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Just saw this. More like Bad Astra.
Two guys sitting in my row left an hour or so into it and never came back.
The gap between the quality of sci-fi novels (@liu_cixin, @nealstephenson pre-Fall, Kim Stanley Robinson) and sci-fi movies remains enormous. https://t.co/staDxE2oee
— David Pinsen (@dpinsen) September 29, 2019
I didn’t hate Ad Astra, but it was extremely forgettable. I’ve barely thought about it at all in the week since I saw it.
Ad Astra was like if 2001 and Apocalypse Now were mashed up with Star Wars, but then it didn’t come as a surprise at the end that Colonel Kurtz/The Monolith is Captain Willard’s/The Killer Monkey’s father because every single character in the movie had already mentioned it to the hero two or three times each.
Remember how charismatic Brad Pitt is in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? Well, for Ad Astra the director must have told Brad to just do the opposite of everything Tarantino had him do. Instead of being cool, for example, he should try hard to act uncool. Instead of flashing his million dollar smile, he should appear vaguely depressed. “Try to give the audience the impression that you are distracted by an annoying canker sore.”
I did read the Chinese hard science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu that was originally published in Chinese in 2006 and translated to English in 2014. It was a little difficult to follow at first because all the characters with Chinese names and similar personalities started sounding to me like a Little Richard song: Yang Wang Ding Dong! But eventually I got squared away and enjoyed the book a lot.
It’s kind of a detective story like another large-scale alien encounter novel, Niven and Pournelle’s 1973 The Mote in God’s Eye, although that classic was more biologically/ecologically sophisticated. The aliens in this one aren’t described much at all other than that they can dehydrate themselves to survive a Chaotic Era in their solar system and then rehydrate again when a Stable Era comes around. (The stereotypically Chinese aspects of the author’s imagination add interest.) I won’t describe the plot for fear of giving away twists.
If you don’t expect too much literariness, it’s very good. It’s a little like Andy Weir’s The Martian in the sense of a smart engineer-type coming up with a really good idea for a sci-fi novel and then executing well. There are two more installments in the trilogy that I haven’t read. The Chinese shot a film of the novel a few years ago but it has never been released, perhaps due to low quality. On the other hand, the Chinese film industry is opaque to outsiders so who knows what is going on.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
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French
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Hebrew
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Persian
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Here’s some good astronomy.
That sounded like a less good Slowdive circa 1994.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ylunl72PyEReplies: @Jenner Ickham Errican
https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/aoc%20chakr.jpgReplies: @Kronos, @Neoconned
How can something from the Solar System “threaten the universe”? Universe be like “fuck you! here is a supernova, deal with it!”
Anyway, the problem with SciFi movies is that for us greybeards we have seen it all before. The storyline is mostly known, nowadays may even have fatter hints to keep the somewhat slower audiences updated. Music is known. Compared the relatively pedestrian sets of 2001 aesthetics are much much better of course. But I can get good graphics from games if I find time (rare!), games have interactivity *and* can mash up known tropes into new rearrangements that do not have to please a large audience or the urban market (and pussyhattisms/bluehairity/fatassfirmation is still non-prevalent).
In the end, info about the Real World and how to marginally manage it are more rewarding (And do I see the 2nd edition of “Reinforcement Learning” from MIT Press? Buy or not? Hmm….)
I would rather watch a documentary about Apollo 11 or Pluto Fast Flyby and quietly chuckle about the post-Y2K Church of the Moon Hoax self-abasement activism.
(For example, I wanted to check out Observation (trailer, in which you actually play the station AI for once; but it’s an exclusive for the Epic Platform for now, so later maybe.)
P.S. nit
“as if”. Steve, stay away from Valley Girls!
Also, why is Commander Adama in the movie?
Ok, where is my coffee? Ah, here it is..
That’s a good one. Maybe add youwannatouchmyhairdontyou.
Presumably the queers were in Hollyweird all along, but civilized social and cultural mores reigned them in from continually beating us over the head with their pathology until this last generation.
It shows this really isn't "all about the money", because while there's a queer audience, there can not be money in queering up everything. A good number of normal guys--like myself--hit this and just hit the off button. And that shows up in any stats on eyeballs.Replies: @Mr. Anon
Lorne Greene is still working?Replies: @Anonymous, @MEH 0910
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/1033614892694167552?s=20
The only mildly clever bit of site design in Ad Astra was a sign on a wall on Mars with a help number for people with drug problems, the sort that you'd see on an industrial work site.Replies: @Daniel Williams, @Buzz Mohawk, @Mr. Blank
It would have been much better without the voiceover and pointless action sequences in the first half.
Based on Steve’s description of Pitt’s performance, I’ll maintain my position that Pitt is a much better second man than he is a lead.
The movie’s marketing imagery reminded me of Interstellar, but I don’t really have an interest in seeing it.
I heard a radio commercial for this movie and so thought – “Ed Astra” is a strange name for a movie. Sort of of like “John Carter”, and I imagine it will bomb just as hard.
Sci-fi is pretty much for incels and effeminate homosexuals, right?
The way that the book frankly deals with the Cultural Revolution was surprising to me. The book itself had too many off planet chapters that were just boring. The stuff in China was O.K.
OT
Ann Althouse has a post on the scissors-dreadlock story.
Here is a girl whose name and picture should not be in the newspaper
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2019/09/here-is-girl-whose-name-and-picture.html
— Like Steve she thought the girl shouldn’t be named, and went so far as not to blog the story until it ended up in the New York Times, rendering any blogger name censorship silly.
— She thinks Mrs. Pence should not be mentioned either.
— She notes that most versions of the story treat it as confirmed, but the Times at least qualifies every claim properly.
— Commenters at Ann’s more mainstream site are not that different than here on this topic.
— Steve gets namechecked in comments and there’s a link to one of his Let’s Talk Hair posts.
— It’s remarkable to be how virtually all of her commenters figure it’s a hoax. I guess hate hoax awareness are now more mainstream.
— As I pointed out in a comment here, “nappy” is a suspicious word to put in the mouth of young, white boys.
— The non-national nature of the story is mentioned.
— A commenter notes the geometrically, anatomically unlikeliness of how she describes the encounter.
— Lack of witnesses noted (but nobody has mentioned that the boys themselves have not been confirmed as existing, i.e., did she blame three specific boys by name and have they been talked to? It’s really fuzzy. There’s been no “the boys have been asked to stay home pending an investigation” or anything. So are there three actual boys, or three mini Haven Monahans?)
— Their weird possession of scissors was mentioned by commenters.
— Commenters mention their own botched attempts at haircuts at that age.
Even watching the trailer is a waste of time!
A Parkinson’s Now.
They totally dropped the thing about how Brad Pitt’s character always keeps his heart rate below 80. For a second I thought they were gonna go somewhere wild with that. Like —I read The Three Body Problem, like that somehow Pitt _was_ his father out in Neptune, or that his father was controlling part of him and keeping him cool under stress all the way from Neptune by some quantum means. But nah. Nothing. Total coincidence that the son of Space Colonel Kurtz is the coolest MF on the planet. Meaningless.
I think it was generational programming to encourage Boomers to retire and Gen X to stay cool and self-sacrificial.
Also note how Pitt and Arwen had no children.
OT
There’s a GoFundMe seeking $10,000 to aid her in her psychological recovery:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/34t65-help
Help 12 Year Old Amari Recover From Assault
$1,155 raised of $10,000 goal
G0t up really early the other day to take the trash out, because I forgot the night before.
Orion was right there in the sky above. That means winter is coming.
Better than any stupid movie. (But maybe not as good as a great one.) Instead of going to see Ad Astra, I think I’ll just get up early again and go outside.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2I/BorisovReplies: @AnotherDad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXeBhFzqzfYReplies: @Kronos
Personally, whenever I hear anything that reminds me of “ding dang yong” I think of Ministry, but perhaps that’s a generational thing.
Gay.
Gay.
Gay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6k4-S4HlHkReplies: @jimmyriddle, @The Alarmist, @Reg Cæsar, @Bubba, @Kronos
So, is Shoegaze making a comeback?
That sounded like a less good Slowdive circa 1994.
http://whenthesunhitsblog.blogspot.comThe bands are in different categories/weight classes.
Men I Trust has a stripped-down “twee” dreampop lo-fi spareness compared to heavily layered, often booming, resounding ‘90s Slowdive. In general, the emotional register is quite different: present/cute vs. transcending/deep. Slowdive’s eponymous 2017 album can be considered dreampop, but is much more sonically complex than bands like Men I Trust. Slowdive is in a class by itself. On-topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0LIO138Z-AReplies: @Neoconned
I’ve yet to encounter a modern, mainstream SF epic with the same narrative arc and story as Fallout: New Vegas.
Is it worth going to see in the theater or should I wait for Redbox?
I disliked the movie’s aesthetic. I wanted some hardcore sci-fi as in The Martian, but I got something like Blade Runner 2049, especially in the Mars base.
There were also some things that did not make sense (including the premise) and suspended my disbelief. It could have been a good movie, but it wasn’t. The only saving grace was the fact that I went to see it in a 4DX cinema and the seats really jolted me around, but Gravity would have been an even better experience.
I don't get the bashing of Blade Runner 2049 (akshully 2017). It's a brilliant and beautiful film. And yes, I'm a total Blade Runner (1982) nerd. Despite Kabal asset George Clooney's presence, Gravity (2013) was a thrilling tale of survival in the most inhospitable environment. Though I'm glad I didn't see it in super-duper 4DX cinema -- buckets of upchuck would have ensued.Replies: @Romanian, @BB753
If you liked The Three-Body Problem, you would probably like its sequel The Dark Forest, which scales up the whiz-bang ideas of the first novel.
I’ve actually read the Three Body trilogy, and seen AD ASTRA at the cinema.
I don’t have much to add, however. Your thoughts largely mirror my own.
I will say there was one scene in that movie which makes me hope the director will consider trying his hand at a horror film at some point in the future. Much “scarier” than any scene to appear in most actual horror films in recent years,
The plot summary on Wikipedia sounds absolutely awful.
Orion was right there in the sky above. That means winter is coming.
Better than any stupid movie. (But maybe not as good as a great one.) Instead of going to see Ad Astra, I think I'll just get up early again and go outside.
https://amazingsky.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/orion-feb-2-11-50mm-5dii.jpgReplies: @Realist, @El Dato, @MEH 0910, @Father O'Hara
Are you an amateur astronomer?
Dang. Maybe I won’t go see Ad Astra now.
The sequels to the Three Body Problem are good and worth reading. But the last book of the trilogy ends on a down note.
And I had the same thoughts regarding the names of the characters!
Anyway, the problem with SciFi movies is that for us greybeards we have seen it all before. The storyline is mostly known, nowadays may even have fatter hints to keep the somewhat slower audiences updated. Music is known. Compared the relatively pedestrian sets of 2001 aesthetics are much much better of course. But I can get good graphics from games if I find time (rare!), games have interactivity *and* can mash up known tropes into new rearrangements that do not have to please a large audience or the urban market (and pussyhattisms/bluehairity/fatassfirmation is still non-prevalent).
In the end, info about the Real World and how to marginally manage it are more rewarding (And do I see the 2nd edition of "Reinforcement Learning" from MIT Press? Buy or not? Hmm....)
I would rather watch a documentary about Apollo 11 or Pluto Fast Flyby and quietly chuckle about the post-Y2K Church of the Moon Hoax self-abasement activism.
