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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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I read the first time this years ago in high school. It is an absolutely fantastic story. I'm hoping Ridley Scott repeats his Aliens and Blade Runner magic on this.
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.
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.....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.
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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.
If you saw the movie Jarhead, it was all told from the perspective and point-of-view of a soldier -- you never saw the "big picture" of the war...there were no helicopter or crane shots, it was all shot from eye-level.
Forever War is told that same way, from one soldier's point of view...and it's clear that he has no idea what is going on in the war in general...although you also get the feeling that nobody else does, either. The way that the movie skips through time with each long near-lightspeed trip makes his adventure even harder for him to understand -- the whole world changes dramatically with each hop.
I think that unlike a lot of SF books, this one really could be made into a good movie, that would capture the richness of each of the episodes in imagery that takes Haldeman many many pages to describe. I just hope that they just let the audience be as confused and out-of-sorts as the narrator is.
Forever War seems to be one of those "writer's first books" [like Grisham's A Time for a Kill, Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Hofsteader's Godel Escher Bach] that was slaved over, re-editted, re-written, re-thought, and probably submitted to publishers a dozen times before it finally saw print, because it is as tight a book as I have read. There's nothing wasted, there's nothing overly described that is better left to the reader's imagination.
Great choice, Ridley.
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Also, 1984:Republicans as Brave New World:Democrats.
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.
>some of us don't have perfectly aligned eyes and the "3D" effect
>isn't cool to people like me it gives me a raging headache for hours
This gave me an idea (maybe I should patent it)... how about "2D glasses" for the 3D movies? Offer patrons a choice, either watch it in 2D, or in 3D.
How?
Really simple. Simply make SOME of the glasses with both eyes having identically-polarized lenses. That way, both eyes see the same image, and you just get one of the two simultaneously-shown frames.
So for anyone who hates having stuff pop out of the screen, or gets headaches from the frequent depth transitions, they can still enjoy the movie along with everyone else.
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Here's some simple GIF "wiggle-grams" that illustrate the parallax effect:
http://www.well.com/user/jimg/stereo/stereo_list.html
The "stone gate" is my favorite. (Click the thumbnail for bigger size.) Warning: some "artful" nudity.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
What I remember was that the war started thru combination of misunderstanding, accident, and indeed some government agenda... but that the war continued simply because the Taurons simply could not communicate with a species of individuals. Only when humans evolved into a homgenous species "Man" could they talk with us and thus end the war.
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That's a pretty neat effect, but unless it's a disaster movie about earthquakes, I don't really see this technique as useful for films...
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
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.
Some voicing their concerns about 3D ruining their enjoyment by giving viewers headaches or disorienting them with fading transitions, wipes and other common 2D movie tools need to understand that there are already techniques in place to remedy these problems.
First off, the new polarization techniques don't use the older, vertical/horizontal polarized light filters. Instead, clockwise/counterclockwise spiral polarization is used, resulting in less image bleed-over into each eye. Second, directors have the ability to lessen the perceived depth of a frame, making it seem not as if you are viewing reality, but more a bas relief sculpture. This helps during transitions or fast motion to keep people from getting headaches or experiencing vertigo. The recent film Monsters vs. Aliens used these variable depth shots quite a bit. I've had problems in the past myself with watching polarized 3D films, but have no problems watching any of the new 3D tech.
I'd say a much bigger concern is going to be how films done in 3D transition to DVD/bluray. If directors start shooting their films differently in order to take advantage of 3D imagery, how much intention will be lost when the film is converted to 2D? Imagine a director tweaks the depth of everything in a shot to lie in the far background, then pulls one particular item forward to emphasize its importance in the shot. Everything else considered equal, that information will be lost in the 2D version. It's a comparable problem to taking a color film and turning it into black and white. If "the girl with the red umbrella" suddenly becomes just some other person amidst a sea of other gray umbrellas, the meaning of the shot is lost.
Some newer TV's have 120hz refresh rates (or better) to allow for 60fps stereoscopic imaging when using shutter glasses, but that is hardware which is going to have a hard time making it into living rooms.
I have to wonder if that's part of the "immersiveness" of handheld camera shots. You're getting some extra depth information from the very slight change in the camera location.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I have amblyopia, so my eyes don't point quite paralell. 3D movies are worse than useless to me, I just get my choice of a blurry distorted image or a splitting headache.
Captcha says reject, which is what these movies make me think.
Cramming Starship Troopers credibly into two hours is impossible but I think it could be serialized into a week long miniseries or a tightly scripted Heroes-type story spread over a season. The same goes for the Forever War. I'd be much more excited about projects like that rather than another butchered sf movie.
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.
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No god please no, don't do it Ridley!!! The Forever War is my favorite sci-fi novel, and demands a live cast. There is some serious acting to be done here, a modern, adult sci-fi film, not a 3D film which is never going to be as good.
How can you take the misery and apathy of Mandella, and the serious, prolonged waste of life and turn it into effectively a 3D cartoon?
Get the damn budget and immortalise the story, or leave it until someone else can do it.
Modern 3d doesn't use red/blue glasses. I've always stayed away from 3d because of how lame red/blue glasses are.
The latest 3d uses circular polarization, so no issues with color, like red/blue, and no issues with orientation (i.e. effect breaks if you're not sitting perfectly still and facing the screen "just so") like parallel/horizontal polarization. Honestly, it's really cool, I had no issues with convergence, and stuff really did look like it was 3D. The glasses were sturdy plastic, pretty high quality for theater 3d glasses. I didn't feel like a complete tard wearing them, hehe.
In Monsters vs Aliens the vast majority of the 3d effect was used to make it look like you were looking out into a rectangular hole in the wall onto the 3d scene, though they did have a couple "pop out" effects. One in particular was a paddle-ball toy, that was kinda funny, and unexpected.
I popped my glasses on and off a few times, and the difference was incredible. Obviously with the glasses off things were a little blurred and odd, but they were just so incredibly flat, it was stunning. It was easilly the best 3d I've ever seen, and I can't wait for more.
For sure I'm worried about how good live-action will be, but the animation was just stunning, so I'm sure live will be decent at least.
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No, shutter glasses are on the way out. That's why 3D's gone mainstream again, you can do a cheap pair of plastic or paper specs with a different polarising film in each side and sell them for two bucks extra per movie ticket, compared to the expensive and fragile shutter glasses. The circular polarisation is maintained upon reflection.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
They've called Silver Screens, and they're in common use in cinemas everywhere. And yes, they preserve both linear and circular polarisation. Shutter glasses have framerate and synchronisation problems (ESPECIALLY keeping a large room full of glasses synced at the correct rate for their position relative to the screen), and rarely get the same wrong-eye isolation that circular polarisation can. Plus they're bulky, expensive and need batteries.
Big screen $1200 7.1 sound 800 comfy chair 300 the ability to pause, hit the head and grab a beer on the way back... priceless
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
It wasn't an adventure novel about blowing up the Bugs - it was about military insanity and the political madness that permits idiot wars that kill millions for no sane cause. The war against Spain, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the War against Communism, the War against Alcohol, the War against Drugs, and the king of them all, the War on Terrorism, which is a war on a noun with no referent, a war on anyone we damned well don't like.
The author was a Vietnam vet fresh back from the Forever War against ???, and he wrote what he knew.