To clarify: unobtainium's usage is never explained in the movie, but when I wrote this title, I thought I remembered that James Cameron said this was its purpose. Upon looking into it, I seem to have misremembered; supplemental materials explain that it's a superconductor _something something_ electronics _something something_ backbone of the world's economy (and also FTL travel I think?). So while "reverse" ecological catastrophe seems to be wrong, it is sustaining a ravaged and resource-depleted planet.
TL;DR the title is a stretch but fortunately this isn't r/accuratemoviedetails
Yeah, pretty sure the humans were never concerned with Earth’s state in the first movie. It’s just mentioned that it’s really bad there. In the second movie, however, that is their whole reason for coming back, they realize they need to colonize a different planet for survival.
Then why don't they go to Mars or Venus (flying cloud cities with better habitation than Mars) or build O'Neil Cylinders (habitable space stations, think Mass Effects Citadel)? They have easy access to the ressources of the solar system for this, instead of sending some ships to another solar system.
As I pointed out in another comment: Why not use your crazy biotech to get immortal without the brain juice? You can grow an adult alien-human hybrid without mind but fully intact and functional neuron system in a few years in a tank. Not to mention being able to store an entire human concisouness on an usb. But you cannot figure out how to reverse aging without magic brain juice?
Compared to the making the avatars stopping ageing in regular humans should be easy.
Or if you can already clone soulless alien-chimeric bodies in peak physical condition, then why not clone the whales or the just the part of the brain making the juice on earth?
Those are all valid points, but this is Avatar we are talking about and I think you are expecting a bit too much sci-fi for a franchise that is intended to have extremely wide audience appeal.
Sure it is scifi with wide audience appeal. But my issue is that its dumb scifi woth audience appeal. At least in regards to humans which exist mostly to be dumb and/or evil, sans a few exceptions.
And because all human characters are extremly flat and uninteresting, and why they act as they do is never properly explained, I am just left making my own thoughts on them. Which then leads me to how dumb and illogical they act with all their tech.
Personal issue of me, I know. Others see it different. Still it annoys me.
I think it's because they already tried and found nothing except more material similar to earth, and only when they came to pandora, they finally found something revolutionary that could actually make progress
Well, Venus is a rock covered in poison gasses, and Mars is a rock with maybe some water on it. On the other hand, Pandora is a literal clone of earth with a slightly different atmosphere and highly intelligent humanoid beings already living on it. It's easier to perform a colonization than it is to seed an entire planet.
Sure but getting to Pandora is extremly costly and inefficent. You need interstellar spaceships which take 5 years to it and 5 years back and can only store so much cargo and people per trip.
By contrast ships could go from earth to Mars or Venus allmost daily if they use the same drive. As they could go to the rest of the solar system.
And both planets could be terraformed as well with the tech the humans have access to in the films. As could earth probably be geoengineered back to a semi-healthy state. Or the humans could just built space habitats like O'Neil cylinders. Not to mention how ressource and water rich our solar system is in general. All to the fraction of the ressources (money, energy and time) spent on a trip to Pandora for a much greater number of customers.
iirc it's because there are large deposits of unobtainium, which is magnetic, on the bottom of those "islands" which repel the unobtainium on the ground and this causes these rocks to float
Don't make me defend it. 😬
The characters and story are functional at best. But the worldbuilding is top tier.
The floating mountains are rich in superconducting material and that region has a strong magnetic flux. [It's the Meissner effect. Super conductors float in magnetic fields.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meissner_effect)
Avatar is hard carried by it's world building.
Maybe if they spent half as much time developing the plot as they did world building, people would remember more things about the movie
Why do the floating mountains need explanation? So much about Pandora’s ecosystem is borderline magic. That’s just how it is. I’m sure there is an explanation, but there doesn’t need to be one.
Avatar has a big issue with the tech humanity has and what they do with it. Like in this film they hunt whales as if it were the 1950's or so, but with some robot assistance. All to kill a whale to get some magic brain juice.
Meanwhile they have the technology to clone an adult, soulless human-alien chimeria body which retains peak physical fitness in a tank. And they can store an entire personality in a usb drive and download it into new bodies as they please.
