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"Red Planet": Stay Here
I can sum the movie up in one sentence: It's worse than both Mission to Mars and Waterworld.
Skip the wrong-headed science. Forget the problems with the dialogue. Let's just concentrate on the most simple thing you expect from a movie: a coherent story.
We start the movie off with a voiceover: The earth is dying, we've trashed it, and now we can't fix it. So, we it's decided that we'll start terraforming Mars, by bombarding it with genetically tailored algae, etc. The algae start to disappear, and we have to send people to Mars now to find out why the algae have disappeared.
It's a fairly standard plot, not a bad start at all -- but at no point do we get any idea of who the characters are. For the rest of this movie, we're kept in the dark: no character is explored in any detail, characters are inexplicably offended and say weird statements which have little or no rational value to them. No scene ever gets to the meat of who these people are, why anyone might be doing what they're doing, or even some clue as to the dynamics which connect them. It's nearly a half-hour into the movie before we even start to know what kind of person Val Kilmer's character is -- and he's the star of the show! By the end, it's hard to like, dislike or even much care about these characters. No sympathy, no tension, no nothing. It's banality at its extreme.
Even the discovery by one of the characters that he's dying from the stress of the emergency evac to Mars is anti-climatic. It's definitely not interesting. Certainly not scary, frightening, or even a tear jerker.
To get some emotion into this scene, I guess the director though he'd put in some scenes in flashback shown not more than 5 minutes ago -- except the flashbacks are longer than the original. In fact, the flashbacks are actually critical to the plot -- but this jerk of a director doesn't mention these scenes until just before they're needed. No sense of poignancy, no sense of grace, no building. The director just drops this "Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention ..." scene as the guy's doing something meant to be meaningful. Truthfully, it ruins what could be an interesting point about philosophy and science at this point, by practically shoving the moment in the viewer's face and telling him what he/she should get out of it.
At this point his fellow characters leave him to die. No problem, his injury might kill them. But those rotten jerks all say, "OK," and start walking. I mean, a moment of pause or at least a few seconds of "Well, we could do this," and then a few minutes to say goodbye to this guy they've been living with for six months would be nice. But no dice, it's hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to save our own rears we go.
The rest of the movie has similar, stilted moments when the characters just don't act ... well, like humans. People start fighting without any reason, people go insane without any reason, characters fall in love without knowing one another (oh, yeah -- the director forgot something again. Another flashback to justify that scenario). People see other people die, and no one's even slightly moved by it.
Lots more happens -- but none of it makes sense. Every bit is just a strange mess of half-created emotions, special effects that, while cool, aren't very coherent, characters flat as cardboard, situations so artificial they are still wrapped in plastic, and a really, really wasted set of decent actors.
Now for the usual bad science rant. OK, I know the actual science of physics has only been around for around 50-75 years, but it's pretty well documented; and you can get an excellent primer from many, many books, and see it used properly in a story in many science fiction novels. Gravity, mass and velocity aren't magic -- so you can't make them suddenly appear, disappear, or become less or greater then they were originally. Same goes for the biology of humans, biology of algae, and how life could and might appear in the universe. Same with pyrotechnics, meteorology, ballistics (although they didn't try the "turn left when you get to the planet" maneuver that Mission To Mars did -- Small blessings!), electronics and telecommunications. Simplify, fine. But make major mistakes, center your plot on things that couldn't possibly work, and then it's just embarrassing and sloppy.
The usual dazzling special effects and panoramic vistas -- including a well-modeled animated robot -- at least give some visual pleasure to the whole thing, and the dialogue is at least not so stiff you could use it as shingles.
But overall, if you have to miss one movie this year, make it this one.
Right. That was no nematode, that was my ex-wife! It looked more like an arthropod than a nematode, or I'm an allotherian.
That's pretty though-provoking, but I don't think that Star Wars would get as soundly thrashed as the current round of sci-fi nasties.
Aside from providing us with some actual character, plot, and theme, a story must remain internally consistent in order for us (or for me, anyway) to suspend disbelief.
By incorporating situations that are known to current physics and whose solutions are known (or at least obvious), Red Planet incorporates some of reality into its own storyline. By muffing the physics, or by having its characters and organizations make mistakes that ordinary geeks can see through, or by lacking any sort of motivation for the crisis-of-the-minute, RP sabotages the disbelief of its own audience. More importantly, the story isn't good enough to offset the egregious errors in the physics. When the physics is lousy, and the story sucks, and the acting is terrible, there's not much left except some cool eye-candy. SW billed itself as a fairy tale ("A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...") and hence had much more latitude with the magic spacedrives and gravity generators and such. That series also seems to remain consistent within its own set of rules (which, admittedly, it can make up as it goes!). More importantly, the first three movies actually had good stories to tell. The stories and characters were interesting in their own right, if a bit stereotyped, and the plots were focused and made a bit of sense. That's why SW didn't suck.
Bad movies have problems in at least one, but usually more than one of these areas. I think that criticizing the science in a sci-fi movie may often simply be an easy way to point out the movie's lack of integrity. If one had the time to sit down and write a long analysis and critique of, say, the character development and interaction (or lack thereof), one could demonstrate that a movie was equally weak in those areas; however, on /., simply pointing out gaping flaws in the science is a shorthand for "if they got this wrong, what are the chances they got *anything* right?"
Red Planet is a bit too new, but search the web for reviews of Mission to Mars, and you'll find plenty like this one: "director Brian De Palma has reached a new nadir", "Ineptly directed, badly acted, and scripted with an eye towards stupidity and incoherence, the film is worthwhile only to those who are in desperate need of a nap. And, as is often the case when a big budget, high profile motion picture self-destructs, this one does so in spectacular fashion." Now that reviewer is my kinda guy! :)
As for Battlestar Galactica, well, perhaps we do come from totally different universes...
