Even More Avatar

By Wade

This is a fairly long, extensive article detailing the differences between a scriptment Cameron wrote right after Titanic and the Avatar that we've seen on the big screen. If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, the bullet points at the beginning cover most of it, but here's a few sections I felt would have given the movie a different perspective(in the original script Jake was named Josh):

...an Earth where the people aren't just urban, they've completely and utterly lost touch with anything green. Keep this in mind, because this is one of the guiding elements of what makes Josh fall in love with Pandora.

Josh's cramped apartment has a huge TV screen that takes up an entire wall. It's on this TV that we learn about the state of the environment in the wake of a news report about the death of the last lion outside of captivity. Then Josh watches a report on a massive fire on the Boston subway that asphyxiated one hundred commuters; soon we'll learn one of those commuters was his twin brother.

This sort of contrast would've made the amazing environment of Pandora all the more startling.

They want the Na'vi to work in Pandoran refineries - it's cheaper to refine the metals they mine on site, making them weigh less, before shipping them back home.

In Project 880 the billions spent on Avatars means saving trillions on workers.

I don't know if this is any less stereotypical evil corporation, but it does add an outsourcing element to the exploitation of the indigenous.

...first he discovers how deadly Pandora is - as he is disembarking from the shuttle there's a shriek from the jungle and giant sentry guns spray fire into the darkness. Immediately we see that Hell's Gate is a place that is under constant siege.

I like this a lot, giving the planet a feeling more akin to a creeping vine constantly searching for a way in to strangle the foreign body.

What these guys tell Josh that's really interesting (and answers a huge number of questions from Avatar) is that RDA is chartered by the ICA - Interplanetary Commerce Administration - the future Earth trade regulating body. This charter allows RDA to exploit any moon, planet, etc they want, but they must follow strict rules, chief among which is they are allowed a limited military presence and no weapons of mass destruction.

RDA games the system in Project 880, as opposed to being just monolithically evil in Avatar. This is how it happens in the real world, too.

Josh Sully tells the Earth that Pandora will give any humans that return a disease that will wipe out humanity.

And this answers some of my biggest questions: namely, why wouldn't the big evil corporation just come back with more firepower and obliterate all life on the planet to get their shiny rocks?

If you have the time and the inclination, the whole thing is worth reading. As I've said before, I'm a sucker for "what ifs".