(For example, I wanted to check out Observation (trailer, in which you actually play the station AI for once; but it's an exclusive for the Epic Platform for now, so later maybe.)
P.S. nit"as if". Steve, stay away from Valley Girls!
Also, why is Commander Adama in the movie?
Ok, where is my coffee? Ah, here it is..Replies: @Alfa158, @AnotherDad, @SunBakedSuburb, @Dave Pinsen
pussyhattisms/bluehairity/fatassfirmation
That’s a good one. Maybe add youwannatouchmyhairdontyou.
BTW, they played an Ad Astra trailer when we went to see Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. (Of course they did. It’s Brad Pitt™ after all.) It looked really interesting except for the fact that there was nothing at all in that preview to give any clue as to the plot or what the whole thing was about.
So, we were left with what is good enough for plenty of people: “Wow that’s gonna be cool!”
Not good enough for us, though, and now that our favorite movie reviewer has clued us in, not good enough at all.
BTW II: One man who solved a real Three Body Problem was named Richard Arenstorf. He was the mathematician who solved the problem necessary to get men to the Moon and back.
It’s amazing what people could do with less than what you have in your “smart” phone.
Lot, Jack D et al, go and wet your incontinence pants.Replies: @Medvedev
Orion was right there in the sky above. That means winter is coming.
Better than any stupid movie. (But maybe not as good as a great one.) Instead of going to see Ad Astra, I think I'll just get up early again and go outside.
https://amazingsky.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/orion-feb-2-11-50mm-5dii.jpgReplies: @Realist, @El Dato, @MEH 0910, @Father O'Hara
Plus, we have our 2nd confirmed interstellar visitor now infalling: Comet Borisov:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2I/Borisov
“The Three Body Problem” is quite good. The part about the Cultural Revolution is scarily relevant to Americans today.
Other than Larry Mcmurtry’s movies, because he write the scripts as well as the novels, has there been a movie as good as the book? Some have been good, but often they’re different than the book. Sometimes, (Starship Troopers), the only thing in common is a title and some character names. Dean Koontz’s Servants of Twilight, they followed the book religiously until the end, thus ruining the work they did. So, any movies where they followed the book, and the movie was good?
*Leaving aside the fact that Bogie looks nothing like Sam Spade
I am sure there are many others. I remember a French Madame Bovary so faithful to the book it was EVEN MORE BORING.
A better question is why some films can never even get close to the stories they were adapted from. For instance, every single book of Edgar Rice Burroughs is completely butchered, what is the deal with that? I mean come on, we can't get one decent Synthetic Men of Mars, Back to the Stone Age, Tarzan and the City of Gold?
The movie version of “L.A. Confidential” is better as a stand-alone story. It differs from the book, especially toward the end. The story from the book is tied into a series of other novels. The novel is better when read in conjunction with the other novels in the series, but the movie is better if you just look at it as a stand-alone work.
I bet though there are a fair number of movies where the movie is better than the book because the book isn't that great.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Richard_F._Arenstorf.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Three-body_Problem_Animation_with_COM.gif
It's amazing what people could do with less than what you have in your "smart" phone.Replies: @Lurker, @The Alarmist, @Verymuchalive, @anonymous coward, @Kronos, @Alfa158
Are you sure, he doesn’t look like a black lady?
What would a list of the best SF movies look like……Some films that come to mind:
2001 (Of course)
Seconds (Perhaps the best SF medical horror film ever made)
Forbidden Planet (Brilliant music and set designs)
Stalker (I like it better than Solaris)
A Clockwork Orange
Primer (Ultimate time travel movie)
Upstream Color (Uncompromising SF)
I would add:
The Forbin Project
The Andromeda Strain
Logan's Run
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
The Arrival
PaycheckReplies: @syonredux, @The Germ Theory of Disease
I think there are some great movies to be made--with good writing--on the destruction immigration is imposing on people, communities, nations. Some really exciting speculative ones on possible future civil wars it starts in white nations.
Of course, there are great movies to be made on the destruction--personal and communal--wrought by, welfarism, feminism--female careerism, sluttism, divorce rape, single motherhood--homo-mania, transgenderism ... pretty much anything contemporary liberalism is imposing on us.
And I'm surprised no anime movies have been mentioned. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence was pretty good.
Stalker
La Jetée
Blade Runner
The Face of Another
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Castle in the Sky
THX 1138
TRON: Legacy
Alphaville
Solaris
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
eXistenZ
Videodrome
A Clockwork Orange
Planet of the Apes
TRON
Dead Ringers
Jurassic Park
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
Metropolis
Akira
The Terminator
The Thing
Zardoz
The Matrix Revolutions
Minority Report
Sunshine
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones
Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Siegel
Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Kaufman
Body Snatchers - Ferrara
Alien³
Fahrenheit 451
Alien
Alien: Resurrection
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
Galaxy Quest
Mars Attacks!
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
A Scanner Darkly
Inception
Being John Malkovich
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Looper
The Hunger Games
The Fifth Element
Star Wars
Open Your Eyes
Stepford Wives
Anyway, the problem with SciFi movies is that for us greybeards we have seen it all before. The storyline is mostly known, nowadays may even have fatter hints to keep the somewhat slower audiences updated. Music is known. Compared the relatively pedestrian sets of 2001 aesthetics are much much better of course. But I can get good graphics from games if I find time (rare!), games have interactivity *and* can mash up known tropes into new rearrangements that do not have to please a large audience or the urban market (and pussyhattisms/bluehairity/fatassfirmation is still non-prevalent).
In the end, info about the Real World and how to marginally manage it are more rewarding (And do I see the 2nd edition of "Reinforcement Learning" from MIT Press? Buy or not? Hmm....)
I would rather watch a documentary about Apollo 11 or Pluto Fast Flyby and quietly chuckle about the post-Y2K Church of the Moon Hoax self-abasement activism.
(For example, I wanted to check out Observation (trailer, in which you actually play the station AI for once; but it's an exclusive for the Epic Platform for now, so later maybe.)
P.S. nit"as if". Steve, stay away from Valley Girls!
Also, why is Commander Adama in the movie?
Ok, where is my coffee? Ah, here it is..Replies: @Alfa158, @AnotherDad, @SunBakedSuburb, @Dave Pinsen
And homomania. Apparently the “no it’s the gay Jews” people have decided that we straight people must have queers, queers kissing, queers pawing each more and more shoved in our face 24-7-365. Something that just elicts disgust from normal men. (Yes, i take myself as normative in this regard.)
Presumably the queers were in Hollyweird all along, but civilized social and cultural mores reigned them in from continually beating us over the head with their pathology until this last generation.
It shows this really isn’t “all about the money”, because while there’s a queer audience, there can not be money in queering up everything. A good number of normal guys–like myself–hit this and just hit the off button. And that shows up in any stats on eyeballs.
Orion was right there in the sky above. That means winter is coming.
Better than any stupid movie. (But maybe not as good as a great one.) Instead of going to see Ad Astra, I think I'll just get up early again and go outside.
https://amazingsky.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/orion-feb-2-11-50mm-5dii.jpgReplies: @Realist, @El Dato, @MEH 0910, @Father O'Hara
Hercules (2/12) Movie CLIP – Hercules Fights a Bear (1983) HD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6k4-S4HlHkReplies: @jimmyriddle, @The Alarmist, @Reg Cæsar, @Bubba, @Kronos
Wow, where did they find that antique?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Richard_F._Arenstorf.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Three-body_Problem_Animation_with_COM.gif
It's amazing what people could do with less than what you have in your "smart" phone.Replies: @Lurker, @The Alarmist, @Verymuchalive, @anonymous coward, @Kronos, @Alfa158
Where to locate the sound stage? What do you think is really at Area 51?
As a hard SF fan, movies as a medium are, by there nature, not going to work well.
For what Hollywood spent on Starship Troopers, they could have been tactically true to Heinlein. Instead we got a camp comedy – basic plot and politics from the book with Hollywood adding breasts and their version of military tactics. (FTL travel with WW1 infantry tactics against big bugs). I’m guessing they nixed the infantrymans’ powered jump/flying armor from the novel because there would have been no battlefield drama between characters.
Sidebar: Avalon Hill had a great Starship Troopers board game in the 80s.
The Sub-Beacon podcast panned Astra more or less like the article. They especially hated the speed, time and g-force ignorance in a movie that promoted itself as a very realistic space travel film. Surprising that Pitt agreed to such incoherence.
The Martian was good. I’m looking forward to more from Andy Wier.
The Expanse series, which is limited to the solar system, is very good hard SF for TV. The books are, of course, better. The TV series also frustrates with regard to small arms / infantry tactics, but what are you gonna do. Of course, if you do the acceleration math on Epstein Drive, you discover that it’s functionally light speed capable. So they should have had probes or settlements on nearby stars.
Having said all THAT, I thought Interstellar was excellent. Yeah, there was some suspension of disbelief, especially for the time travel. But once accepted, the film worked well (up to its weak ending).
https://sanjosebarstool.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/denise-richards-starship-troopers-shower-scene-e73f3.jpgReplies: @Brutusale
The sequels to The Three Body Problem were even better than the first book.
The Mote book was great too. I can only assume the makers of Ad Astra didn’t read it either. Otherwise, why run with such a weak story as they did?
I found the aesthetic I could see from the trailers interesting. It seemed to self-consciously model itself after the 1960s (Like 2001) with a lot of the visions for the space future draw up in the 50s/60s/70s. But I could see that extending into the characters, everybody has Western European surnames let alone non-European. Like the social revolutions of 1968 never really happened, demographically as well as culturally.
I feel like the producers added Ruth Negga (A professional black woman born in Ireland who tries like immigrants in Canada and Sweden to claim about how racist those places were in the 90s when they were the only non-whites in their class. Yes those racist 1990s in the West…) to make up for this. Not only is she not white, she is unattractive and unfriendly.
I haven’t seen it yet but I’m intrigued if there is a reasonable explanation for the space pirates on the moon (They can’t live off the land, they have to have a physical base that can be easily attacked and destroyed from orbit. How is it worth the risk? Where do they get their equipment? How are the resupplied? How do they get into orbit? Surely their launch facility should either be an easy target or their launch vehicle easily found in orbit and outnumbered? Are they running an extortion model or are they stealing something?) on the moon or if it was just a really stupid excuse for a car chase on the moon.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Richard_F._Arenstorf.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Three-body_Problem_Animation_with_COM.gif
It's amazing what people could do with less than what you have in your "smart" phone.Replies: @Lurker, @The Alarmist, @Verymuchalive, @anonymous coward, @Kronos, @Alfa158
Born 1929 Hamburg, Ph.D Mainz 1957. Obviously a Hitlerjungend. Even more despicable than Werner von Braun. How could this despicable man be involved in putting Americans on the moon.
Lot, Jack D et al, go and wet your incontinence pants.
Dave Pinsen: “The gap between the quality of sci-fi novels … and sci-fi movies remains enormous.”
Tinseltown science fiction flicks feature gunplay, violence, and Will Smith. Ideas, the ingredient which makes literary science fiction a mecca for the curious, are foreign objects to the moneymen who decide what gets green-lit. Unfortunately, I’ve had to abandon science fiction literature because it doesn’t mix well with marijuana.
