I saw the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers last night. Here's what Wikipedia has to say:
"It initially received varied reviews from critics, though its critical reception has significantly improved in subsequent years, receiving a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, and also being hailed as one of the greatest remakes ever as well as one of the best science-fiction horror films of all time."
Here's what I have to say:
It's shit. Absolute total shit. Despite having at least 3 A-listers on board, it was one of the worst movies I have ever seen. The acting was worse than some school plays I've seen, with some of the top actors of all time phoning in some of the absolute worst performances in the entire history of cinema.
Absolutely zero money was spent on wardrobe, as everyone wore the exact same outfit (as if they were me) over the course of about a week, with at least two or maybe three of the characters wearing the exact same coat, as if they were on sale at K Mart or something at the time.
The last third of the movie was shot in near total darkness from some of the worst angles I have ever seen. The sound quality was shit, the dialogue was shit, the effects were sub-par for movies made during that era, and there's a scene where a dog with a man's face appears out of butt fuck nowhere, for no other reason than to scare the humans and out them in front of the aliens, and then disappears with no explanation and is never spoken of again.
Now the two worst aspects. First, the movie breaks its own rules. When you have a movie where something impossible happens, like alien plants invade and duplicate people or zombies come back to life, you have to establish the rules early on and stick with them to the very end. It's already been established two things: 1. the aliens just float in from space and 2. it takes hours for a person to be duplicated. If we take 1 at face value then why do the aliens need to establish a base in San Francisco and then have pods trucked out to everywhere else? Couldn't they just waft in anywhere and everywhere on the planet simultaneously? This does not make sense. This is a major plot hole. The other major plot hole is 2, it takes hours for a person to be duplicated. For 3/4 of the movie this is a major plot point, because three times people have fallen asleep and we watch the pod grow a duplicate very slowly, slow enough that the person can be woken up and the duplicate will die. Yet somehow, for "drama" or lack of time or whatever, near the very end when Brooke Adams' character falls asleep for like a second, despite there being no pods in the vicinity, she crumbles to dust and a new perfectly formed duplicate appears naked in the bushes instantly to scare Donald Sutherland. This is the second major plot hole, and taken together they absolutely ruin this movie.
And the second worst aspect is the script. This is some of the absolute worst writing I have ever seen. Okay, so we begin the movie, the beginning, the very beginning, where the aliens invade. Maybe two characters are very partially introduced, and then in the next scene hundreds of people have already been replaced. It's like the whole first act was cut out. Brooke Adams (I don't remember any of the characters names except Donald Sutherland was Matthew because they said his name seven, eight thousand times) goes to Donald Sutherland and says "My boyfriend has been replaced, his personality is totally different!" Let's not introduce the character and spend 20 minutes getting to know him so we the audience can be sure he's different, let's introduce him out of nowhere already replaced and just take it as given he's different. The same thing happens with everyone. Characters are not introduced until after they are replaced and we're supposed to take as given that they are different. There's zero chance of getting into the movie because the entire first third, where the world and the characters are introduced, was omitted for whatever reason. It wasn't run time, because the movie was almost 2 hours long and they had time enough to repeat several plot points three times, just so we would get it.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1978 shouldn't have been released to theaters, it shouldn't even even have been released straight to video, it should have been released straight into the garbage.
Showing posts with label Film Reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Film Reviews. Show all posts
Saturday, August 24, 2019
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
Deadhead Mountain
Donnie Eichar in his book Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident, tries to censor everyone who reveals the bullshit "secret" "true" reason behind why 9 experienced skiers died in the Ural mountains mysteriously. He is not interested in the truth, he wants you to buy his shitty book. Well, here's the "secret" and here's why it's a total load.
The shape of the Kholat Syakhl mountain produces a Kármán vortex street when the wind hits it just right. These vortices of air generates infrasonic noise that 22% of the population are highly susceptible to (and, coincidentally, ALL 9 skiers were in that 22%). The noise causes them to go crazy and stuff ("hijacking their bodies" and "wreaking havoc on their minds") after they listen to it for a few hours. They run out of their tents naked in a panic. There was no moon that night, and the temperature was 40 below freezing. The combination of extremely low temperature and injury from bumping into things in the dark killed them.
Of course, it doesn't explain how ALL 9 of the skiers were in that magic minority that is susceptible to infrasonic waves like this. It doesn't explain why one skier was missing a tongue and another was missing eyes. It doesn't explain why they had internal crushing injuries and broken bones but no bruises or any external injuries. It doesn't explain why a few bodies had dark orange skin and were highly radioactive. It doesn't explain why no one before or since, of the thousands of people who have been there, have ever experienced this phenomenon, including the natives who live in the area, and multiple teams of researchers who investigated the deaths.
It doesn't take into account the lights they saw in the sky (which were later identified as Russian missile launches, as the mountain is near a top secret military base) and any possible motive the military would have for killing them to keep their missile tests a secret.
No reason is given why the author did not go to the mountain and set up any equipment to listen for these infrasonic waves. He's throwing away all other hypotheses as obviously wrong and setting up his own as obviously right without actually conducting a test to see if these waves are actually produced by the mountain or not? He didn't actually conduct the test? He based it on similarly shaped mountains that produce kind of similar infrasonic effects that have never ever killed anyone so far.
I shit you not.
There, I just saved you the $20 for the book and ruined the author's fun by exposing the secret ending.
Now, here's what we do know:
•FACT: This was during the coldest time in the Cold War when both the US and USSR were testing a great deal of new weapons.
•FACT: There is a Soviet military base within the vicinity of the mountains where the hikers were staying.
•FACT: There were reports of lights in the sky were confirmed to have been Soviet rocket tests.
•FACT: The Soviet Union has a long history of testing air-burst weapons such as the Father of All Bombs.
•FACT: The internal crushing injuries the skiers received are consistent with the powerful shock waves produced by these types of explosives.
•FACT: The Soviet government had every reason in the world to cover up the deaths as they had with other accidental casualties of military experiments, such as the anthrax leak at Sverdlovsk in 1979.
Can this hypothesis I've cobbled together over the past ten minutes explain everything about the Dyatlov Pass incident? No. Does it do a better job at explaining at least some of the details than the total bullshit explanation a Hollywood screenwriter came up with and repackaged as non-fiction because he wanted to get a movie deal and drum up positive press for his potential future pay day? Absolutely.
By the way, I've used first-person pronouns with less frequency in this review than the author did in the original book.
The shape of the Kholat Syakhl mountain produces a Kármán vortex street when the wind hits it just right. These vortices of air generates infrasonic noise that 22% of the population are highly susceptible to (and, coincidentally, ALL 9 skiers were in that 22%). The noise causes them to go crazy and stuff ("hijacking their bodies" and "wreaking havoc on their minds") after they listen to it for a few hours. They run out of their tents naked in a panic. There was no moon that night, and the temperature was 40 below freezing. The combination of extremely low temperature and injury from bumping into things in the dark killed them.
Of course, it doesn't explain how ALL 9 of the skiers were in that magic minority that is susceptible to infrasonic waves like this. It doesn't explain why one skier was missing a tongue and another was missing eyes. It doesn't explain why they had internal crushing injuries and broken bones but no bruises or any external injuries. It doesn't explain why a few bodies had dark orange skin and were highly radioactive. It doesn't explain why no one before or since, of the thousands of people who have been there, have ever experienced this phenomenon, including the natives who live in the area, and multiple teams of researchers who investigated the deaths.
It doesn't take into account the lights they saw in the sky (which were later identified as Russian missile launches, as the mountain is near a top secret military base) and any possible motive the military would have for killing them to keep their missile tests a secret.
No reason is given why the author did not go to the mountain and set up any equipment to listen for these infrasonic waves. He's throwing away all other hypotheses as obviously wrong and setting up his own as obviously right without actually conducting a test to see if these waves are actually produced by the mountain or not? He didn't actually conduct the test? He based it on similarly shaped mountains that produce kind of similar infrasonic effects that have never ever killed anyone so far.
I shit you not.
There, I just saved you the $20 for the book and ruined the author's fun by exposing the secret ending.
Now, here's what we do know:
•FACT: This was during the coldest time in the Cold War when both the US and USSR were testing a great deal of new weapons.
•FACT: There is a Soviet military base within the vicinity of the mountains where the hikers were staying.
•FACT: There were reports of lights in the sky were confirmed to have been Soviet rocket tests.
•FACT: The Soviet Union has a long history of testing air-burst weapons such as the Father of All Bombs.
•FACT: The internal crushing injuries the skiers received are consistent with the powerful shock waves produced by these types of explosives.
•FACT: The Soviet government had every reason in the world to cover up the deaths as they had with other accidental casualties of military experiments, such as the anthrax leak at Sverdlovsk in 1979.
Can this hypothesis I've cobbled together over the past ten minutes explain everything about the Dyatlov Pass incident? No. Does it do a better job at explaining at least some of the details than the total bullshit explanation a Hollywood screenwriter came up with and repackaged as non-fiction because he wanted to get a movie deal and drum up positive press for his potential future pay day? Absolutely.
By the way, I've used first-person pronouns with less frequency in this review than the author did in the original book.
Monday, October 15, 2018
Devil's Pass
Saw a movie called Devil's Pass. It's a "found footage" movie, meaning it's shite and there are scenes in porno night vision. A group of kind of plain looking people and a fatty with a face like a jack-o-lantern who have never acted before in their entire lives are making a mockumentary about the Dyatlov Pass incident, where some Russian hikers died under mysterious circumstances.
Of course they make sure to leave the cameras rolling during all the parts that have absolutely nothing to do with the documentary they are working on just in case they die and someone decides to make their home movies into a horror flick. This includes night vision sex, I shit you not. The "film makers" actually record themselves having sex. Of course fatty cheeseburger, who is the main character and her character's name is her real name because none of these people are actors, is jelly and some guy gives her a bottle of Jack because we're going to be camping in the woods for one night and have to have sex because we have to earn our R rating.
There's an avalanche or something and the kind of plain girl gets thrown into the camera with a wide-the-fuck-open mouth because that's how everyone dies. The guy who does her gets his leg broke and he's surprisingly coo with two amateurs resetting the bone, which is sticking out of his leg, by hitting it with a board while someone off camera breaks some celery. I'll admit that was the one moment where I winced. Celery really does sound gross.
