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"Warp" <war### [at] tag povrayorg> wrote in message
news:4adb6cf3@news.povray.org...
> somebody <x### [at] ycom> wrote:
> > Except that, even in these movies, the only purpose those on board serve
is
> > to screw things up. How hard would it be for NASA to crash an unmanned
craft
> > into the sun? All you need is 1960's dumb technology for that, scaled up
> > accordingly for the payload.
> I find it rather amusing how you are bashing a movie you haven't even
seen.
<g>
> You *think* that it was just a question of "let's send a rocket to the
> Sun... oh, it failed, well, we'll just send another... oh, it also failed,
> well, we'll just keep sending them until one succeeds; heck, let's send
ten
> ships at the same time, at least one is going to succeed".
>
> Except that's not the case in the actual movie, which you would know if
> you had actually seen it. The second ship was the absolutely last chance
> humanity had. That's it. No more. If it fails, humanity is dead.
The *first* ship would have been unmanned in reality.
And *if* the second unmanned ship failed, *then* they'd send a manned rescue
and repair mission, which would make for a more beliavable premise.
> The idea was that they packed *all* the fissive material they could find
> into the two ships. There was no more after the second one. Finito. If the
> two ships failed, humanity is dead.
>
> Thus it makes a lot of sense to send a manned ship. Even the smallest of
> failures, something which could be trivially fixed by a crew, could mean
the
> mission would fail.
I'm afraid manned crafts still don't make sense. Trying to accomodate humans
badly compromises such missions. Not just due to life support issues, but
mainly due to the need to return them back to earth. Maybe one reasonable
scenario (stealing even more heavily from 2001) would be to have one or two
sacrificial humans in suspended animation, to be awakened for a limited time
only in case of emergency. Alternatively, you send a trailing rescue/steward
mission. But really, there's next to nil that can go wrong on an impact
mission to the sun if you do your homework, and there's next to nil that on
board humans can do should something go wrong, as Columbia and Challenger
showed us. Yes, astronauts fixed the Hubble, but that took months of intense
ground preparation.
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On 10/18/09 16:36, Darren New wrote:
> Neeum Zawan wrote:
>>> Also: Mission to Mars (altho the movie itself was not that great)
>> Fun movie. Not at all hard SF, though, or even close.
>
> Really? They even got the orbital mechanics right and such. I thought it
> was very good physics, other than the very ending of course.
Well, perhaps you're right. It's been a while. I suppose Mars doesn't
have a significant enough atmosphere to worry about burning up the way
they entered?
--
When you die, you lose a very important part of your life.
-- Brooke Shields
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Darren New schrieb:
>> Event Horizon has some great SF in it,
>
> I have no idea why everyone liked that movie. I thought it was awful.
Not /everyone/ did. I think it was one of the worst "SF" movies ever:
You go to the theater expecting some nice decent science fiction (in
broadest sense) action movie, and all you get is some horror thriller.
"Contact" was equally "disappointing", but it was easily able to make up
for it by being ingenious in its own right.
I think "Alien" was just as bad as "EH", but as I never went to the
theater to watch it, I'm more willing to forgive.
In this respect - i.e. regarding expectations being met, "Independence
Day" was probably the best Sci-Fi-Action movie I've ever seen, both at
the theater and at home.
It promised straightforward action and special effects in a Sci-Fi-esque
setting, and hit that mark 100%. The plot was just an adaptation of "War
of the Worlds", but it never claimed to have an original plot in the
first place.
Ah, thinking about it, I must say that there's another movie that fully
met my expectations, /and/ had an intelligent plot: "I, Robot". It
actually /exceeded/ my expectations, in that it managed to amalgamate
multiple of Asimov's short stories and their plot devices into a
consistent single storyline.
Another movie set in the future and happening to feature Will Smith, "I
am Legend", definitely falls into the same category as "Event Horizon".
A pseudo-science-backed classic vampire movie - WTF?!
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Stephen schrieb:
> attack craft behave as if they were aeroplanes. Accelerating forward to
> go faster when they are in orbit and banking when they turn.