Steve ‘TD’ Sailer: “Ad Astra was like if 2001 and Apocalypse Now were mashed up with Star Wars”
Sounds like a spec script a friend of mine had circulating in the late 1990s, minus the Star Wars. Better send him a message.
The seventys were awesome! If I recall correctly...
Ad Astra is a turd. If your taste runs to “hard” sci-fi of the “alien encounter” sub-genre try Les Johnson’s Mission to Methone .
2001 (Of course)
Seconds (Perhaps the best SF medical horror film ever made)
Forbidden Planet (Brilliant music and set designs)
Stalker (I like it better than Solaris)
A Clockwork Orange
Primer (Ultimate time travel movie)
Upstream Color (Uncompromising SF)Replies: @SunBakedSuburb, @Mr. Anon, @SFG, @Steve in Greensboro, @AnotherDad, @The Germ Theory of Disease, @syonredux, @Alfa158, @dfordoom, @Anonymous
Seconds (1966) is part of the stream of remarkable films that John Frankenheimer directed in the early to mid 1960s. Haven’t seen Tarkovsky’s Stalker yet, but am a big fan of Solaris (1972).
What made MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE special was the blend of comedy and horror. SECONDS, in contrast, is stodgily one-dimensional in execution and meaning. An overdrawn-out episode of TWILIGHT ZONE.
Still, KMG offers superb commentary on the work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj__RjOcTRw
Don’t forget Shamma Lammy Scammy Scammy Anti-White Scam Artist Ding Dong.
https://twitter.com/LivesMorgoth/status/1178211972904562689?s=20
There were also some things that did not make sense (including the premise) and suspended my disbelief. It could have been a good movie, but it wasn't. The only saving grace was the fact that I went to see it in a 4DX cinema and the seats really jolted me around, but Gravity would have been an even better experience.Replies: @SunBakedSuburb, @Dave Pinsen
“but I got something like Blade Runner 2049”
I don’t get the bashing of Blade Runner 2049 (akshully 2017). It’s a brilliant and beautiful film. And yes, I’m a total Blade Runner (1982) nerd. Despite Kabal asset George Clooney’s presence, Gravity (2013) was a thrilling tale of survival in the most inhospitable environment. Though I’m glad I didn’t see it in super-duper 4DX cinema — buckets of upchuck would have ensued.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6k4-S4HlHkReplies: @jimmyriddle, @The Alarmist, @Reg Cæsar, @Bubba, @Kronos
You should have posted this under “Jenner Ickhan Adrian”.
Another movie about Kansas? Didn’t The Wizard of Oz pretty much cover all that can be said?
Anyway, the problem with SciFi movies is that for us greybeards we have seen it all before. The storyline is mostly known, nowadays may even have fatter hints to keep the somewhat slower audiences updated. Music is known. Compared the relatively pedestrian sets of 2001 aesthetics are much much better of course. But I can get good graphics from games if I find time (rare!), games have interactivity *and* can mash up known tropes into new rearrangements that do not have to please a large audience or the urban market (and pussyhattisms/bluehairity/fatassfirmation is still non-prevalent).
In the end, info about the Real World and how to marginally manage it are more rewarding (And do I see the 2nd edition of "Reinforcement Learning" from MIT Press? Buy or not? Hmm....)
I would rather watch a documentary about Apollo 11 or Pluto Fast Flyby and quietly chuckle about the post-Y2K Church of the Moon Hoax self-abasement activism.
(For example, I wanted to check out Observation (trailer, in which you actually play the station AI for once; but it's an exclusive for the Epic Platform for now, so later maybe.)
P.S. nit"as if". Steve, stay away from Valley Girls!
Also, why is Commander Adama in the movie?
Ok, where is my coffee? Ah, here it is..Replies: @Alfa158, @AnotherDad, @SunBakedSuburb, @Dave Pinsen
“why is Commander Adama in the movie?”
Lorne Greene is still working?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7517723/Corrupt-human-tornado-Hillary-Clinton-joined-Chelsea-rails-against-illegitimate-president.html?ico=pushly-notifcation-small
OT:
TOLD YOU HILLARY would run again.
What? Anybody really think they’d let Trump landslide Warren or Biden or lol 1 of the reparations candidates….?
Follow the money….
She wants it, but no one has any interest in her.
SARFT rejects any sort of supernatural explanation for anything, so maybe the aliens in the movie don’t meet the ChiCom standard for realism.
I know nothing of the plot, but SARFT also objects strenuously to even the appearance of the “bad guys” winning, so that could also kill a release until the movie is “corrected”.
https://twitter.com/crystalvisits/status/1134289155242860544?s=21Replies: @SFG
Presumably the queers were in Hollyweird all along, but civilized social and cultural mores reigned them in from continually beating us over the head with their pathology until this last generation.
It shows this really isn't "all about the money", because while there's a queer audience, there can not be money in queering up everything. A good number of normal guys--like myself--hit this and just hit the off button. And that shows up in any stats on eyeballs.Replies: @Mr. Anon
Just in the last couple of years, there has been a proliferation of TV commercials (for everything – cars, insurance, you name it) that feature interracial couples or homosexual couples, often in the latter case, with children. There is clearly an agenda being pushed and – as you say – it has nothing to do with money. It is social programming: a deliberate effort to normalize things that are not normal.
2001 (Of course)
Seconds (Perhaps the best SF medical horror film ever made)
Forbidden Planet (Brilliant music and set designs)
Stalker (I like it better than Solaris)
A Clockwork Orange
Primer (Ultimate time travel movie)
Upstream Color (Uncompromising SF)Replies: @SunBakedSuburb, @Mr. Anon, @SFG, @Steve in Greensboro, @AnotherDad, @The Germ Theory of Disease, @syonredux, @Alfa158, @dfordoom, @Anonymous
I would agree with 2001. And Forbidden Planet was pretty good too. Seconds was a very good movie, but I wouldn’t call it sci-fi. Or Clockwork Orange for that matter – it was more just social satire. I’m not familiar with the others on your list. I’ve heard about Primer and would like to see it.
I would add:
The Forbin Project
The Andromeda Strain
Logan’s Run
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
The Arrival
Paycheck
"Close Encounters" though, while a really excellent movie, isn't a sci-if movie, it is Spielberg's unwitting autobiography.
Think of it: a guy from Nowheresville starts having visions (cinema) and he thinks he's going crazy. Then he meets other people who have the same crazy visions (other movie nuts). Then he discovers there's a whole massive secret organization dedicated to these weird visions, and the visions are real. The secret organization is even headed by... Francois Truffaut! Then he finally says goodbye to Earth and gets on board a spaceship which will take him to the source of the visions (Hollywood).
It's kind of the most heart-felt thing he's ever done.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @syonredux, @Dave Pinsen, @Mr. Anon
.
If Hollywood were to remake “Apocalypse Now” (and they very well might), they probably would make Captain Willard (Marlowe) the son of Colonel (Mr.) Kurtz.
I dislike the personalization in modern movie motives. At the heart of seemingly every story is either 1.) some kind of family drama (the “I am your father” device) or 2.) revenge.
For me, the Star Wars saga instantly turned to crap when Darth Vader revealed himself to be Luke’s father. Not that it was that great anyway.
And revenge is the cheapest, tritest plot device imaginable and has become massively overused.
Tagline: "His accounting methods were... unsound."
OT:
A game I like to play, having learned it here, is how many paragraphs does it take to reveal the true story when the obvious intent is to Blame Whitey.
https://abc13.com/5573573/?sfns=mo&fbclid=IwAR3laLinOtbvlRp7mzN9sW4q7G8c-oGPs9baftdHQmR7hC7iuTT1xtxRVA8
14 paragraphs until they admit that the victim was murdered by another minority. Guarantee less than 5% of readers would even get to that point.
Orion was right there in the sky above. That means winter is coming.
Better than any stupid movie. (But maybe not as good as a great one.) Instead of going to see Ad Astra, I think I'll just get up early again and go outside.
https://amazingsky.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/orion-feb-2-11-50mm-5dii.jpgReplies: @Realist, @El Dato, @MEH 0910, @Father O'Hara
Make sure to put your pants on before you go out. Your body is perhaps not so heavenly.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Richard_F._Arenstorf.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Three-body_Problem_Animation_with_COM.gif
It's amazing what people could do with less than what you have in your "smart" phone.Replies: @Lurker, @The Alarmist, @Verymuchalive, @anonymous coward, @Kronos, @Alfa158
It’s easier to create fake news when people trust the TV blindly.
I thought the “Three Body Problem” was a reference to our friend Ed Buck.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Richard_F._Arenstorf.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Three-body_Problem_Animation_with_COM.gif
It's amazing what people could do with less than what you have in your "smart" phone.Replies: @Lurker, @The Alarmist, @Verymuchalive, @anonymous coward, @Kronos, @Alfa158
They couldn’t get distracted by social media and porn. Also, they didn’t need to worry about “muh diversity” during the first moon landing. (That came later.)
I know nothing of the plot, but SARFT also objects strenuously to even the appearance of the "bad guys" winning, so that could also kill a release until the movie is "corrected".Replies: @Dave Pinsen
This is what I heard when I asked an SF writer who had drinks with Cixin at a convention in China (another SF writer answered).
(Which is what Google Translate gives me for 'development hell'.)
The upcoming short film “Blood Machines” looks a lot better. Looks like a sci fi version of Tarantino’s “Death Proof” Or “Grindhouse.” Also I’m a sucker for good synthwave. (And nudity too.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFlZ6pVtnv0
Apple is the best!Replies: @Kronos, @MEH 0910, @J.Ross
Isn’t that the one where some astronaut is left behind on Mars and the black astrophysicist genius comes up with the rescue solution–no one else could have ever thought of!–using a Chinese rocket, and then the butt-kicking-ex-babe (i.e. middle aged white woman) leads the rescue mission–endangering five more people–and pulls it all off with her personal grit and heroics ….
all costing about a billion dollars to save one guy who had volunteered to go to Mars! … instead of the 100x normal people who could have been saved spending the same money fixing dangerous intersections or arresting and deporting illegal alien drunk drivers.
Yep, I saw that one … ridiculous, ridiculously PC and not even meeting the “great while watching” that a decent movie should reach.
2001 (Of course)
Seconds (Perhaps the best SF medical horror film ever made)
Forbidden Planet (Brilliant music and set designs)
Stalker (I like it better than Solaris)
A Clockwork Orange
Primer (Ultimate time travel movie)
Upstream Color (Uncompromising SF)Replies: @SunBakedSuburb, @Mr. Anon, @SFG, @Steve in Greensboro, @AnotherDad, @The Germ Theory of Disease, @syonredux, @Alfa158, @dfordoom, @Anonymous
The original Blade Runner probably ought to be added in.
Does the 1962 Manchurian Candidate count as SF? The brainwashing/mind control is certainly in advance of what was achievable in the early '60s (Or now, for that matter)....