I found the info on the Canadian group that is helping set up film societies -- if you're looking for great independent and foreign films, give them a call!
"The Film Circuit: A division of the Toronto International Film Festival Group, a charitable, cultural and educational organization devoted to celebrating excellence in film and the moving image. The Film Circuit is generously sponsored by: Alliance Atlantis, Cineplex Odeon, Famous Players Canada, Telefilm Canada, and the Ontario Film Development Corporation."
Now, in Vernon, what we have is a small collection of people (perhaps a dozen) who are organizers for the incoming film shows. Each show is being held on Mondays (sometimes with a second showing on Wednesday) at the local six-plex Famous Players. Tickets are six bucks a pop. Shows are packing the seats to overflowing.
The also maintain a collection of videos at the local Art Gallery. There are a couple hundred videos there, for rent for a couple of bucks.
I know that Cineplex Odeon is in dire financial straits. I'll bet that you can get them to sponsor the showings pretty darn easy, given the floods of people the shows are attracting -- although, on the other hand, it may be a year before word of mouth really makes them popular.
Anyway, *have a go at it!* You've got nothing to lose, and a *lot* to gain!
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
The reason I am suspicious of critics, and dislike a certain type of film criticism (intellectual type) has been motivated by a certain film critic I used to read in my Sunday paper.
She is called Anne Bilson, and writes in the Sunday Telegraph here in the UK. An example of her film criticism occured when 'Top Gun' was shown here in the UK a few months ago. She said that the film was an extended metaphor for Homosexuality. The relationship between Val Kilmner and Tom Cruise was clearly homosexual, she said. Tom Cruise's girlfriend is trying to keep him thouroughly heterosexual. But in the end, he goes the gay way "You can ride my tail anytime" says Kilmner. "No, you can ride mine" replies Cruise. I think she got this from a Tarantino skit, but she was serious. And all her film reviews are like that.
She just can't help inserting her own feminist opinions into the review. Anyway, I don't read her anymore, because that kind of criticism spoils the film and puts idiotic ideas in ones head.
My method is to approach each film as though I am a child. It usually leads to greater enjoyment. I only engage in some sort of intellectual analysis after I have seen it, and only if it was interesting enough to promote such thinking. (the Matrix might be a good example of this - it has some very interesting ideas).
As for BG, well, all I can say is that you must be a Silon if you don't appreciate its genius ;-)
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
And even if the oxygen detecters were gone, the pressure should have been detectable. They were wearing pressure suits for goodness sake - any such decent suit should be able to detect external pressure!
The incompetence of movies of this kind merely reflects the limited ability and intellect of their creators, and the mass market which consumes them. These movies aren't unpretentious - they're actually hugely pretentious failures. With Mission to Mars, for example, it's clear that Brian de Palma was trying, decades after it had already been done, to copy the effects and feel of movies like 2001.
As for Star Wars, I think you're again demonstrating your lack of discrimination if you can't tell that Star Wars was really good cinema, especially compared to, say, Battlestar Galactica which came out shortly thereafter, IIRC. If /. had existed then, I suspect the majority would have liked Star Wars, much as they like The Matrix today, while BG would have received the panning it deserved.
I gotta distinctly disagree. I went, worried that the whole movie would be "Robot kills all"..
:)
It wasnt that. Sure, it wasnt a character-driven movie, but hey, this isnt Dangerous Liaisons.
This was a great vehicle to show off Carrie-Ann's GORGEOUS body (SOooo close to seeing what we want), alot of action, and a GREAT set of special effects.
As to the 'sympathy' level of the astronauts, BULL. You are being spoonfed too many movie astronauts. They have a mission to accomplish, and are generally military men. They analyze the situation, and act.
This was a pretty good movie in my opinion. It sounds like you had unrealistic expectations for an action movie to be a drama.
When is the last good action movie with a SOLID plot and character development? T2? Even that had its problems..
Maybe the Matrix, but that is the hand of god, blessing the silver screen, and truly, one of a kind.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
You are aware that Mars Attacks was a comedy, right timothy? It was supposed to be sort of hokey and rely on cliches from other sci-fi movies. It really fit the Tim Burton mold - if you like his movies, you liked Mars Attacks. OK, I wouldn't have seen it in the theater (and didn't, in fact) but it was OK on video.
I have no such excuses for Battlefield Earth, but on the other hand I could tell it was lousy from the previews and didn't go see it 'cause I don't want to encourage L. Ron Hubbard :)
...ethereal, not-so-patiently waiting for the new Dune movie on Sci-Fi in December...
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
In fact, I think that if the old Star Wars movies were first released today, we'd trash them, too. Even worse, look at how far Star Trek has drifted from the real of reality. Babylon 5's attempts to maintain at least a little realism wouldn't make it through here, either.
Instead, we're so imbued with certain stereotypes that we even let The Phantom Menace's "midiclorians" - the "tiny organism that inhabit every cell in your body and channel the Force" - slip by with little complaint.
So here we are, trying to get people to try and accept a new operating system - even thought it isn't perfect - but meanwhile, we can't accept a few flaws in our movies. I'm not really trying to defend movies abusing the laws of physics, I'm just trying to point out some more of our trademark Slashdot hypocrisy that turns up every few weeks.