So some Ivans find them in the morning because they stupidly launch a flare that goes all of ten feet and they shoot the cripple because they're racist against cripples. Fatty Cheeseburger, Jack, and some other guy then go to the bunker they found the other night and they go inside because being locked inside a Cold War bunker to die in agony over several days is better than getting shot, or taking your chance running knowing the people following you have a finite number of bullets and they've already used several. And there's like trees and shit, you can't just duck?
Inside they find two tunnels leading off in the same general direction and the lights start blowing out because zombies. You know it's going to be zombies because it's a found footage film, it has to be zombies. So they go down the other tunnel and find pictures of the Philadelphia Experiment, which was originally featured in Playboy, believe it or not. Jack just so happens to be an expert on the subject.
Inside the tunnel they find obviously CGI zombies who kill the other guy. Fatty Cheeseburger and Jack lock themselves into another room and find a worm hole with spider veins. They theorize that the worm hole will take you wherever you focus, but it has to be someplace fresh in your mind. Now even though I could picture every square inch of my house with my eyes closed these two idiots focus on the outside of the bunker where two men with guns are waiting for them.
They then appear outside the bunker as corpse men in 1959. Reds take them inside the bunker, which was new at the time, and undress them for some reason. They also take the camera, which is rather considerate, and place it where we can see the bodies because that's exactly what a soldier would do when he finds a piece of alien technology with a couple of bodies. The Reds leave and we see the two naked bodies hanging from meat hooks for some reason and we see... surprise!... NOT! The two zombies are really Fatty Doo Doo and Johnny Walker! They've been alive/undead inside the tunnel since 1959 because it's a found footage film and there's only so many different ideas we can use for those.
The sad part is IMDB shows production stills and they had some really decent makeup effects for the zombies. Why they decided to go with early Tomb Raider quality CGI is beyond me.
Oh and that camera Ivan Drago places on the operating table? He left it on since 1959 and the batteries didn't go dead until 2013 when Fatty and Jack found it. I got to get me some of those batteries. The batteries in my camera last 45 minutes tops.
Of course they make sure to leave the cameras rolling during all the parts that have absolutely nothing to do with the documentary they are working on just in case they die and someone decides to make their home movies into a horror flick. This includes night vision sex, I shit you not. The "film makers" actually record themselves having sex. Of course fatty cheeseburger, who is the main character and her character's name is her real name because none of these people are actors, is jelly and some guy gives her a bottle of Jack because we're going to be camping in the woods for one night and have to have sex because we have to earn our R rating.
There's an avalanche or something and the kind of plain girl gets thrown into the camera with a wide-the-fuck-open mouth because that's how everyone dies. The guy who does her gets his leg broke and he's surprisingly coo with two amateurs resetting the bone, which is sticking out of his leg, by hitting it with a board while someone off camera breaks some celery. I'll admit that was the one moment where I winced. Celery really does sound gross.
So some Ivans find them in the morning because they stupidly launch a flare that goes all of ten feet and they shoot the cripple because they're racist against cripples. Fatty Cheeseburger, Jack, and some other guy then go to the bunker they found the other night and they go inside because being locked inside a Cold War bunker to die in agony over several days is better than getting shot, or taking your chance running knowing the people following you have a finite number of bullets and they've already used several. And there's like trees and shit, you can't just duck?
Inside they find two tunnels leading off in the same general direction and the lights start blowing out because zombies. You know it's going to be zombies because it's a found footage film, it has to be zombies. So they go down the other tunnel and find pictures of the Philadelphia Experiment, which was originally featured in Playboy, believe it or not. Jack just so happens to be an expert on the subject.
Inside the tunnel they find obviously CGI zombies who kill the other guy. Fatty Cheeseburger and Jack lock themselves into another room and find a worm hole with spider veins. They theorize that the worm hole will take you wherever you focus, but it has to be someplace fresh in your mind. Now even though I could picture every square inch of my house with my eyes closed these two idiots focus on the outside of the bunker where two men with guns are waiting for them.
They then appear outside the bunker as corpse men in 1959. Reds take them inside the bunker, which was new at the time, and undress them for some reason. They also take the camera, which is rather considerate, and place it where we can see the bodies because that's exactly what a soldier would do when he finds a piece of alien technology with a couple of bodies. The Reds leave and we see the two naked bodies hanging from meat hooks for some reason and we see... surprise!... NOT! The two zombies are really Fatty Doo Doo and Johnny Walker! They've been alive/undead inside the tunnel since 1959 because it's a found footage film and there's only so many different ideas we can use for those.
The sad part is IMDB shows production stills and they had some really decent makeup effects for the zombies. Why they decided to go with early Tomb Raider quality CGI is beyond me.
Oh and that camera Ivan Drago places on the operating table? He left it on since 1959 and the batteries didn't go dead until 2013 when Fatty and Jack found it. I got to get me some of those batteries. The batteries in my camera last 45 minutes tops.
Thursday, September 27, 2018
Skybound
Saw a movie called Skybound. It must have been made for negative dollars because there are two sets and one of them is a green screen and the other is a single room. Also no one can act. At all. At no time was I convinced that I was watching something other than people who have never even tried to act at all in their entire lives pretend to act like normies believe actors act while acting.
Basically some 25 year old high school kids are on a private plane with some 60 year old man, who's diabetic by the way, and absolutely no one else because plot. There are two guys who are brothers and you can tell because they dress alike. There's also the token black guy.
Something happens and New York (referred to as Chicago because plot) is on fire, or something? So is Kansas City, so they can't land the plane.
No one knows what is going on and there is no communication with the outside world. All the information they have is from 2 day old newspapers that were left on the plane because plot. This movie takes place at Christmas, by the way.
It turns out that the newspapers conveniently out the old man as the leader of a cult that used LSD to brainwash people into believing the world was ending. He's diabetic and the diversity hire flushed his insulin down the toilet believing it to be LSD that the old man was pumping into the air of the plane to convince everyone the world was ending because plot. The old man conveniently dies within minutes.
This movie takes place on a plane.
The one brother somehow knows how to pilot a plane because plot and he takes the plane down to the clouds in Colorado because the plane has just as much fuel as the plot demands it to have. One of those clouds is a mushroom cloud and ash gets into the plane. Did I mention they had to open the door while the plane was in the air to vent all the bad air they thought was full of LSD?
They dive beneath the clouds to find that Monument Valley, I shit you not, is on fire and bison are running around on fire while the ground is covered in pools of lava because I the most obvious target of a nuclear attack is the middle of nowhere.
They then go back up really high and girl's dad calls her on the plane, this movie takes place on a plane, by the way. He's the only person to have survived the end of the world and he lives in a mansion by a fireplace and he dresses like Hugh Hefner. He says that 11 nuclear missiles were fired from Russia and the only way to survive is to stay... "Skybound"! Where have I heard that before? The signal then cuts out, conveniently.
The brothers then realise they have Wikipedia on the plane and pull up an article about Hiroshima that tells them 2 important, and wrong, plot points: 1. modern nucular weapons are exactly 7 times more powerful than they were in 1945, and 2. radiation has unlimited omnidirectional range over land but very limited range over water, while showing a picture of the Castle Bravo fallout cloud that was very much over water.
Blondie then reveals she's good at maths and gets shit-faced and calculates that flying to Canada or Mexico is a death sentence because radiation has unlimited range over land, and they don't have enough fuel to reach Hawaii because plot.
They then decide to cut stuff out of the plane with a hatched they brought along because plot and dump it (and presumably the dead man's body, because we never see it again) into the sea. But that's still not enough to get them to Hawaii, because plot.
They're in an airplane, did I mention that?
One of the brothers goes outside the plane and uses the hatchet to, I shit you not, cut one of the engines off the plane so they are light enough to make it to Hawaii. He dies.
They almost make it in the middle of the night when the fuel runs out and they instantly drop straight down, because the wings of a plane don't generate lift and can't glide for several miles without power, and hits the sea.
Everyone then wake up completely dry on the beach and we see the Murican flag waving in the distance while someone on the radio, which no one brought with them but appears on the beach because plot, says that thousands of survivors have escaped to Canada, Mexico, and Hawaii, which are the only places safe from the radiation.
The end.
Here's the trailer, which contains the entire movie. Enjoy.
Basically some 25 year old high school kids are on a private plane with some 60 year old man, who's diabetic by the way, and absolutely no one else because plot. There are two guys who are brothers and you can tell because they dress alike. There's also the token black guy.
Something happens and New York (referred to as Chicago because plot) is on fire, or something? So is Kansas City, so they can't land the plane.
No one knows what is going on and there is no communication with the outside world. All the information they have is from 2 day old newspapers that were left on the plane because plot. This movie takes place at Christmas, by the way.
It turns out that the newspapers conveniently out the old man as the leader of a cult that used LSD to brainwash people into believing the world was ending. He's diabetic and the diversity hire flushed his insulin down the toilet believing it to be LSD that the old man was pumping into the air of the plane to convince everyone the world was ending because plot. The old man conveniently dies within minutes.
This movie takes place on a plane.
The one brother somehow knows how to pilot a plane because plot and he takes the plane down to the clouds in Colorado because the plane has just as much fuel as the plot demands it to have. One of those clouds is a mushroom cloud and ash gets into the plane. Did I mention they had to open the door while the plane was in the air to vent all the bad air they thought was full of LSD?
They dive beneath the clouds to find that Monument Valley, I shit you not, is on fire and bison are running around on fire while the ground is covered in pools of lava because I the most obvious target of a nuclear attack is the middle of nowhere.
They then go back up really high and girl's dad calls her on the plane, this movie takes place on a plane, by the way. He's the only person to have survived the end of the world and he lives in a mansion by a fireplace and he dresses like Hugh Hefner. He says that 11 nuclear missiles were fired from Russia and the only way to survive is to stay... "Skybound"! Where have I heard that before? The signal then cuts out, conveniently.
The brothers then realise they have Wikipedia on the plane and pull up an article about Hiroshima that tells them 2 important, and wrong, plot points: 1. modern nucular weapons are exactly 7 times more powerful than they were in 1945, and 2. radiation has unlimited omnidirectional range over land but very limited range over water, while showing a picture of the Castle Bravo fallout cloud that was very much over water.
Blondie then reveals she's good at maths and gets shit-faced and calculates that flying to Canada or Mexico is a death sentence because radiation has unlimited range over land, and they don't have enough fuel to reach Hawaii because plot.
They then decide to cut stuff out of the plane with a hatched they brought along because plot and dump it (and presumably the dead man's body, because we never see it again) into the sea. But that's still not enough to get them to Hawaii, because plot.
They're in an airplane, did I mention that?
