Can I just start by saying what a trip it’s been to be TheGamer’s resident Avatar defender this past week? Not only did I get to attend the Hollywood premiere thanks to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:this passionate defense of Unobtanium, but🌜 I also get the satisfaction of seeing the sequel that &ls🌞quo;nobody asked for’ have an incredible opening weekend at the box office. Yes it’s weird to celebrate Disney adding another billion to its bottom line, no I’m not going to stop.
Not everyone is thrilled to see Avatar succeed of course. Haters gonna hate, so I’d just like to address something I’ve already been hearing some grumbling about. Towards the end of The Way of Water, after the Resource Development Administration (RDA) hunts down the whale-like creature known as a tulkun𝔍, it’s revealed that there’s a new, even more valuable unobtanium. It has to be extracted from the brains of the tulkun, and it makes humans immortal. Naturally, our secondary antagonist Brendan Cowell has to point out that this stuff is worth a shit load of money.
Even during the premiere, in a theater filled with the cast and crew of the movie, I heard someone loudly sigh at the reveal. Even I was taken aback by it momentarily. Beyond the strange premise, it&rsqu𒉰o;s a peculiar scene because it perfectly mirrors one from the original Avatar. In fact, Cowell’s monologue to Quaritch is a🥃lmost word-for-word what Parker said to Doctor Augustine about unobtanium, down to the phrase “it’s what pays for the whole party.”
This is obviously intentional. Cameron is smacking the audience in the face with this inform🌳ation for good reason, but before I get into that, I want to 🍷address what people are saying about this reveal, and why I think it’s such a strong plot device.
I don’t think Cameron wrote out unobtainium and replaced it with this new exotic material because people mocked the name so much. Firstly, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:as I already explained in gℱreat detail elsꦅewhere, unobtanium is♐ a clever name because it tells us a lot about the unimaginative corpos that named it. Cameron has no reason to bury unobtanium or feel ashamed for naming it that. Secondly, James Cameron is one of the most confident men to ever walk the planet. He’s not some kind of low self-esteem Elon Musk type that needs to grovel for the approval of his critics. When the first Avatar was in development, an executive at Fox tried to pressure Cameron to shorten the runtime. Do you want to know 🐬what he told him? Here’s the quote from :
“I said something I’ve never said to anybody else in the business,” Cameron said, revealing that he told the exec the following statement: “I think this movie is going to make all the fucking money. And when it does, it’s going to be too late for you to love the film. The time for you to love the movie is today. So I’m not asking you to say something that you don’t feel, but just know that I will always know that no matter how complementary you are about the movie in the future when it makes all the money. “And that’s exactly what I said, in caps, ALL THE MONEY, not some of the money, all the fucking money,” Cameron continued. “I said, ‘You can’t come back to me and compliment the film or chum along and say, ‘Look what we did together.’ You won’t be able to do that.’ At that point, that particular studio executive flipped out and went bug shit on me. And I told him to get the fuck out of my office♕. And that’s where it was left.”
So𒉰 no, I don’t think Cameron was taking notes from Twitter hacks making the same &l🍎squo;Dances With Wolves in Space’ joke for the last decade.
So what’s the deal then? Why inv⭕ent this new, even more valuable version of unobtanium? Let’s get the obvious reason out of the way: the RDA needed a reason to hunt whales. Other than pure abject cruelty, there’s not really a good reason for an interstellar megacorp to hunt and kill sentient whales. Whaling was a big deal during the industrial revolution because whale blubber could be rendered into oil for things like lamps and soap. The RDA would have no use for this kind of fuel, especially with all the, you know, unobtanium everywhere. So the tulkun needs to provide something even more valuable to humans.
But why the fountain of youth specifically? There are plenty of other reasons the tulkun could have been valuable. Maybe one of their organs could have contained pure unobtanium, denser and richer than any vein they could tap on Pandora. Why make such a dram🐠atic leap from an efficient fuel source to the cure for dying?
Earth’s needs have shifted in the years since the RDA was mining unobtanium. Before, what remained of human civilization needed an alternate fuel source after using up all of the planet's natural resources. But humanity is abandoning Earth now. They don’t need the resources there, because they’re on their way to Pandora. What they need is a way to survive the six-year trip there and the decades it's going to take to terraform the planet into a hospitable place for humanity that they can actually enjoy living in.
In other words, the elites don’t want to spend their golden years living in a jungle fighting off the natives. They’re happy to kill other sentient beings in order to extend their own lives. If they care about anything other than themselves, they 💖wouldn’t have ruined Earth in the first place. Pandora𝓰 already has everything they need to continue the cycle of consumption and destruction, of course it would also have the key to immortality.
The Way of Water is about the cyclical nature of things. The Metkayina see the cycle of life through the sea. They believe you are there before you are born and you return there when you die. Many of the events in the film mirror what happened in the original, and Cameron uses repeated phrases to draw our attention to them. Quaritch tells his crew that planet they’re🐲 about the invade is hostile, Sully has to ingratiate himself to a new society by learning their ways, there’s a natural resource humans want to extract from Pandora and turn into surplus value for stockholders, mankind consumes its own planet through greed and seeks out a new one. There’s an inevitable, inescapable quality to these things, like fundamental laws of reality. But the sky people are entitled to everything. The planet, its resources, the Na’vis’ land, even control over the cycle of life and death.
It feels like a bit of a throwaway detail when it happens, because it’s only mentioned once, but The Way of Water is doing a lot of setup for the future of the series, and the immortality juice is going to be an important part of the story as the humans make their way to Pa⛄ndora. It’s fascinating to think about their imperial mindset. They’ve succeeded in co🧜lonizing the Earth to death, the next step is to colonize time itself through immortality. When we’re finished extracting all the value from our planet, where will our profit-driven doom march lead us next?