The third segment in I Am Cuba, the seminal 1964 Cuban-Soviet co-production, follows revolutionaries in Havana. They are students, working with guerrillas outside the city, but still attempting to maintain some normalcy as a cover. They spread leaflets, destroy propaganda, hold meetings—building the movement until they can move to the streets. Their actions can be bold, the opening scene of the segment shows protestors burning an open-air theater’s movie screen, but afterwards they have to slip into their normal lives. Enrique, the principal character, meets a girl on the street that night—he worries about whether it is safe to go home—and attends university the next day. Eventually Enrique will die, at the hands of the police. He will be celebrated as a martyr. Now, though, his life floats between order and chaos. He fights for a better world, while still living in the old one.
Far Cry 6 is a game about revolution, but it has a revolution problem. The game follows Dani Rojas, a man or woman depending on player choice (I played a woman so I’ll use she/her from now on), who just wants to leave the oppressed island nation of Yara. After her friends die and her ship to Miami is grounded, she joins Libertad, a small but growing group of guerrilla revolutionaries determined to overthrow Yara’s fascist dictator, Antón Castillo. The group’s leader, Clara Garcia, instantly places Dani at the head of organization, and tasks her with uniting various groups across the island. In premise, the game is about organizing a diverse coalition to fight from the shadows. In practice, Far Cry 6 turns revolution into an ego-trip, the realm of blood-thirsty vigilantes who embody, even as they contradict, imperialist play.
Key to this is Far Cry’s bread and butter: clearing patrols and occupying bases. Every major road in Yara is broken up by guard posts and checkpoints. Soldiers will recognize Dani if she tries to pass through them normally and the speed bumps will slash her tires if she moves too fast. The only option left is to take them down. (Well, the only option that makes moving through Yara fun and convenient for the player.) Once Dani does so, other guerrillas instantaneously, via a short cutscene, rebrand the checkpoint. They spray paint its walls with slogans and raise a new flag. The game itself reveals this strategy’s impracticality. Libertad-occupied checkpoints are constantly clogged up with Yaran army raids, with only a couple of guerrillas to defend the spot. Taking a checkpoint does very little to help the cause along, but does render it more visible, with further opportunities for ambush. The same goes for the multitude of other bases, factories, and hospitals that Libertad can occupy. Yaran tanks will drive past buildings emblazoned with the artwork of their enemies. Libertad is supposed to be an underground guerrilla movement, but it occupies spaces like the very fascists and imperialists it fights.
The constant fighting re-enforces a myth of revolution, that it is without discipline, routine, or even normalcy. The back of box pitch is that Libertad’s revolution has been driven to the outskirts of Yara, but even early missions are bombastic and loud. Whenever Dani travels in Yara, she is likely to run into a firefight or a skirmish. Even soldiers do not have time off, homes to return to, or hobbies. In one mission, I stalked soldiers to their favorite bar, only to find them patrolling in uniform, a sniper posted in a makeshift nest above the building. In Yara, the war is everywhere all of the time.
The revolutionaries in I Am Cuba, just like the real life ones they represent, were not open carrying in front of soldiers, not gathering in “hidden” meeting places with graffiti sprayed all over the exposed walls, not painting signposts and slogans over hiding spots. They had lives to live, both to maintain cover and because they were real human beings. The first stages of Cuba’s revolution took place over roughly five years. People were born, died, and really lived in that time; the movement of life does not stop because of violence. Far Cry 6’s pace, even tempered by the endless content of an Ubisoft game, is non-stop. It seems as if Libertad’s war takes place over days or weeks, rather than the grinding pace (broken up with sudden victories and frenetic losses) of the revolutions it borrows from.
As Enrique’s coffin is paraded through the streets, the camera moves up from the ground, around a bridge between buildings, and through an office, all while still following the funeral procession. It’s just one of the film’s numerous showy long takes. Rather than being an immersive tactic, like long takes in modern cinema or videogames, these remind you of the human hands that made the film. A shot like the one I described above requires multiple camera operators, handing the device to each other with the aid of pulleys or ropes. The actors must move around the camera, dance with it, without ever fully acknowledging its presence. This is true of many long takes, but digital film has rendered the apparatus easier to erase, human hands easier to forget. In 1964, there were no tricks. Every shot was made by another human being, part of a community making a film together. Every second without a cut whispers, “this is what we can build together.”
Superficially, Far Cry 6 does emphasize communities. Dani’s quest is to win the hearts and minds of people across Yara. In practice, these communities boil down to a handful of important individuals: the old revolutionaries of 1967, the leaders of a student movement, and a rapper/DJ duo are among the recruits. These groups don’t really express an ideology, they just want to fight Castillo purely on their own terms. Recruiting them does not mean ensuring that their interests will be represented, that the Yara after Castillo will be free for them. Rather, they cede you their territory and resources for the price of just a few favors. In a dramatic confrontation with Castillo, Clara asks why he is so interested in dividing them: “It’s one fucking Yara.” Clara’s revolution though, is divided. The Monteros, wealthy farm owners on the west side of the island, might have different reasons for wanting Castillo out than the plucky students of La Moral, on the more urbanized east side. The end goal of a revolution for wealthy landowners is different from one for poor, marginalized students.