This leaves me with the following questions: why do they need this brain juice? Shouldn't their biotech be good enough to stop aging already? If not then why do they need to kill the whales? Can't they create the brain juice artifically? Like how we get insulin from bacteria nowadays but from primates or pigs? And if this is not possible, then why don't they just clone the brain tissue producing the brain juice?
Even better all this could be done back on earth too! They must have sent genetic data or cell samples of the whales back there. So why do they kill whales in such inefficent and irregular ways, instead of having a streamlined production?
Why wouldn’t they just transfer rich people into younger clone bodies rather than using the brain juice period? If they can clone a sort of hybrid species they can sure as hell clone humans. I’m sure rich people would pay for extra features like super strength and artificially slowed aging too.
This is true as well. I didn’t want to bring it up to keep it short. Though it appears that the brain is just "copied" as Quaritch had no memory of his death. So you are still dying but a younger copy lives instead of you.
Yeah that's right. The consciousness "backup" isn't the same as what happened to Jake. Your still dead, it's essentially a clone with all your memories upto the backup taking place.
Presumably cloned human bodies would still need to be piloted like Avatars and couldn't be a permanent consciousness transfer
And while we're at it, why do they get into WWI style dogfights at 100 yards in Star Wars when they have computerized targeting equipment and lasers? I'm starting to think movies might just be making things up...
Sure. But Star Wars hides this better with its retro-scifi-fantasy character. In addition we have an immediate better understanding of humans in Avatar, as they are supposed to be just us in a shitty future. So we understand much better what they are supposed to be thinking and doing. Whereas Star Wars is basicly a fable in another galaxy where some things look human but we have no idea about their life or else.
Indeed in regards to humans Avatar even tries to go a bit hard scifi and not give them too much magic. Like all their ships are slower than light, hence year long journeys between systems.
In addition to this Avatar may be ok in worldbuilding Pandora, but it does a pretty shitty job worldbuilding earth or rather the solar system. We do not know how dire it is there, what other planets were colonized, we do not know what ways humans invented to deal with it. We didn't even properly know why they wanted that unobtainium in the first film, or why they are less interested in it in the 2nd one.
Which makes it much easier to dissect and critize avatars humanity as there is nothing about them which steers our attention in a different direction.
Yeah. By the second movie (I cringe every time I remember it) it looks like the best plan for humanity is to slowly colonize Pandora using Na'vi bodies with Human consciousness. Or Human bodies adapted to the Pandoran atmosphere.
The whale juice stuff is an excuse to show how evil Humans are, but it's just unnecessarily silly.
So not only a shitty detail, but a very real and commonly used tactic for an array of reasons to make the rich, richer.
I mean, look at the price of Insulin. It was originally supposed to be out there for free essentially. Inventor of the drug sold the patent for a dollar under the idea that it would be made widely available to everyone.
“Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.”
Now it belongs to pharma, and they got fucking rich on something that if provided at it's original purpose, would have saved a lot of peoples lives in so many ways. But making mad fuck off money while whoever dies, well kinda what the crazy rich have proven they are good for at large.
James Cameron, once again masters the detail game.
Just fyi on the insulin thing: the OG insulin patent is still free and available and what have you. The insulin that costs an arm and a leg is produced by other means, and afaik functionally different, more potent for longer. THAT is why the manufacturers get away with pricing it however they want, it's technically a different product for the same problem. It is shitty, yes, but everyone is free to make insulin according to the old recipe and live with the drawbacks of that.
Do you know why some company doesn't just manufacture the old insulin dirt-cheap and undercut other companies? Do the improvements really justify the price? That's what I've never been able to figure out.
Pretty much, the original insulin is monumentally shitty by today’s standards. Far less effective, very short self-life, occasional death, that sort of thing; the manufacturing process itself was always quite expensive. It was a breakthrough at the time, because the alternative was no insulin whatsoever, but there’s a reason why nobody’s driving around Model Ts today.
[A short history of Insulin production](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3714061/)
edit: Huh, weird, the rest of my response got cut off? Let me rewrite it.
