You know, now that I think about it, I never really thought that the unobtanium was repelled by gravity anyway. I thought the concave metallic disk-thing that is was suspended over emitted some sort of magnetic type of force that was keeping it aloft. Was anything ever said to the effect that unobtanium was repelled by gravity? Maybe I was too busy admiring some visual effect or other that I missed it.
I wish they had filmed Speed Racer in 3-D. That movie was a LOT of meaningless, oblivious FUN!
I think that the Marx brothers movies aren’t really remembered as movies, more as a catalog of one-liners. How many people know which of the jokes went with which movie? Which is exactly what you said, upon reread! nemmine.
But, to the main, I believe that the OP is wrong, because the movie has a really great plot/storyline. If it wasn’t good, it wouldn’t have been used in 40000 thousand movies before Avatar.
I have to say, for myself, that the idea of a fairytale ending for a paraplegic was a nice touch for the boring movie, and the girl kind of got me hot. Except for the tail part, but that could be overlooked, because she was a hardbody, so I liked it 51 percent, and disliked it 49 percent.
Best wishes,
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I kept imagining what Navi sex would be like, coupled together by your sexual organs AND with that hair-USB-thingie.
I haven’t seen Avatar, but I’ve heard that there was a deleted sex scene. From what I could gather, sex only involved the USB connection.
On a related note, I’ve heard it said that when the Navi connect to wildlife via USB, it is rape.
Its up to the ancestors in the Soul Tree to determine what is consensual and what is not!
Ben Rothlisberger would have never made it as a Na’vi.
I’ve heard it said that Na’vi sex was through the USB connection, but that begs the question of how birth takes place. It seems to me that the USB connection was more a means of neuro-communication than a reproductive system, and I’d hate to think that Jake wasn’t able to get it on with Neytiri in the time honored fashion. (Though I can see how making the connection first would add to the experience. “Zehelu me first, Jake! Zehelu me!”)
I haven’t read any of the guides on the movie, but it’s obvious per the clues in the movie there is a far reaching associative group intelligence that passively dominates the plant’s exosphere. The questions of whether this intelligence is “designing” the plants and animals to interface with each other or this is simply “blind watchmaker” evolution in action another question.
If the humans come back in strength in the inevitable second movie I’m seeing this intelligence using the magnetic flields of the planet to defend itself.
I expect the second movie to be a fish-out-of-water buddy cop film like Rush Hour.
Let me describe a plot:
At some point in the future humans have traveled to another planet. The planet has a seven-foot-tall humanoid native species which is intelligent but is not as technologically advanced as the people of Earth. There is a substance on this planet that humans would like to bring back to Earth, since it can be used to generate energy. The aliens, though, don’t want to use the substance for energy, since they treat it with a religious awe. The protagonist of this plot is a low-level employee of a major Earth corporation that wants to collect this substance. There are a large number of the humans on this planet that would like to simply wipe out the aliens, although so far the majority of humans are reluctantly willing to allow the aliens to continue to exist. The protagonist goes on a mission to find a large quantity of the substance. At the end of the story, though, he decides that the aliens are right and the humans are wrong. He now believes that the aliens should be allowed to keep the substance and humans have no business taking it.
This is the plot of Avatar, right? It’s also the plot of the story “In the Walls of Eryx” by H. P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling, written in 1936 and published in 1939. Other people have pointed out that Avatar also is similar in its plot to the story “Call Me Joe” by Poul Anderson, in which a crippled man is able to control the body of an alien on another planet through some sort of mind lock. Eventually this man decides that he would rather live as an alien. I don’t know if Cameron was consciously influenced by either of these stories. It was just luck that I happened to be reading “In the Walls of Eryx” as I saw this thread.
(Incidentally, at the end of “In the Walls of Eryx” the protagonist dies. The Earth corportation decides that the aliens can’t be trusted and is about to completely wipe out the aliens. So evil wins in this story. I would like to see Cameron try something as unappealing to his core audience as that sometime.)
