Unobtainium

Jan 19, 2010 18:27

Was it just me, or did anyone else thing that Unobtainium was a fucking stupid name for a mineral, from the get go?

Another thing I didn't like, concerning the stuff, was that absolutely no effort was put into explaining exactly why humans were wanting this shit.

avatar

Leave a comment

Comments 6

kane_magus January 20 2010, 00:41:42 UTC
While it is a textbook example of a MacGuffin, plain and simple, I do agree that they still could have tried to put a little more effort into it than "Unobtainium" and that at least a cursory, throw-away explanation of what it was or why they wanted it would have been nice, even if it was never mentioned again. "Okay, see this floaty rock here? This is Cameronite* and we use it to power our war mechs and bomber shuttles and avatar machines and such. Got it? Good. Now, let's go bomb us some space elves! Hoorah ( ... )

Reply

(The comment has been removed)

kane_magus January 20 2010, 01:12:52 UTC
Was it ever made clear in the movie that the humans actually bothered to explain to the Na'vi why they were even there at all? I'm sure it can be implied that Sigourney Weaver (tried to) explain it to them at some point off camera or something, but I don't recall this actually being explicitly said. For all we know (at least based on what I remember from the movie), the humans just showed up out of the blue and started hanging around for no apparent reason at all, at least from the perspective of the Na'vi. It would explain why they seemed so surprised that the humans were suddenly firebombing them, if they didn't actually know that what the humans wanted was the floaty rocks under their tree.

And if the Na'vi did know why the humans were there, it wasn't made clear why the Na'vi were refusing to help them, aside from a general "why should we let these sky people dig up our homes just to get some useless rocks?"

Reply

kane_magus January 20 2010, 01:00:24 UTC
(Third times the charm?)

Hell, for that matter, Unobtainium itself has its own TvTropes page too, except that in the case of Avatar and its Unobtainium, the TvTropes MacGuffin definition actually fits better than their Unobtainium one.

Reply


akuma_neko January 20 2010, 04:02:28 UTC
I'm glad to hear I wasn't the only one who thought it was the worlds dumbest name. But then again, humans aren't really given much credit when it comes to creatively naming things anyways.
"What's that?"
"An automobile!"
"why?"
"'cause it's automatically mobile."
"ah"

Also, if this ....I can't say it without giggling. If this stupidly named rock FLOATS and is all under this tree....why isn't the tree in danger of floating away? Just wondering.

Reply

(The comment has been removed)

kane_magus January 20 2010, 18:32:11 UTC
"It floats when subjected to a certain force, such as the one emitted by my paperweight here, and this is why we're ready and willing to genocide some blueskins" would have actually been a good technobabble, handwavy explanation for why they wanted it so badly, and still would have sufficed to make the humans seem just as dickish and the Na'vi just as saintly. It didn't really matter as to the reason why the humans wanted it. The complaint here is that the movie didn't really try to justify it at all.

Also, supposedly, that was why those rocks were floating in that other area. They were in the "flux" or whatever. Whether they were made of unobtainium or not wasn't stated, as far as I recall, but it's likely they were, given the law of conservation of detail. That is to say, the floaty rock on the guy's desk was unobtainium, so it stands to reason that the floaty rocks in the floaty islands was also unobtainium and were being subjected to a similar force to the one put out by the thing on the desk. That company guy also didn't ( ... )

Reply

akuma_neko January 22 2010, 04:49:27 UTC
Should've been called "unexplainedium" then.

Reply


Leave a comment

Up