Yeah, they obviously didn't play those "attractor" leves of "Osmos" :-)
As for banking however, there /is/ some sense to it (though probably
unknown to most movie makers) for manned craft: While "upward"
acceleration of 9g can be survived with proper equipment and training,
"downward" acceleration of that order of magnitude probably kills
instantly though brain hemorrhaging, and I could imagine that "sideways"
acceleration of 9g could break a pilot's neck.
(I couldn't find any definite infos on this on the 'net, but it seems
that for instance roller coasters in Germany may have an "upward"
acceleration of up to 6g, but a "sideways" acceleration of no more than 2g.)
So while it is most likely true that attack craft in movies typically
bank because the director didn't think /at all/, non-banking (manned)
attack craft would only prove that the director didn't think /enough/.
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Chambers schrieb:
> One based on biology rather than physics: 28 Days Later.
>
> It's not a movie about zombies. It's a movie about rabies on crack -
> and it's one of the best movies of the decade :)
Given that you think it worth mentioning, I reckon it /is/ a movie about
zombies, backed with a pseudo-scientific background story explaining
that this type of zombies happens to be people infected by rabies on crack.
Just like "I am Legend", I guess.
I actually detest such movies. If I'd want a zombie movie, I'd watch a
/real/ zombie movie.
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somebody <x### [at] ycom> wrote:
> The *first* ship would have been unmanned in reality.
Why? The first ship failing for a trivial reason was as possible as with
the second ship.
> And *if* the second unmanned ship failed, *then* they'd send a manned rescue
> and repair mission, which would make for a more beliavable premise.
You don't "rescue and repair" a ship which eg. plummets into the Sun
without exploding because something critical failed a bit before.
I honestly think you are now really stretching to try to find something
to complain (about a movie you haven't even seen). I'm failing to see your
ultimate motive. Is it to disagree just for the sake of disagreeing? What
is your ultimate goal?
--
- Warp
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clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Darren New schrieb:
> >> Event Horizon has some great SF in it,
> >
> > I have no idea why everyone liked that movie. I thought it was awful.
> Not /everyone/ did. I think it was one of the worst "SF" movies ever:
> You go to the theater expecting some nice decent science fiction (in
> broadest sense) action movie, and all you get is some horror thriller.
> "Contact" was equally "disappointing", but it was easily able to make up
> for it by being ingenious in its own right.
> I think "Alien" was just as bad as "EH", but as I never went to the
> theater to watch it, I'm more willing to forgive.
> In this respect - i.e. regarding expectations being met, "Independence
> Day" was probably the best Sci-Fi-Action movie I've ever seen, both at
> the theater and at home.
> It promised straightforward action and special effects in a Sci-Fi-esque
> setting, and hit that mark 100%. The plot was just an adaptation of "War
> of the Worlds", but it never claimed to have an original plot in the
> first place.
> Ah, thinking about it, I must say that there's another movie that fully
> met my expectations, /and/ had an intelligent plot: "I, Robot". It
> actually /exceeded/ my expectations, in that it managed to amalgamate
> multiple of Asimov's short stories and their plot devices into a
> consistent single storyline.
Wait a moment. You base your opinion about movies solely on whether they
meet the *expectations* you had about the movies before seeing them (rather
than judging them in their own right, without any prejudices)?
I'm sorry to say this, but that sounds just crazy.
--
- Warp
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Bill Pragnell wrote:
> > Ok, I see what you mean. (I don't like warp drive personally, it's a retrofitted
> > contortion that, as you say, requires quite fine gravity control.
>
> Well, it's the one that actual scientists are actually talking about. :-)
Not the only one! Wormholes have been discussed in the journals for a couple of
decades now.
> Generally speaking, "hyperdrive" and "warp drive" tend to mean the same
> thing - going somewhere that the speed of light is faster. (Assuming it's
> explained at all.)
Perhaps we're thinking of a different warp drive - I think star trek's warp
drive ended up as a bubble of compressed spacetime, not a different realm...
> > whereas I've not heard of any engineering applications of the Higgs Boson yet!
> Well, it depends what you can do with it! Higgs provides inertial mass, as I
> understand it, so it's really likely the basis of any "generated" gravity.