La Jetée (along with Primer, probably the best low-budget SF film)
Dark City (Covers some of the same territory as The Matrix, but I think that it's the better film)
The Road (superior example of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre)Replies: @Dave Pinsen
2001 (Of course)
Seconds (Perhaps the best SF medical horror film ever made)
Forbidden Planet (Brilliant music and set designs)
Stalker (I like it better than Solaris)
A Clockwork Orange
Primer (Ultimate time travel movie)
Upstream Color (Uncompromising SF)Replies: @SunBakedSuburb, @Mr. Anon, @SFG, @Steve in Greensboro, @AnotherDad, @The Germ Theory of Disease, @syonredux, @Alfa158, @dfordoom, @Anonymous
Does “Dark City” fall into the Science Fiction category? Whether or not it does, it is a wonderful movie. I’ll see your Anne Francis and raise you Jennifer Connelly.
https://www.famousbirthdays.com/headshots/jennifer-connelly-8.jpgReplies: @Stan d Mute
https://twitter.com/crystalvisits/status/1134289155242860544?s=21Replies: @SFG
So it’s in Fāzhǎn dìyù ?
(Which is what Google Translate gives me for ‘development hell’.)
2001 (Of course)
Seconds (Perhaps the best SF medical horror film ever made)
Forbidden Planet (Brilliant music and set designs)
Stalker (I like it better than Solaris)
A Clockwork Orange
Primer (Ultimate time travel movie)
Upstream Color (Uncompromising SF)Replies: @SunBakedSuburb, @Mr. Anon, @SFG, @Steve in Greensboro, @AnotherDad, @The Germ Theory of Disease, @syonredux, @Alfa158, @dfordoom, @Anonymous
Enjoyed reading SciFi when i was an adolescent. And to be fair it’s a good genre to explore a few themes. But most of it is just noise, space opera, escapism. Less interesting than constraint to working with the world we have and had.
I think there are some great movies to be made–with good writing–on the destruction immigration is imposing on people, communities, nations. Some really exciting speculative ones on possible future civil wars it starts in white nations.
Of course, there are great movies to be made on the destruction–personal and communal–wrought by, welfarism, feminism–female careerism, sluttism, divorce rape, single motherhood–homo-mania, transgenderism … pretty much anything contemporary liberalism is imposing on us.
If you sit through the film, you get to join the RAF.
2001 (Of course)
Seconds (Perhaps the best SF medical horror film ever made)
Forbidden Planet (Brilliant music and set designs)
Stalker (I like it better than Solaris)
A Clockwork Orange
Primer (Ultimate time travel movie)
Upstream Color (Uncompromising SF)Replies: @SunBakedSuburb, @Mr. Anon, @SFG, @Steve in Greensboro, @AnotherDad, @The Germ Theory of Disease, @syonredux, @Alfa158, @dfordoom, @Anonymous
I always sort of thought the best sci-fi movie was All the President’s Men.
“and similar personalities”
That’s a problem with hard sci-fi in general, due to being written by nerdy authors with poor social skills.
“Mote” was especially poor in this regard. The ending was also so anti-climatic that I vowed to never read another Niven and Pournelle book again.
Sure…..Although, like Forbidden Planet, its chiefly memorably for its sets and music…..Let’s see, other films that come to mind:
Does the 1962 Manchurian Candidate count as SF? The brainwashing/mind control is certainly in advance of what was achievable in the early ’60s (Or now, for that matter)….
La Jetée (along with Primer, probably the best low-budget SF film)
Dark City (Covers some of the same territory as The Matrix, but I think that it’s the better film)
The Road (superior example of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre)
Brad Pitt does best with male co-stars. Always has. The last time he was even slightly compelling with another grown woman as a co-star was in his breakout movie, Thelma and Louise. He also does well with kids. When he’s alone or with women, he is morose and bland.
Let me put it another way–he’s terrible at romance and introspection. Great at camaraderie and comedy.
OT – is Sarah Jeong, IIRC recently dropped from the editorial board, trying to organise a subscriber boycott of NYT?
“NYT does pay attention to subscriber cancellations. It’s one of the metrics for “outrage” that they take to distinguish between “real” outrage and superficial outrage. What subscribers say can back up dissenting views inside the paper about what it should do and be.”
The popularity of the three body problem novels in china is comforting as a signal that they are more rational than the decadent west but I am not comforted at all by the novel’s merciless and nihilistic power politics creepily combined with childish gender roles and empty interior lives.
The three body sequels are considerably more interesting in their ideas if not the writing.
The Ad Astra reviews made me check out his previous Lost City of Z and despite a few nicely done minutes of jungle adeventure inspired by other good movies the rest was an unbelievably tedious lesson in elementary school political correctnes. I avoided Ad Astra.
I also thought the contrast between the masculine willingness to violate certain taboos in order to survive and the female inability to face up to the harsh decisions had the ring of truth. I'd describe these differences as archetypal rather than 'childish'.
The three body sequels are considerably more interesting in their ideas if not the writing.
The Ad Astra reviews made me check out his previous Lost City of Z and despite a few nicely done minutes of jungle adeventure inspired by other good movies the rest was an unbelievably tedious lesson in elementary school political correctnes. I avoided Ad Astra.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @J, @J James
I only made it part way through Lost City of Z.
Anyway, the problem with SciFi movies is that for us greybeards we have seen it all before. The storyline is mostly known, nowadays may even have fatter hints to keep the somewhat slower audiences updated. Music is known. Compared the relatively pedestrian sets of 2001 aesthetics are much much better of course. But I can get good graphics from games if I find time (rare!), games have interactivity *and* can mash up known tropes into new rearrangements that do not have to please a large audience or the urban market (and pussyhattisms/bluehairity/fatassfirmation is still non-prevalent).
In the end, info about the Real World and how to marginally manage it are more rewarding (And do I see the 2nd edition of "Reinforcement Learning" from MIT Press? Buy or not? Hmm....)
I would rather watch a documentary about Apollo 11 or Pluto Fast Flyby and quietly chuckle about the post-Y2K Church of the Moon Hoax self-abasement activism.
(For example, I wanted to check out Observation (trailer, in which you actually play the station AI for once; but it's an exclusive for the Epic Platform for now, so later maybe.)
P.S. nit"as if". Steve, stay away from Valley Girls!
Also, why is Commander Adama in the movie?
Ok, where is my coffee? Ah, here it is..Replies: @Alfa158, @AnotherDad, @SunBakedSuburb, @Dave Pinsen
What movie since has had better set design than 2001?
The only mildly clever bit of site design in Ad Astra was a sign on a wall on Mars with a help number for people with drug problems, the sort that you’d see on an industrial work site.
There were also some things that did not make sense (including the premise) and suspended my disbelief. It could have been a good movie, but it wasn't. The only saving grace was the fact that I went to see it in a 4DX cinema and the seats really jolted me around, but Gravity would have been an even better experience.Replies: @SunBakedSuburb, @Dave Pinsen
Ad Astra was a broad pastiche. In addition to the Apocalypse Now theme Steve mentioned, it had a couple of nods to 2001 (e.g., the moon base is in the Tycho crater, which was where the monolith was found; the red couch the Mars boss lady sits on looks like it came from the space station lobby in 2001). And it borrowed psych evaluation theme from the Blade Runner sequel, plus some of the lighting effects. It also borrowed a bit in tone from the George Clooney remake of Solaris.
Does the 1962 Manchurian Candidate count as SF? The brainwashing/mind control is certainly in advance of what was achievable in the early '60s (Or now, for that matter)....
La Jetée (along with Primer, probably the best low-budget SF film)
Dark City (Covers some of the same territory as The Matrix, but I think that it's the better film)
The Road (superior example of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre)Replies: @Dave Pinsen
I’d include both Blade Runner movies along with Dark City and 12 Monkeys, which was sort of an expansion of La Jetée, if memory serves. But even with the Blade Runner movies, the story is kind of thin.
GATTACA wasn't a great movie but it's one of the few that afterward I thought, well, I could plausibly see that happening in my lifetime.
I don’t know if the difference is in anything hands-on they do as producers or just in their selection of projects, but I feel like I’m more likely to see a good movie if Tom Cruise rather than Brad Pitt is starring.
However, Pitt's range is considerable. You don't often see Cruise playing a dad, a husband, a loser. There's that funny moment in Ocean's 11 when Topher Grace, Brad Pitt, and George Clooney walk out of an establishment and the girls all mob Grace, because in the movie, he was the star, and Clooney/Pitt faded into the background. Cruise would be hard pressed to sell that. Pitt's played a believable dad on a couple occasions, a dolt, a weird financial genius, and a charismatic leader. Cruise could play the last, reliably, not sure of the rest.
With Pitt, it comes down to the nature of the character. If he can find the zone, he blows Cruise out of the water. If he can't, it's terrible. Cruise is more consistent, but also more limited in range.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgRaI8UPovU
That’s funny.
True. With Pitt, it’s the role.
However, Pitt’s range is considerable. You don’t often see Cruise playing a dad, a husband, a loser. There’s that funny moment in Ocean’s 11 when Topher Grace, Brad Pitt, and George Clooney walk out of an establishment and the girls all mob Grace, because in the movie, he was the star, and Clooney/Pitt faded into the background. Cruise would be hard pressed to sell that. Pitt’s played a believable dad on a couple occasions, a dolt, a weird financial genius, and a charismatic leader. Cruise could play the last, reliably, not sure of the rest.
With Pitt, it comes down to the nature of the character. If he can find the zone, he blows Cruise out of the water. If he can’t, it’s terrible. Cruise is more consistent, but also more limited in range.
Agree, although for whatever reason I never thought of 12 Monkeys as science fiction. While it does involve time travel and bioweapons and whatnot the set design is so far from the usual sci-fi palette that I took that to mean that Terry Gilliam wanted to distance himself from the genre.
GATTACA wasn’t a great movie but it’s one of the few that afterward I thought, well, I could plausibly see that happening in my lifetime.
2001 (Of course)
Seconds (Perhaps the best SF medical horror film ever made)
Forbidden Planet (Brilliant music and set designs)
Stalker (I like it better than Solaris)
A Clockwork Orange
Primer (Ultimate time travel movie)
Upstream Color (Uncompromising SF)Replies: @SunBakedSuburb, @Mr. Anon, @SFG, @Steve in Greensboro, @AnotherDad, @The Germ Theory of Disease, @syonredux, @Alfa158, @dfordoom, @Anonymous
In case anyone is curious as to why no mention was made of things like The Terminator and The Road Warrior , I’m excluding SF films from the list that have strong action elements.
Other sci-fi movies I like:
Moon
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Truman Show
I feel like the producers added Ruth Negga (A professional black woman born in Ireland who tries like immigrants in Canada and Sweden to claim about how racist those places were in the 90s when they were the only non-whites in their class. Yes those racist 1990s in the West...) to make up for this. Not only is she not white, she is unattractive and unfriendly.
I haven't seen it yet but I'm intrigued if there is a reasonable explanation for the space pirates on the moon (They can't live off the land, they have to have a physical base that can be easily attacked and destroyed from orbit. How is it worth the risk? Where do they get their equipment? How are the resupplied? How do they get into orbit? Surely their launch facility should either be an easy target or their launch vehicle easily found in orbit and outnumbered? Are they running an extortion model or are they stealing something?) on the moon or if it was just a really stupid excuse for a car chase on the moon.Replies: @Steve Sailer
No, there isn’t any explanation. There’s just a Moon Buggy chase.
My friends I am advise please avoid scifi book and especial movies. Learn nothing waste of time defacate. Also, you must be careful of movie maker. They take your money never give it back to you.