Cameron is not a terribly original writer. All his ideas are similar to ones that appeared long ago in written science fiction. In my opinion, his best movie is still Terminator, which steals its ideas from all over the place. He ended up having to pay Harlan Ellison a lot of money because in an interview Cameron said that he was inspired by a couple of episodes of The Outer Limits that Ellison wrote. Cameron no longer talks about his inspirations in his interviews.
The real question is whether you were entertained by the film. I wasn’t particularly entertained. I was actually a little bored by the film. I’m not commenting on whether anyone else was entertained by it, just pointing out that I wasn’t.
It’s great if you turn your brain off and just look at the pretty pictures.
After watching for a while and realizing what the “plot” was, I did that. It went well. I came out satisfied.
I finally saw Avatar this weekend (yeah I’m a little late.) It was beautiful, mindblowing, and also very predictable. Still worth seeing on the big screen.
But it didn’t make you think like Terminator 2 did, along with all of T2’s explosions and manliness, there was a nice time-travel paradox and man-vs-machines question.
Did I miss how it was determined the connector was USB? It’s Hollywood - firewire, baby!
Uh, just wondering:
Near the end of the big battle scene, why were the guys trying to push a big pallet of explosives out of the plane instead of just releasing a bomb?
Also, earlier on, was the flamethrower supposed to be some kind of a joke?
They didn’t have a bomber or bombs, or at least no bombs big enough to do the damage they wanted to do. That was a dropship, and those were demolition explosives.
It was explained in the movie, so why did so many people miss it? The plot was pretty simple and unconvoluted; I could follow it even while staring at the pretty pictures.
They mention in-film that the magnetic fields which cause the floating mountain phenomenon also make their navigational and communications tech all but unusable in the area of the mountains.
I think it’s therefore apparent that some interaction of the properties of unobtanium and powerful magnetic fields cause the antigrav effect. That’s why the sample on Ribisi’s desk that he picks up and carries around for exposition needs the platform that it sits on rather than just floating around the room.
I think some have noted that this would make unobtanium in all probablility a room-temperature superconductor, but I don’t think they ever actually say that.
Unobtanium.
This is confirmed in quite a lot of the tie-in material, such as the Pandora featurette narrated in-character by Sigorney Weaver.
Presumably, since its properties have utterly no effect on the plot (other than its value, which is mentioned quite a bit), the in-movie references were dropped.
Thanks, but I was under the impression that the the magnetic fields which created the flux vortex around the floating mountains were caused by some other phenomenon unique to that particular area I never correlated it with the unobtainium. Given that the largest deposit of unobtainium (well, within ‘five clicks’ anyway ;)) was directly under Home Tree, I would expect the force field to be strongest there rather than in the area of the floating mountains. Still, the movie did seem to go out of its way to showcase that little floating bit of unobtainium, so perhaps you’re right after all. I wondered at the time why such an odd bit of exposition was necessary, since you’d think that Grace would have long known how valuable it was by then…given that she was in charge of the Avatar program and all.
I think the mag field is basically given as the cause of the floating of the mountains- I’m guessing (and from the design it implies) that the mountains were once connected to the surface but the magnetic field has caused great chunks of unobtanium-enriched land to pry themselves out of the crust - it may even be the tree’s root system that kept that locale’s deposit from pulling out of the ground.
So I think while unobtanium reacts to strong magnetic fields, it does not generate them. I think also that it’s not very clear from the script what causes the magnetic fields that mess with their equipment and also floats the mountains. So I could be wrong.
I think that as much abuse as this movie rightfully takes in the script department, the ideas seem to have been very well thought through and the script supports many logical interpretations that they are free to make plain later without being guilty of retconning or violating the rules of the world.
I started a response to your comment about the movie’s ideas being well thought through and it turned into an OP. A long one. 