One of the brothers goes outside the plane and uses the hatchet to, I shit you not, cut one of the engines off the plane so they are light enough to make it to Hawaii. He dies.
They almost make it in the middle of the night when the fuel runs out and they instantly drop straight down, because the wings of a plane don't generate lift and can't glide for several miles without power, and hits the sea.
Everyone then wake up completely dry on the beach and we see the Murican flag waving in the distance while someone on the radio, which no one brought with them but appears on the beach because plot, says that thousands of survivors have escaped to Canada, Mexico, and Hawaii, which are the only places safe from the radiation.
The end.
Here's the trailer, which contains the entire movie. Enjoy.
Thursday, September 20, 2018
The Predator is Literally About Weaponized Autism
The new movie The Predator rewrites the mythos of the predator species entirely, making them search the galaxy to literally weaponize autism so they can survive on Earth after global warming kills all the humans.
Sunday, September 16, 2018
The Mist
The Mist is a movie made about a book written by Steven King, who likes to write stories with really stupid endings because art, or something. The Mist is one of the most unintentionally funny movies of all time. The entire thing is 120 minutes leading up to a single joke.
Here's the ten second synopsis: People are trapped inside a store when the town is engulfed in a mist that contains tentacle monsters/Japanese porn stars. One woman wants to leave the store to go find her kids, but this guy who looks like Sean Nelson without glasses refuses to go with her. He's the protagonist. Some woman with a bowl cut becomes a cult leader who demands human sacrifices because reasons. The guy kills the cult leader and feeds her to the monsters.
Then comes the ending, which is pure comedy gold. The guy escapes from the store with his son and three old people, they drive all day until the car runs out of gas. It looks like the mist goes on forever, so he kills his son and the old people and runs out of bullets. Two seconds later the entire US Army comes by and clears out the mist.
AND they come in from behind him, meaning the entire US Army was just yards behind the car the whole time as it drove through the mist.
To rub it in his face even more the woman who escaped the store at the beginning of the movie to find her kids is one of the survivors. She spent the entire movie out in the mist and nothing bad happened to her or her kids.
What's more the guy is seriously OVERACTING!!!!111
Here's the ending, in case you haven't seen it.
Here's the ten second synopsis: People are trapped inside a store when the town is engulfed in a mist that contains tentacle monsters/Japanese porn stars. One woman wants to leave the store to go find her kids, but this guy who looks like Sean Nelson without glasses refuses to go with her. He's the protagonist. Some woman with a bowl cut becomes a cult leader who demands human sacrifices because reasons. The guy kills the cult leader and feeds her to the monsters.
Then comes the ending, which is pure comedy gold. The guy escapes from the store with his son and three old people, they drive all day until the car runs out of gas. It looks like the mist goes on forever, so he kills his son and the old people and runs out of bullets. Two seconds later the entire US Army comes by and clears out the mist.
AND they come in from behind him, meaning the entire US Army was just yards behind the car the whole time as it drove through the mist.
To rub it in his face even more the woman who escaped the store at the beginning of the movie to find her kids is one of the survivors. She spent the entire movie out in the mist and nothing bad happened to her or her kids.
What's more the guy is seriously OVERACTING!!!!111
Here's the ending, in case you haven't seen it.
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Was the Remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still About Colonialism?
One thing to note at the beginning, the aliens in the original were very liberal. They don't care what any species does on its own planet as long as no one tries to initiate violence between planets. They set up, in Klaatu's words, a police force of robots to kill anyone who tried to initiate violence, and that was the entire scope of the galactic government. The government doesn't care what you do as long as you don't try to hurt anyone else (you can hurt yourself all you want). The supreme directive of the aliens is that interpersonal violence is the supreme evil. And all involvement in the galactic government was voluntary. You didn't have to abide by the interplanetary law if you wanted to keep to yourself on your own planet, but if you did decide to join the galactic government there was no way to go back on that decision.
The aliens in the remake are authoritarian, if not outright genocidal. They glorify violence if it achieves their goal of protecting barely sentient life like bacteria or moss. Interplanetary law is imposed on all planets without any warning or announcement. Not only can you never leave, you don't even get to decide whether you join or not, you are born into the legal system and there are no alternative systems to escape to. The galaxy is a prison and you're stuck in it.
Now to think about colonialism you have to think about how the message from the aliens in the remake does not make any sense.
Planets that can support complex life are so rare in the universe that the aliens have to kill all humans because humans are polluting the Earth. And to do this the aliens don't use some hi-tech weapon that will kill ONLY humans and spare everything else, they release an exponentially expanding plague of robots that eats absolutely everything, including rock, erasing completely a biosphere that took millions of years to develop, and then they will re-seed the now totally barren, lifeless Earth with animals they saved from their zoo. And they think this plan can actually work. You strip the planet down to bedrock, cover that with a blanket of gazillions of dead robot bugs, and then place a small handful of plants and animals rescued from the handful of ships, and hope that the one pair of elephants doesn't eat the one grove of trees that gets planted and dooms all life on Earth to extinction permanently because now not only has the biosphere been wiped clean but all the zoo animals have died.
This plan can never work. Raising endangered animals in captivity and releasing them into the wild only works because there is a wild to release them into. If the wild is destroyed completely and the endangered animals are released into barren rock then the released animals will die too because there's not enough food to go around.
What if the aliens terraform the Earth again over millions of years? Maybe they will, but that still sets life back millions of years. They still have to keep the elephants alive on the tiny little ships for millions of years, and they clearly didn't bring enough plants with them to do that, unless the aliens feed all the animals the magic placenta material until new forests have developed. You can't have terraforming and Noah's Ark at the same time. If the aliens want to terraform the barren Earth then they'll have to accept that all the complex life they claim to cherish so much will go extinct, by their own hand, and evolution will have to start over again from bacteria. If the aliens want to preserve complex life they would have developed a human-specific virus that would have spared all other species. The aliens want to do both at the same time and would probably end up achieving neither.
So, since the alleged motivation and plan of the aliens makes absolutely no sense then we can suppose one of two things: 1. The writers never bothered to think things through and just got drunk and slapped a CGI-crapfest together in a weekend, or 2. The aliens are lying.
We're rational beings here, we know 1 is the correct answer, but just for fun let us assume the writers were intelligent and what they really intended was 2.
The aliens were hostile from the beginning because they wanted the Earth for their own use. They come to Earth and tell a couple of humans "You are not using your resources efficiently enough. We can use them more efficiently, so you must die." Mind you the aliens can control all electricity and all electronic devices, they have an unlimited power source, are capable of faster than light travel, and they can cancel inertia, they could easily transmit a signal to TVs, radios, and computers simultaneously without needing to physically meet at the UN building. This fact alone makes it look like a setup. The aliens could warn the planet but they decide to warn a handful of military personnel instead?
The aliens are classic invaders, and they are justifying their invasion in colonialist terms. The Chinese are not "invading" Tibet, they are "peacefully liberating" it, because the Tibetan people do not know how to live properly and must be "educated" and freed from the "oppression" of their government. Meanwhile half the population is "liberated" from living, all the Tibetan resources are extracted for Chinese use, and all the Chinese nuclear waste is dumped in Tibet.
Similarly, the aliens are not "invading" the Earth because they want to exploit it for themselves, they are "peacefully liberating" the Earth from the human "infestation".
Think about it. What is the difference between what humans are doing and what all other species do? Contrary to what Agent Smith said in the first Matrix, animals do not seek equilibrium, equilibrium just establishes itself naturally because the exploitative capacity of any group of animals is finite and is usually in line with the capacity of other competing species to avoid exploitation. When all the restraints are removed any species will use up all available resources until nothing is left. This is seen in every situation with an invasive species. Rats accidentally land on an island and within a few years all the native ground-nesting birds are extinct. The rats were not seeking equilibrium, they were following their biological directive to seek out resources and use them to make more rats. At the very least one can say humans are no more selfish than any other species, just that human capacity far exceeds that of all other species, so there is no competition, humans completely dominate in every environment, in every sphere of activity. In that sense humans are the most animal-like animals on the planet.
The one thing Humans have beyond other animals is rational intelligence. As smart as they are, chimpanzees and dolphins not only don't care about the environment, they do not know what an environment is. Not too long ago, in the grand scheme of things, humans developed the concept of an environment and realised "If we follow our biological directive and eat everything then there won't be anything to eat in the future, so if we want to survive we have to put limits on our biological directive and utilise the available resources in a more efficient way." Humans are the only creature on Earth that has ever had that thought. Humans are then, simultaneously, the only creatures capable of destroying the biosphere, the only species capable of preserving the biosphere, and the only species that knows what a biosphere is.
And in 4 billion years that thought has only arisen ONCE. The very same thought the aliens claim to profess only ever arose in ONE species on the Earth, and the aliens want to exterminate the ONE species like themselves, the ONE species that had moved beyond instinctual selfishness to rational selfishness and, in some cases, rational altruism. (It is mysterious to note that the event that led Keanu to spare humans was a single instance of a mother comforting her child, which is something most mammals do to preserve their own genes and is thus an instinctually selfish act, rather than, say, agriculture, or treaties limiting fishing or pollution, or the whole concept of protecting endangered species, or nuclear nonproliferation treaties that have done more to protect the environment than anything.)
The aliens, then, are more selfish than the humans. The aliens are not more moral, they just create moral-sounding language to justify their selfishness. This is the same thing all colonial powers do. The natives are too ignorant, or to racially inferior, or they are simply being oppressed, and so the moral colonialists must move in and take over, kill the ruling class (the humans) and use their technological, intellectual, and moral superiority to uplift the lives of the oppressed natives (other animals and plants). Not enough is known about the aliens' culture to say for certain which mode of colonialism best applies, but they seem very similar to Communist China to me.
Was that what the writers intended when they came up with this remake of the great sci-fi classic? Not a chance, they were just making a popcorn flick, but it certainly has been entertaining to over-analyse the film.
The aliens in the remake are authoritarian, if not outright genocidal. They glorify violence if it achieves their goal of protecting barely sentient life like bacteria or moss. Interplanetary law is imposed on all planets without any warning or announcement. Not only can you never leave, you don't even get to decide whether you join or not, you are born into the legal system and there are no alternative systems to escape to. The galaxy is a prison and you're stuck in it.
Now to think about colonialism you have to think about how the message from the aliens in the remake does not make any sense.