As a general rule, Tom Cruise vehicles are quality films: good directors, good co-stars, good scripts, etc. Of course, exceptions do exist. The Mummy, for example, was an astonishingly bad film…..and highly derivative of An American Werewolf in London and Lifeforce
I don't get the bashing of Blade Runner 2049 (akshully 2017). It's a brilliant and beautiful film. And yes, I'm a total Blade Runner (1982) nerd. Despite Kabal asset George Clooney's presence, Gravity (2013) was a thrilling tale of survival in the most inhospitable environment. Though I'm glad I didn't see it in super-duper 4DX cinema -- buckets of upchuck would have ensued.Replies: @Romanian, @BB753
I also liked the movie and it had an interesting aesthetic (as did the apparently forgotten Aeon Flux), but I disliked it in Ad Astra which I had expected to have a different aesthetic. I feel that big budgets should be spent on realism and that stylized approaches are useful for people trying to stretch a lower budget. I was very much impressed by The Expanse’s aesthetic, which I felt was perfect. I think there is a market segment of people like me, who want the experience of a future we never had.
2001 (Of course)
Seconds (Perhaps the best SF medical horror film ever made)
Forbidden Planet (Brilliant music and set designs)
Stalker (I like it better than Solaris)
A Clockwork Orange
Primer (Ultimate time travel movie)
Upstream Color (Uncompromising SF)Replies: @SunBakedSuburb, @Mr. Anon, @SFG, @Steve in Greensboro, @AnotherDad, @The Germ Theory of Disease, @syonredux, @Alfa158, @dfordoom, @Anonymous
Ditto on Stalker. I never even noticed how long it was.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Richard_F._Arenstorf.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Three-body_Problem_Animation_with_COM.gif
It's amazing what people could do with less than what you have in your "smart" phone.Replies: @Lurker, @The Alarmist, @Verymuchalive, @anonymous coward, @Kronos, @Alfa158
Very cool.
I just got home from seeing Ad Astra. I enjoyed it.
It had some great action sequences from beginning to end. The aesthetics had a kind of 1960s-NASA feel, unlike The Martian, which felt more 21st century to me. The problem with Ad Astra was it had such a downer vibe, which overwhelmed all the high adventure going on.
I agree with Steve Sailer about Brad Pitt’s performance–like he was vaguely depressed the whole movie. The movie had no sense of humor, no moment of levity, all seriousness all the time. Pitt was this competent soldier and astronaut, a survivor, who does heroic things, but I couldn’t get behind him at any point in the movie. We’re trapped in his mind and have to endure two hours of Freudian father/son psychological nonsense, which made it hard for me to enjoy all the action and intrigue on his journey from Earth to the Moon to Mars to Neptune.
It’s one thing to disobey direct orders and hijack a spaceship. It’s quite another to kill the crew of the ship you hijacked. If I were writing this, my hero wouldn’t have killed innocent crew members who were just doing their jobs and following orders without ill intent. Kinda makes it hard to get behind the hero.
Otherwise, a very good movie, good ending, good message at the end. I’m hoping we see more sci-fi like this with more realistically rendered space travel, zero gravity in space, and more stories told in our Solar System as opposed to people walking around in spaceships like they’re on Earth, warp/hyper drives, laser blasters, humanoid aliens speaking English, Jedi mysticism, etc. I’m hoping Ad Astra and The Martian mark the end of the Star Wars/Star Trek era of sci-fi movies and the beginning of a new era with more realistically portrayed space travel. The movie-making technology exists now for this.
If anyone is interested, I wrote a sci-fi novel called The Forgotten Outpost about a soldier deployed to Saturn’s moon of Titan. I’m looking for feedback. If you’d like to read it, shoot me an email and I’ll send you a free copy on Kindle or in print. My email is [email protected]
Here’s the link to my book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FZLFPLH
Or you can download a free copy of my space opera, Galaxy of Heroes, here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002RL9L96
Lorne Greene is still working?Replies: @Anonymous, @MEH 0910
The Mote book was great too. I can only assume the makers of Ad Astra didn’t read it either. Otherwise, why run with such a weak story as they did?Replies: @Daniel Williams
What’s your take on Fall? I strongly disliked everything that took place in Bitworld, but enjoyed the Meatspace sections almost as much as I liked Seveneves (which I liked quite a bit).
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/1136413943801491456?s=21
Astronaut Roy (Brad! Brad?) is on an ultra-high-priority Mission, he must hie to the launch facility to catch the Mars flight, you’d think Space Command could scrape up a moon flyer (a la 2001) to get him there in one piece especially since the Moon Pirates (“Arrrr!”) are a known hazard, but no, the narrative, such as it is, requires a Close Scrape. Apparently somebody got paid to write this stuff.
OT:
TOLD YOU HILLARY would run again.
What? Anybody really think they'd let Trump landslide Warren or Biden or lol 1 of the reparations candidates....?
Follow the money....Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @AnotherDad
Hillary -and- Chelsea will be on Colbert Monday night. Yet another reason to never watch his show.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/1033614892694167552?s=20
The only mildly clever bit of site design in Ad Astra was a sign on a wall on Mars with a help number for people with drug problems, the sort that you'd see on an industrial work site.Replies: @Daniel Williams, @Buzz Mohawk, @Mr. Blank
I remember being pretty impressed with Seven.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6k4-S4HlHkReplies: @jimmyriddle, @The Alarmist, @Reg Cæsar, @Bubba, @Kronos
“Do these glasses make me look fat or like a astronomical expert? And don’t touch my (European Becky) hair!”
The thing is, she majored in economics. I’m assuming she’s a show within a show to balance Millennial SJWs with the current economic system. (She wouldn’t receive nearly as much publicity if she wasn’t playing ball.) Her persona looks like a Sanders but she’s actually a behind-the-scenes Clinton Democrat.Replies: @Bubba
I've noticed something similar in the UK where white British dudes marry Hindi girls and here it seems white guys will marry ANYTHING but nasty STDs filled whitegirl lib sjw mudsharks.....an exotic Cuban or Somali girl(think Bowie and Iman) is much better than Susie the grievances white girl major who makes excuses about why she wont give you oral sex every other night. These foreign girls at least seem to know how to treat their men.
It had some great action sequences from beginning to end. The aesthetics had a kind of 1960s-NASA feel, unlike The Martian, which felt more 21st century to me. The problem with Ad Astra was it had such a downer vibe, which overwhelmed all the high adventure going on.
I agree with Steve Sailer about Brad Pitt's performance--like he was vaguely depressed the whole movie. The movie had no sense of humor, no moment of levity, all seriousness all the time. Pitt was this competent soldier and astronaut, a survivor, who does heroic things, but I couldn't get behind him at any point in the movie. We're trapped in his mind and have to endure two hours of Freudian father/son psychological nonsense, which made it hard for me to enjoy all the action and intrigue on his journey from Earth to the Moon to Mars to Neptune.
It's one thing to disobey direct orders and hijack a spaceship. It's quite another to kill the crew of the ship you hijacked. If I were writing this, my hero wouldn't have killed innocent crew members who were just doing their jobs and following orders without ill intent. Kinda makes it hard to get behind the hero.
Otherwise, a very good movie, good ending, good message at the end. I'm hoping we see more sci-fi like this with more realistically rendered space travel, zero gravity in space, and more stories told in our Solar System as opposed to people walking around in spaceships like they're on Earth, warp/hyper drives, laser blasters, humanoid aliens speaking English, Jedi mysticism, etc. I'm hoping Ad Astra and The Martian mark the end of the Star Wars/Star Trek era of sci-fi movies and the beginning of a new era with more realistically portrayed space travel. The movie-making technology exists now for this.
If anyone is interested, I wrote a sci-fi novel called The Forgotten Outpost about a soldier deployed to Saturn's moon of Titan. I'm looking for feedback. If you'd like to read it, shoot me an email and I'll send you a free copy on Kindle or in print. My email is [email protected]
Here's the link to my book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FZLFPLH
Or you can download a free copy of my space opera, Galaxy of Heroes, here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002RL9L96Replies: @Steve Sailer, @S. Anonyia
I thought that for a big budget Brad Pitt movie they should have shown the effects of lighter gravity on people walking indoors on the moon and Mars.
+!. The young Jennifer Connelly was a complete babe. Then she had a bunch of plastic surgery and now looks like a bulimia victim.
Have been since I was a boy. Had my own 6″ clock-driven Newtonian reflector at 7,800 feet growing up. Sold it when I finally let go of the old house a few years ago. Where I live now, the best I get is the bright stuff.
I would add:
The Forbin Project
The Andromeda Strain
Logan's Run
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
The Arrival
PaycheckReplies: @syonredux, @The Germ Theory of Disease
I would. The surgical/medical procedures that they use to turn John Randolph into Rock Hudson are far in advance of anything that we have today, let alone the 1960s.
There’s a rich history of satirical SF: Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants, the “Laputa” section of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker series, Robert Sheckley’s Journey Beyond Tomorrow, etc. And the science fiction elements in Clockwork (the near-future setting, the invented slang, the Ludovico technique itself) are quite strong.
Primer‘s very good. Be warned: Unlike most SF films, this one does not hold your hand and spell things out for you.
I would add:
The Forbin Project
The Andromeda Strain
Logan's Run
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
The Arrival
PaycheckReplies: @syonredux, @The Germ Theory of Disease
Yeah, I kind of thought “Arrival” was the best mainstream sci-fi movie in a long time.
“Close Encounters” though, while a really excellent movie, isn’t a sci-if movie, it is Spielberg’s unwitting autobiography.
Think of it: a guy from Nowheresville starts having visions (cinema) and he thinks he’s going crazy. Then he meets other people who have the same crazy visions (other movie nuts). Then he discovers there’s a whole massive secret organization dedicated to these weird visions, and the visions are real. The secret organization is even headed by… Francois Truffaut! Then he finally says goodbye to Earth and gets on board a spaceship which will take him to the source of the visions (Hollywood).
It’s kind of the most heart-felt thing he’s ever done.
https://youtu.be/o-uGQYEN4jc
Low gravity must be a much harder effect to pull off than zero gravity, since no one even seems to attempt it. First Man didn’t either.
Also, Ad Astra ignored another effect of low gravity that Clarke and Robinson describe in their books: people who grow up in it are tall. The boss lady who was born on Mars should have been played by a willowy model type.
For what Hollywood spent on Starship Troopers, they could have been tactically true to Heinlein. Instead we got a camp comedy - basic plot and politics from the book with Hollywood adding breasts and their version of military tactics. (FTL travel with WW1 infantry tactics against big bugs). I'm guessing they nixed the infantrymans' powered jump/flying armor from the novel because there would have been no battlefield drama between characters.
Sidebar: Avalon Hill had a great Starship Troopers board game in the 80s.
The Sub-Beacon podcast panned Astra more or less like the article. They especially hated the speed, time and g-force ignorance in a movie that promoted itself as a very realistic space travel film. Surprising that Pitt agreed to such incoherence.
The Martian was good. I'm looking forward to more from Andy Wier.
The Expanse series, which is limited to the solar system, is very good hard SF for TV. The books are, of course, better. The TV series also frustrates with regard to small arms / infantry tactics, but what are you gonna do. Of course, if you do the acceleration math on Epstein Drive, you discover that it's functionally light speed capable. So they should have had probes or settlements on nearby stars.
Having said all THAT, I thought Interstellar was excellent. Yeah, there was some suspension of disbelief, especially for the time travel. But once accepted, the film worked well (up to its weak ending).Replies: @syonredux, @Mr. Anon
Well, on the positive side, some of the breasts belonged to a young Dina Meyer:
Yeah, off-hand, I can’t think of a movie that depicts low-G. In The Martian, for example, characters walk around on Mars ( 38% Earth gravity) in exactly the same fashion that they do on Earth.
