It is just so far removed from our actual reality,” Mako says. “It does inspire those feelings of longing. Like, what are we doing? And how can we be doing what we’re doing differently?”

Not to be a real kalweyaveng about it, but Frontiers of Pandora feels like just the right amount of Avatar. Like unobtanium, the sought-after resource that drives the greedy humans in the first film, Avatar’s narrative fuel seems to be a finite resource. While Cameron has plans for two (2) whole more Avatar movies, he is also looking to the reception of Fire and Ash to decide whether to produce more films.

I have not yet seen the third Avatar movie. Maybe it will be excellent. Maybe it will be sngeln. (That’s the Na’vi word for garbage.) I’ll find out when I watch it on Christmas Day in 4DX with those moving seats that occasionally spray water at you. Maybe three-and-a-half hours of trying to get maximum immersion into the land of Pandora will be enough to satiate my Avatar fix.

But I think not. And in that case, Frontiers of Pandora will be there, and available to explore long after. To that, I say: I see you.