Unobtainium

[kronys]

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.

Comments

[kane_magus]

"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 say that the source found under the home tree was the only one, just that it was the closest and biggest (and probably the easiest to mine since it was on stable ground and not floaty islands). But even if those floaty islands were made of unobtainium, they were also still the home of the Na'vi's flying dragons, so I doubt they would have been any more willing to let the humans mine those than they were the home tree, and the result would have been the same in the end.

See also the movie Star Trek: Insurrection. It was the same sort of thing. There was something on that planet that caused people to rejuvenate. The natives had access to it, and the invaders wanted it. The difference here is that a) the movie at least tried to explain why the invaders were willing to go to such great lengths to get what they wanted, and b) those great lengths were to simply relocate the natives rather than just bulldoze them out of the way, at least at first. But, in the end, the story would have been pretty much the same if the Ba'ku had simply been sitting on a pile of unexplained Unobtainium.