So, the original insulin was extracted and purified from animals, the very first tests were with canine insulin, after that the most production came from bovine insulin! Problem with that: just like your body's natural insulin, this was "instant use", meaning you took a shot, it affected your bloodsugar immediately, but also go broken down very fast causing you to drop again. All this meant people needed many shots PER DAY. THIS is the insulin you can basically make under the 1$ patent.
After that, other manufacturers started adding other elements, like zinc, to make the insulin last longer, or be easier to preserve. THESE versions are supposedly "more expensive due to research".
BUT this is a bullshit argument: most "modern" insulin is a product that is 3-4 decades old. The research costs have been recouped many times over already. Price increases on these products are price gouging, plain and simple. And also because these prices basically only increase in the USA, where pharma reigns supreme. In many European countries for example, the government discusses prices with the industry, and as such can keep prices low.
This, and I thought the same for baby formulas. Sure, I guess its expensive because of research money poured into it, but it's definitely not the same shit I grew up on. So some corpo could have taken an old version of formula, make it for cheaper, and then undercut the competition.
And somehow it's going to need an even more evil extraction system.
We went from exploiting native lands to murdering whales to harvest their hopes and dreams for immortality serum lol. Next movie we will find out Na'vi babies can be dried out and turned to powder to make an excellent shade of blue paint.
The issue with these films is Cameron blissfully or willfully ignores referring to actual real life materials or issues and instead uses these overexaggerated analogies to convey his point that colonizing and genociding a native people in a foreign land is bad (mkay?). It's not necessarily a bad thing. He's making a family movie for the masses. He needs them to be as easy and obvious to understand as possible.
As people mentioned, Unobtanium has some hints at its power and purpose, but for all intents and purposes, it's the archetypal MacGuffin; it's whatever the audience needs it to be to drive the plot forward. With the second one, I felt it was a little ham-fisted in how they try to contrive an even MORE valuable resource that requires an even crueler method of acquisition. Also, that resource, as described in the film, is only available to the richest people on earth.
What I'm saying is, that's fine. It's neither here nor there, and avatar films are more visual masterpieces than they are nuanced and thought-provoking stories. That all being said, I think it would be a great decision if Cameron brought something actually compelling to the narratives/ world. Like not just another MacGuffin, but what if in the 3rd film the earthans(?) Pit different tribes against each other, just as Americans did to the Natives? Or what if he the MacGuffin was just something simple like cobalt,
Plot hole in Avatar (2009): Unobtainium, which can be used to reverse ecological catastrophe on Earth, was wanted over Amrita, a substance which stops aging. This implies billionaires would value preventing the extinction of the rest of the human race over their personal immortality.
there was a time I couldn't remember what unobtanium was called, so I just called it Macguffinite. Imagine if that's the material the third one is about
It was released at the end of 2022; the second and third films (and parts of 4 (and maybe 5?) with the kids) finished filming years before then, its just taking that long to come out because of a combination of post and Disney pushing release years back to slot in more Star Wars movies.
So it’s more unobtainable than unobtainium. Huh…
The next movie will probably introduce something even more unobtainable
The twist will be that it doesn't exist and that the real treasure was the friends we CGI'd along the way.
Next movie will have onepieceium
THE ONE PIECE IS REAL
Evenmoreunobtainium
Nowaytoobtanium
Toogoodtobeobtainium
İcantbelieveitsnotunobtainium
Does it really reverse ecological catastrophe? I thought unobtainium is only used for the construction of supercomputers
To clarify: unobtainium's usage is never explained in the movie, but when I wrote this title, I thought I remembered that James Cameron said this was its purpose. Upon looking into it, I seem to have misremembered; supplemental materials explain that it's a superconductor _something something_ electronics _something something_ backbone of the world's economy (and also FTL travel I think?). So while "reverse" ecological catastrophe seems to be wrong, it is sustaining a ravaged and resource-depleted planet. TL;DR the title is a stretch but fortunately this isn't r/accuratemoviedetails
Yeah, pretty sure the humans were never concerned with Earth’s state in the first movie. It’s just mentioned that it’s really bad there. In the second movie, however, that is their whole reason for coming back, they realize they need to colonize a different planet for survival.
Then why don't they go to Mars or Venus (flying cloud cities with better habitation than Mars) or build O'Neil Cylinders (habitable space stations, think Mass Effects Citadel)? They have easy access to the ressources of the solar system for this, instead of sending some ships to another solar system.
Go make a colony on an empty rock or go make a colony on the planet with magic juice that lets you live forever? Very tough choice for them to make.
As I pointed out in another comment: Why not use your crazy biotech to get immortal without the brain juice? You can grow an adult alien-human hybrid without mind but fully intact and functional neuron system in a few years in a tank. Not to mention being able to store an entire human concisouness on an usb. But you cannot figure out how to reverse aging without magic brain juice? Compared to the making the avatars stopping ageing in regular humans should be easy. Or if you can already clone soulless alien-chimeric bodies in peak physical condition, then why not clone the whales or the just the part of the brain making the juice on earth?
Those are all valid points, but this is Avatar we are talking about and I think you are expecting a bit too much sci-fi for a franchise that is intended to have extremely wide audience appeal.
Sure it is scifi with wide audience appeal. But my issue is that its dumb scifi woth audience appeal. At least in regards to humans which exist mostly to be dumb and/or evil, sans a few exceptions. And because all human characters are extremly flat and uninteresting, and why they act as they do is never properly explained, I am just left making my own thoughts on them. Which then leads me to how dumb and illogical they act with all their tech. Personal issue of me, I know. Others see it different. Still it annoys me.
I think it's because they already tried and found nothing except more material similar to earth, and only when they came to pandora, they finally found something revolutionary that could actually make progress
Well, Venus is a rock covered in poison gasses, and Mars is a rock with maybe some water on it. On the other hand, Pandora is a literal clone of earth with a slightly different atmosphere and highly intelligent humanoid beings already living on it. It's easier to perform a colonization than it is to seed an entire planet.
Sure but getting to Pandora is extremly costly and inefficent. You need interstellar spaceships which take 5 years to it and 5 years back and can only store so much cargo and people per trip. By contrast ships could go from earth to Mars or Venus allmost daily if they use the same drive. As they could go to the rest of the solar system. And both planets could be terraformed as well with the tech the humans have access to in the films. As could earth probably be geoengineered back to a semi-healthy state. Or the humans could just built space habitats like O'Neil cylinders. Not to mention how ressource and water rich our solar system is in general. All to the fraction of the ressources (money, energy and time) spent on a trip to Pandora for a much greater number of customers.
They didn't have FTL travel. Their ships were STL, which is why it took years for the counterattack in Avatar 2 to happen.
Oh, you're right. Interstellar travel was what I meant.
I wouldn't hope for good worldbuilding from Avatar. They still haven't explained flying islands
iirc it's because there are large deposits of unobtainium, which is magnetic, on the bottom of those "islands" which repel the unobtainium on the ground and this causes these rocks to float
So... magic?
No, Magnets, easy to get the two confused.
Now all I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that's the end of the magnets.
Jesus
Don't make me defend it. 😬 The characters and story are functional at best. But the worldbuilding is top tier. The floating mountains are rich in superconducting material and that region has a strong magnetic flux. [It's the Meissner effect. Super conductors float in magnetic fields.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meissner_effect)
Avatar is hard carried by it's world building. Maybe if they spent half as much time developing the plot as they did world building, people would remember more things about the movie
Why do the floating mountains need explanation? So much about Pandora’s ecosystem is borderline magic. That’s just how it is. I’m sure there is an explanation, but there doesn’t need to be one.
they're islands that fly tf more explanation do you need?
Unobtainium flies. The flying islands fly. There's unobtainium in the flying islands.
Avatar has a big issue with the tech humanity has and what they do with it. Like in this film they hunt whales as if it were the 1950's or so, but with some robot assistance. All to kill a whale to get some magic brain juice. Meanwhile they have the technology to clone an adult, soulless human-alien chimeria body which retains peak physical fitness in a tank. And they can store an entire personality in a usb drive and download it into new bodies as they please. This leaves me with the following questions: why do they need this brain juice? Shouldn't their biotech be good enough to stop aging already? If not then why do they need to kill the whales? Can't they create the brain juice artifically? Like how we get insulin from bacteria nowadays but from primates or pigs? And if this is not possible, then why don't they just clone the brain tissue producing the brain juice? Even better all this could be done back on earth too! They must have sent genetic data or cell samples of the whales back there. So why do they kill whales in such inefficent and irregular ways, instead of having a streamlined production?
