I just watched Moon. 80% on IMDB, 89% on RottenTomatoes. People compare it
to 2001 and Solaris. Those people should be shot. The "movie" is a huge
insult to the viewer's intelligence. Hint: If you are so technologically
advanced to have achived artificial gravity (!) and faster than light
communications (!), you probably don't need to go to the trouble of cloning
humans and implanting them with memories solely for the purpose of carrying
a canister from point A to point B, and kill them after 3 years. I've
probably just ruined it for those who haven't seen the movie and intending
to see it. To them, I say you are welcome.

Why is it that this genre has become such a bad joke?

</invisible>

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Moon was great. Not entirely believable, no, but still good. Spoiling a 
movie because you didn't like it is bad form.

  - Slime

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On 6/13/2010 12:30 AM, Slime wrote:
> Moon was great. Not entirely believable, no, but still good. Spoiling a
> movie because you didn't like it is bad form.
>
> - Slime

I liked the movie as well. Better than the second Solaris.

-- 
http://isometricland.com

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"Slime" <pov### [at] slimelandcom> wrote in message
news:4c145f7e$1@news.povray.org...

> Moon was great. Not entirely believable, no, but still good. Spoiling a
> movie because you didn't like it is bad form.

In that casel, more spoilers below...

I would say it's *entirely* unbelievable. Why on earth (or moon) would a
company probably worth multi trillions of dollars not able to afford to keep
a crew of more than one person on their  base? Does it make sense to any
reasonable businessman, not to mention paranoid shareholders, to trust all
your company marbles to the sanity and physical health of a single human?
Why go through all the trouble (ethical, legal, technical, logistic) trouble
of using self-destructing clones, when shipping a proper and healthy crew
every six months or so would probably be even cheaper and without all the
risks? Plus, if you are going through all that trouble, why give your HAL
clone an Asimovian conscience so it can screw up things royally when the
inevitable comes? (BTW, if you are going to rip off so many pieces from
previous movies, at least try to improve on them. Compared to the original,
the new HAL's lines and voice acting was beyond forgettable. What were they
thinking? That the silly smiley faces would somehow make up for its utter
lack of character?)

It seems that the whole operation is automated, except for taking a full
canister from the harvester and putting it into the launcher, which their
engineers conveniently forgot to automate. Speaking of the launcher, it
needs to accelerate to about 5000 km/s in a few seconds - just how many g's
would a person hiding inside (even if we are to believe the engineers again
conveniently and myseteriously made it much bigger than necessary) be
pulling? The drawers full of clones in the hidden chamber was so ridiculous
on so many levels that I laughed out loud.

Not to mention the magical earth normal gravity inside the base and even
outside on the lunar surface (to their credit, there's a 2 second period
when he's returning back having dumped the other clone back into the truck,
that they remembered about the lunar gravity). Instantenous earth moon
videoconferencing (everyone and their dog knows there's a minimum of just
over 2 sec delay) shows that they could not be bothered to look up even the
most obvious facts. I was given no excuse for suspension of disbelief. I am
willing, but I expect the movie makers to meet me at least halfway there.

I'm not even going to bother with the poor character development. I could
not care one bit for either of the clones. Their interaction was no more
than a slapstick comedy act anyway. There was no suspense, no mystery.
Everything was so cardboardy.

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somebody wrote:

> Why is it that this genre has become such a bad joke?

As Theodore Sturgeon famously quipped, when confronted with the 
statement that 90% of science fiction is crap, "Ninety percent of 
everything is crap."

The movie industry's attitude towards the genre indicates that they have 
absolutely no appreciation of its potential, but merely use it to entice 
money out of people who will pay to watch anything that features a 
technological future.

The fans share no small part in this general failure.  The typical fan 
either goes "oh--ah!" at the explosions and exotic elements, or hopes 
that high tech will bring meaning to his life.

Regards,
John

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John VanSickle <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> The movie industry's attitude towards the genre indicates that they have 
> absolutely no appreciation of its potential, but merely use it to entice 
> money out of people who will pay to watch anything that features a 
> technological future.

  It all comes down to one's *definition* of "sci-fi". Basically sci-fi
has a wide scale of "hardness", and where people put the line between
"real" sci-fi depends on personal opinion.

  On the "softest" end of sci-fi we have products which take immense amount
of liberties and go absolutely to extremes with everything. We may have
spaceships routinely traveling between *galaxies* in short periods of time,
thousands of alien species (all of which inexplicably speak English as a
common lingua franca), time travel (with or without any regard to any kind
of consistency) and often a varied amount of supernatural phenomena, such
as telepathy. Don't expect even regular physics to be very accurate in these
products.

  On the "hardest" end we have products which take place just a few decades
in the future, and where there's very little, if anything, that current
science wouldn't take for granted or at least very possible. For example
no faster-than-light travel (which means the story is located entirely
inside the Solar system), no aliens, no artificial gravity (unless you
count centrifugal gravity, which of course is completely ok), realistic
spaceships, realistic traveling times, and not even exotic modes of
propulsion (unless it has been seriously proposed by scientists).

