Daily Dialogue — September 26, 2011

SELFRIDGE: Well — lucky your guy had a twin brother, and lucky the brother wasn’t an oral hygienist or something. A Marine we can use. I’m assigning him to your team as security escort.

GRACE: The last thing I need is another trigger happy asshole out there!

SELFRIDGE: Look, you’re supposed to be winning the hearts and minds of the natives. Isn’t that the whole point of your little puppet show? If you look like them, if you talk like them, they’ll trust you.

Selfridge crosses to his office, behind a glass wall nearby. Grace follows.

SELFRIDGE: But after — how many years? — relations with the indigenous are only getting worse.

GRACE: That tends to happen when you use machine guns on them.

On Selfridge’s desk is a magnetic base, and hovering in mid-air, in the invisible field, is a lump of METALLIC ROCK. Pure UNOBTANIUM. He grabs it and holds it up between thumb and forefinger, in front of Grace’s eyes.

SELFRIDGE: This is why we’re here. Unobtanium. Because this little gray rock sells for twenty million a kilo. No other reason. This is what pays for the party. And it’s what pays for your science. Comprendo?

He places it back in the magnetic field.

SELFRIDGE: Those savages are threatening our whole operation. We’re on the brink of war and you’re supposed to be finding a diplomatic solution. So use what you’ve got and get me some results.

— Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), Grace (Sigourney Weaver), Avatar (2009), written by James Cameron

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is terrible exposition suggested by Teddy Pasternak who also suggested this exchange from Avatar.

Trivia: “Unobtainium” is a humorous term used mainly in the aerospace industry. It describes a material that is perfect for an application, but does not exist, is extremely expensive, or violates the laws of physics. Its chemical symbol is Uo. “Unobtainium” is also a general concept term used by sci-fi enthusiasts for any fictional substance that is needed to build a certain device that is crucial to the plot of a sci-fi story. “Unobtainium” is featured in the movie The Core, where the earth-boring vessel called the “Virgil” has a hull made from unobtainium to help it withstand the massive pressures inside the Earth’s core. “Unobtainium” is also an anti-gravity element in the online multi-player video game “Skyrates.”

Dialogue On Dialogue: Why do you think this dialogue is terrible exposition?

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