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> The plot of "Avatar" was depressingly cliche; a standard retelling of the standard action movie plot, done once again. I liked when Avatar was described as "
by mikeyouse 12y ago
> The plot of "Avatar" was depressingly cliche; a standard retelling of the standard action movie plot, done once again.
I liked when Avatar was described as "Pocahontas in Space". It's pretty interesting tooling around on TVTropes.org and seeing exactly how you can break down a movie into well-known and well-worn cliches.
It reminds me a bit of high school literature critique. It used to bother me quite a bit when we'd tease out these meanings from books since I couldn't believe that authors spent their time trying to come up with hidden metaphors on every page. It took a long time to change my perspective to recognize that these books were successful decades after they've been written because of those buried metaphors and tropes. All of the books that were facile and poorly written disappear into history, and whether the authors intended every single sunset to mean something unique, the books are worth studying because they connect in that way and for whatever reason, we connect with those meanings.
Warning for those who get sidetracked easily, TVTropes is a worse wormhole than wikipedia, but it's endlessly interesting to see what's behind successful media: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/Avatar http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/Avatar
- pzxc 12y agoYeah, the plots of Avatar and Pocahontas are so identical that you can literally take a synopsis and play Mad Libs substituting the character names and it describes both perfectly. The ultimate laziness of avatar: The mineral they're after that is so hard to find that is the basis for the movie, what shall we call it? Ahem, unobtainium yeah that's a good name! I laughed out loud in the movie theater when they revealed that.
- fdej 12y agoI disagree that the name unobtanium is an example of lazy writing. I always took it for an in-universe joke (doubling as a meta-joke), and/or a deliberately gimmicky marketing name invented by the corporation. There are plenty of playful scientific terms in the real world (the "sonic hedgehog" protein just to take one example).
- anigbrowl 12y agoThe whole point of 'unobtanium' is to draw attention to the allegorical nature of the film.
- gizmo686 12y ago>The ultimate laziness of avatar: The mineral they're after that is so hard to find that is the basis for the movie, what shall we call it? Ahem, unobtainium yeah that's a good name! Maybe they are mispronouncing Ununpentium.
- Chinjut 12y agoIs that really lazy? It's exactly the sort of name I can imagine cheeky scientists coming up with, perhaps starting off jokey but eventually losing all such connotation and simply becoming standard. Are names such as "strange quarks", "Big Bang", "oobleck" (taken from Dr. Seuss), etc., so dry and dignified?
- kian 12y agoMy physics teacher used to say: "Take a massless, frictionless, inextensible rope made of pure unobtanium..."
- dllthomas 12y agoI recall joking about "unobtainium" long before that movie came out...
- HolyHaddock 12y agoThe writers for Avatar were extremely lazy. However Unobtanium has been an engineering in-joke since the '50s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium