Not much to see there besides NASA archival footage, but I like the tone Nolan appears to be taking with the film.
Must be the same stuff, unobtanium, that needed to be mined on Pandora in "Avatar"...joshEH said:It does seem kind of odd to me that there are no resources in our own solar system that can be used, and that we must go "interstellar" somehow, but I'm assuming they'll explain that in the film. At least I hope so. They're still driving cars, but have interstellar FTL capabilities?
For what it's worth, and this is probably not the best place for it ... but I think it's unfair how much negative stuff has been written on Cameron calling the stuff "unobtanium" -- people use that as proof of how bad or uncreative a writer Cameron is. He got the term from real-life scientists, who will sometimes use that to describe the perfect element that would fix whatever engineering problem they'd have if only it existed. So I thought it was an acknowledgment of that, rather than "Wow, he's such a bad writer". There are plenty of criticisms of Cameron to be made, and I think a couple that I might even agree with, but the whole "unobtanium" thing being proof of anything strikes me as silly.Patrick Sun said:Must be the same stuff, unobtanium, that needed to be mined on Pandora in "Avatar"...
Based upon what I've read concerning the plot -It does seem kind of odd to me that there are no resources in our own solar system that can be used, and that we must go "interstellar" somehow, but I'm assuming they'll explain that in the film. At least I hope so. They're still driving cars, but have interstellar FTL capabilities?
Let's hope that is simply the driving reason for humanity to travel into space and the movie is about the impact on people/families and not a 2.5 hour diatribe on environmentalism. The 'advantage' of a wipeout of the food supply leaves all other resources intact to build an interstellar ship. A giant meteor or super volcano would also wipe out all the infrastructure needed to build a space ship.RobertR said:So it's a not-so-subtle "man is killing the planet/climate change" commentary.
Good old Michael Caine, he is certainly amusing. I remember an interview he did once and they asked him why he was in Jaws: The Revenge and he said in his own typical way, "well I opened the script and it said fade in the Caribbean, so i thought, I need a good holiday" which I thought was a genius answer. He also said that the money he made from that brought him a lovely house, which is a nice bonus.joshEH said:Agreed. Nolan could direct a movie about a man's bowel-movement, and I would still watch it. In IMAX. (Can't wait 'till Michael Caine starts blabbing the plot, or what he thinks the plot is.)
Here's a rant that describes my feelings exactly: http://open.salon.com/blog/the_new_number_two/2010/01/18/unobtainium_is_a_joke_and_so_is_your_movieJosh Steinberg said:For what it's worth, and this is probably not the best place for it ... but I think it's unfair how much negative stuff has been written on Cameron calling the stuff "unobtanium" -- people use that as proof of how bad or uncreative a writer Cameron is. He got the term from real-life scientists, who will sometimes use that to describe the perfect element that would fix whatever engineering problem they'd have if only it existed. So I thought it was an acknowledgment of that, rather than "Wow, he's such a bad writer". There are plenty of criticisms of Cameron to be made, and I think a couple that I might even agree with, but the whole "unobtanium" thing being proof of anything strikes me as silly.
(Sorry, clearly I've been holding that back for years haha.)
That's a great, funny piece. I love the bit about him laughing for two solid moments during THE CORE. (I wish I could have been at that screening.) Thank you for linking to it. I'm not an engineer myself (far from it), so I didn't have the same reaction to AVATAR, but it did seem kind of silly when I heard that term used in the movie. However, the movie had much bigger problems for me, so the use of "unobtainium" was the least of it.Mikael Soderholm said:Here's a rant that describes my feelings exactly: http://open.salon.com/blog/the_new_number_two/2010/01/18/unobtainium_is_a_joke_and_so_is_your_movie
I would not go as far as saying it ruined the movie for me, but, man it sucked; when I first saw it theatrically, I was like, 'for real?' when they first said it. That was the most original name for a foreign mineral you could think of, really?
It's not really bad writing, it's just laziness, or lack of imagination, strangely enough, from a writer with so much imagination, which I guess is why it is so irritating.