It had some great action sequences from beginning to end. The aesthetics had a kind of 1960s-NASA feel, unlike The Martian, which felt more 21st century to me. The problem with Ad Astra was it had such a downer vibe, which overwhelmed all the high adventure going on.
I agree with Steve Sailer about Brad Pitt's performance--like he was vaguely depressed the whole movie. The movie had no sense of humor, no moment of levity, all seriousness all the time. Pitt was this competent soldier and astronaut, a survivor, who does heroic things, but I couldn't get behind him at any point in the movie. We're trapped in his mind and have to endure two hours of Freudian father/son psychological nonsense, which made it hard for me to enjoy all the action and intrigue on his journey from Earth to the Moon to Mars to Neptune.
It's one thing to disobey direct orders and hijack a spaceship. It's quite another to kill the crew of the ship you hijacked. If I were writing this, my hero wouldn't have killed innocent crew members who were just doing their jobs and following orders without ill intent. Kinda makes it hard to get behind the hero.
Otherwise, a very good movie, good ending, good message at the end. I'm hoping we see more sci-fi like this with more realistically rendered space travel, zero gravity in space, and more stories told in our Solar System as opposed to people walking around in spaceships like they're on Earth, warp/hyper drives, laser blasters, humanoid aliens speaking English, Jedi mysticism, etc. I'm hoping Ad Astra and The Martian mark the end of the Star Wars/Star Trek era of sci-fi movies and the beginning of a new era with more realistically portrayed space travel. The movie-making technology exists now for this.
If anyone is interested, I wrote a sci-fi novel called The Forgotten Outpost about a soldier deployed to Saturn's moon of Titan. I'm looking for feedback. If you'd like to read it, shoot me an email and I'll send you a free copy on Kindle or in print. My email is [email protected]
Here's the link to my book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FZLFPLH
Or you can download a free copy of my space opera, Galaxy of Heroes, here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002RL9L96Replies: @Steve Sailer, @S. Anonyia
I liked Ad Astra too, though 2 things didn’t make sense: a. Why the moon buggy pirates (other than a shoehorned action sequence) and b. Why is leaking antimatter in space a bigger danger than megatons of floating radiation? So the science wasn’t that great.
But overall it seemed like a more realistic vision of the future than in other sci-fi movies. The footage around Neptune was beautiful. I also enjoyed the movie’s morose & philosophical side, though I got tired of his flashbacks. I enjoyed the mystery of speculating what was really going on, though the truth was a bit of a letdown once it revealed, which I guess was kind of the point, because it mirrored the journeys of the 2 main characters. I thought the message was good, & not overused in film.
It made Interstellar look pretty hokey.
Also who cares if Brad Pitt isn’t cool in one movie? Flamboyant Buzz Aldrin aside, are astronauts generally that cool?
https://youtu.be/jLHhr8Xc4AMReplies: @The Wild Geese Howard
Hopefully you didn’t miss out on 2015’s Turbo Kid:
Apple is the best!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1nd8WPZO_c&feature=youtu.be&t=1112
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzS1Pqlf0k8
For what Hollywood spent on Starship Troopers, they could have been tactically true to Heinlein. Instead we got a camp comedy - basic plot and politics from the book with Hollywood adding breasts and their version of military tactics. (FTL travel with WW1 infantry tactics against big bugs). I'm guessing they nixed the infantrymans' powered jump/flying armor from the novel because there would have been no battlefield drama between characters.
Sidebar: Avalon Hill had a great Starship Troopers board game in the 80s.
The Sub-Beacon podcast panned Astra more or less like the article. They especially hated the speed, time and g-force ignorance in a movie that promoted itself as a very realistic space travel film. Surprising that Pitt agreed to such incoherence.
The Martian was good. I'm looking forward to more from Andy Wier.
The Expanse series, which is limited to the solar system, is very good hard SF for TV. The books are, of course, better. The TV series also frustrates with regard to small arms / infantry tactics, but what are you gonna do. Of course, if you do the acceleration math on Epstein Drive, you discover that it's functionally light speed capable. So they should have had probes or settlements on nearby stars.
Having said all THAT, I thought Interstellar was excellent. Yeah, there was some suspension of disbelief, especially for the time travel. But once accepted, the film worked well (up to its weak ending).Replies: @syonredux, @Mr. Anon
Not even WWI tactics. They fought the bugs by getting in point-blank range and blasting them with machineguns that fired more ammo than they could have even carried. They may as well have used battle-axes.
This was something severely lacking in WWI (Grand Offensive Warfare, 20,000 lives per mile) and Vietnam (Shoot and hide ambushes.) The general populace in the book don’t vote and thus limits the pressure on the military for grand bloody battles and non-existing decisive victories. Bad commanders are effectively removed and not conveniently “kicked-upstairs” and thus cause further trouble on a larger macro-scale.
"Close Encounters" though, while a really excellent movie, isn't a sci-if movie, it is Spielberg's unwitting autobiography.
Think of it: a guy from Nowheresville starts having visions (cinema) and he thinks he's going crazy. Then he meets other people who have the same crazy visions (other movie nuts). Then he discovers there's a whole massive secret organization dedicated to these weird visions, and the visions are real. The secret organization is even headed by... Francois Truffaut! Then he finally says goodbye to Earth and gets on board a spaceship which will take him to the source of the visions (Hollywood).
It's kind of the most heart-felt thing he's ever done.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @syonredux, @Dave Pinsen, @Mr. Anon
I wasn’t referring to the recent A-movie Arrival (which I didn’t see), but to the B-movie The Arrival from 1996 with Charlie Sheen. It was actually pretty good
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1Gqjjq1nic&feature=youtu.be&t=546
"Close Encounters" though, while a really excellent movie, isn't a sci-if movie, it is Spielberg's unwitting autobiography.
Think of it: a guy from Nowheresville starts having visions (cinema) and he thinks he's going crazy. Then he meets other people who have the same crazy visions (other movie nuts). Then he discovers there's a whole massive secret organization dedicated to these weird visions, and the visions are real. The secret organization is even headed by... Francois Truffaut! Then he finally says goodbye to Earth and gets on board a spaceship which will take him to the source of the visions (Hollywood).
It's kind of the most heart-felt thing he's ever done.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @syonredux, @Dave Pinsen, @Mr. Anon
I thought that you were going to argue that it was an SF-version of Spielberg’s parent’s divorce….Interesting anecdote, the scene where the kid starts yelling at his Dad and calling him a “crybaby” was based on a real incident from Spielberg’s childhood…
The Coen Bros. “True Grit” .
Thread on it here. tl;dr: I liked the first 9 parts, basically up to the quest.
"Close Encounters" though, while a really excellent movie, isn't a sci-if movie, it is Spielberg's unwitting autobiography.
Think of it: a guy from Nowheresville starts having visions (cinema) and he thinks he's going crazy. Then he meets other people who have the same crazy visions (other movie nuts). Then he discovers there's a whole massive secret organization dedicated to these weird visions, and the visions are real. The secret organization is even headed by... Francois Truffaut! Then he finally says goodbye to Earth and gets on board a spaceship which will take him to the source of the visions (Hollywood).
It's kind of the most heart-felt thing he's ever done.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @syonredux, @Dave Pinsen, @Mr. Anon
Since he wrote “The Arrival”, I assume he means this one from the ‘90s, which I think was better than “Arrival”.
"Close Encounters" though, while a really excellent movie, isn't a sci-if movie, it is Spielberg's unwitting autobiography.
Think of it: a guy from Nowheresville starts having visions (cinema) and he thinks he's going crazy. Then he meets other people who have the same crazy visions (other movie nuts). Then he discovers there's a whole massive secret organization dedicated to these weird visions, and the visions are real. The secret organization is even headed by... Francois Truffaut! Then he finally says goodbye to Earth and gets on board a spaceship which will take him to the source of the visions (Hollywood).
It's kind of the most heart-felt thing he's ever done.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @syonredux, @Dave Pinsen, @Mr. Anon
Interesting take. Possible. I just dug the whole look, sound, and feel of the movie. It looked great, had an intelligent script, and had one of John William’s all-time best scores. Apart from the sci-fi elements, it is also a great window into 1970s middle-american society.
Right. That once scene is a jump-out-of-your-seat scare.
I notice now it’s a clever reference to 2001.
Lot, Jack D et al, go and wet your incontinence pants.Replies: @Medvedev
Wait, I though brilliant Blac womxn did that?! This can’t be true, must be hateful White nationalist propaganda.
The Ten Commandments
The Maltese Falcon and Rosemary’s Baby.Both are extremely faithful* to the source material and both are excellent films.
*Leaving aside the fact that Bogie looks nothing like Sam Spade
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/1033614892694167552?s=20
The only mildly clever bit of site design in Ad Astra was a sign on a wall on Mars with a help number for people with drug problems, the sort that you'd see on an industrial work site.Replies: @Daniel Williams, @Buzz Mohawk, @Mr. Blank
2001 has many levels of meaning and contains all kinds of little Easter eggs that Kubrick hid within. People are still analyzing it and discovering things.
https://uniformpattern.blogspot.com
Very obviously, The Hunger Games. Those films were extremely faithful to the books, but the action film adds to any story made them outstanding.
Howard’s End and Being There are both perfect film adaptations of the books they came from.
I am sure there are many others. I remember a French Madame Bovary so faithful to the book it was EVEN MORE BORING.
A better question is why some films can never even get close to the stories they were adapted from. For instance, every single book of Edgar Rice Burroughs is completely butchered, what is the deal with that? I mean come on, we can’t get one decent Synthetic Men of Mars, Back to the Stone Age, Tarzan and the City of Gold?
Lorne Greene is still working?Replies: @Anonymous, @MEH 0910
Hum, what do:
Ringworld
Gateway etc
Neuromancer
Helliconia etc
Lucifer’s Hammer
The Metal Doom (David H Keller for those of you unfamiliar, and an absolute masterpiece.)
Left Hand of Darkness (seriously, you think the Hollywood F****t brigade would be all over that one)
The Forever War
And at least 100 others
all have in common?
Right, they have never been made into films.
I hear Hollywood is working on a big SciFi film now – A giant radioactive bird claws and pecks its way across the New Mexico desert, terrifying the locals in:
The Alamogordo Chicken !!!!
Now that is the SciFi film Hollywood wants to make.
https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/aoc%20chakr.jpgReplies: @Kronos, @Neoconned
This is the “I’m a 95 IQ SJW grievance study major who needs to look smart” look.
The thing is, she majored in economics. I’m assuming she’s a show within a show to balance Millennial SJWs with the current economic system. (She wouldn’t receive nearly as much publicity if she wasn’t playing ball.) Her persona looks like a Sanders but she’s actually a behind-the-scenes Clinton Democrat.
And she's been an attention-seeking, ass-kissing, affirmative-action nutjob since high school. She actually won a prize at the Intel International Science show in high school yet ended up with a B.A. in economics from Boston University and then as a bartender after graduation. One has to wonder what happened to the smart kid in high school that she bumped out to get into the contest.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DtRW6gDWoAASBeF.jpg
https://qz.com/1481551/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-won-a-2007-isef-science-fair-prize-for-her-microbiology-research/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFlZ6pVtnv0
Apple is the best!Replies: @Kronos, @MEH 0910, @J.Ross
Best soundtrack in a film this Decade!