Planets that can support complex life are so rare in the universe that the aliens have to kill all humans because humans are polluting the Earth. And to do this the aliens don't use some hi-tech weapon that will kill ONLY humans and spare everything else, they release an exponentially expanding plague of robots that eats absolutely everything, including rock, erasing completely a biosphere that took millions of years to develop, and then they will re-seed the now totally barren, lifeless Earth with animals they saved from their zoo. And they think this plan can actually work. You strip the planet down to bedrock, cover that with a blanket of gazillions of dead robot bugs, and then place a small handful of plants and animals rescued from the handful of ships, and hope that the one pair of elephants doesn't eat the one grove of trees that gets planted and dooms all life on Earth to extinction permanently because now not only has the biosphere been wiped clean but all the zoo animals have died.
This plan can never work. Raising endangered animals in captivity and releasing them into the wild only works because there is a wild to release them into. If the wild is destroyed completely and the endangered animals are released into barren rock then the released animals will die too because there's not enough food to go around.
What if the aliens terraform the Earth again over millions of years? Maybe they will, but that still sets life back millions of years. They still have to keep the elephants alive on the tiny little ships for millions of years, and they clearly didn't bring enough plants with them to do that, unless the aliens feed all the animals the magic placenta material until new forests have developed. You can't have terraforming and Noah's Ark at the same time. If the aliens want to terraform the barren Earth then they'll have to accept that all the complex life they claim to cherish so much will go extinct, by their own hand, and evolution will have to start over again from bacteria. If the aliens want to preserve complex life they would have developed a human-specific virus that would have spared all other species. The aliens want to do both at the same time and would probably end up achieving neither.
So, since the alleged motivation and plan of the aliens makes absolutely no sense then we can suppose one of two things: 1. The writers never bothered to think things through and just got drunk and slapped a CGI-crapfest together in a weekend, or 2. The aliens are lying.
We're rational beings here, we know 1 is the correct answer, but just for fun let us assume the writers were intelligent and what they really intended was 2.
The aliens were hostile from the beginning because they wanted the Earth for their own use. They come to Earth and tell a couple of humans "You are not using your resources efficiently enough. We can use them more efficiently, so you must die." Mind you the aliens can control all electricity and all electronic devices, they have an unlimited power source, are capable of faster than light travel, and they can cancel inertia, they could easily transmit a signal to TVs, radios, and computers simultaneously without needing to physically meet at the UN building. This fact alone makes it look like a setup. The aliens could warn the planet but they decide to warn a handful of military personnel instead?
The aliens are classic invaders, and they are justifying their invasion in colonialist terms. The Chinese are not "invading" Tibet, they are "peacefully liberating" it, because the Tibetan people do not know how to live properly and must be "educated" and freed from the "oppression" of their government. Meanwhile half the population is "liberated" from living, all the Tibetan resources are extracted for Chinese use, and all the Chinese nuclear waste is dumped in Tibet.
Similarly, the aliens are not "invading" the Earth because they want to exploit it for themselves, they are "peacefully liberating" the Earth from the human "infestation".
Think about it. What is the difference between what humans are doing and what all other species do? Contrary to what Agent Smith said in the first Matrix, animals do not seek equilibrium, equilibrium just establishes itself naturally because the exploitative capacity of any group of animals is finite and is usually in line with the capacity of other competing species to avoid exploitation. When all the restraints are removed any species will use up all available resources until nothing is left. This is seen in every situation with an invasive species. Rats accidentally land on an island and within a few years all the native ground-nesting birds are extinct. The rats were not seeking equilibrium, they were following their biological directive to seek out resources and use them to make more rats. At the very least one can say humans are no more selfish than any other species, just that human capacity far exceeds that of all other species, so there is no competition, humans completely dominate in every environment, in every sphere of activity. In that sense humans are the most animal-like animals on the planet.
The one thing Humans have beyond other animals is rational intelligence. As smart as they are, chimpanzees and dolphins not only don't care about the environment, they do not know what an environment is. Not too long ago, in the grand scheme of things, humans developed the concept of an environment and realised "If we follow our biological directive and eat everything then there won't be anything to eat in the future, so if we want to survive we have to put limits on our biological directive and utilise the available resources in a more efficient way." Humans are the only creature on Earth that has ever had that thought. Humans are then, simultaneously, the only creatures capable of destroying the biosphere, the only species capable of preserving the biosphere, and the only species that knows what a biosphere is.
And in 4 billion years that thought has only arisen ONCE. The very same thought the aliens claim to profess only ever arose in ONE species on the Earth, and the aliens want to exterminate the ONE species like themselves, the ONE species that had moved beyond instinctual selfishness to rational selfishness and, in some cases, rational altruism. (It is mysterious to note that the event that led Keanu to spare humans was a single instance of a mother comforting her child, which is something most mammals do to preserve their own genes and is thus an instinctually selfish act, rather than, say, agriculture, or treaties limiting fishing or pollution, or the whole concept of protecting endangered species, or nuclear nonproliferation treaties that have done more to protect the environment than anything.)
The aliens, then, are more selfish than the humans. The aliens are not more moral, they just create moral-sounding language to justify their selfishness. This is the same thing all colonial powers do. The natives are too ignorant, or to racially inferior, or they are simply being oppressed, and so the moral colonialists must move in and take over, kill the ruling class (the humans) and use their technological, intellectual, and moral superiority to uplift the lives of the oppressed natives (other animals and plants). Not enough is known about the aliens' culture to say for certain which mode of colonialism best applies, but they seem very similar to Communist China to me.
Was that what the writers intended when they came up with this remake of the great sci-fi classic? Not a chance, they were just making a popcorn flick, but it certainly has been entertaining to over-analyse the film.
Monday, April 11, 2016
20 Things Wrong with The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008)
1. The kid was super annoying.
2. Gort was in 2 scenes, and he turned into a cloud of little bugs that ate everything in the second scene, for no reason.
3. The CGI Gort looks totally fake. They could have shot an actor on a green screen and made him look 20 feet tall like Xerxes.
4. Klaatu has magical powers that fluctuate depending on what the plot calls for at any given moment.
5. Klaatu has magical powers, full stop.
6. Klaatu kills people to show how violent and destructive humans are?
7. Life is so precious that the super advanced aliens need to abduct animals on an ark because they plan on killing every living thing on the planet?
8. The super advanced aliens invented a weapon that eats absolutely everything, including rocks, because they wanted to wipe out the humans. Why not just engineer a human specific virus and spare all the other creatures?
9. The alien super weapon can convert any random matter into more copies of itself regardless of the chemical composition of what it eats, and it can apparently generate a limitless supply of energy out of nothing.
10. If the aliens have free energy and they are so worried about humans polluting the Earth why not just give humans the free energy technology and solve the problem without killing anyone?
11. Klaatu makes one half-assed attempt at contacting all the world leaders and then decides "To hell with it," and releases the super weapon to destroy the planet.
12. Klaatu's people are hypocrites, as John Cleese points out. Klaatu's people DID destroy their home world, and in a fit of desperation developed free energy, and instead of giving other species the same opportunity, they decide to wipe them out instead.
13. Klaatu's people can cancel inertia, so why does he need the password to escape the government prison? Why doesn't he just blast his way through the walls?
14. The size of the killer bugs Gort transformed into varies depending on the scene. In one scene they are microscopic, in another they are clearly the size of common garden ants.
15. Klaatu DOES say "Klaatu barada nikto" but super loud "dramatic" music drowns it out.
16. Why did Klaatu's ship land on Earth in 1928 to pick up Keanu Reeves' body and then decide to come back in 2008 to kill all humans when humans were clearly making progress in saving the planet by that time. The worst time for ecological destruction was in the 1950s when thousands of open air nukes were being detonated. Pollution and environmental destruction have decreased since then, so humans are making progress, if at a somewhat slow pace. Klaatu should be able to appreciate that more people care about the environment now than ever before.
17. Klaatu destroys Gort in the end.
18. The device Klaatu uses to destroy Gort not only destroys all electronics on the planet, it stops everything mechanical, whether it is electronic or not!
19. Building on the horror from 18, think of all the people who died when all machines were destroyed? Every plane in the air fell to the ground, all submarines sank and were crushed in the ocean, everyone in an elevator is trapped and will suffocate, everyone on a ship is permanently stranded at sea unless they can paddle to shore, everyone who requires insulin will die now that there is no refrigeration, ALL vaccines and medicine will be wiped out, food production will decrease dramatically, 5 billion people, at least, will die. The annoying kid and the suspiciously attractive scientist will almost certainly die within the year. Rather than saving humanity, Klaatu has pretty much doomed humanity to the iron age permanently, since all the scientists and engineers who will be needed to rebuild the Earth's infrastructure will almost certainly die. It would have been a lot more merciful just to wipe everyone out rather than let billions of people starve to death.
20. WHY THE HELL DIDN'T KLAATU JUST GIVE HUMANS THE DAMN FREE ENERGY TECHNOLOGY?! That would have solved every single problem with the story. None of this makes any sense. That's why changing the story doesn't work. The 1951 story was perfect. "Humans have developed nuclear weapons and rockets and the aliens don't want humans to spread war to outer space so they quarantine the Earth." Works perfectly. The 2008 story makes no sense. "Humans are polluting the Earth so aliens who completely destroyed their home planet with pollution will completely destroy the Earth and remake it without humans." That makes no sense. Just give humans the free energy and no one will ever pollute again! Then no one needs to die! It only takes a few seconds to think this through. The writers could have come up with something just as relevant to the 21st century as nuclear weapons were to the 1950s, but NO, they came up with something incredibly stupid with more plot holes than Swiss cheese! It does not make sense. It doesn't fit. If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.
2. Gort was in 2 scenes, and he turned into a cloud of little bugs that ate everything in the second scene, for no reason.
3. The CGI Gort looks totally fake. They could have shot an actor on a green screen and made him look 20 feet tall like Xerxes.
4. Klaatu has magical powers that fluctuate depending on what the plot calls for at any given moment.
5. Klaatu has magical powers, full stop.
6. Klaatu kills people to show how violent and destructive humans are?
7. Life is so precious that the super advanced aliens need to abduct animals on an ark because they plan on killing every living thing on the planet?
8. The super advanced aliens invented a weapon that eats absolutely everything, including rocks, because they wanted to wipe out the humans. Why not just engineer a human specific virus and spare all the other creatures?
9. The alien super weapon can convert any random matter into more copies of itself regardless of the chemical composition of what it eats, and it can apparently generate a limitless supply of energy out of nothing.
10. If the aliens have free energy and they are so worried about humans polluting the Earth why not just give humans the free energy technology and solve the problem without killing anyone?