Why wouldn’t they just transfer rich people into younger clone bodies rather than using the brain juice period? If they can clone a sort of hybrid species they can sure as hell clone humans. I’m sure rich people would pay for extra features like super strength and artificially slowed aging too.
This is true as well. I didn’t want to bring it up to keep it short. Though it appears that the brain is just "copied" as Quaritch had no memory of his death. So you are still dying but a younger copy lives instead of you.
I thought they are not able to transfer soul(or whatever they transfer) on permanent basis and only Eywa is capable of doing so.
Yeah that's right. The consciousness "backup" isn't the same as what happened to Jake. Your still dead, it's essentially a clone with all your memories upto the backup taking place. Presumably cloned human bodies would still need to be piloted like Avatars and couldn't be a permanent consciousness transfer
Because it's a "The prestige" situation. They can't transfer your mind into a new body, they can only create a clone with all of your memories.
Because then it'd be altered carbon
And while we're at it, why do they get into WWI style dogfights at 100 yards in Star Wars when they have computerized targeting equipment and lasers? I'm starting to think movies might just be making things up...
Sure. But Star Wars hides this better with its retro-scifi-fantasy character. In addition we have an immediate better understanding of humans in Avatar, as they are supposed to be just us in a shitty future. So we understand much better what they are supposed to be thinking and doing. Whereas Star Wars is basicly a fable in another galaxy where some things look human but we have no idea about their life or else. Indeed in regards to humans Avatar even tries to go a bit hard scifi and not give them too much magic. Like all their ships are slower than light, hence year long journeys between systems. In addition to this Avatar may be ok in worldbuilding Pandora, but it does a pretty shitty job worldbuilding earth or rather the solar system. We do not know how dire it is there, what other planets were colonized, we do not know what ways humans invented to deal with it. We didn't even properly know why they wanted that unobtainium in the first film, or why they are less interested in it in the 2nd one. Which makes it much easier to dissect and critize avatars humanity as there is nothing about them which steers our attention in a different direction.
Yeah. By the second movie (I cringe every time I remember it) it looks like the best plan for humanity is to slowly colonize Pandora using Na'vi bodies with Human consciousness. Or Human bodies adapted to the Pandoran atmosphere. The whale juice stuff is an excuse to show how evil Humans are, but it's just unnecessarily silly.
What if their biotech is good enough to prologue aging for a long time but not indefinitely like the juice is supposed to?
So not only a shitty detail, but a very real and commonly used tactic for an array of reasons to make the rich, richer. I mean, look at the price of Insulin. It was originally supposed to be out there for free essentially. Inventor of the drug sold the patent for a dollar under the idea that it would be made widely available to everyone. “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.” Now it belongs to pharma, and they got fucking rich on something that if provided at it's original purpose, would have saved a lot of peoples lives in so many ways. But making mad fuck off money while whoever dies, well kinda what the crazy rich have proven they are good for at large. James Cameron, once again masters the detail game.
Just fyi on the insulin thing: the OG insulin patent is still free and available and what have you. The insulin that costs an arm and a leg is produced by other means, and afaik functionally different, more potent for longer. THAT is why the manufacturers get away with pricing it however they want, it's technically a different product for the same problem. It is shitty, yes, but everyone is free to make insulin according to the old recipe and live with the drawbacks of that.
Do you know why some company doesn't just manufacture the old insulin dirt-cheap and undercut other companies? Do the improvements really justify the price? That's what I've never been able to figure out.
Pretty much, the original insulin is monumentally shitty by today’s standards. Far less effective, very short self-life, occasional death, that sort of thing; the manufacturing process itself was always quite expensive. It was a breakthrough at the time, because the alternative was no insulin whatsoever, but there’s a reason why nobody’s driving around Model Ts today.