OT
Ann Althouse has a post on the scissors-dreadlock story.
Here is a girl whose name and picture should not be in the newspaper
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2019/09/here-is-girl-whose-name-and-picture.html
-- Like Steve she thought the girl shouldn’t be named, and went so far as not to blog the story until it ended up in the New York Times, rendering any blogger name censorship silly.
-- She thinks Mrs. Pence should not be mentioned either.
-- She notes that most versions of the story treat it as confirmed, but the Times at least qualifies every claim properly.
-- Commenters at Ann’s more mainstream site are not that different than here on this topic.
-- Steve gets namechecked in comments and there’s a link to one of his Let’s Talk Hair posts.
-- It’s remarkable to be how virtually all of her commenters figure it’s a hoax. I guess hate hoax awareness are now more mainstream.
-- As I pointed out in a comment here, “nappy” is a suspicious word to put in the mouth of young, white boys.
-- The non-national nature of the story is mentioned.
-- A commenter notes the geometrically, anatomically unlikeliness of how she describes the encounter.
-- Lack of witnesses noted (but nobody has mentioned that the boys themselves have not been confirmed as existing, i.e., did she blame three specific boys by name and have they been talked to? It’s really fuzzy. There’s been no “the boys have been asked to stay home pending an investigation" or anything. So are there three actual boys, or three mini Haven Monahans?)
-- Their weird possession of scissors was mentioned by commenters.
-- Commenters mention their own botched attempts at haircuts at that age.Replies: @Dave Pinsen
The Cultural Revolution is apparently fair game in China now, but Tiananmen Square isn’t.
In the book, I think it was called “Operation Bughouse.” The book characters sarcastically referred to it as Operation Madhouse afterwords. I think the author was trying to demonstrate a political system that could successfully handle and purge a military fuckup. The fictional high command generals were effectively removed afterwards and replaced with more competent military planners.
This was something severely lacking in WWI (Grand Offensive Warfare, 20,000 lives per mile) and Vietnam (Shoot and hide ambushes.) The general populace in the book don’t vote and thus limits the pressure on the military for grand bloody battles and non-existing decisive victories. Bad commanders are effectively removed and not conveniently “kicked-upstairs” and thus cause further trouble on a larger macro-scale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXeBhFzqzfYReplies: @Kronos
That scene is so bad it’s great! Thanks for sharing.
RedLetterMedia blink-and-you-miss-it Arrival/The Arrival joke:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1Gqjjq1nic&feature=youtu.be&t=546
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6k4-S4HlHkReplies: @jimmyriddle, @The Alarmist, @Reg Cæsar, @Bubba, @Kronos
I was part of Astronomy Club. We didn’t have anyone hot (or female) at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFlZ6pVtnv0
Apple is the best!Replies: @Kronos, @MEH 0910, @J.Ross
Half in the Bag Episode 95: The Visit and Turbo Kid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1nd8WPZO_c&feature=youtu.be&t=1112
That sounded like a less good Slowdive circa 1994.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ylunl72PyEReplies: @Jenner Ickham Errican
There’s been a shoegaze ‘second wave’ since the late aughts:
http://whenthesunhitsblog.blogspot.com
The bands are in different categories/weight classes.
Men I Trust has a stripped-down “twee” dreampop lo-fi spareness compared to heavily layered, often booming, resounding ‘90s Slowdive. In general, the emotional register is quite different: present/cute vs. transcending/deep. Slowdive’s eponymous 2017 album can be considered dreampop, but is much more sonically complex than bands like Men I Trust. Slowdive is in a class by itself. On-topic:
I hate comics, I hate that almost the only movies Hollywood makes are comic book movies, but the other day someone pitched a Dr Doom movie and it was brilliant.
In a time without artistic freedom, the comic book bad guy gives you licence to say whatever you want, because after all he’s a bad guy. The heroes have to keep up with the latest edition of the wokespeak dictionary but a bad guy can point out that illiterates make bad leaders.
It is stupidly easy to write comedy for Dr Doom. Pretty much anything said by him, especially if it’s actually good advice, is hilarious.
Brush your teeth after every meal. So says Doom.
The best part is there already was a movie titled Doom so this one would have to be called Problem of Late Twentieth Century Latverian Economics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFlZ6pVtnv0
Apple is the best!Replies: @Kronos, @MEH 0910, @J.Ross
I intended to recommend this movie and never got around to it. I only knew about it because of stumbling across its gorgeous soundtrack.
The visuals of “Ad Astra” were phenomenal — unfortunately, everything else was a drag. It was all about a slow buildup with no payoff.
To be fair, Kubrick sliced the Gordian knot of depicting aliens decisively with “2001,” where it was all done through suggestion, allowing the audience to fill in the details with their imagination. Unless or until we contact actual aliens, it’s hard to imagine anybody else will come close to what Kubrick did, and “Ad Astra” doesn’t even try.
“Ad Astra” was a strange movie — I was never bored by it, but I was never really engaged, either. It reminded me of certain middle-rank sci-fi novels I’ve read, in that it is absolutely committed to building a vivid, well-defined, consistent world — it’s just that it never gets around to telling a good story within that world.
For a fairly hard sci-fi story, there were a few annoying instances of Hollywood Science that really stood out. I might have been more willing to forgive these if there had been more of a payoff, or if the story had been more engaging. When we were leaving the theater, my wife summed it up best: “I spent the whole movie waiting for something that never happened.”
i thought i was the only person who likes The Arrival. the real The Arrival, with Charlie Sheen. not a great movie, but there’s something entertaining about it.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/1033614892694167552?s=20
The only mildly clever bit of site design in Ad Astra was a sign on a wall on Mars with a help number for people with drug problems, the sort that you'd see on an industrial work site.Replies: @Daniel Williams, @Buzz Mohawk, @Mr. Blank
There’s never been a sci-fi film with better set design than “2001” — though as you noted, that sign was an absolutely inspired bit of set design, as was the casting of the perpetually-strung-out-looking Natasha Lyonne as the Mars customs officer.
The three body sequels are considerably more interesting in their ideas if not the writing.
The Ad Astra reviews made me check out his previous Lost City of Z and despite a few nicely done minutes of jungle adeventure inspired by other good movies the rest was an unbelievably tedious lesson in elementary school political correctnes. I avoided Ad Astra.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @J, @J James
miles: The rationality and the cold logic of the novel is more than creepy. The novel explores the choices and decision making in extreme situations. The Solarian decision to reduce Earth’s population by famine reminds one of the logic of Nazis in the Warshaw ghetto. The logic of the battle among the few survivor ships for remaining resources is terrifying. The popularity of a novel stating naked power politics without a hint of human emotion – is frightening. Think it again and to the end, and you will find it less comforting.
(Almost like maybe the people in charge of our joint don't really have our interests at heart.)
I thought the movie version of “Fight Club” was better than the book. There were a lot of details in the book that were only suggested or hinted at in the movie, which somehow made the movie a lot better.
The movie version of “L.A. Confidential” is better as a stand-alone story. It differs from the book, especially toward the end. The story from the book is tied into a series of other novels. The novel is better when read in conjunction with the other novels in the series, but the movie is better if you just look at it as a stand-alone work.
The three body sequels are considerably more interesting in their ideas if not the writing.
The Ad Astra reviews made me check out his previous Lost City of Z and despite a few nicely done minutes of jungle adeventure inspired by other good movies the rest was an unbelievably tedious lesson in elementary school political correctnes. I avoided Ad Astra.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @J, @J James
What do you mean by ‘childish gender roles’? I thought the highly feminized future he portrayed seemed credible. Per Pinker, as a species we’ve been getting more and more domesticated and the tail end of certain masculine traits such as aggression have less and less permissible outlets.
I also thought the contrast between the masculine willingness to violate certain taboos in order to survive and the female inability to face up to the harsh decisions had the ring of truth. I’d describe these differences as archetypal rather than ‘childish’.
The Three Body Problem movie is tangled in rights disputes, that’s why it’s dead in the water.
They quickly made another one based on the same author’s work–The Wandering Earth. It’s on the level of a pretty fine Sy Fy or direct-to-DVD film.
Same way the Russians are now making stuff like:
Beyond the Edge of Reality https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5629524/ (“The Russian Inception” with Banderas as the hero’s estranged collective unconscious magus dad)
Gravity https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4731148/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 (“The Russian The Day the Earth Stood Still”)
The Martian https://www.filmpro.ru/movies/337763 (“The Russian The Martian”)
Salyut 7 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6537238/(‘The Russian Apollo 13″)
It’s all pretty OK stuff wobbling between Sy Fy and high end Hollywood circa 1999, but with a typically loose approach to (and understanding of) the three act structure.
I saw the last of the Russian movies you mentioned and thought it was very good.
Thanks for the reply. My interest started in my late teens.
https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/aoc%20chakr.jpgReplies: @Kronos, @Neoconned
Shes dating a liberal white dude & the Somali congresswoman just cheated on her husband with her white adviser.
I’ve noticed something similar in the UK where white British dudes marry Hindi girls and here it seems white guys will marry ANYTHING but nasty STDs filled whitegirl lib sjw mudsharks…..an exotic Cuban or Somali girl(think Bowie and Iman) is much better than Susie the grievances white girl major who makes excuses about why she wont give you oral sex every other night. These foreign girls at least seem to know how to treat their men.
http://whenthesunhitsblog.blogspot.comThe bands are in different categories/weight classes.
Men I Trust has a stripped-down “twee” dreampop lo-fi spareness compared to heavily layered, often booming, resounding ‘90s Slowdive. In general, the emotional register is quite different: present/cute vs. transcending/deep. Slowdive’s eponymous 2017 album can be considered dreampop, but is much more sonically complex than bands like Men I Trust. Slowdive is in a class by itself. On-topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0LIO138Z-AReplies: @Neoconned
Are you a fan of chillwave? Toro and Neon Indian and Washed Out are guilty pleasures of mine. Vaporwave and dreamwave are great sub genres as well. Synth stuff from the early 2010s….
Ringworld
Gateway etc
Neuromancer
Helliconia etc
Lucifer's Hammer
The Metal Doom (David H Keller for those of you unfamiliar, and an absolute masterpiece.)
Left Hand of Darkness (seriously, you think the Hollywood F****t brigade would be all over that one)
The Forever War
And at least 100 others
all have in common?
Right, they have never been made into films.
I hear Hollywood is working on a big SciFi film now - A giant radioactive bird claws and pecks its way across the New Mexico desert, terrifying the locals in:
The Alamogordo Chicken !!!!
Now that is the SciFi film Hollywood wants to make.Replies: @Redneck farmer
I finally read The Left Hand Of Darkness a couple of years ago. It was better than I thought it would be, having heard it was a Feminist Classic. Hollywood would definitely f*** it up.
Ursula K. LeGuin, the feminist sci-fi writer who died last year, was the daughter of the famous anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960), who was the keeper of Ishi (c. 1861-, the last Indian of his tribe, when he came out of the California forest in 1911. That’s a really long expanse of times, both in years and conceptually: from Stone Age Ishi to a feminist sci-fi author.
