I laughed!

BTW – I don’t think the line was as bad as it sounds.

It fitted in with the characters perfectly. He was talking to the scientist and reminding her the reason they where their was for the mineral .. not to study the curiosities of the native lifeforms.

It’s like my boss calling me into his office to beat into my head that I get paid to produce results, not spend time commenting on screenwriting websites.

Sure – you could argue that it is exposition, because I should know that already. Yet somehow he needs to tell me it regularly.

Hang on – he’s just calling now …

Mac

In the original script he set that up with … wait for it … tedious exposition.

The summary: The mineral is a wide temperature range superconductor. Basic physics says that a superconductor will float above a magnet. (It effectively acts as a ‘mirror’ magnetically – so if you have a north pole of a magnet it will appear as an identical north pole, and so repel. The interesting thing about this is that it tends to be self-stabilising, so the superconductor will just ‘float’ rather than fly off into space)

All this exposition was cut … just leaving references to the weird magnetic fields around the floating mountain which stuffed up the instruments.

Perhaps you would have preferred more exposition to explain this ?

Mac

Speaking of distracting floating rocks, it makes me wonder by what physics mountains are supposed to defy gravity? Didn’t James Cameron study physics?

Don’t want to sound like an Avatar basher though, I did have fun watching it as mindless popcorn spectacle. The Pocahontas parallels are probably intentional, wouldn’t be the first time Cameron has had a history repeating plot motif; think of the endings of both Terminator flicks…

Ouch. Yes, without the distraction of the floating rock that line hurts!

For many kids today, Avatar will be what Superman was back then. By the standards of my generation, in many ways that’s very poor.

Could a ‘better’ script keep a movie at #1? Possibly, if I see what Pixar have achieved. Interesting discussion.

Like you, I’m waiting for MM’s verdict. My guess: there will be blood…
(BTW: Where’s your avatar, Oscar?)

I’d love to know what Mystery Man thinks about Avatar, a flick with some truly cringe-worthy exposition. “This is unobtainium, its why we’re here…” says the evil expository device (Selfridge, as in selfish) to the good expository device (Grace, as in… oh sod it).