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
Thanks for the advice. I'll go check out "The Grinch" instead.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
I enjoyed the film, but that scene pissed me off. Given their situation, the fact that it looked like they were going die of thirst, they would have saved their piss. At the very least, their suits would have recycled it. into drinking water. When you're on a dry planet with no other source of water, you can't afford to be squeemish.
Yeah, thin white tank-tops have been standard issue for females in space since Ellen Ripley - a trend I do not wish to discourage. Frankly NASA's TV broadcasts would become more popular if they'd adopt it.
...or Mission To Mars, which had people audibly snickering when I saw it. At least, for the most part, these people behaved as if they possessed an IQ closer to a scientist than a Hollywood Screenwriter.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
What is a reviewer supposed to say?
I'm not asking for miracles. Subjective opinion and point-by-point analysis are not only valid, they're often very useful to the movie watcher. What's totally worthless is an overall recommendation to not go and see it yourself, even if it's in the general subject area that you'd normally enjoy.
On the other hand, maybe one should examine the premise behind your question entirely. Perhaps we've been deluded into thinking that reviews do actually serve a useful purpose, on balance. Maybe the benefit is not so clearcut, maybe analysis without assessment should be the goal. It's academic though, because today's reviewers would not tolerate the suggestion that their personal emotional response is of no interest to anyone else.
I think I'll vote for diversity and support the existence of even the most extreme of reviews as general input. It's worth noting though that the only reason why the film industry does frequently produce masterpieces despite them not being box-office hits is because critics are generally ignored by everyone with a mind of their own. If it weren't so, the studios simply couldn't afford to produce the films, since nobody would go and see them after the first negative review.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
When I saw ads for the movie "Red Planet" I hoped it was a movie-ization of the Heinlein book of the same name. You know the one -- a progenitor of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" with Boy Scouts and lots of guns.
Heinlein's science may not always have been plausible, but at least it was almost always internally consistent. (And for those of you who don't know how to read: no, "Starship Troopers" the movie was nothing like "Starship Troopers" the book; the book was squared away.)
I sure as hell wish some of those old Heinlein books would be made into movies. I'd also like to see R. A. Lafferty's "The Reefs of Space" and A. E. Van Vogt's "Voyage of the Space Beagle" on screen.
Wait! I forgot! Gene Rodenberry stole "Space Beagle," lobotomized it, and turned it into a half-assed TV show called "Star Dreck" or something.
You know, literacy is a curse, especially if you like science fiction. I have yet to see a TV or movie SF plot that wasn't done to death in novel form before WW II.
There is a whole Galaxy (and Analog and F&SF) full of good science fiction books out there waiting to be made into thoughtful, dramatic movies, but we get George Lucas and similar crud instead.
And no, it's not "sci-fi." Call it "science fiction" if you know what you're talking about and you're not TV-moronized since birth.
- Robin Miller
"science fiction fan since 1959"
They did announce that the "science package" was destroyed. They did not intend a bouncing landing, that was the backup. Their original intention was a normal rocket-assisted landing, but they had to blow the landing package.
No, the main groaner for me was - why the hell woundn't they remove the military programming from the robot before they put it on the ship?
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
It had great potential - what a f***ing waste. I still liked the atmosphere, though.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Note to self, NEVER take movie advice from somebody who actually admits to going to see BOTH Battlefield Earth AND Waterworld...
Well that too. But you see, these astronauts spent 6 months getting to Mars, and they did not even try to do some science from space before heading down? Smart people always plan. Even if they did not, Houston in Earth would. What was their excuse for heading down to surface that quickly?
. In the middle of the movie, they went "whoa! we have no more money" and hauled in a cheap-ass director to finish up what the first guy began (sorry, don't recall names) - and so the whole business with the pyrotechnics and the ship blows chunks.
Right, and you know, they shoot movies in order, shot for shot....
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
At least the producers of Battlefield Earth had an excuse -- they're $cientologists.
Technical errors which are too glaring to ignore:
The direction and screenplay sucked, sucked, sucked, and it didn't even swallow. Wooden characters; gratuitous ham-handed sex; subplots that are introduced and forgotten in seconds; dumb, stereotyped, dumbass dialog; inexplicable choices for the crew (come on, are these really the best and brightest? Or did NASA just wander down to the nearest pool hall and pick up a few buffoons to head to Mars?); horrible flashbacks; random inexplicable crises; and feeble attempts at heroics are just a few of the more egregious problems with the directing.
Yuck.
My friends and I snuck into "Best of Show" immediately afterward. Much better movie (albeit with no special effects)! We laughed our asses off.
I took a great class while an undergrad at USC: CNTV-466, taught by Leonard Maltin (the movie critic guy). The nature of the class is a discussion unto itself, but my point here is Maltin's philosophy of watching movies, which you have hit on the head of the proverbial nail.
Maltin's philosophy is to try to understand what the intentions of a particular movie are, so that it can be reviewed in that context. As you and others have mentioned, most movies are not of the caliber of American Beauty (which we screened a month before opening night, with Anette Benning as the guest!). Yes, comparatively, Mars Attacks! is a pile of mindless drivel -- but as a hokey comedy, I don't think it gets much better. And for me, Waterworld is a decent movie (average plot, nice scenery), if you ignore the whole "smokers" sub-plot as well as the end of the movie, when all of the lame-ass morallity sub-plots come to fruition.
Yes, there are some truly horrible movies out there. These tend to be the ones that fail to live up to their own intentions. (Waterworld, for example: in a world without dirt -- a major plot element and intention of the movie -- how were they growing the tobacco for their cigarettes? Hydroponics? In the dark bowels of the Exxon Valdez? Get rid of the whole "smokers" thing and it isn't so bad...) But summarily judging against a movie because it is not Academy Award(tm) quality is stupid and shortsighted.
