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Yeah, 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 descr

by pzxc 12y ago

Yeah, 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 ago
I 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 ago
The 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 ago
Is 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 ago
  My physics teacher used to say: "Take a massless, frictionless, inextensible rope made of pure unobtanium..."
dllthomas 12y ago
I recall joking about "unobtainium" long before that movie came out...
HolyHaddock 12y ago
The 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

by pzxc 12y ago

fdej 12y ago

I 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 ago

The 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 ago

Is 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 ago
My physics teacher used to say: "Take a massless, frictionless, inextensible rope made of pure unobtanium..."

dllthomas 12y ago

I recall joking about "unobtainium" long before that movie came out...

HolyHaddock 12y ago

The 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