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."

Comments

How gimmicky is this 3D stuff?

[jollyreaper]

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?

Re:How gimmicky is this 3D stuff?

[Dr. Manhattan]

They're still learning how to use 3D. Look at the first silent movies - they were basically set up like theater stages. People then started to experiment, develop a 'visual vocabulary', and learn how to use the new capabilities. 3D's like that now, still a bit gimmicky but getting better. It's certainly not as obtrusive as it's been, and can help immersion.

(One thing that does not translate from 2D to 3D - at least for me - is a cross-fade. That just breaks my brain. In 2D, everything's in one focal plane. In a 3D crossfade, I can't figure out where to focus as things are appearing and disappearing and it's all a confused blur until the fade's over.)

The other issue is that 3D can't make a bad movie good. My youngest kids enjoyed "Fly Me To The Moon", but my wife and I... well, at least I had my PDA with me.

Re:How gimmicky is this 3D stuff?

[Sockatume]

Depends on how it's used. I watched My Bloody Valentine, which is one of the few current live-action flicks in 3D, and as well as cute gimmicks* they made some surprisingly artistic use into-the-screen depth, which definitely gives you more of a sense of place and of space when done properly. There's quite a difference between peering down a dank passageway in 2D and 3D, at least. "Pop-out" effects made my head swim more often than not which sounds like the same problem you had.

*As far as gimmicks go, I'd love to see a dolly zoom in 3D.

Re:How gimmicky is this 3D stuff?

[DinDaddy]

It is always going to be disorienting for many people as long as your eyes want to focus and converge on something as if it were in the place it appears to be. 3D suffers from the innate problem of trying to make things appear closer to you when they are really still on a screen 30 feet away. Your eyes don't like to focus a one range but converge at another.

Things that make you go bleh.

Re:How gimmicky is this 3D stuff?

[Ephemeriis]

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?

The 3D technology itself has been much improved. It works a lot better. The effects themselves don't induce as many headaches as the old stuff. And they're better able to create real depth...instead of just having things either on the screen or floating several feet in front of it.

However, it is still up to the director/effects guys/writers/whoever to do a good job with it. Just like any special effects in any movie... It can be done well, or not.

It can still be disorienting. It can still be pointless and gratuitous. We'll just have to wait and see how well it is handled...

Re:How gimmicky is this 3D stuff?

[clarkn0va]

Um, have you ever been to a kids movie in a theater? With all the distraction going on in there you would be lucky to ever even notice the guy with the PDA.

Re:How gimmicky is this 3D stuff?

[Dr. Manhattan]

Sorry, but you INTENTIONALLY went and PAID to see 'Fly Me To The Moon'?

So I work, see, and my wife runs this bakery, y'know, and we've got four kids, with one very young, so the times we can arrange childcare for the baby and get the rest of the family out to see a movie are limited, and sometimes you have to work with what's available. But I'm glad I could help your self-esteem a little! You rock with your bad self!

Forever War is fantastic

[SpuriousLogic]

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.

Re:Forever War is fantastic

[WillAdams]

The traditional way to describe it is:

  - Starship Troopers is written for World War II Vets in the early stages of a Cold War world

  - The Forever War is written for Vietnam Vets in the later stages of a Cold War world

William
(who would give a lot to see a Starship Troopers which was an accurate adaptation of the book as written by Heinlein)

Re:Forever War is fantastic

[radtea]

I just keep thinking about how this was supposed to be a response to Heinlein's Starship Troopers (or vice versa?)

Response to. "Starship Troopers" was first published in '59, "The Forever War" was published in the early '70's.

Heinlein's book tries to be pro-military rather than pro-war, but it's sometimes a distinction without a difference. On the other hand I know people who read Haldeman's book as a pro-war story, missing the larger point entirely.

Heinlein was a naval officer who never saw action. Haldeman a combat engineer who did. Differences in experience and generational differences are important to understanding the differences between the books.

I personally find "The Forever War" a more satisfying story, both morally and narratively, although the resolution of the conflict with the Taurans is tantamount to magic, which I found disappointing. On the other hand, Heinlein asks, "Why do people fight?" and ultimately gives us no deeper answer than "Unit cohesion", although the quasi-nationalist racial hygiene stuff clouds that conclusion at times.