Most movie critics are idiots. But after that class, I have respect for what Maltin says -- even if I later disagree with his opinion.
And for the record, I saw Red Planet last night. The shower scene does not live up to my expectations, but there are enough gratuitous "nippy" scenes to keep me happy. The only two "errors" that really stood out in my mind were the DNA code messup (ATGC, not ATGP) and calling the little critters "nematodes" -- they look a lot more like crustaceans or insects, not little worms.
With respect to the above, this movie is much better than Mission to Mars. I would rather have limited, unemotional dialogue (RP) than hokey, overly emotional dialogue (M2M), and the only product placement that I noticed were the technical labels on their space suits (Toshiba and Hughes are the only two I can recall). And the dramatic scene where one person EVA's to rescue the other while tied by umbillicus to the main ship: a nice, happy ending in RP. That one scene in M2M is what pushed me over the edge -- I was willing to forgive its faults until that point, and after that I was looking at my watch, waiting for it to end...
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
Classically, science fiction is split into 2 camps. There's the real-world variety (Arthur C. Clarke, Kim Stanley Robinson, etc) which is true science fiction (sometimes called "hard" science fiction), and then there's the fantasy variety - Star Wars, Buck Rogers, etc. The fantasy variety is known as "space opera".
Each must be internally consistent. Hard science fiction requires that things follow the laws of physics we know (or at least that it looks like that). If spaceships make noise as they go past, or objects in space slow down from friction, then you're screwed. The film of 2001 became impenetrable by introducing the flashy graphics display, which you only understood what he was trying to show if you'd read the book, since it emphatically DIDN'T follow our known science (being alien technology).
Space opera on the other hand can have its universe run on any set of rules you care to choose, but you have to stay consistent to those rules. Had Luke Skywalker suddenly been able to shoot fireballs at Darth Vader, that's not something any Jedi has been seen doing, so it breaks the rules (unless of course he's some kind of "new breed", in which case that's an essential plot feature). Incidentally, are episodes 2 and 3 going to explain how the Emperor gets to do this? cos that was dodgy in RotJ.
The problem is the overlap. Concepts like "the physics of Star Trek" miss the point, which is to get the crew in a pressure situation then get them to dig themselves out through what looks like ingenuity. It's all complete rubbish ("So if we set up a positive feedback positronic hyperdimensional wave" or shit like that), but it's fantasy and we accept that it's possible. The problem comes when the writer/director tries to inject real world into it. The 2 classic examples here are Phantom Menace's "Jedi cooties" and the Matrix's "human Duracells". Star Wars had managed 3 episodes with the Force as a universal field surrounding everything, and that worked, but suddenly Lucas tries to say what causes it, and the suspension of disbelief breaks down bcos he's not being internally consistent (... and cos it's a crap idea in the first place, but anyway). The human Duracell is a nice image, but it's real-world intruding again - energy processing just doesn't work that way. Suppose (as an example I've just thought up) the Matrix had said, "the humans are actually part of the computer - the real world is just a screensaver to keep the brain occupied while the computer uses each brain's processing power for its own purposes, after it was found that pure processing-only with sensory deprivation causes people to become psychotic and corrupts the computing process". Now that's consistent with what we know about the brain, it gives the computer a reason to supply a meta-world to people, and best of all it doesn't attempt to explain HOW the computer does it.
Any time a film pulls something out of it's ass just to fill a plot-hole, it's failed. I can think of 5 places where Phantom Menace did this without even trying (and I only saw it once). Matrix was a kick-ass film, but that human battery bit interfered with my enjoyment of it. Trekkies have slated Voyager for the "magical photon torpedo generator" - if you notice these things, it'll bug you. If a script-writer, director, continuity man and a team of actors between them don't notice this, they deserve to have their films crash and burn.
Grab.
You obviously have a lot of misplaced faith in Hollywood.
Isn't "Felicia's Journey" directed by Canada's own (by way of Armenia and Egypt) Atom Egoyan? Of course, in this day and age, there are lots of movies that are not easy to peg to one country.
BTW, I also highly recommend Egoyan's "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter".
Bit of trivia: His father named him "Atom" in honor of Egypt's first nuclear reactor. How funky is that? So who among you will be the first to name your kid "Linus", "Linux", or better yet, "Kernel"?
Unfortunately, real zero-g fire pretty much goes out right away as, in general, there is no draft to bring fresh reaction products in. The only unintentional fire in a spaceship was the one on Mir, a few years ago, discussed in Linenger's book -- what was burning there was an 'oxygen candle', which of course could supply its own oxygen to the flame.
Of course, the studio just wanted something that looked cool, so we made some assumptions that made reasonable scientific sense and still looked cool -- the fire was usually a surface the moved through the atmosphere, the idea being that the fire would oxidize the fuel as it went; but it didn't just sit in one place and burn.
For the (other) nerds out there, the animation was all done with my own Z animation system and rendered with Pixar's Renderman on our Linux render garden (5 machines doesn't count as a render farm.)
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
That was Pathfinder, yeah. They also used some off-the-shelf radios for rover/base comms. They then spent a few million bucks qualifying the hardware for space use.
However, they didn't run the hardware through the ringer. If we had a strong solar flare it could have wiped out those radios. It was a calculated risk, to save money.
More seriously, as I haven't seen Red Planet I'll have to bow to your opinion on that one.