These contradictions are not explored because what exactly Clara’s revolution is fighting for and fighting against is vague. Libertad’s central demands are “Free expression. Free elections. Free the outcasts.” The first two points are just bell whistles of western liberal democracy. The last is a demand to end Castillo’s slave camps, which he uses to develop and export his miracle cancer cure, Vivero. Fundamental questions of how Yara’s economy will structure itself without its major export or how the nation's slaves will be freed and properly cared for go unaddressed. Answering those questions would mean exposing what a better world could mean, something Far Cry 6 is categorically unable to do. After Castillo dies, one of the revolutionaries literally asks, “What do we do now?” Generously, this lack of a plan foreshadows the revolution’s eventual implied failure. More honestly, it serves to avoid the disruption of the game’s imperialist fantasy. Libertad fights against fascism and slave labor, which we can all agree is bad, but it fights for nothing.
Fittingly, the violence is also weightless. No named characters die without dramatic reason. With every major death, someone previously skeptical joins the cause. Setbacks and foibles only lead to eventual victory. Meanwhile, countless nameless guerrillas die in the game’s unending setpieces, without fanfare or acknowledgement. Outside of a chosen few, the revolution is voiceless.
The center of that voicelessness is Dani herself. She, in contrast to Enrique, has no old life. Dani’s an orphan, her only friends die within the first 20 minutes of the game. We learn she’s ex-military, court martialed, but there is little to no picture of what her day-to-day life looked like before the revolution. As soon as she joins the fight, her life becomes chaotic. Her body count rises to the thousands, she travels all across the island. She has no place to call her own. No family, found or otherwise, to go back to. The game makes some effort to thematize this, but it ultimately serves to make her a cypher, a skin that anyone can occupy. She has enough personality to hang a cutscene around, but not enough to really distance herself from whoever plays as her.
Despite her blandness, Dani is still the most important figure of the revolution. When Clara dies, she is the one who takes over. She is the one who gathers the strength of the island. She is the one who frees every outpost with her own hands. Rather than earning her (one) rifle by taking it from a dead soldier like her real world counterparts, Dani is a walking arsenal, able to swap between innumerable weapons at any time. She gets all of the glory of revolution, but none of its mundanity. It is an egotistical and imperialist perspective, allowing the player to act out a fantasy version of revolution with all of the perks and none of the dangers. The fact that Dani is from Yara and the game’s revolutionary theming does nothing to diminish Far Cry’s past and present as an imperialist playground.
There is one moment in Far Cry 6 that moved me. After doing a couple of favors for Libertad, Clara gives Dani a boat. She then offers her a place in Libertad. The game obviously intends for Dani to stay, but it does let her escape to the States if the player chooses to stray from the plot. The next scene shows Dani hanging out on a beach in Miami as the radio announces that Yara’s revolution was defeated. Dani is expressionless, unmoved by the massacre of her people. It’s a moment that feels genuinely biting, condemning Dani for her inaction and her apathy. Even this, though, is egocentric. Dani is the one force that can ensure the revolution’s success. Her inaction is all that matters.
Contrast this, again, with I Am Cuba’s last scene. After a final segment chronicling a farmer joining the guerillas, it shows a victory procession after the revolution successfully overthrows Fulgencio Batista's government in 1959. There are familiar faces among them, but the impact comes from seeing a wave of human beings—an entire community—achieving victory together. A revolution might have leaders, but it is not the work of an individual. It is a communal effort that requires communal care and communal power.
It might seem ridiculous to compare a big-budget videogame to propaganda films made in the aftermath of a revolutionary victory, but Far Cry 6 invites these comparisons. In interviews, its lead writer touted the fact that the team talked with actual fighters from the Cuban Revolution. Its advertisements sell the ability to “dive into the gritty world of a modern-day guerrilla.” Once a game bases itself on the history, values, and politics of a real culture, it loses the ability to claim that it is just joking around. People died in the wars this videogame models itself upon. Far Cry 6 treats the material of their lives as goofy fodder for a weightless action-adventure.
To me, revolution is a sacred act of love. It is more than violence and war, though it can include those things. It requires a deep devotion to a land or a people, a yearning for a better world, and a grim determination to see that world through. It cannot be undertaken lightly. Dani does not have any of those things, not really. She joins the revolution because it’s fun and does not care about making Yara better once it is over. Far Cry 6 is offensive in all the predictable ways these games are. It also makes revolution into slick, slimy junk food. It makes meaning with the barrel of a gun, a raised flag over conquered land. Everything else is peripheral. Dani may be from Yara, her comrades homegrown revolutionaries, but her game is still about being a fucking tourist.
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Grace is a freelance writer, a contributor at Paste Magazine, Gamespot, and Uppercut, and weekend editor at Gamepur. She is currently reading Witcher novels and reviewing niche indie videogames on her Patreon. You can find her and her work on Twitter @grace_machine.