The knife looked and seems pretty ridiculous. If the military of the future needs to equip mechs for wandering in dense jungles, I find it hard to believe that they wouldn’t find a more elegant solution than making it hack through the underbrush with a machete. Even a retractable straight blade or saw blade or something would make more sense than a giant robot Rambo knife in a sheath.
Responding directly to the OP: I think that there’s absolutely no reason to watch it outside of a 3D IMAX theater. It’d be like buying a DVD of Star Tours.
I thought Dave’s analysis was very intriguing. In terms of SF tropes, Avatar was very intelligent. It borrowed VERY intelligently from SF tropes of the past … the floating mountains being the most arresting example, in my opinion. He did not just baldly present floating mountains, he also presented them as a gravitational anomaly that also threw off instrumentation. Very slick. Like Dave, I am often disappointed by SF films that take on a few of the visual trappings of SF but ignore the sense of wonder that makes SF so appealing at its very best. Avatar hit the mark on these points, much more effectively than most other SF films do.
A raving hardcore close-minded libertarian friend of mine actually saw the movie as a metaphor/message against…wait for it…imminent domain.
So, the N’avi are property owners, see? And the government is trying to take their land without giving them fair market value, so they are merely fighting for their right to control their own property.
So, he basically liked the N’avi because they were, for him, the emblem of the hard-working American landowner fighting against the faceless corrupt government. No environmentalism at all for him.
THAT was a surreal conversation to be having, for sure.
That’s brilliant. So the Navi are really just New Londoners, the company is Pfizer, and the Colonel is Supreme Court Justice David Souter?
Yes. Exactly as retarded. By which, of course, you mean not at all because it worked pretty well.
That doesn’t look anything remotely like a tank with a giant hunting knife attached. It looks more like a tank with a “cattle-catcher” sort of gizmo.
I just saw it last night on DVD and while it is a visually stunning film (and I expect more so in 3D), that “inside joke” was by far the most irritating thing for me. For Og’s sake use a little technobabble, that’s what it’s there for. Calling it “unobtainium” is like blandly calling a mysterious object “the Hitchcockian McGuffin” on screen. The fourth wall is there for a reason, and you break it at your peril.
I saw the similarity to Fern Gully and The Last Samurai, and Dances with Wolves. Honestly that didn’t bother me too much as I’m well aware of the old saw about there being only X original stories and how everything is derivative of what came earlier.
-DF
JFTR, it’s eminent domain. Unless your land is suddenly going to appear.
Like this?
I don’t get this. Unobtainium is techno-babble.
Sure, but a knife wielded with some dexterity would be more effective than a cattle-catcher type gizmo. So why use a cattle catcher when you can just hold the knife in your hand?
Why hold the knife in your hand when you could use some sort of blade built into the mech that you couldn’t drop or have knocked out of your robot hand? Why not have some sort of saw blade? Why carry around some silly robot hunting knife and not a robot machete or something if you’re going to be hacking through the brush? Who picks a Rambo knife as their preferred way to carve through a jungle?
It’s not logical, it was just something Cameron (or whoever) thought looked cool. Thinking that it looked silly instead of cool is perfectly legitimate.
Here’s a still of the mech holding its knife. I’m sorry, but arguing that that knife is a tool for hacking through the jungle is just… well, again, silly. In fact, I forgot just how ridiculous it looked until I saw it again now.
Unobtainium is a general term, incredibly well known to anyone writing speculative fiction or performing thought experiments in materials science.
It’s like saying we need to get these aliens off their tree because there’s a big deposit of “weird, hard to get matter”. “Unobtainium” lacks specificity.
There’s an “unobtainium” trope! To hear it in actual usage in a script is as jarring to me as hearing a political candidate uttering “insert pithy comment here” while delivering a speech. It is something that some hack writer left in there because s/he didn’t do a final polish and fill in the blanks, or s/he forgot to replace the place holders. I get that such a remark can be intended ironically but it has to fit the overall speech and candidate.
If you want to argue that scientists have a sense of humor, I will agree with you. IUPAC has a somewhat more formal naming process for new materials than, say archaeologists (Hey, I’m down with thagomizer). Personally “eludium” might have been a better choice, if only because it is less commonly used in discussing and
analyzing speculative/fantastic fiction.
By the way, wikipedia states in its article on techobabble that “Technobabble’s principal use in most science fiction, in particular more hard science fiction is to conceal the true (impossible) nature of materials, technologies or devices mentioned in the story, frequently because of a violation of the laws of physics.”
Calling something “unobtainium” doesn’t, in my opinion, conceal much. Your mileage may obviously vary.
-DF
As I said in the previous thread, “unobtainium” is perfectly fine in-universe, as long as you can accept that characters in that universe are capable of possessing a sense of humour. Sometimes names given as a joke stick, as shown by the Thagomizer. In-universe, “unobtainium” works perfectly, since it’s a mineral with amazing, unique properties that is incredibly difficult to obtain. “McGuffin” doesn’t work in-universe, because the term relies on the item having useful properties outside the plot, which is impossible if your “plot” is real life.
Because installing a built-in weapon that would get in the way of using the hand misses the point of creating a humanoid mech. It should be obvious that these mechs are designed to be able to do anything a human can, even by a pilot with no real mech pilot training. They’ve got hands like a human does, they’ve got about the same proportions a human does, and they’re controlled by the pilot moving their body in a natural way.
:smack: :o
No need, you’ve seen Avatar, so you’ve more or less seen Ferngully. The biggest difference? No mentally unstable bat.
It’s a tank with a serrated blade on the front, specifically for cutting things. Mechanically, it’s analogous, given that tanks have no hands. Knives do not require power to operate, can be created with trivial use of technology. Maybe it was an aftermarket addition on the planet’s surface, an improvised idea that went to production. You know, like the up-armoring of HMMVs in Iraq.
There are variations.
http://www.track48.com/shop/product.php?productid=381&cat=54&page=1
http://www.missionmodels.com/files/images/t_16975.jpg
A knife can be used to pry things, pick at things, work at angles a hand can not. It’s a lever with a sharp end and sharp edge. Handy sort of thing, really. Attaching it permanently to a hand reduces the amount of use you can get out of it, either by removing the flexibility of using it in the hand (eg, attaching it to the forearm) or reducing the size of the knife (attaching it to the hand) or interfering with the use of the hand (attaching it to the hand) Think of the difference between Wolverine and a guy with a sword. There’s a reason people use swords instead of sharp objects strapped to their forearms.
Grumman already addressed part of this. But in general, do you think you’d be more adept with a knife if you’re holding it in your hand and can reorient it as necessary? Or if it were taped to your palm?
Yeah, maybe. Or maybe it’s a ridiculous looking Rambo knife being held by a robot because someone thought it would look cool when the robot knife-fought some blue alien chick.
Given the pronounced lack of robots using their knives to cut through vines or carefully pry open giant robot beer cans or pick things out of rocks and the prevalence of robots using their giant robot knives to fight blue alien chicks, I think I have evidence on my side 
This is pretty much the entire reason for legged mecha existing in sci-fi at all: because they’re fucking awesome. Realistically, as I understand it, they’re highly impractical compared to wheeled or treaded vehicles.
So when the mecha itself only exists because it’s fucking awesome, you might as well keep following the Rule of Cool and have it wield a bigass knife.