Re:Forever War is fantastic

[Dun Malg]

I just keep thinking about how this was supposed to be a response to Heinlein's Starship Troopers (or vice versa?)

It was partly as a counter-point to Starship Troopers. I think it went too far in the other direction and got a little stupid. Being an actual combat vet myself, I can say that the training and doctrine portrayed in ST was a hell of a lot more realistic that TFW. TFW was more like a snide caricature of what anti-war people think military training and tactics are like. And topping it off, TFW bizarrely had only "genius IQ" types being conscripted, which is completely asinine. Geniuses don't make good soldiers... at all. Still, TFW was an interesting read once you got past the silly axe-grinding to the story.

Re:Forever War is fantastic

[netsavior]

The whole time I was reading the forever war I was hoping the Taurans were Time dilated humans (or vice versa), who were fighting out of confusion. The only part of the book I hated was "Oh it's a clone thing you wouldn't understand."

Re:Forever War is fantastic

[stoolpigeon]

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.

Re:Forever War is fantastic

[radtea]

Heinlein pretty much posits that all wars are a matter of population growth and limited resources.

This is so weirdly Malthusian, particularly coming from a technological optimist like Heinlein, that I never bought into it. The Future History stories are a broad refutation of this premise.

Ask any economist and they'll tell you that wars are not only not inevitable, but there is no rational explanation for them at all, if by "rational" you mean "economically rational." There is a serious problem in economics called "the war puzzle" or "the war problem" that tries to figure out why the hell people ever go to war, because it is never economically rational for either side to do so, regardless of outcome.

Heinlein tries to pretty up various completely irrational ideas as to why people fight to make it seem inevitable, but the only one that made sense to me was at the individual level. The rest amounted to, "Eventually we will meet something that wants to fight us, and we'd better be ready"--the H&MP instructor says almost exactly that at some point. And we will meet something that wants to fight us because "that's the way the world is."

This is far less rational, on a purely empirical basis, than Haldeman's admittedly thin "why can't we all just get along" schtick: flat-out to-the-death conflict is extremely rare in nature, and even in human history until fairly recently. Limited warfare was the norm until the late 1700's: the past 200 years of total war are the anomaly, and Heinlein's view took that anomaly to be the norm, the model for all conflict between intelligent or quasi-intelligent beings (see Daniel Bell's "The First Total War" for a good introduction to changing beliefs about war in the time of Napoleon.)

Re:Forever War is fantastic

[Nursie]

You do know that Starship Troopers is a deliberate satire on the source material, right?

It's not perfect in its execution, but whilst you can (and I did when I first saw it as a young teenager) see it as just a gung-ho action movie that's basically content-free. When you then put it into the context of Heinleins original glorification of war and armed service it becomes clear that the film is actually a somewhat clever satire of the original, whilst also being entertaining and action-y enough to satisfy those that prefer not to think too much.

Re:Forever War is fantastic

[roystgnr]

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.

Re:Forever War is fantastic

[kafka47]

That's just it. The 'rah-rah-ness' of Starship Troopers was a deliberate and ironic statement on fascism.

Re:Should be a fine film, if....

[Peganthyrus]

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.

Thanks an effn lot

[OzPeter]

I'm blind in one eye.

Geek's psyche

[Pecisk]

.....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.

Re:Should be a fine film, if....

[netsavior]

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.

This could be a great movie

[Thagg]

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.

Re:Should be a fine film, if....

[SpuriousLogic]

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.

2D glasses for 3D movies?

[Goldenhawk]

>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.

Re:Excellent, more SF films.

[LWATCDR]

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.

Action packed....

[vague disclaimer]

an action packed novel about the impact of the time dilation effect on soldiers returning from an interstellar war against the mysterious Tauran species.

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.

New 3D effects concerns

[Artifex33]

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.

Re:New 3D effects concerns

[DragonWriter]

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?

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.

Re:You'd think they'd have gotten it right by now.

[Dr. Manhattan]

Stereoscopic movies are a fad that crops up every 20 years or so. Rediscovered, lost. Rediscovered, lost. Lather, rinse, repeat.

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.