11. Klaatu makes one half-assed attempt at contacting all the world leaders and then decides "To hell with it," and releases the super weapon to destroy the planet.
12. Klaatu's people are hypocrites, as John Cleese points out. Klaatu's people DID destroy their home world, and in a fit of desperation developed free energy, and instead of giving other species the same opportunity, they decide to wipe them out instead.
13. Klaatu's people can cancel inertia, so why does he need the password to escape the government prison? Why doesn't he just blast his way through the walls?
14. The size of the killer bugs Gort transformed into varies depending on the scene. In one scene they are microscopic, in another they are clearly the size of common garden ants.
15. Klaatu DOES say "Klaatu barada nikto" but super loud "dramatic" music drowns it out.
16. Why did Klaatu's ship land on Earth in 1928 to pick up Keanu Reeves' body and then decide to come back in 2008 to kill all humans when humans were clearly making progress in saving the planet by that time. The worst time for ecological destruction was in the 1950s when thousands of open air nukes were being detonated. Pollution and environmental destruction have decreased since then, so humans are making progress, if at a somewhat slow pace. Klaatu should be able to appreciate that more people care about the environment now than ever before.
17. Klaatu destroys Gort in the end.
18. The device Klaatu uses to destroy Gort not only destroys all electronics on the planet, it stops everything mechanical, whether it is electronic or not!
19. Building on the horror from 18, think of all the people who died when all machines were destroyed? Every plane in the air fell to the ground, all submarines sank and were crushed in the ocean, everyone in an elevator is trapped and will suffocate, everyone on a ship is permanently stranded at sea unless they can paddle to shore, everyone who requires insulin will die now that there is no refrigeration, ALL vaccines and medicine will be wiped out, food production will decrease dramatically, 5 billion people, at least, will die. The annoying kid and the suspiciously attractive scientist will almost certainly die within the year. Rather than saving humanity, Klaatu has pretty much doomed humanity to the iron age permanently, since all the scientists and engineers who will be needed to rebuild the Earth's infrastructure will almost certainly die. It would have been a lot more merciful just to wipe everyone out rather than let billions of people starve to death.
20. WHY THE HELL DIDN'T KLAATU JUST GIVE HUMANS THE DAMN FREE ENERGY TECHNOLOGY?! That would have solved every single problem with the story. None of this makes any sense. That's why changing the story doesn't work. The 1951 story was perfect. "Humans have developed nuclear weapons and rockets and the aliens don't want humans to spread war to outer space so they quarantine the Earth." Works perfectly. The 2008 story makes no sense. "Humans are polluting the Earth so aliens who completely destroyed their home planet with pollution will completely destroy the Earth and remake it without humans." That makes no sense. Just give humans the free energy and no one will ever pollute again! Then no one needs to die! It only takes a few seconds to think this through. The writers could have come up with something just as relevant to the 21st century as nuclear weapons were to the 1950s, but NO, they came up with something incredibly stupid with more plot holes than Swiss cheese! It does not make sense. It doesn't fit. If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.
Sunday, October 4, 2015
Equestria Girls: Friendship Games
How is sound coming out of Rainbow's electric guitar when it's not plugged into anything?
Evil Twi is the unibomber!
I find it hard to believe that she was able to create a magic detector having seen magic very briefly at best two times. There would have been no way to calibrate it. And when she touches the base of the statue ripples appear from the portal. When Pinkie Pie ran into it at the end of the first movie it was clear that the statue has turned completely to stone again. There should be no remnant of the portal left.
That city looks lazily done. The houses are bland and generic and the background is one solid piece. Sometimes that has been used to good effect in other cartoons, but it doesn't seem to fit here. It comes off looking rushed.
I don't like the idea of what appears to be rivals to mane six. The idea of "evil" counterparts again seems lazy. Rather than creating new characters let's just have anti-matter clones of everyone so everyone knows who they are and it saves a whole lot of time.
Hold on! Sunset has been on Earth for four years (she won that Fall Formal three times and lost the fourth to pony Twilight). How does she not know about Crystal Prep and yet everyone else does?
Principal Celestia announces the games happen every four years. Then how the hell does everyone except Sunset know about them so well, and how are they all so bitter? The last Friendship Games would have happened before they all entered high school. Maybe if a few of them have older siblings they would have heard about it, but if the games happen every four years they would have only seen a few in their lives, and they would have been little kids who wouldn't have properly understood or even cared about them. 8 minutes in and I'm not liking this premise at all. It's just so contrived.
There's a song where RD wastes a couple minutes. It seems hinted that she's friends with the head of the school band. I hope we see that expanded instead of just a one off moment.
Okay, so everyone at school knows about magic and Sunset being from Equestria. Evil Twi knows. How is it no one else does? If a magical being from another universe came to this Earth and there was a huge battle we've all seen E.T., we know what would happen. There would be no way to hide this from the world. The government would have come in and taken over. It would not end well.
Sunny needs a hug.
Evil Twi gets a much better song, but how is it she is singing in the hall and no one notices, or cares?
Why would the principal want Evil Twi to compete in a sport event when she should know she has no athletic ability? That does not make sense. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit. If it doesn't fit, you must quit. If winning is so important then Evil Twi is the last person the evil principal would want competing.
And I would say that CHS building a "reputation" is the understatement of the century. Even if they somehow managed to keep magic under wraps, which would have been impossible, it would still be all over the news that the front of the school was destroyed for no reason after the battle with Sunny that no one knows about. Let's assume you could somehow hide the fact that a magical apocalypse almost took place. It would be impossible to hide a gaping hole in the front of the school that would have taken months to fix.
This is not me overthinking things. These are huge flaws in the whole premise of the story that anyone would notice. Me as a kid would have noticed this. This story just plain does not make sense. It could never work.
No one knows that's not pony Twi, that's Evil Twi, who so far isn't all that evil, but she's the evil twin counterpart from the evil school, so I expect her to do something evil soon.
That has to be the first really good part of this movie, where everyone talks to Evil Twi mistaking her for pony Twi and then Pinkie figures out who she really is.
Evil Twi happens to have a device that steals magic. That's can't possibly go wrong.
That principal's a bitch.
Poor Brad. No one told him yet.
Did dragon Spike and dog Spike switch places? Nope, dog Spike just gained a new power.
Sunny tears Evil Twi a new one! Way to go. Just like Ken Watanabe says in Godzilla "The arrogance of men is thinking nature is in our control and not the other way around."
Evil Twi wants to "learn" things by wrecking them. Just like in the 1950s when the Van Allen belts were discovered and the US and USSR wanted to see what would happen if you nuked them. "Here's this thing and it protects life on Earth from the solar wind, so let's see if we can blow it up!" No one thought that was a bad idea at the time!
It's just like GMOs. "Let's take something that at best we have no idea what will happen and release it into the wild and feed it to 300 million people. What could go wrong?"
But it's worse than not knowing what will happen. Genetically modified soy has been shown to produce sterility and birth defects. This has been demonstrated with hamsters and pigs and yet trillions of dollars are backing forcing this crap down the throats of Americans. Europeans are smarter than that. There are a lot of horrible chemicals and GM "foods" that are illegal in Europe that are perfectly legal in America. WORSE, it's illegal to tell the public that food might contain GMOs! Every time someone tries to pass a law that says companies have to lable their food, you know, so people at least have a CHOICE, it gets shot down. Apparently "pro-choice" only means "pro-abortion". You don't have a choice when it comes to anything else.
And what happens if those GM crops were to mate with wild species? What are the potential effects for the entire biosphere if this stuff escapes our control? When there is a lack of biodiversity there is crop failure. A single parasite can wipe out an entire species and then millions of people will starve. If something goes wrong with these GM crops that are replacing all the other varieties then it won't just be one country that is affected. Food production is spread out over the world. The failure of a crop could kill a billion people. We need to think things through first.
Enough damage has been caused by just rushing into things without thinking them through first (that hasn't stopped people from rushing even faster today). When the stakes are as high they are there is no margin for error.
Sunny has remorse for bringing magic to Earth.
Bitch principal is evil. She wants Evil Twi to use the stolen magic for evil. And that's terrible.
No one thinks giving super powers to the girl who everyone has been a dick to the entire movie is a bad idea?
Repeat of battle with Sunny with role reversal. It lacks the impact of the original.
Pony Twi shows up at the end, makes a reference to the as yet unaired season five finale, and then spots Once Evil Now Good Twi.
What else can I say. It began slowly, didn't really introduce any of the new characters except Bitch Principal and Evil Twi, and then there was maybe a minute or two of a battle I've already seen. It's been done. There were some entertaining parts toward the end, but that was it. There was nothing new or groundbreaking. There were hints of possible directions the story could have gone, better directions, and then they were dropped. I understand the target audience is adults with deep pockets who have below 70 IQs and only care about "ZOMG FUN! Infinity/10! Saying 'it's a kid's show' excuses piss poor writing!", but even me as a little kid would have been underwhelmed by this third movie. Maybe it would have captured my attention for an afternoon, but the previous movies still have not left me. They deal with great archetypal struggles (especially the first one), whereas Friendship Games was just the same thing done worse to make money. This reminds me of when The Land Before Time started making a new movie every year, with more songs and less plot every time, and they just kept getting crappier, just to make money.
When you have 20 characters in a 70 minute movie there's no way even half of them can be fully fleshed out. Some of them only get a couple of lines. Who the hell are Sour Sweet, Sugarcoat, and the rest, but gimmick characters? They have no personalities. They are boring. Even Evil Twi and Bitch Principal come off as flat. The writers must have spent all of ten seconds thinking them up.
This is the kind of movie where there are 20 good minutes if you shut your brain off, but if you dare spend more than a couple minutes thinking about it it starts to suck, and the longer you think the more it sucks. Rainbow Rocks created an extended world for the characters to explore and it did a fantastic job with that. Friendship Games tried to do the same and ended up sucking. It wasn't terrible, not season five terrible, but it wasn't good either. It existed, it had good moments, it had more bad moments, it does not bode well for the upcoming fourth movie, but it is what it is, and I have to say I'm glad I saw it.
70/100
Evil Twi is the unibomber!
I find it hard to believe that she was able to create a magic detector having seen magic very briefly at best two times. There would have been no way to calibrate it. And when she touches the base of the statue ripples appear from the portal. When Pinkie Pie ran into it at the end of the first movie it was clear that the statue has turned completely to stone again. There should be no remnant of the portal left.
