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Ridley Scott's Forever War In 3D
bowman9991 writes "Ridley Scott's next science fiction film, his first since Blade Runner, will be a 3D adaptation of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, an action packed novel about the impact of the time dilation effect on soldiers returning from an interstellar war against the mysterious Tauran species. Scott recently decided to move to 3D after watching footage of James Cameron's yet to be released science fiction epic Avatar. The Forever War, Cameron's Avatar, and Scott's other upcoming science fiction project, Brave New World, will make the next five years a fantastic time to be a science fiction movie enthusiast."
The 3D I've seen is more distraction than enhancement. I don't want to have to wear stupid 3D glasses every time I watch a movie. I saw Beowulf in 3D and the effect was sometimes neat, sometimes disorienting.
Have they made any improvements or is this just more of the same?
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This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Did you read a different book than I did? One of the important plot threads is Mandella's fragmented-by-interstellar-travel romance.
If all you remember was the battles on remote planets and the clone armies and whatnot, you did not get the point of the book at all - it's Haldeman's Vietnam-era rebuttal to the largely pro-war stance of Heinlein's Starship Troopers. The human dimension is important.
egypt urnash minimal art.
.....damn....another sounding-good movie from those Hollywood mafia guys. They keep bugging us with their "intelectual property" plans...They want to bring down The Pirate Bay....must hating them. We hating them.......Damn....trailer looks good....I will download bootleg....damn, it looks too good...oooh shiny...screw it, I will boycot them another time.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
The story was ABOUT Marygay and Mandella's romance. The ONLY part of pre-war society that survived the war was their love. Wow, I think he did read a different story.
Unit cohesion is an answer on the individual level - on a larger scale his answer is simply that they fight to survive. This is pretty clearly illustrated in Juan's H&MP class when he is in the academy becoming an officer. Heinlein pretty much posits that all wars are a matter of population growth and limited resources.
I think that he does a great job of illustrating why war is inevitable. Then it makes sense that he venerates those who give completely of themselves to ensure the survival of others.
Haldeman just operates from another premise, that war is not inevitable and that we should all just get along.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I agree. SciFi is not really about spaceships and laser guns and death stars and all that. SciFi takes a human theme (as in Forever War, the bond between separated lovers) and illustrates it in some way by using a future setting. The Forever War uses the time dilation of the jumps as a way to illustrate how a soldier feels when they have to leave home to do fight and the strains that doing so puts on his family, society and lover(s). If you remove that human part of the story, it will just be crap. You will end up with 300 in space suits, just war porn.
Funny but I thought it was a rant about living in an amoral society where meaningless sex and drugs where a replacement for love and moral behavior.
The only real rules where to not make other people feel bad. It seemed like political correctness run amok too me.
The hero was an "old fashioned" man.
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That's a bit like saying Animal Farm is concerned with the power struggle between different types of animal - true , but not quite the point.
Quite a lot, which will (a) give people a reason to go to the theatre to see movies, and (b) provide an incentive for the development and adoption, within a decade or so, of whatever the successor to today's home viewing technology turns out to be, supporting home 3D viewing. "Replicating the theater experience at home" is, as always, about hitting a moving target.
Limited warfare was the norm until the late 1700's
Limited warfare is mostly the norm today: you surrender, the aggressor stops fighting you to the death. If the aggressor doesn't stop that, then we stop calling it "war" and start calling it "genocide".
Of course, that's for an extremely literal definition of "limited"... but exactly what other definition does make the claim I've quoted above make sense? Try a search for "sack of", check out the first few dozen of the countless results, and make sure your definition of "limited" includes raping and pillaging from non-combatants, mass executions of prisoners of war, and other such war crimes that used to be status quo. I'll admit that Heinlein's post-WWII writing might have been distorted by some of that particularly-heinous context, but even genocide isn't a new thing in history. Ever read the Old Testament?
But suppose that total war and genocide have become particularly common in the last few centuries, perhaps because of the better killing technologies available... how exactly would that reflect poorly on Heinlein's arguments that preparation for war is a necessity for survival? If the temptation of and damage done by war are going up with the advancement of technology and the passage of time, then surely that makes it reasonable to postulate a technologically-advanced future where those factors haven't decreased back to "the norm" yet. This is science fiction, after all - noticing that the norms in human history have included limited war, horse-drawn carts, stone tools, etc. has little relevance to a genre of literature that's also noticed that the norm in modern history is for norms to be perpetually changing.
That's just it. The 'rah-rah-ness' of Starship Troopers was a deliberate and ironic statement on fascism.
Technical limitations - and the economic limitations that spring from them - have limited 3D's usage to gimmicks before. They've done red-green 3D... but that can't do color. They've done vertical and horizontal polarization... but that requires you to keep your head almost perfectly vertical, or else the 3D effect vanishes.
These days they're using circularly polarized light with opposite signs. Clockwise in one eye, counterclockwise in the other. That way the 3D effect can be maintained even if the viewer's head is quite a bit further off vertical, making the whole experience a lot more comfortable. In the future, framerates can be made high enough, and LCD shutters can be made cheap enough, that alternating frames to allow 3D may well be economical.
Economics actually argues for 3D now, instead of against - movie theaters need a draw that's hard to duplicate at home. I already wait to see most movies on DVD, or Blu-ray at most, 'cause I've got a decent-sized flat-panel and good speakers.
The past can be a good guide to the future... but it's not an infallible guide.
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