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This is why I've just never liked super hero universes.
In isolation, it's passable, fun even, and I've enjoyed some marvel stuff.
When they actually try to do world building, it's just so, so bad.
This is my opinion, apologies to those who generally like the Marvel universe, but I just can't stand it. (Based on the handful of films I've seen or heard about).
Nothing beats Unobtanium.
I swear, when I first heard that, I was out. I've despised every Avatar movie because of what is possibly the stupidest artistic choice in cinematic history.
You spend a billion dollars on a film franchise, and best you can come up with is Unobtanium? Go away.
you were watching Disney's Pocahontas in space with tall smurfs. have some whimsy.
Valid, LOL.
I thought it was how the WNBA was supplementing paychecks???
I'm pretty sure they meant it as a meta joke. Unobtanium has been used to describe fantsy/sci-fi fictional plot relevant material for many years before either Avatar was made.
Maybe, but that would be as dumb as calling it a MacGuffin, which is basically same thing in suspense thrillers.
"Let's invade this planet and kill everybody for a MacGuffin!"
It's not like he worked that hard at the story. The plot is literally Ferngully, and the name was already in use in another animated series. He was clearly more interested in creating a vehicle for his film tech, which he obviously cared more about than that clumsy story.
Well yeah of course MacGurffin makes a terrible fake metal name. Change it to MacGufftanium and then we've got a real winner
I don't know, I mean, look at the naming that some tech companies use IRL. They use some pretty silly names. The idea of a company finding a metal that's sci-fi grade and calling it Unobtanium as a nod to their love of sci-fi isn't that crazy.
This seems like the same problem that we have with shuffling music, where a truly random shuffle doesn't feel random; if you make it less random, it ends up feeling more random. Similarly, making a movie less realistic can make it feel more realistic.
In real life, poor imagination is acceptable. In a billion dollar movie, we expect better than real life.
I was about to say, we live in a world where Big Brother is about to be fully matured and is unironically named Palantir. I really don't know what else to say, like the point should be clear.
In real life it would have been named after it's discoverer or the planet on which it was found. Most sci-fi shows at least name their made up materials Nequadah, Trilithium, Spice, Red Matter, Really hot tea, etc
Per the internet, so grain of salt and all, unobtanium predates Avatar by some time, typically used as a brainstorming device. You know how a physics problem might say "assume a frictionless environment" or something of that nature, in order to focus on a specific point or phenomena? Unobtanium is sort of like that. Picture a bunch of aerospace engineers in the mid-50s, talking about how they're gonna put a person in space. They're throwing all their spaghetti against the wall, hoping some of it will stick. One guy stands up and says, according to his calculations, if they can get the mass of the launch vehicle down to X, he's confident they can do the thing. Unfortunately, material science being what it is at the time, there is nothing that would be light, strong, cheap, and workable enough to fashion such a vehicle, but the math all checks out. These engineers jokingly start referring to the hypothetical material that would satisfy all their needs as "unobtanium", while they search for practical solutions.
Fast forward 60 years, and Cameron is writing his Pocahontas in Space movie. He needs a name for his MacGuffin, but, being a MacGuffin, it's entirely irrelevant to the plot outside of the fact that the characters are destined to fight over it. So, he decides to call it unobtanium, since that's pre-existing shorthand for "rare material that does everything you need it to", and that's literally all this material needs to be for the plot.
It's still silly, sure, but no more or less silly than mechs fighting giant blue people that fuck via ponytail sounding.
Yeah, but it's like if a movie was trying to be taken seriously, but literally called its macguffin the MacGuffin. It would take you out of it every dramatic scene because they're just using the plot device by the word for the kind of plot device it is.
Unobtanium is a real world term for something partly defined by not really existing. You can make up a stupid but plausible name and people won't mind (Marsium, Pandorium, etc) or you can go with something wildly implausible like making up an alien word for it (bonus points if you then give it phonetic decay into english) and nobody cares or even thinks it's cool. But this snapped people out of it a bit because nobody would call a material they're actively mining unobtanium, worst case they'd give it nicknames.