That city looks lazily done. The houses are bland and generic and the background is one solid piece. Sometimes that has been used to good effect in other cartoons, but it doesn't seem to fit here. It comes off looking rushed.
I don't like the idea of what appears to be rivals to mane six. The idea of "evil" counterparts again seems lazy. Rather than creating new characters let's just have anti-matter clones of everyone so everyone knows who they are and it saves a whole lot of time.
Hold on! Sunset has been on Earth for four years (she won that Fall Formal three times and lost the fourth to pony Twilight). How does she not know about Crystal Prep and yet everyone else does?
Principal Celestia announces the games happen every four years. Then how the hell does everyone except Sunset know about them so well, and how are they all so bitter? The last Friendship Games would have happened before they all entered high school. Maybe if a few of them have older siblings they would have heard about it, but if the games happen every four years they would have only seen a few in their lives, and they would have been little kids who wouldn't have properly understood or even cared about them. 8 minutes in and I'm not liking this premise at all. It's just so contrived.
There's a song where RD wastes a couple minutes. It seems hinted that she's friends with the head of the school band. I hope we see that expanded instead of just a one off moment.
Okay, so everyone at school knows about magic and Sunset being from Equestria. Evil Twi knows. How is it no one else does? If a magical being from another universe came to this Earth and there was a huge battle we've all seen E.T., we know what would happen. There would be no way to hide this from the world. The government would have come in and taken over. It would not end well.
Sunny needs a hug.
Evil Twi gets a much better song, but how is it she is singing in the hall and no one notices, or cares?
Why would the principal want Evil Twi to compete in a sport event when she should know she has no athletic ability? That does not make sense. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit. If it doesn't fit, you must quit. If winning is so important then Evil Twi is the last person the evil principal would want competing.
And I would say that CHS building a "reputation" is the understatement of the century. Even if they somehow managed to keep magic under wraps, which would have been impossible, it would still be all over the news that the front of the school was destroyed for no reason after the battle with Sunny that no one knows about. Let's assume you could somehow hide the fact that a magical apocalypse almost took place. It would be impossible to hide a gaping hole in the front of the school that would have taken months to fix.
This is not me overthinking things. These are huge flaws in the whole premise of the story that anyone would notice. Me as a kid would have noticed this. This story just plain does not make sense. It could never work.
No one knows that's not pony Twi, that's Evil Twi, who so far isn't all that evil, but she's the evil twin counterpart from the evil school, so I expect her to do something evil soon.
That has to be the first really good part of this movie, where everyone talks to Evil Twi mistaking her for pony Twi and then Pinkie figures out who she really is.
Evil Twi happens to have a device that steals magic. That's can't possibly go wrong.
That principal's a bitch.
Poor Brad. No one told him yet.
Did dragon Spike and dog Spike switch places? Nope, dog Spike just gained a new power.
Sunny tears Evil Twi a new one! Way to go. Just like Ken Watanabe says in Godzilla "The arrogance of men is thinking nature is in our control and not the other way around."
Evil Twi wants to "learn" things by wrecking them. Just like in the 1950s when the Van Allen belts were discovered and the US and USSR wanted to see what would happen if you nuked them. "Here's this thing and it protects life on Earth from the solar wind, so let's see if we can blow it up!" No one thought that was a bad idea at the time!
It's just like GMOs. "Let's take something that at best we have no idea what will happen and release it into the wild and feed it to 300 million people. What could go wrong?"
But it's worse than not knowing what will happen. Genetically modified soy has been shown to produce sterility and birth defects. This has been demonstrated with hamsters and pigs and yet trillions of dollars are backing forcing this crap down the throats of Americans. Europeans are smarter than that. There are a lot of horrible chemicals and GM "foods" that are illegal in Europe that are perfectly legal in America. WORSE, it's illegal to tell the public that food might contain GMOs! Every time someone tries to pass a law that says companies have to lable their food, you know, so people at least have a CHOICE, it gets shot down. Apparently "pro-choice" only means "pro-abortion". You don't have a choice when it comes to anything else.
And what happens if those GM crops were to mate with wild species? What are the potential effects for the entire biosphere if this stuff escapes our control? When there is a lack of biodiversity there is crop failure. A single parasite can wipe out an entire species and then millions of people will starve. If something goes wrong with these GM crops that are replacing all the other varieties then it won't just be one country that is affected. Food production is spread out over the world. The failure of a crop could kill a billion people. We need to think things through first.
Enough damage has been caused by just rushing into things without thinking them through first (that hasn't stopped people from rushing even faster today). When the stakes are as high they are there is no margin for error.
Sunny has remorse for bringing magic to Earth.
Bitch principal is evil. She wants Evil Twi to use the stolen magic for evil. And that's terrible.
No one thinks giving super powers to the girl who everyone has been a dick to the entire movie is a bad idea?
Repeat of battle with Sunny with role reversal. It lacks the impact of the original.
Pony Twi shows up at the end, makes a reference to the as yet unaired season five finale, and then spots Once Evil Now Good Twi.
What else can I say. It began slowly, didn't really introduce any of the new characters except Bitch Principal and Evil Twi, and then there was maybe a minute or two of a battle I've already seen. It's been done. There were some entertaining parts toward the end, but that was it. There was nothing new or groundbreaking. There were hints of possible directions the story could have gone, better directions, and then they were dropped. I understand the target audience is adults with deep pockets who have below 70 IQs and only care about "ZOMG FUN! Infinity/10! Saying 'it's a kid's show' excuses piss poor writing!", but even me as a little kid would have been underwhelmed by this third movie. Maybe it would have captured my attention for an afternoon, but the previous movies still have not left me. They deal with great archetypal struggles (especially the first one), whereas Friendship Games was just the same thing done worse to make money. This reminds me of when The Land Before Time started making a new movie every year, with more songs and less plot every time, and they just kept getting crappier, just to make money.
When you have 20 characters in a 70 minute movie there's no way even half of them can be fully fleshed out. Some of them only get a couple of lines. Who the hell are Sour Sweet, Sugarcoat, and the rest, but gimmick characters? They have no personalities. They are boring. Even Evil Twi and Bitch Principal come off as flat. The writers must have spent all of ten seconds thinking them up.
This is the kind of movie where there are 20 good minutes if you shut your brain off, but if you dare spend more than a couple minutes thinking about it it starts to suck, and the longer you think the more it sucks. Rainbow Rocks created an extended world for the characters to explore and it did a fantastic job with that. Friendship Games tried to do the same and ended up sucking. It wasn't terrible, not season five terrible, but it wasn't good either. It existed, it had good moments, it had more bad moments, it does not bode well for the upcoming fourth movie, but it is what it is, and I have to say I'm glad I saw it.
70/100
Saturday, August 29, 2015
Why Taken is the Most Satisfying Movie in History
Taken (2008) stars Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills, the ultimate badass. He is retired from some government job that he only refers to as being a "preventer". He's basically a clean James Bond combined with Maximus. This guy is an expert at slaughtering bad people. His daughter goes to Paris with her idiot friend who gets killed because she doesn't see the danger of inviting some random guy she met for three seconds at the airport over to have consequence free sex. The daughter gets captured by Albanians who run a sex trafficking operation (It is easier for them to work in Paris than in Albania for some reason the movie does explicitly mention, but I forget what it is). Bryan (Liam Neeson) then gets the bad guy on the phone and delivers the greatest whole paragraph ever:
"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you. "
The villain, who is also an idiot, snarkly says "good luck" and hangs up.
Bryan knows this weaselly little guy who works behind a desk under another guy we never see who works behind a bigger desk who is somebody within the French government. He gets Bryan to Paris because he only has a couple days to rescue his daughter. When he gets there he kills a few really bad people and destroys a trailer and the desk jockey tells him to leave. Bryan instead tricks him and disappears.
He steals the ID of a French inspector and breaks into the hideout of the Albanians, who are idiots and do not question why a French inspector is speaking English with an Irish accent. There he meets the guy on the phone and says "I told you I would find you." He then kills everyone in the hideout except the telephone guy, who he brings to this rundown building. There he slams two railroad spikes into the guy's thighs and hooks him up to electrical wires. And asks where his daughter is. The guy does not answer so Bryan electrocutes him. He asks again and the guy again refuses to answer, because, as I've already said twice, this is one stupid criminal. Bryan electrocutes him again and then he gets fed up. He tells the thug "You either give me what I need or this switch will stay on until they turn the power off for lack of payment on the bill." The guy answers. He tells him that he sold his daughter to a man named Saint-Clair. Bryan knows he is telling the truth. He says "I believe you. But that won't save you," and then he turns the power on and leaves the room, letting the guy fry, and it's like a full body orgasm. There is human garbage in the world who really do this kind of thing and they deserve not only to die but to suffer, and this movie satisfies that need in me, but I'll say more about that later.
Bryan goes back to the desk jockey who stonewalls him until he shoots his wife (she lives) and then the desk jockey does what is right instead of what is legal and reveals where Saint-Clair lives.
Saint-Clair turns out to be an American who sells young women in this Eyes Wide Shut place. His goons catch Bryan during a party and Bryan kills them all, noisily. Saint-Clair asks a waiter or someone to check out what all the noise is and the second he opens the door he gets shot in the face and dies. Bryan then shoots Saint-Clair in an elevator and demands to know where his daughter is. Saint-Clair tells him she is on the boat of this billionaire sheik that is leaving in a few minutes. Lying in a pool of blood he pleads with Bryan, saying "Please understand... it was all business. It wasn't personal." To which Bryan replies "It was all personal to me," and then empties the gun into this fucker's face.
Bryan speeds along the riverside in a stolen car and then jumps off a bridge onto the boat. He kills a bunch of people on the boat and then breaks into the room of the sheik. The sheik has his daughter. He's got a knife to her throat. The sheik thinks he's going to get out of this, he thinks he's seen enough movies to know how this works. He thinks this is the real world. He is mistaken. He tries to tell Bryan "We can negoti-" and gets shot in the face mid-sentence in the best scene ever ever. This scene is like fifty times better than when that son of a bitch got electrocuted. If real life were a movie now would be the time to smoke, but life is not a movie and smoking is a filthy habit, so I just have to come down naturally.