I would rate the Elmer Gantry movie well above the book. Transcending your source material when it’s Sinclair Lewis isn’t that hard, however.
https://sanjosebarstool.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/denise-richards-starship-troopers-shower-scene-e73f3.jpgReplies: @Brutusale
Much more pulchritudinous breasts, those belonging to Denise Richards, were available to the director, yet they remained, alas, under wraps.
Consider that some people, such as Steve, didn’t read the sequels yet, and might not want to hear spoilers.
They quickly made another one based on the same author's work--The Wandering Earth. It's on the level of a pretty fine Sy Fy or direct-to-DVD film.Same way the Russians are now making stuff like:
Beyond the Edge of Reality https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5629524/ ("The Russian Inception" with Banderas as the hero's estranged collective unconscious magus dad)
Gravity https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4731148/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 ("The Russian The Day the Earth Stood Still")
The Martian https://www.filmpro.ru/movies/337763 ("The Russian The Martian")
Salyut 7 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6537238/('The Russian Apollo 13")It's all pretty OK stuff wobbling between Sy Fy and high end Hollywood circa 1999, but with a typically loose approach to (and understanding of) the three act structure.Replies: @Dave Pinsen
I thought The Wandering Earth was more Michael Bay-level, though the plot was dumbed down from Cixin’s story, which was also darker than the movie.
I saw the last of the Russian movies you mentioned and thought it was very good.
I’m afraid that Denise does nothing for me. Dina Meyer,though, does it for me…big time:
Placing the entire Earth (or in this case, the entire solar system!) in jeopardy is too often just a lazy way to create dramatic interest. Especially when the writers can’t even come up with a plausible threat (where did all this antimatter come from, and why would this space station need so much!?). Why even bother calling it ‘science fiction’? Why not just have demons attacking Earth?
RE: Ishi,
At least two SF novels have been directly inspired by his story:Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague and George R Stewart’s Earth Abides. The Scarlet Plague is pretty good (about mid-level Jack London, I would say), but Stewart’s novel is an all-time classic, deeply moving and heart-felt.
Tinseltown science fiction flicks feature gunplay, violence, and Will Smith. Ideas, the ingredient which makes literary science fiction a mecca for the curious, are foreign objects to the moneymen who decide what gets green-lit. Unfortunately, I've had to abandon science fiction literature because it doesn't mix well with marijuana.
Steve 'TD' Sailer: "Ad Astra was like if 2001 and Apocalypse Now were mashed up with Star Wars"
Sounds like a spec script a friend of mine had circulating in the late 1990s, minus the Star Wars. Better send him a message.Replies: @Jeff Albertson
Marijuana, ouch. Maybe that’s why I thought Steve was going to talk about Lou Grant. But then I realized I had Ed mixed up with the hefty bag guy/Richie Cunningham’s dad.
The seventys were awesome! If I recall correctly…
Another thing about Ad Astra that really annoyed me: No sense of scale WRT Neptune and its rings. You’d get the impression that the rings were only hundreds of miles in diameter. Either that, or the individual chunks of rock were the size of Ceres, and the space station was thousands of kilometers across. (Almost as bad as the intro sequence to Star Trek Voyager, where you see the reflection of Voyager on the rings of some planet.)
Yeah, most contemporary “-wave” sub-genres have some good bands. Many reinterpret previous eras, keeping the sounds and aesthetics timeless, e.g. psych Tame Impala, Italo-disco Chromatics. Lots of great music of all kinds still being made!
I allows thought they could do a comedy remake of Apocalypse Now with Enron’s Jeffey Skilling playing Col. Kutz fleeing to the Amazon jungles and becoming a God among the Indians and have Capt. Willard be played by Micheal Moore.
Tagline: “His accounting methods were… unsound.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2I/BorisovReplies: @AnotherDad
Lemme know if it’s going to hit and mercifully end the insanity.
OT:
TOLD YOU HILLARY would run again.
What? Anybody really think they'd let Trump landslide Warren or Biden or lol 1 of the reparations candidates....?
Follow the money....Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @AnotherDad
And you’re still wrong.
She wants it, but no one has any interest in her.
Ben Hur; Jurassic Park.
I bet though there are a fair number of movies where the movie is better than the book because the book isn’t that great.
All science-fiction movies are supposedly a subconscious commentary on their contemporaneous society. What hidden truth does Ad Astra (‘to the stars’) reveal?
I found it odd that they glossed over Pitt's character's mother and her fate.
The thing is, she majored in economics. I’m assuming she’s a show within a show to balance Millennial SJWs with the current economic system. (She wouldn’t receive nearly as much publicity if she wasn’t playing ball.) Her persona looks like a Sanders but she’s actually a behind-the-scenes Clinton Democrat.Replies: @Bubba
You’re right.
And she’s been an attention-seeking, ass-kissing, affirmative-action nutjob since high school. She actually won a prize at the Intel International Science show in high school yet ended up with a B.A. in economics from Boston University and then as a bartender after graduation. One has to wonder what happened to the smart kid in high school that she bumped out to get into the contest.
https://qz.com/1481551/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-won-a-2007-isef-science-fair-prize-for-her-microbiology-research/
Important qualification, as two movies that came to mind when I read your query were Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park.
Other sci-fi movies I like:
Moon
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Truman Show
Yeah. What a genius move then, in the face of a rising China, to tell our smart women not to reproduce, and start replacing our white population with mostly lower IQ foreigners.
(Almost like maybe the people in charge of our joint don’t really have our interests at heart.)
I liked Ad Astra. It had a number of “physics doesn’t work that way” moments, but I found it easy to let most of them slide and enjoy what it did well. It appears the maker of Ad Astra loved Apollo and wanted to picture what it would look like if Apollo never ended, if a trillion dollars each decade had gone to building better and better Saturn Vs. No new breakthroughs, just pervasive infrastructure and steady improvement in performance and reliability like there could be if there were a Space Command with funding comparable to what the navy spends on carriers and submarines and ports and men around the world to maintain them. Even the moon buggy chase seemed mostly in that vein: a chance to show off vehicles that are very recognizably successors of the one Harrison Schmitt left behind. There’s a dozen of them and they’re souped up, but still open vehicles for men wearing spacesuits.
I just read a plot synopsis of Ad Astra, and it sounds skull-crushingly retarded. I felt stupider just from reading the summary, who knows what watching the movie would do.
Supposedly it’s modeled on Heart of Darkness (and thus Apocalypse Now), but those works combine an inner spiritual journey with an outward social journey into the depths of colonialist brutality, primitive savagery, the madness of war and so forth. This movie sounds like Brad Pitt suffers a bunch of inconveniences on a very long, tedious space commute to go meet, not a genius-turned-madman, but a cranky, kind of stupid weirdo.
And the alleged Neptune Project is so brains-into-pudding it makes the old Grade School Volcano Project sound like CalTech.
This was a genius-level story in China? Then we have nothing to worry about.
Supposedly it's modeled on Heart of Darkness (and thus Apocalypse Now), but those works combine an inner spiritual journey with an outward social journey into the depths of colonialist brutality, primitive savagery, the madness of war and so forth. This movie sounds like Brad Pitt suffers a bunch of inconveniences on a very long, tedious space commute to go meet, not a genius-turned-madman, but a cranky, kind of stupid weirdo.
And the alleged Neptune Project is so brains-into-pudding it makes the old Grade School Volcano Project sound like CalTech.
This was a genius-level story in China? Then we have nothing to worry about.Replies: @Steve Sailer
No, Americans are responsible for “Ad Astra.”
Both the Three Body Problem and the only Robinson book I’ve read (Aurora) were brutally bad. Like, could barely finish them bad. Mr Pinsen has heard this from me before 🙂
Oh, and Once Upon a Time is a top-three movies of all time.
Ab Astra….
But the walls of their fort were like 15 ft tall, and veeeerrrryyyyy hard for the bugs to surmount.
2001 (Of course)
Seconds (Perhaps the best SF medical horror film ever made)
Forbidden Planet (Brilliant music and set designs)
Stalker (I like it better than Solaris)
A Clockwork Orange
Primer (Ultimate time travel movie)
Upstream Color (Uncompromising SF)Replies: @SunBakedSuburb, @Mr. Anon, @SFG, @Steve in Greensboro, @AnotherDad, @The Germ Theory of Disease, @syonredux, @Alfa158, @dfordoom, @Anonymous
No-one has mentioned Metropolis yet. Or the 1960 Village of the Damned.
And I’m surprised no anime movies have been mentioned. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence was pretty good.
Self-absorption and daddy issues. Also, superficiality in the nuts and bolts of things.
I found it odd that they glossed over Pitt’s character’s mother and her fate.
I don't get the bashing of Blade Runner 2049 (akshully 2017). It's a brilliant and beautiful film. And yes, I'm a total Blade Runner (1982) nerd. Despite Kabal asset George Clooney's presence, Gravity (2013) was a thrilling tale of survival in the most inhospitable environment. Though I'm glad I didn't see it in super-duper 4DX cinema -- buckets of upchuck would have ensued.Replies: @Romanian, @BB753
Both Clooney and Sandra Bullock totally ruined the film for me. I can’t stand more than ten minutes of Sandra Bullock onscreen.
I didn’t understand the scene in Gravity where Clooney states he could no longer hold on to Bullock; aren’t you at the SAME velocity as the spaceship once you grasp it? No change in velocity means no acceleration and so no force!
https://www.famousbirthdays.com/headshots/jennifer-connelly-8.jpgReplies: @Stan d Mute
So you dig chicks with mustaches & sideburns?
https://twitter.com/ManifoldPodcast/status/1174696749941841921
Nobody wants to hold on to Sandra Bullock that long even if your life at stake, lol! There’s something deeply repulsive about her. Definitely epicene.
2001 (Of course)
Seconds (Perhaps the best SF medical horror film ever made)
Forbidden Planet (Brilliant music and set designs)
Stalker (I like it better than Solaris)
A Clockwork Orange
Primer (Ultimate time travel movie)
Upstream Color (Uncompromising SF)Replies: @SunBakedSuburb, @Mr. Anon, @SFG, @Steve in Greensboro, @AnotherDad, @The Germ Theory of Disease, @syonredux, @Alfa158, @dfordoom, @Anonymous
2001: A Space Odyssey
Stalker
La Jetée
Blade Runner
The Face of Another
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Castle in the Sky
THX 1138
TRON: Legacy
Alphaville
Solaris
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
eXistenZ
Videodrome
A Clockwork Orange
Planet of the Apes
TRON
Dead Ringers
Jurassic Park
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
Metropolis
Akira
The Terminator
The Thing
Zardoz
The Matrix Revolutions
Minority Report
Sunshine
Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones
Invasion of the Body Snatchers – Siegel
Invasion of the Body Snatchers – Kaufman
Body Snatchers – Ferrara
Alien³
Fahrenheit 451
Alien
Alien: Resurrection
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
Galaxy Quest
Mars Attacks!
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
A Scanner Darkly
Inception
Being John Malkovich
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Looper
The Hunger Games
The Fifth Element
Star Wars
Open Your Eyes
Stepford Wives
Many people have good things to say about this film, but I found it pretentious, strained, and overwrought. Worst of all, obvious. FACE OF ANOTHER is an infinitely greater work on a similar theme.
What made MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE special was the blend of comedy and horror. SECONDS, in contrast, is stodgily one-dimensional in execution and meaning. An overdrawn-out episode of TWILIGHT ZONE.
Still, KMG offers superb commentary on the work.