That's what I mean - it looks hopeful, but we don't know enough to have any
specific ideas yet. :)
> > Hmm, the 'manipulation of gravity' that I was thinking about wasn't any cleverer
> > than piling big fat masses up in interesting ways - ever read any Stephen
> > Baxter?
>
> The few I've read have been awful. :-)
Ah well. I agree his Ideas take front seat to everything else, so it depends on
what you look for in SF. However, the Mammoth series is definitely worth reading
- no cosmology in those - and I quite enjoyed the imagery in Flux (even if it is
a rehash of Niven's The Smoke Ring).
> And piling up big fat masses isn't gravity manipulation to achieve FTL
> travel? :-)
Well, we could do that now!
> As an aside, I just got back from the bookstore and it seems they have no
> actual science fiction in their science fiction section. There was some
> heinlein and asimov and other dead authors, a whole shelf of star wars and
> star trek, another shelf of manga, and everything else was vampires and
> dragons. Oh, except for the John Ringo type stories. (Many of which I'm not
> even sure why they're listed under Science Fiction, except the author also
> writes some science fiction.) WTF guys? Haven't you written any actual
> science fiction in ten years? Is America so hopelessly stupid and luddite
> that nobody reads something with actual science in it?
A shame. I was looking at the SF section in a bookshop over here recently, and
it's pretty decent at the mo. There's the regular slew of dead/getting on
classics (asimov, clarke, niven etc), a couple of shelves each of star wars,
star trek, doctor who and whatnot. But I'd say at least 20-30 shelves of proper
recent (last 30 years) SF. Much of it is british authors though, we don't get so
many of the recent US stuff unless it's popular. I had a really hard time
finding Vernor Vinge over here, for example. Buying online's the best bet - but
then browsing is impossible.
(I read A Fire Upon the Deep for the first time last year - probably the best SF
I'd read for a long time!)
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Warp schrieb:
> Wait a moment. You base your opinion about movies solely on whether they
> meet the *expectations* you had about the movies before seeing them (rather
> than judging them in their own right, without any prejudices)?
No; if I did that, I wouldn't have enjoyed "Contact".
If you interpret that into my posting, you haven't read it carefully
enough, or with a bias.
> I'm sorry to say this, but that sounds just crazy.
Why? If I feel like watching a Sci-Fi action movie, and the thing I pay
money for turns out to be some splatterpunk or whatever - which I
wouldn't normally like anyway, and which I absolutely positively /not/
feel like right now - then what's crazy about me considering the movie bad?
My judgement of a movie is simple: If I enjoyed it, then I consider it
good - if I didn't, then I consider it bad. Obviously, expectation /is/
a factor affecting whether I like it or not.
I don't give a damn about excellent vs. not-so-good acting so long as
the movie manages to keep me focused on the story it tells; nor do I
give a damn about excellent vs. not-so-good plot as long as the movie
manages to keep me focused on the acting. And the expectations I have
when entering the theater affect how good a movie can accomplish this.
If I came particularly for the special effects, I really don't give a
damn about anything else as long as the special effects are good and
plenty and the other stuff is good enough to not distract me for longer
than a few moments.
Anyone claiming to judge movies otherwise, and considering my way to
judge movies superficial, I'd consider them dishonest, puffed-up
intellectual farts.
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clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Anyone claiming to judge movies otherwise, and considering my way to
> judge movies superficial, I'd consider them dishonest, puffed-up
> intellectual farts.
Oi! :)
I try to have no expectations of a movie that I don't know anything (or much)
about; I often enjoy such movies more than any other precisely for that reason.
In such cases, I'll try to classify it by genre only afterwards.
For your second point, naturally you're entitled to enjoy any movie any way you
see fit :)
In many cases, however, I can see what's coming from the publicity. Where
overly-hyped cinema is concerned, I am rarely wrong about what is coming. I knew
exactly what I was getting with, say, Transformers (and was not disappointed!).
I knew exactly what was coming with, say, Ghost Rider (and was accordingly
disappointed).
We don't all watch movies in the same way. If we did, there would be no
controversy over what constitutes a 'good' movie or a 'bad' movie.
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