If you have not figured it out yet, this is the best movie ever, and the reason is very simple: this movie is the exact opposite of real life. This is the way life should be. In the real world bad people get away with doing bad things all the time. The law protects bad people, who have "rights", whereas good people get beaten in the face with a telescoping baton. Little kids get tickets for running an illegal lemonade stand while Saudi princes can run prostitution rings in the US for decades and nothing happens to them. People can get arrested for collecting rain water because the government wants you to pay the legal water monopoly for something that should be free while windmill companies can kill tens of thousands of endangered birds every year. Someone who smokes a joint gets beaten in the face and thrown in jail for 20 years while child rapists get out in only 5. That's how real life works.
Movies don't have to be like real life. In a movie good wins over evil, right wins over wrong. In a movie the ultimate badass can say "fuck their rights" and kill villains who deserve to die. A movie hero can say "fuck corrupt laws that protect bad people" and do what is right instead of what is legal and can save the innocent and kill complete monsters. And the hero of Taken does this while rubbing it in the face of the authority figure. He berates the desk jockey for caring about what is legal instead of what is right, and he is totally vindicated in the end and triumphs over evil. In movies the heroes have power and skills and weapons and the villains are weak and stupid. No movie exemplifies this more than Taken, and that is why it is the greatest movie ever. It satisfies the deep abiding need of knowing that right will win against wrong and seeing bad people suffer and good people get rewarded. Taken satisfies the need for the world to make sense and for order and justice to prevail. It is medicine for the soul.
"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you. "
The villain, who is also an idiot, snarkly says "good luck" and hangs up.
Bryan knows this weaselly little guy who works behind a desk under another guy we never see who works behind a bigger desk who is somebody within the French government. He gets Bryan to Paris because he only has a couple days to rescue his daughter. When he gets there he kills a few really bad people and destroys a trailer and the desk jockey tells him to leave. Bryan instead tricks him and disappears.
He steals the ID of a French inspector and breaks into the hideout of the Albanians, who are idiots and do not question why a French inspector is speaking English with an Irish accent. There he meets the guy on the phone and says "I told you I would find you." He then kills everyone in the hideout except the telephone guy, who he brings to this rundown building. There he slams two railroad spikes into the guy's thighs and hooks him up to electrical wires. And asks where his daughter is. The guy does not answer so Bryan electrocutes him. He asks again and the guy again refuses to answer, because, as I've already said twice, this is one stupid criminal. Bryan electrocutes him again and then he gets fed up. He tells the thug "You either give me what I need or this switch will stay on until they turn the power off for lack of payment on the bill." The guy answers. He tells him that he sold his daughter to a man named Saint-Clair. Bryan knows he is telling the truth. He says "I believe you. But that won't save you," and then he turns the power on and leaves the room, letting the guy fry, and it's like a full body orgasm. There is human garbage in the world who really do this kind of thing and they deserve not only to die but to suffer, and this movie satisfies that need in me, but I'll say more about that later.
Bryan goes back to the desk jockey who stonewalls him until he shoots his wife (she lives) and then the desk jockey does what is right instead of what is legal and reveals where Saint-Clair lives.
Saint-Clair turns out to be an American who sells young women in this Eyes Wide Shut place. His goons catch Bryan during a party and Bryan kills them all, noisily. Saint-Clair asks a waiter or someone to check out what all the noise is and the second he opens the door he gets shot in the face and dies. Bryan then shoots Saint-Clair in an elevator and demands to know where his daughter is. Saint-Clair tells him she is on the boat of this billionaire sheik that is leaving in a few minutes. Lying in a pool of blood he pleads with Bryan, saying "Please understand... it was all business. It wasn't personal." To which Bryan replies "It was all personal to me," and then empties the gun into this fucker's face.
Bryan speeds along the riverside in a stolen car and then jumps off a bridge onto the boat. He kills a bunch of people on the boat and then breaks into the room of the sheik. The sheik has his daughter. He's got a knife to her throat. The sheik thinks he's going to get out of this, he thinks he's seen enough movies to know how this works. He thinks this is the real world. He is mistaken. He tries to tell Bryan "We can negoti-" and gets shot in the face mid-sentence in the best scene ever ever. This scene is like fifty times better than when that son of a bitch got electrocuted. If real life were a movie now would be the time to smoke, but life is not a movie and smoking is a filthy habit, so I just have to come down naturally.
If you have not figured it out yet, this is the best movie ever, and the reason is very simple: this movie is the exact opposite of real life. This is the way life should be. In the real world bad people get away with doing bad things all the time. The law protects bad people, who have "rights", whereas good people get beaten in the face with a telescoping baton. Little kids get tickets for running an illegal lemonade stand while Saudi princes can run prostitution rings in the US for decades and nothing happens to them. People can get arrested for collecting rain water because the government wants you to pay the legal water monopoly for something that should be free while windmill companies can kill tens of thousands of endangered birds every year. Someone who smokes a joint gets beaten in the face and thrown in jail for 20 years while child rapists get out in only 5. That's how real life works.
Movies don't have to be like real life. In a movie good wins over evil, right wins over wrong. In a movie the ultimate badass can say "fuck their rights" and kill villains who deserve to die. A movie hero can say "fuck corrupt laws that protect bad people" and do what is right instead of what is legal and can save the innocent and kill complete monsters. And the hero of Taken does this while rubbing it in the face of the authority figure. He berates the desk jockey for caring about what is legal instead of what is right, and he is totally vindicated in the end and triumphs over evil. In movies the heroes have power and skills and weapons and the villains are weak and stupid. No movie exemplifies this more than Taken, and that is why it is the greatest movie ever. It satisfies the deep abiding need of knowing that right will win against wrong and seeing bad people suffer and good people get rewarded. Taken satisfies the need for the world to make sense and for order and justice to prevail. It is medicine for the soul.
Monday, September 29, 2014
Rainbow Rocks Review
My review of Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks. Also up at my My Little Pony page.
I saw Rainbow Rocks at the first showing and I must say it was worth every pfennig (though I only have ten and they're not accepted as legal tender anywhere on Earth). I've written six pages of let's call it running commentary on the movie from memory, twelve hours after I saw it (so there might be a couple of mistakes). It's much more detailed than my normal reviews that I've just noticed I haven't been posting here very often. Well, here it is. Since the whole thing is outlined on MLP wiki and it's already up on Youtube I'm not too worried about spoilers. Just in case I'll put some arrow things, if y'all don't want to read it.
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Those short videos that have been released, the ones where Rarity and Fluttershy deal with the hamsters and Vinyl dances in the street, they appear nowhere in the movie. That was a surprise. The movie was short enough, only 75 minutes. They could have added the shorts to make it longer.
We begin as we have seen in the spoilers that have been officially released (I've done probably 80% of my best to avoid the unofficial spoilers) in the human world where Adagio Dazzle, Sonata Dusk (she's the adorable one), and Aria Blaze are in the shop feeding off of human misery when they spot the magic rainbow from the end of the first movie and Adagio conceives a plan to take over the world using the magic brought into this world with Twilight's crown (left over, after the crown was taken back).
Cue the first song during the opening credits: "Rainbow Rocks". It's cool.
Sunset Shimmer is uncomfortable in the auditorium, being ostracized by the other students, and finds a little relief with the mane five, who are always, unintentionally, bringing up what she did in the past, leading to frequent repetition of "no offense," "none taken." Tia and Lulu arrive and mention the Fall Formal, making things worse.
One very nice thing about this movie is the directionality of the sound. They shift the channels depending on where the character is, so you can tell if someone is to the right or left, and when they move the sound moves with them.
We then see the mane five practice, under the name The Rainbooms. Cue second song: "Better than Ever". A tear nearly snuck out of my eye when they sang "we're the Wondercolts forever." The girls get pony features when they sing, and not just from friendship, but also from excellence, as we see RD start to develop features alone when she's acting like a total jerk. Flutters wants to sing the song she wrote, but RD is being an even bigger narcissistic, egotistical jerk than usual (and that's saying something) and is actually mean to Flutters. Rarity wants to pick out costumes for the band and AJ is also mean and dismissive, in an odd way. She had little problem with Rarity picking out the dresses for the Fall Formal, and she has to know that bands don't just wear anything, but the writers need to add the seed of conflict. Pinkie Pie doesn't like the arguing, but not because it's not productive or is totally unnecessary or is not what friendship is about, but because she's bored of it. Herein lies three of the main problems that will turn up again and again throughout the movie. They are a significant plot point, so pay attention.
Flash, aka Brad, aka waifu thief, bursts in looking for waifus to steal (he wants to know if Twi will be there). AJ says no and Flash leaves in dejection.
Sunny is called by the principal to introduce the new students, who are the villains, to the school. More Sonatabetes.
Jump to the cafeteria, and the next song: "Battle of the Bands". We see that the mane five, plus Sunny, are the only ones immune to the villains' powers. It is a very sensual song, with a lot of curvy ladies moving about enticingly, from interesting angles, caressing people, and uncrossing their legs. The camera does seem to linger on certain things more than I expected. Hot damn, they're taking risks with this movie.
And all of this was spoiled. Officially. Almost the first fifteen minutes were revealed by Hasbro on the Internet. Nearly one fifth the whole movie was given away for free. This is simultaneously my biggest gripe and the very thing that led me to spend actual money on the movie. Had I not seen those clips, going off just the shorts that serve as a sort of prequel, I would have thought this would be terrible and never have gone. The official spoilers made me realise how awesome this was going to be.
Tia and Lulu are under the villain's hypno magic spell, so they turn to the last bit of magic they know: Sunny's book. She uses it to write letters to Celestia, like Twi, only without the need for a dragon. Of course we never learned of this before, but that's okay. They don't know if it will work, but it does, or the movie would end right there.
Cut to the only pony part of the whole movie. Ponyville is as it was after Tirek destroyed it, so weeks, maybe months have passed since the previous movie. The other copy of the book is now in Twi's possession. She reads that her human friends (and Sunny) are in trouble and has to think of a way to help. She reads up on the villains, who turn out to be sirens. Starswirl banished them to Earth (thanks a lot) a really long time ago, which means that even though they look like high school students they're really hundreds of years old, which means they're not jailbait, they're sexy grannies. It also means they are immortal.
Twi hooks the book up to the mirror, says some science-y bullshit, and then bypasses the thirty moons restriction. She tells her friends to stay behind, because it's not like we've had a ton of episodes where telling your friends to stay behind turned out to be a really bad idea. She goes through the portal with Spike and that's the last we ever see of ponies.
She enters human world and is met with a group hug that leaves poor Sunny high and dry. It's so sad how people treat her until the very end. That's a plot point, pay attention.