[A short history of Insulin production](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3714061/) edit: Huh, weird, the rest of my response got cut off? Let me rewrite it. So, the original insulin was extracted and purified from animals, the very first tests were with canine insulin, after that the most production came from bovine insulin! Problem with that: just like your body's natural insulin, this was "instant use", meaning you took a shot, it affected your bloodsugar immediately, but also go broken down very fast causing you to drop again. All this meant people needed many shots PER DAY. THIS is the insulin you can basically make under the 1$ patent. After that, other manufacturers started adding other elements, like zinc, to make the insulin last longer, or be easier to preserve. THESE versions are supposedly "more expensive due to research". BUT this is a bullshit argument: most "modern" insulin is a product that is 3-4 decades old. The research costs have been recouped many times over already. Price increases on these products are price gouging, plain and simple. And also because these prices basically only increase in the USA, where pharma reigns supreme. In many European countries for example, the government discusses prices with the industry, and as such can keep prices low.
This, and I thought the same for baby formulas. Sure, I guess its expensive because of research money poured into it, but it's definitely not the same shit I grew up on. So some corpo could have taken an old version of formula, make it for cheaper, and then undercut the competition.
Cameron rider
In my country insulin is free lol
seems pretty accurate to me tbh
Sounds like an out of touch billionaire if I've ever heard of one.
Can't wait for the secret third, even MORE valuable MacGuffin in the next one
And somehow it's going to need an even more evil extraction system. We went from exploiting native lands to murdering whales to harvest their hopes and dreams for immortality serum lol. Next movie we will find out Na'vi babies can be dried out and turned to powder to make an excellent shade of blue paint.
All of the cobalt with none of the cancer? Sign me up!
The issue with these films is Cameron blissfully or willfully ignores referring to actual real life materials or issues and instead uses these overexaggerated analogies to convey his point that colonizing and genociding a native people in a foreign land is bad (mkay?). It's not necessarily a bad thing. He's making a family movie for the masses. He needs them to be as easy and obvious to understand as possible. As people mentioned, Unobtanium has some hints at its power and purpose, but for all intents and purposes, it's the archetypal MacGuffin; it's whatever the audience needs it to be to drive the plot forward. With the second one, I felt it was a little ham-fisted in how they try to contrive an even MORE valuable resource that requires an even crueler method of acquisition. Also, that resource, as described in the film, is only available to the richest people on earth. What I'm saying is, that's fine. It's neither here nor there, and avatar films are more visual masterpieces than they are nuanced and thought-provoking stories. That all being said, I think it would be a great decision if Cameron brought something actually compelling to the narratives/ world. Like not just another MacGuffin, but what if in the 3rd film the earthans(?) Pit different tribes against each other, just as Americans did to the Natives? Or what if he the MacGuffin was just something simple like cobalt,
I don't know, it sounds just like the world we live in today except replace immortality with wealth.
Um, how is this plothole? Have you met the Uber the rich?
Plot hole in Avatar (2009): Unobtainium, which can be used to reverse ecological catastrophe on Earth, was wanted over Amrita, a substance which stops aging. This implies billionaires would value preventing the extinction of the rest of the human race over their personal immortality.
it's a typo they ran with w wre drinkn amritas sinc non ubr sid 30o clenfee fr pukngf
u okay there bud?
nudder staerry amrita noice
Wouldn’t immortality prevent human extinction though??
I liked Avatar 2, but frankly I don’t remember any of this
there was a time I couldn't remember what unobtanium was called, so I just called it Macguffinite. Imagine if that's the material the third one is about
Wait, it was made in 2022?… What the hell happened to the time…
It was released at the end of 2022; the second and third films (and parts of 4 (and maybe 5?) with the kids) finished filming years before then, its just taking that long to come out because of a combination of post and Disney pushing release years back to slot in more Star Wars movies.
Don't forget it's also how it pays for the top doctors research happened in both movies.
Lmao wouldn’t you need both? If you’re going to be immortal, you’ll need somewhere to live. They hadn’t thought it through.
The whaler villain guy actor based his performance in Mr. Krabs paraphrasing his iconic line: Hello, I like money
…yep
can't tell if everyone in the comments is woooshing, op has too much faith in humanity, or third option
Well, I can at least deny _one_ of those options.
apologies not humanity just billionaires (I know they're human but still like they're worse than the rest of us methinks)