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Comment by pzxc | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, the plots of Avatar and Pocahontas are so identical that you can literally take a synopsis and play Mad Libs substituting the character names and it describes both perfectly.

The ultimate laziness of avatar: The mineral they're after that is so hard to find that is the basis for the movie, what shall we call it? Ahem, unobtainium yeah that's a good name!

I laughed out loud in the movie theater when they revealed that.

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I disagree that the name unobtanium is an example of lazy writing. I always took it for an in-universe joke (doubling as a meta-joke), and/or a deliberately gimmicky marketing name invented by the corporation.

There are plenty of playful scientific terms in the real world (the "sonic hedgehog" protein just to take one example).

Is that really lazy? It's exactly the sort of name I can imagine cheeky scientists coming up with, perhaps starting off jokey but eventually losing all such connotation and simply becoming standard. Are names such as "strange quarks", "Big Bang", "oobleck" (taken from Dr. Seuss), etc., so dry and dignified?

My physics teacher used to say: "Take a massless, frictionless, inextensible rope made of pure unobtanium..."

The whole point of 'unobtanium' is to draw attention to the allegorical nature of the film.

The writers for Avatar were extremely lazy.

However Unobtanium has been an engineering in-joke since the '50s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium

>The ultimate laziness of avatar: The mineral they're after that is so hard to find that is the basis for the movie, what shall we call it? Ahem, unobtainium yeah that's a good name!

Maybe they are mispronouncing Ununpentium.

I recall joking about "unobtainium" long before that movie came out...

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