Didn’t they warp away from the earth before the final battle?

Look, what is perhaps the most common thematic element in every kind of story you can think about? Love. What do we commonly say about love? It’s a mystery.

We describe love, we explain the situation of love, we can be abstract or particular. We can justify love in evolutionary and reproductive terms. We can be crass or lyrical. Yet we always come back to the idea that love is a mystery.

Mystery. It’s a great part of story telling. You can solve the mystery or not, that’s a choice of the story teller. Both are fine as long as you engage your audience.

I”m pretty sure Awakenings was based on actual events.

And I’m with everyone who thinks that the Red Matter wasn’t at all the point of the movie. A 5000 HellaWatt laser from the year 2500 that needs 48 hours to charge before the death pulse would have served the same plot purpose. Or would we be complaining because the lasing medium wasn’t sufficiently explained in that case?

Clear skies, Alan

Agreed. Stories can ask for a suspension of belief. There are limits and some commonly accepted guidelines (although these are regularly tested). However the impulse to explain everything is particular to to the mechanistic/scientific mind. Millions like or even prefer mystery.

One of the things that I really liked about Awakenings was that it never completely explained how the drug worked. In the end it stopped working and no one knew why. The problem was, they had never figured out how it worked in the first place. That left the main characters ill equipped to correct the situation when things started to go wrong.

The story ended with a mystery and may even have been stronger for doing so.

Not Sci-Fi of course. Just goes to the point that not everything has to be explained. You can even have a mystery that the whole plot turns on and is never completely resolved.

“Coming back to ‘unobtainium’ – logic dictates that as soon as you’ve got hold of some, it becomes ‘obtainedium’… but the masses aren’t pedants and they don’t care what it’s called, or what it does (which Cameron didn’t sufficiently explain – why was it needed anyway?).”

The movie hints strongly at it being a room temperature superconductor, of which we would have many many uses. The extra features and literature confirm this.

At first the name “Unobtanium” really bugged me. But then I started to think of how it would actually play out in real life. I think it’s totally realistic for the media and mainstream to give a new important discovery a totally misleading name, i.e. “The God Particle”.

Seriously, folks. Abrams’ Star Trek was better when it came out in 1977.

An unexplained plot device will work for the majority of the people: they don’t have the curiosity to want to know what it is and how it works, it’s sufficient to just be there.

2001 has been mentioned a couple of times. In and of itself, it was a brilliant piece of art, and IMO, Trumbull’s FX have yet to be bettered (of a similar style – matting and CGI is getting close, but from a pure modelling basis, none have come close). But taken in the context of the novel, it becomes a disappointment.

According to IMDB, Duncan Jones’ Moon broke even. A brilliant film, little ‘unobtainium’, but technically very detailed – didn’t have the mass market appeal. Authors have a similar problem: if you put formulae in a book, the public aren’t interested. They don’t want facts, they want entertainment.

Coming back to ‘unobtainium’ – logic dictates that as soon as you’ve got hold of some, it becomes ‘obtainedium’… but the masses aren’t pedants and they don’t care what it’s called, or what it does (which Cameron didn’t sufficiently explain – why was it needed anyway?). But as long as there’s drama and thrilling adventures, and they get a return on their movie ticket, everything is as it should be. But as soon as they get bored with the technical explanations… they tell their friends ‘it’s boring, don’t bother going to see it, wait for the DVD’, and the movie companies start to lose money.

Claire

“But I think Abrams takes the idea too far, valorizing mystery for its own sake, rather than as motivation for the characters and the audience to try to solve the mystery. The reason why mysteries are interesting is because we want to figure them out! If they are simply irreducibly mysterious — if there is no sensible explanation that ultimately makes sense of all the clues — then it’s simply frustrating, not magical.”

I would phrase it as implausibly mysterious. Event Horizon was mentioned above, and I think this is a perfect example. An experimental starship, missing for some time, turns up in the solar system and is unresponsive. When investigators enter the ship, we are shown its Maguffin: a device that opens a space warp inside the ship. That, for me, rendered the movie ludicrous as SF (though it works well as horror.)

I don’t mind having something be ultimately mysterious. In Star Wars, The Force works precisely because it is explained as little as possible. I agree with the comment above that Lucas ruined it when he tried to ascribe it to “midichlorians” — obviously analogous to mitochondria. That leads the view to contradictions as distracting as wondering how a ship can travel through a gate that’s inside it.

“There are those who argue that science destroys the magic of the world by figuring things out. That’s exactly backwards — the scientific quest to solve the world’s puzzles is one of the things that makes the story of our lives so interesting.”

I fully agree with this. Arthur C. Clarke understood it very well, and explained it eloquently. There’s a quotation from another person that also expresses it well. Unfortunately I’ve lost the attribution, but it goes much like this: “The bigger the ocean of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.”

“I think there’s a big personality type distinction going on here”.

Yes, I think you have hit the mark here. Clearly some are quite happy to practice the willful suspension of disbelief.
Is that a good thing? Should scientists bring a critical, analytical attitude to everything in life? Or are we better, happier people for being able to embrace mystery in some aspects of our life?

What I find interesting is that a lot of people were NOT disappointed by the Lost mysteries in their black boxes. I find this hard to contemplate — wanting to know more was what kept everyone hooked, wasn’t it?

I think there’s a big personality type distinction going on here. Perhaps the same one that gets a physicist funny looks when they get excited about how many quarks there are (for lack of a better example).