But more generally I think my comments have some validity. I'm not saying that one should be undescriminatory about films, rather that one should rely on ones gut instinct. (I'm sounding a bit like the Queen now;). You should just sit down, watch a film and try and enjoy it for what it is, rather than starting an intellectual critique, which will spoil any film if taken too far, IMO. And if you don't like it on those terms, then it is awful.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
They had just entered orbit, and were just getting ready to start the process then a massive solar flare blew a huge amount of their equipment and blinded their insturments. The original reviewer was way off the mark; this is one of the least scientifically offensive SF films in a while. Especially as compared to "Mission To Mars".
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
"oh crap, these are metric algae, not Imperial-measured algae!"
Tell me again, were we meant to send 100 TONS of algae, or 100 TONNES?
--
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Is the idea that the bacteria produced enough oxygen to envelope Mars entirely. OK - let's pretend that it is possible. Still these bunch of scientists approaching the planet to find the cause of the supposed oxygen depletion never bother to do basic simple spectroscopy to discover this, until they had to take off their helmets to breathe to discover it!
Whoever wrote the script had no idea about how science is done. Scientists are not technical workers who go to Mars to fix an oxygen problem like plumbers turning up in your home to fix a leaky pipe. They are curious people who will go to great lengths to VERIFY that Mars does indeed have no oxygen before embarking on such a trip. And you think they would do something so simple as to point a spectrometer or send probe to get close to it first!
The scriptwriter is an absolute moron.
Reasonable science fiction, but weak story telling. The plot is plausible. The special effects are reasonably good for Y2K (but may look hokey in a couple years).
I almost walked out of the theatre when I heard the starting narration. A sign of very bad story telling is have to begin with a lecture. Then came Stamp's hokey philosophizing.
In Romeo Must Die, Jet Li did the 360-kicking thing. He's the fucking *man*, and I have no problem whatsoever with that.
You've got me on the MI2 one though.
Even NASA says now that anyone who has anything to learn about keeping shit up in space for VERY long periods of time have to learn from the Russians. Their program failed not because it was flawed but because it ran out of money. Damn if anyone else could keep a functioning Mir in orbit for 11 years. The great story I like is the $500K Fisher space pen that NASA commissioned so that astros could writ during an EVA. The Astros showed it to the Russians on Soyuz who whipped out a pencil!
They got a working lander on the moon first, they go a remote piloted lander on the moon first, they got the first 1 and 3 man crews in space and they built the largest launch vehicles. True the program never had the high tech gee-whiz bells-n-whistles of the American program but it did prove its point with comparitively little funding which is just what Americans are demanding of their space program now.
Perhaps you should read Kant's "Critique of Judgment" for a some insight into those value judgments that you circularly refute yet engage in yourself......
That would indeed be a possible counter argument, if it weren't for the fact that I did not refute the reviewer's value judgements about the film. What I said was that his judgements were not of universal relevance. Undoubtedly his judgements are completely valid in so far as he applies them to himself.
The question here is not the validity of the value judgements, but of the scope of their validity.
As for Kant, he was the ultimate universalist, a position which he somehow managed to defend while accepting the impossibility of direct knowledge of hard reality because our only access to it is empirical. Good observation, but questionable and dangerous deduction, in view of where it led his successors through Fichte. If he were alive today my reply to him would be "Fine, just as long as you don't impose your inferred universals on those who beg to differ." Ultimately it leads to absolutism, and coercion at the point of a gun.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
If the next POTUS is GWB then we'll be treated to moooovies about satanic communist child molesting foreigners from another dimension who are stupidly battling Christ's new army for the souls of all the CHIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLLLLDREN !!!!!
It's been over ten years since I saw it and I don't remember too much about it, but I remember it was so long that if for nothing else it should get marks for trying so hard.
Does anyone really expect much going into these movies? You know what? 9/10 people find "realistic" space action scenes boring. Just ask Johnny Sixpack what he thought about 2001.
You will never go broke underestimating the intelligence of your audience. Most people go to films like this for the same reason I'm about to spend all day watching football, for action and maybe if I'm lucky, some drama. Not a coherent story. Not for scientific accuracy. And they certainly don't want to think. "Who Wants To Be A Millionare" is popular for the same reason. Zero substance and questions that would make a 3rd grader feel smart.
end communication
But there's a big gap between warmed-over Tarantino satire being regurgitated as pop feminist criticism, and poking holes in a plot. The former is pretty ridiculous, especially in the context of a blockbuster action/romance movie. The latter, even a child does.
I had to look it up, not having seen BG for a very long time, but you have to admit, if the Silons would just get on with it and destroy all these pesky humans, at least the flow of bad movies and bad criticism would stop!
I think you meant Mission to Mars. M2M was that other atrocious sci-fi movie that came out recently. Mars Attacks! was a clever comedy by Tim Burton which, although not universally liked, certainly doesn't deserve to be tossed in the "atrociously bad" movie heap.
*grin* One of the best trash films recently, following in the fine footsteps of the great B movies. If we talk about movies being a star vehicle, then 5th Element was definitely a Jean-Paul Gaultier vehicle - more high camp than an expedition up Everest...
Grab.
Are you sure that that article was by Bertrand Russell, rather than Eugene Wigner? (I'd like to know. It didn't seem to have the clarity of expression typical of BR.)
In any event, the author of The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences doesn't seem to have gone to Philosophy of Science 101. He writes:
The argument could be of such abstract nature that it might not be possible to resolve the conflict, in favor of one or of the other theory, by an experiment. Such a situation would put a heavy strain on our faith in our theories and on our belief in the reality of the concepts which we form. It would give us a deep sense of frustration in our search for what I called "the ultimate truth."