And it also just fell right into this spot where the setting felt carefully constructed though fantastical, but the plot felt like an afterthought, and here's a piece of the setting that clearly only exists for the plot and it's loudly announcing that fact with its really stupid name.
I listened to a steampunk opera years ago where the thing they were all fighting over was called an MCG. It took reading the writers notes afterwards for me to realise it was literally a MCGuffin, I did not feel smart that day.
I agree with you in all of the particulars of your argument, but am ultimately unphased by the use of the term. Cameron stopped one step short of calling it MacGuffinite, and I can understand why that would annoy some people. However, within the context of Avatar, it just doesn't bother me.
If I wanted to conjure an in-universe reason for it, I can do so without straining my credulity too much. Aerospace engineers in the 50s develop a term for a hypothetical wonder material that they can't get their hands on: unobtanium. Fast forward hundreds of years, and a material is discovered on Pandora which possesses qualities which were previously only thought of as theoretically possible. Perhaps jokingly, perhaps sincerely, the new wonder material is called unobtanium, referencing the fact it is no longer hypothetical, but it's still damn hard to get a hold of.
Now, I recognize that 1) none of that is explained in the movie, so it's just head canon, and 2) as you say, calling a material you are actively mining 'unobtanium' is stupid. However, I don't think it's any more or less stupid than your suggested alternative courses of action given the context of the plot.
If unobtanium had ANY relevance to the story beyond "this is the source of conflict", I'd wish for more juice there. But Cameron is nothing if not a functional screenwriter. No matter how much lipstick you put on the pig, the sole purpose of the scene is to telegraph the third act conflict (and allegorize the Iraq War, to some extent, but he does more with that elsewhere). The screenplay spends only bare minimum amount of time covering that detail before speeding along to more relevant thematic matters.
So, I agree that it's a dumb contrivance that is clunky. However, it's just so irrelevant that I don't care. Call it whatever you want to, the name, like the material itself, is completely inconsequential. Frankly, I'm actually warming to the idea of calling it MacGuffinite. Put a line in that it was named after the first marine to die on Pandora or some such bs. Have your cake and eat it too, a plausible in-universe name, and a tell to not think about it so much.
Surprisingly, it's the most realistic part of the movie. If you know scientists, if they have a concept for a perfect thing that can't be found, and then they find it for real, they're calling it unobtanium for sure.
Marvel power scaling in a nutshell—there’s always someone 20% stronger 😂
Adamantium is made with vibranium and steel.
You also have Uru, which is an entirely different thing from a magical realm, kinda like Marvel's mithril.
Their hardness, toughness, strength and magical conductivity are different, making Adamantium better for attacking, Vibranium better for defending, and Uru better for enchanting.
Gay
Shouldn't this be reversed? Vibranium was first, then Adamantium and it was stronger. But it's heavier and doesn't have the same properties.
Uru is the strongest, but it's a rare cosmic material.
They also gave mutants a rare cosmic material that they can get by folding space or something.
I just made Urur, which is 20% stronger than Uru
Urest
Well I just made anti Urest which counters it!
Don't forget carbonadium! It's the USSR version of adamantium: a little less strong but a lot more malleable.
Uru isn't the strongest on its own, but it takes well to enchantments.
when I was reading comics admantium was stronger than vibranium but vibranium had this unique quality with resonance and was used in a lot of sonic type devices. caps shield was made from an alloy of both that much like the experiment that created him only worked once and they have never been able to repeat it. The shield was considered much stronger than admantium and the vibranium is what allowed for its ability to bounce around. It was considered indestructible.
IIRC Cap's shield is actually proto-adamantium. They were never able to recreate the formula, and base adamantium is the closest they could get.
yeah im not sure if that is before or after my time but 100% when I was reading it was considered and alloy with vibranium although maybe the admantium part was some admantium precursor given the timeline of when admantium came on the field but im sure it was considered an alloy of both.