  Of course we have all kinds of nuances in-between those two extremes.

  So where is the line between "real" sci-fi and "a bad joke"?

  For example, some people consider the Terminator series to be sci-fi,
even if slightly on the softer half of the scale. Others don't.

  Maybe the definition of "sci-fi" is not so much about the science part,
but about the fiction part, in other words, the storytelling. But that
becomes even harder to define accurately.

  Sometimes I get the feeling that "sci-fi purists" consider "true sci-fi"
only those stories which are really obscure and next to incomprehensible,
a bit like an artist who thinks that "true art" is something that a regular
person cannot understand. Of course the problem with this that this kind of
abstract storytelling doesn't sell, so why would movie companies even bother
to try making them?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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I kinda enjoyed it even though it was pretty predictable, perhaps because of
"2001" heritage:  lone guy on space with an AI, something's gonna break.  The
main point of tension was that for the most part it was not known if the AI was
evil or not.

It also draws from "Blade Runner":  the older clone seems to deteriorate
rapidly, which suggests they got a short time limit to their lives akin to those
of the replicants.  This was never explained in the movie though.  Another
possible explanation:  radiation from being out there for too much time?  But he
was on his gear...

It was kinda obvious he was a clone even from before he met the other guy:
edited recordings, memory issues akin to memory implants.  At first I thought
it'd be another horror-in-space like in "Event Horizon", but it rapidly became
obvious it was all about clones and evil corporations.  Even the AI showed up
less...

For some reason it was still enjoyable though.  Perhaps low expectations?

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Warp wrote:
>   Maybe the definition of "sci-fi" is not so much about the science part,
> but about the fiction part, in other words, the storytelling. But that
> becomes even harder to define accurately.

I know I've said this before, but I usually define sci-fi as needing to be 
about the science and technology rather than the personalities. An 
exploration of "what would the world be like if this science were 
available." If you can tell essentially the same story without the science 
element, it isn't sci-fi.

In the case of Moon, you would have a very hard time telling the story 
without the cloning aspect. Avatar, on the other hand, is Pocohantas in 
space, so it doesn't really count as sci-fi in my book.

It's a little easier to figure out with books and such than it is with 
movies, unless it's really extreme.

I haven't decided how I feel about fantasy that's consistent and the story 
is about the fantastic element. Something like "Master of the Five Magics" 
seemed very sci-fi'ish to me, even though the story was about the apprentice 
learning the "technologies" of all five types of magic.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Eiffel - The language that lets you specify exactly
    that the code does what you think it does, even if
    it doesn't do what you wanted.

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> I know I've said this before, but I usually define sci-fi as needing to be 
> about the science and technology rather than the personalities. An 
> exploration of "what would the world be like if this science were 
> available." If you can tell essentially the same story without the science 
> element, it isn't sci-fi.

  There's a difference between not being good sci-fi and not being sci-fi
at all. Just because the storytelling doesn't rely heavily on the sci-fi
elements doesn't mean that story is not sci-fi. You might argue it's poor
sci-fi (because the sci-fi part is more or less just decoration), but it's
quite a stretch to say that it's not sci-fi at all.

  If the story told by an action movie could be quite well told in a story
belonging to a different genre (such as film noir), that doesn't make the
movie less of an action movie. It might make the story more detached from
the genre, but it doesn't destroy the genre per se. Likewise with sci-fi:
Just because the story doesn't rely on the science fiction elements doesn't
mean there are no science fiction elements. If there are, then it can be
considered a sci-fi story. (Whether it's a *good* story of that genre is
a matter of opinion.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:4c150d75@news.povray.org...
> John VanSickle <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:

>   For example, some people consider the Terminator series to be sci-fi,
> even if slightly on the softer half of the scale. Others don't.

I don't mind speculative sci-fi, where science and technology goes
explicitly far beyond present and even the plausible. Terminator may be soft
on the sci part in that respect, but it's at least not horribly wrong. I
don't have a problem with time travel, FTL... etc. But communicating FTL,
when such technology is not explicitly given or deducible, is simply wrong.
Not accounting differences between moon and earth gravity, when artificial
gravity is not explicitly specified and really infeasible given the
timeline, is plain wrong. I can live with sound in space, for it's not hard
to imagine an observer shift, but how do we explain away these other obvious
and lazy blunders? Further, making people and corporations behave contrary
to common sense in order to introduce a plot, is lazy and wrong.

>   Sometimes I get the feeling that "sci-fi purists" consider "true sci-fi"
> only those stories which are really obscure and next to incomprehensible,

I don't have a problem with Dali's clocks. It's a different premise,
different context than realism. I can buy that. But if some artist is
claiming to be drawing a realistic clock but fumbles and places both the
hour and minute hand at exactly 6 o'clock, for no good artistic reason, that
would ruin the painting.

> a bit like an artist who thinks that "true art" is something that a
regular
> person cannot understand. Of course the problem with this that this kind
of
> abstract storytelling doesn't sell, so why would movie companies even
bother
> to try making them?

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