Any half-decent introduction to Science would have told him that Science is not a search for "the ultimate truth" -- that dodo is in the realm of philosophy. Furthermore, scientists seek agreement between their models and the behaviour of reality only because that makes their theories useful as opposed to being merely mathematically interesting. The inability to distinguish between two theories is nothing to shed tears about, since scientists know that their models and reality herself are two different things entirely, so there might well be multiple equally effective theoretical representations. One can only approximate to how reality behaves with the models of Science, and they never pretend to represent The Truth. They'll always be subject to revision and replacement by tomorrow's improved versions, and you certainly couldn't throw away The Truth with such impunity if you had it in your hands.
The relationship between theory and reality is very carefully crafted coincidence, nothing more. And that's a very powerful observation, because it means that reality will continue to surprise us forever, so mankind's future is potentially unbounded.
In writing about the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics", the author was merely being mystical. It was a good read, but the sense of wonder doesn't really add anything useful to the discussion, even if he hadn't fallen into the trap of thinking of theory as (tentative) reality.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
...it's a movie, an action movie at that.
I've given up on action movies making too much sense. As a geek (by profession) and a rocket scientist (by degree) I don't mind when a movie doesn't have every little detail correct. I would be ecstatic if I did find a movie that dotted every i and crossed every t.
If you want realism take a hike. If you want realism in movies...good luck. In fact go watch "Men of Honor", that's the most realism you'll get in a movie.
Red Planet had stunning visuals and special effects. As has been posted, the robot animation is amazing. I would recommend it as a matinee, but not a full-price action movie necessarily.
Grab your Coke, get your Goobers, sit back, and enjoy the show.
- OK, I know the actual science of physics has only been around for around 50-75 years, but it's pretty well documented;
Wow, you're off by almost an order of magnitude on the age of the science of physics -- and that's if you ignore Plato and Aristotle's efforts.I know the actual science of physics has only been around for around 50-75 years, but it's pretty well documented; and you can get an excellent primer from many, many books, and see it used properly in a story in many science fiction novels. Gravity, mass and velocity aren't magic -- so you can't make them suddenly appear, disappear, or become less or greater then they were originally.
That's funny, I thought that whole field had been around for a lot more than 75 years. I must have been hallucinating about that Newton guy.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Not for a second did I care about any of these characters. I didn't care whether they lived or died. I take that back. I wanted them to die. Quickly. Watching them on screen was more painful than #40 sandpaper briskly rubbing my nipples (hey, it happens more often than you might think.)
At the start of the movie the narrator says, "This is so and so. He's a hothead. Next to him is so and so. He's the soul of the crew." I can remember being in the fourth grade and having my teacher say, "Don't tell us your character is wise. Show us." Apparently the screenwriters who vomited up this bit of pablum should go speak with Mrs Ritchie, my fourth grade teacher.
Now if there's one thing I loathe in a sci-fi movie, its a robot. If a robot is going to be a central character, its going to suck my ass. And this one rimmed me long and deep. The moment they wheeled that stupid thing out I knew it was going to be awful. And the instant they showed it had a "military mode" you could pretty much tell the thing was going to go apeshit.
Of course, the biggest insult to the moviegoers intelligence was that inspid deux ex machina of oxygen being present on Mars. When Val Kilmer was choking and dying, I though, "Ah! I hope he dies so I can go home," I knew that he was gonna pop off his helmet and breathe. What an insult.
Val Kilmer made me chuckle once or twice. The name of his character was Gallagher. Christ on a bun, why couldn't they have gotten the comedian of the same name to smash up some watermelons. That would have improved this flick more than I can describe.
Anyways, this movie made Mission to Mars look like 2001. It really did. Do yourself a favor and avoid this movie. As for myself, I'm going to hunt down the director and smash a lamp in his face for the two hours of my life I'll never get back.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
I think we're probably all looking at this problem from the wrong angle. Look at it like this. When you go into a book store it's neatly divided into book types Fiction/Non-fiction/Biography/Reference etc. Most book stores have the Sci-Fi section but if you look at that area closer it's set up with sub-sections (Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Sci-Fantasy, and sometimes various horror). All the AD&D books are together as Fantasy, Star-Trek is usually under the Science-Fiction, Star Wars sometimes under Sci-Fi but usually under Science-Fantasy. You get the idea.
The book store keeps all of the harlequin romances, quick sales, junk books and stuff they'd rather not categorize up front where people can get it quick and get out quick. The majority of the shoppers shop here. In to get a mag or cheap romance novel, maybe a present for a friend but not in far enough to need to make sense out of how things are categorized on the shelf, much less how the "sci-fi" books are categorized
See to 99% of the population Lord of the Rings is Sci-Fi along with Chronicles of Narnia and Dungeons and Dragons. That 99% doesn't think about the distinctions between books nor really the distinction between movies. To them it's "I want something to scare me... make me laugh... look cool... with lots of fighting... with hot chics... romantic..." They don't even hear the first word in 'dark-comedy', they just hear 'comedy' and then are disappointed when the movie wasn't funny the way they wanted it to be (cable guy).
To me it appears that critics of Red Planet are guilty of the same thing. This was so not a Sci-Fi movie. Personally it's border line even being a Sci-Fantasy movie. Cool special effects, liked the suits, the ship, the robot, etc. But in the end it didn't rely on the hard science that true Sci-Fi's typically rely on. That's where the problem lies. So many of the movies that we see today are clasified by the media and the people who watch them as 'Sci-fi' when in reality they are 'Sci-Fantasy'. Did Star Wars ever explain how the light saber worked or why Obi-Wan dissappeared like that? Hell No! Why? Cuz it was science fantasy, just enough realism to be believable but enough fantasy to make you forget about realism for awhile.
I personally liked Red Planet, I think it succeeded where Mission to Mars failed. Mission to Mars tried to rely to heavily on the science but would chuck it out the door when necessary just to do something neat. That went beyond what I would call artistic liscense. Red Planet didn't focus on the science, nor did it focus on the people really. By the end of the movie you knew that one dead guy had a granddaughter, the other dead guy was too cocky, another dead guy (the nice guy) wasn't quite so nice (spineless), and that dead guy number four 'the jerk' was probably a pretty good guy after all, taking one for humanity and all. We find that the lead character is more resourceful than given credit for and that the female co doesn't need 'rescuing'. Do we really need to know that Kate came from a long line of Navy, or Burchenal was a drunk, or Robby's wife died two years ago, or that Ted had an abusive father. No because it doesn't really help any with the story line. None of their jobs or skills really even help with the story line, because in the end they are stripped down to only one thing, surviving with their humanity. And that in the end is what this movie is about. Humanity, how easily some of us give up on it all, how those of us who seem to have given up really haven't, how the meek sometimes aren't, all the flaws and accomplishments that we have as a species, right there for people to take a look at if they weren't so damned interested in Carrie-Anne Moss's or the fact that oxygen levels could be easily detected well before reaching the planet.
Truth is movie goers are stupid, even the 'smart' ones.
Personally I've read a lot of science fiction and it just fucking bores me to tears sometimes. You know those 6 pages that you have to skip here and there because the author starts talking about singularities, gravitational forces, and space time. YAWN. You know that 99% of the people would leave the movie theater if that happened and that nice three hour long 200million$ science accurate sci-fi would be considered the 2nd Ishtar."Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
I know that the people who read /. are among the most sceptical people on Earth, and rightly, but if you let that get in the way of watching some cheap film you're just an idiot.
Imagine if the original Star Wars was released today. Lots of people here on /. would doubtless flame it because of it's pathetic interpretation of physics and it's architypal characters.
But so what? doesn't anybody remember what it was to be a child and take these things at face value, for 90 minutes at least? If you let your intellect get in the way of enjoying a simple, unpretentious film & you don't enjoy it then I have no sympathy, I'm afraid. Criticising these things is just oh-so-smart intellectual masturbation.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
I liked waterworld!
Am i wrong? Oh no, I'm going against groupthink, arrrgggghhhh!
Lemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
There were a number of similar attempts, as in Armageddon, to include pointless catchphrases in a sad attempt to bulk up the script and provide cute fodder for trailers and teasers. There was an annoying Terminator 2 style monologue delivered for no particular reason over the intro.
However, on the plus side, the nationalistic propaganda wasn't in evidence, as it was in Mission to Mars. You've just crash-landed on a distant world with nowhere to stay, no way to get home, and you come over a hill to see the equipment from a previous mission. Rather than go see if there might be some oxygen, food, or maybe a rocket booster or two, you stop and pick up your flag and stare at it for a while, killing off your oxygen. That alone makes Mission To Mars worse than Red Planet; let's not even mention the lame ending with the tearful alien.
--- http://foo.ca
Well, duh, if NASA sent the algae, it kinda goes without saying they'd disappear!
(I mean, I'm all for sending people to Mars, but really, couldn't we find a more interesting excuse than "oh crap, these are metric algae, not Imperial-measured algae!" ;-)
...and go support your local reperatory (sp?) theatre. If you don't have one, start one.
Up here in Canada, the Famous Players chain of big-box cinemas has become a member of an independent releases self-help group. So FP is willing (nay, eager!) to work with community groups to bring single-showing foreign and independent films to the theatre.
It's worth noting that over the past six months, the *only* screens that are jam-packed with viewers have been these indie films. The other week I was in the lineup for twenty minutes to get in -- and saw *not one person* walk in the door to see any other film.
My town has a population of about 40K. Another nearby town (~45m drive away) has a pop. ~20K. Both towns have a film society... so *your* hometown can have one, too, if you get off your duff and organize it!
Recent films:
"East is East" (UK) -- Very funny story of an East Indian immigrant who is trying to raise his family as Pakistani in England... in particular, in marrying off his sons traditionally. They want none of it! A touch dark, a touch funny, a touch painful.
"New Waterford Girl" (Cda) -- Hilarious. Poor Moonie Potter lives at the edge of the earth, somewhere on Cape Breton, in a cramped, bleak little Catholic community. She's a renegade artiste-type, unappreciated and misunderstood. Things turn around when a new neighbour -- refugees from the Bronx, hiding out from the law -- shows up at about the same time she gets a scholarship to an Fine Arts school -- a scholarship her parents won't let her take. Moonie and her new girlfriend hatch a plot to get her out of Cape Breton...
"The Colour of Paradise" (Iran) -- Poignant, tragic story of Mohammed, a blind eight-year old (the actor really is blind), his bitter, widowed father, and his loving grandmother and sisters. Fascinating look into a small Iranian town, and utterly heart-wrenching.
"Felicia's Journey" (UK) -- Bob Hoskins is a meek and mild child-killer. A psychological thriller, and the *only* film I've ever seen that has caused me to curl up in the theatre seat, hands to face and horrified. Hoskins is a brilliant actor. Felicia is an Irish lassy who comes to Britain to find her run-away boyfriend, and hitches a lift from Bob. He insinuates himself into her life, and it's not going to go well for her. Mortifying, absolutely mortifying.
Anyway, point is, every one of the Film Society films I've seen over the past two years has been an order of magnitude better than the shit that is being pumped out of Hollywood.
You owe it to yourself to at least search for or create alternatives.
www.vernonfilmsociety.bc.ca, if you want to poke 'round my local viewing. Do a search for "Princess Theatre Edmonton Alberta Whyte Avenue" or somesuch, and I'm sure you'll come up with a treasure trove of info ('cause Princess Theatre rocks the film world, IMO).
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
"I stopped being analytical about movies ... I was being ripped off by my own intellect." - Jack Cameron
... to ENJOY the darn thing.
By over-analyzing and being super-critical of movies, I was missing the WHOLE point of watching
You can nit-pick ANY movie, but is it really fun? It's like dissecting a joke, to find out what makes it funny.
I mean, at least they tried. The zero-G fire was handled well, and aside from a number of misstatements and silly oversights, everything seemed like it had been done by someone who had passed high school, unlike the vast majority of Hollywood 'science' fiction movies.
What other movie can you think of where the director actually bothered to demonstrate a gravity differential by having the intrepid heroes take a piss? The director got his reaction mass principles basically right, and best of all, the characters actually seemed to think in scientific terms. Having the characters understand that the circumstances they find on Mars are wrong and need serious explaining, and showing them determined to find it out through investigative means is worth a hundred factual errors that might go over the heads of 95% of the American audience.
Nonetheless, a selection of my favorite misstatements and science goof-ups, forthwith:
As I said, though, that's a pretty small list compared to such rancid pieces of science-hating crap as Armaggeddon.
The character development was some what weak, but Carrie Ann Moss did a good job of showing us that she can be a bit more feminine than Trinity, and the shower scene was, as mentioned earlier, pretty much worth the price of admission.
The whole thing felt like a throwback to 1950's science fiction.. some nice morality plays in a setting where the characters have to use science and engineering to solve their problems, and feelings are sublimated under the stress of a high IQ. All of which dooms it to a lousy box office, but I liked it.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
But, but, but .... I already missed Battlefield Earth .... does this mean I have to go see it now? (shudder) .... you're evil ...
So what DID you like about the movie? I saw it, and I'm really wondering. It was poop. And I even agree with you that movies can be enjoyed even if they're filled with "Slashdot errors".
But the reviewer is dead on with this review. The movie is filled with moments that just made me confused. Every five minutes one of the characters would do something completely out of context.
And the bad science wouldn't be an issue if the movie wasn't taking the science so seriously. One of the themes of the movie is hard science. The writer seems to be trying to impress us with hard science. But the science is awful! All of it.
Everything that happens is either physically impossible or contextually implausible.
Jon Sullivan
Jon Sullivan
www.jonsullivan.com
I can sum the movie up in one sentence: It's worse than both Mission to Mars and Waterworld.
:-)], but it's a rare film that doesn't have some good qualities and some very committed fans.
I can sum the review up in one sentence: it suffers from the usual problem with critics, subjective myopia. Belief in the universality of values seems to be mandatatory for film reviewers, presumably because otherwise it would admit the possibility that their critical judgements are irrelevant to anyone except themselves. Sigh.
The fact of the matter is, watching a movie is a different experience for different people, and no single value judgement applies. One man's charisma is another man's overacting, and one man's scientific accuracy is another man's lack of imagination.
And it gets even worse when the critic somehow manages to synthesize a number of failings into an overall recommendation to avoid the show at all costs. Among other things, that's scientifically inaccurate, because a movie is definitely more than the sum of its parts.
I liked Mission to Mars, Mars Attacks! and Waterworld, all for different reasons (haven't seen B.E. yet) which may or may not match the experience of others. The perfect movie doesn't exist [well, apart from possibly The Matrix
And hey, some people don't like The Matrix. Would we listen to them if their profession happened to be film critic?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I _Liked_ "Mars Attacks!" I mean, it went up against "Independence Day" for the Hugo award that year!
Besides, I think that it's fair that cowboy yodelling could cause one's brain to explode...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
- In the Matrix, the idea is VR. This makes it the perfect excuse for the eye-popping, outlandish special effects.
- In the Terminator, the idea is a relentless killing machine sent back through time. Sounds stupid, but once you accept the premise, the idea of a soldier being sent back as a protector and Father of the future leader is not crazy.
- In Back To The Future, the gimmick is a car that is a Time Machine, sent back to the 1950s. Once you accept this fantastic idea, it stands to reason that if broken, you could not fix such a machine in the 1950s, when you could in 1980s. Everything else follows or is an elaboration of that premise.
In Red Planet, we have a bunch of intelligent scientists sent to investigate a supposedly oxygen depleted planet. They do everything - discuss sex, talk about God, fly through space etc except try to accomplish their mission. At least, in Star Trek, Data would announce that the the neutronium detector was broken and no telemetry of the planetary composition was possible.You tell me if that is an excusable plot device.
I have no problem with movies that get science wrong. A certain amount of leeway is fine in order to portray an interesting story.
Unfortunately, hollywood has started making movies which are all about the science. They play up how "accurate" the science is, and make it an integral part of the plotline. BUT THEY GET IT HORRIBLY HORRIBLY WRONG!!!
Star Wars was never meant to be about science. They never even try to explain the cool tech they have. And that's fine, it falls under the category "not important to the plot to try to explain."
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
What I want to know is where these critics are hanging out? I mean, where are these real world people that make so much sense? Most of the people I meet "are inexplicably offended and say weird statements which have little or no rational value to them". Kudos to the director for putting realistic characters in the movie, avoiding the unbelievable and cliche "rational" type that Hollywood usually serves up.
"No sympathy, no tension, no nothing. It's banality at its extreme". Hmmm. sounds like my life. I guess I should get out more.