They figure they have to stop the villains quickly, so they barge into the auditorium and try to do their friendship beam but it doesn't work, because without the crown music is the only thing that can activate magic, for some reason. Now they have to enter the battle of the bands and use a musical "counter spell" to activate the friendship beam. The entire onus of the task is foisted upon Twi, who tries to tell everyone she can't do it alone, but they don't listen because they are preoccupied with previous plot points. These are all plot points, pay attention.
Lyra and Bon Bon are there, together.
Twi goes to sleep in the library, but Pinkie Pie insists she and everyone else, and Sunny, stay at her house. We get to see them all looking cute in their pyjamas (AJ's got feet!). AJ and RD are playing a Mane-iac video game, and just before AJ wins RD turns off the power, then taunts AJ. Dear Lord, RD has become a total jerkass by this point. Why would anyone EVER want to spend time with her?
When everyone is asleep Twi sneaks into the kitchen to write her song, when Sunny comes in and asks if she can help. She opens the refrigerizor to discover it is entirely full of whipped cream, which she eats off her fingers (it's getting hot in here?). They are interrupted by Maud (who is stunning in human form), who seems to have gone full retard, pouring crackers on a "hungry" Boulder, making a mess throughout the house as she walks away. Twi and Sunny almost get to the point where Twi asks for help, but she backs down at the last second.
The next day the song isn't working. They practice in AJ's barn. One of them says "at least we're better than the last time" and Big Mac walks past the window for the sole purpose of saying "nope." People cracked up over that one. Daft Punk reference. Well, without the spell they have to win the battle of the bands the old fashioned way, by being good singers. Those designated arguments start up again. Remember them? You were paying attention, weren't you?
At school Snips and Snails try to rap, badly, and lose right away though they think they're so cool. The mane six sing next, cue next song: "Shake Your Tail" (a different version than the one that was released months ago). Rarity is wearing a coat with metal dangly bits. For some reason Photo Finish uses magnets to sabotage her. AJ doesn't seem to care that it wasn't Rarity's fault. Snips and Snails chase Flutters with a spotlight, Pinkie's party cannon almost chokes Twi to death and something else happens that I don't remember. They argue some more, but they're good enough to move on.
Derpy has a band of what I can only assume are background ponies, and they all play strange quasi instruments: a cow bell and a triangle, and Derpy plays a saw. It's cool.
Cue montage. We're gonna' need a montage! Ooo it takes a montage! Show lots of things happening at once; remind everyone what's going on! To show it all would take too long. Even Rocky had a montage. While The Dazzlings sing "Under Our Spell" we see the progression of the contest. We see the CMC in their Show Stoppers outfits and flashing lights, Snowflake beats Lyra and Bon Bon (who are playing piano together, rubbing cheeks, almost adopting fannon completely) with a violin that is four sizes too small, the mane six beat Octy (who speaks one line, for the first time ever), and Brad's band beats someone, before themselves getting beaten (Brad, under the siren spell, hates Twi, and he made her cry).
The mane six play the Jerk's song about how she's the best person in the universe and everyone else sucks (seriously, what is magic again? I think I know why the friendship beam didn't work the first time). It rots, but RD is so in love with herself that she almost transforms. Sunny can't let the villains see her transform, so she tackles her and everyone gets pissed off. More pissed off.
Trixie plays a song "Tricks up My Sleeve". It is... interesting. And kind of long, and kind of like a filler song. Trixie plays the role of minor villain. This is a plot point, pay attention. Trixie is better, but the villains hypnotise Tia, who lets the mane six win. Trixie gets pissed and the next day, when the mane six are about to perform, she opens a trap door and traps them beneath the stage. Since the mane six can't be found Trixie takes their spot and performs again.
Beneath the stage everyone is fighting even more. This allows the villains to suck up their magic and they use it to transform themselves into anthros (pony ears, tails, and bat wings) with glowing red eyes. It's a very cool transformation. Sunny jumps in and saves the day. She points out the obvious, that all those plot points I told you to remember are the reason they can't make the magic work. Everyone atones. AJ accepts Rarity's outfits, and RD accepts Flutters' song. That door RD had been banging on for hours opens up. Turns out it opens in, not out. Spike brought Vinyl to help. Her headphones cancel out the siren spell. She also has a car that transforms into an amp.
The villains are singing their song and are just about ready to take over when the heroes sing back. The villains release their siren forms (which look like sea ponies) to physically do battle with the mane six, who have transformed into their anthro forms as well, and they almost win, but Twi finally asks Sunny for help and she picks up the mic and starts to sing. She takes her coat off, so you know this shit's just got real, revealing a nice backless top she never wore before. She transforms too, into good mode this time. Together their singing creates a giant alicorn of light which destroys the villains' pendants and busts them down to normal. They try to sing, to regain control of the crowd, but now their singing sucks and they run away in shame.
Brad hugs Twi, and Sunny reveals she's a totally awesome guitar player and she's now a permanent part of the band. Twi leaves. Sometime in the future Sunny is writing to Twi through the magic book, which allows the portal to be opened at any time. It's really sweet.
There is no pony bit at the end like last time. We go straight to the credits, and they are lovely. Last time there were just scrolling words, with Derpy at the very end, but this time there are a series of very lovely drawings of many of the characters. The song "Shine Like Rainbows" plays.
At the very end, after the credits, we see someone looking over a wall of pictures and charts centered around Canterlot High. It is human Twilight with her real dog Spike (first alluded to by Pinkie Pie in the previous movie). She is certain that something profoundly unusual is going on there.
They took a lot more risks with this movie than the last one, which was mostly bronybait. Sunny actually says she transformed into a demon and in the final song battle the word soul is used. In this fundamaterialistic naytheist progressive age anything that even remotely resembles religion is strictly forbidden, no matter how non-specific, so that was something to see. Adagio calls her comrades idiots, and in this progressive age where words don't mean things anymore anything that sounds like shaming people who are not "neurotypical" (a bullshit, made up word for normal people) is strictly forbidden. Lyrabon shipping. This one actually has nothing to do with progressivism, it has to do with how fandoms work. Shippers will go down with their ships, and anytime one particular ship is even hinted at officially it is going to piss a lot of people off. Lastly, there is a whole lot of sexy movement and camera angles. That is what surprised me most. It was nothing compared to actual high school (which would have to have a lot of stuff cut just to get an R rating), but for My Little Pony, I never expected that.
But none of that bothered me. They were the good kind of surprises (not the bad kind, like IRS surprises). There were three things I didn't like: 1. the movie was really short, 2. Maud, who is writing her PhD dissertation on geology, can't be so retarded that she would dump crackers on Boulder expecting him to really eat them, and 3. RD has turned into a total jerkass for no evident reason. I can't imagine how RD could have gone from where she was at the end of the first movie, at most a couple months earlier, to being a complete jerk, who is so unbelievably mean to all her friends that she makes the rumors Sunny spread in the first movie look small in comparison. Seriousry? She's Gilda bad. Her jerkness was the only thing that turned me off, and the only thing that deducted points from an otherwise perfect movie.
My final rating is 94/100. I can't possibly recommend seeing this in person enough (or at least buying the Blu-ray when it comes out 28 October).
I saw Rainbow Rocks at the first showing and I must say it was worth every pfennig (though I only have ten and they're not accepted as legal tender anywhere on Earth). I've written six pages of let's call it running commentary on the movie from memory, twelve hours after I saw it (so there might be a couple of mistakes). It's much more detailed than my normal reviews that I've just noticed I haven't been posting here very often. Well, here it is. Since the whole thing is outlined on MLP wiki and it's already up on Youtube I'm not too worried about spoilers. Just in case I'll put some arrow things, if y'all don't want to read it.
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Those short videos that have been released, the ones where Rarity and Fluttershy deal with the hamsters and Vinyl dances in the street, they appear nowhere in the movie. That was a surprise. The movie was short enough, only 75 minutes. They could have added the shorts to make it longer.
We begin as we have seen in the spoilers that have been officially released (I've done probably 80% of my best to avoid the unofficial spoilers) in the human world where Adagio Dazzle, Sonata Dusk (she's the adorable one), and Aria Blaze are in the shop feeding off of human misery when they spot the magic rainbow from the end of the first movie and Adagio conceives a plan to take over the world using the magic brought into this world with Twilight's crown (left over, after the crown was taken back).
Cue the first song during the opening credits: "Rainbow Rocks". It's cool.
Sunset Shimmer is uncomfortable in the auditorium, being ostracized by the other students, and finds a little relief with the mane five, who are always, unintentionally, bringing up what she did in the past, leading to frequent repetition of "no offense," "none taken." Tia and Lulu arrive and mention the Fall Formal, making things worse.
One very nice thing about this movie is the directionality of the sound. They shift the channels depending on where the character is, so you can tell if someone is to the right or left, and when they move the sound moves with them.
We then see the mane five practice, under the name The Rainbooms. Cue second song: "Better than Ever". A tear nearly snuck out of my eye when they sang "we're the Wondercolts forever." The girls get pony features when they sing, and not just from friendship, but also from excellence, as we see RD start to develop features alone when she's acting like a total jerk. Flutters wants to sing the song she wrote, but RD is being an even bigger narcissistic, egotistical jerk than usual (and that's saying something) and is actually mean to Flutters. Rarity wants to pick out costumes for the band and AJ is also mean and dismissive, in an odd way. She had little problem with Rarity picking out the dresses for the Fall Formal, and she has to know that bands don't just wear anything, but the writers need to add the seed of conflict. Pinkie Pie doesn't like the arguing, but not because it's not productive or is totally unnecessary or is not what friendship is about, but because she's bored of it. Herein lies three of the main problems that will turn up again and again throughout the movie. They are a significant plot point, so pay attention.
Flash, aka Brad, aka waifu thief, bursts in looking for waifus to steal (he wants to know if Twi will be there). AJ says no and Flash leaves in dejection.
Sunny is called by the principal to introduce the new students, who are the villains, to the school. More Sonatabetes.
Jump to the cafeteria, and the next song: "Battle of the Bands". We see that the mane five, plus Sunny, are the only ones immune to the villains' powers. It is a very sensual song, with a lot of curvy ladies moving about enticingly, from interesting angles, caressing people, and uncrossing their legs. The camera does seem to linger on certain things more than I expected. Hot damn, they're taking risks with this movie.
And all of this was spoiled. Officially. Almost the first fifteen minutes were revealed by Hasbro on the Internet. Nearly one fifth the whole movie was given away for free. This is simultaneously my biggest gripe and the very thing that led me to spend actual money on the movie. Had I not seen those clips, going off just the shorts that serve as a sort of prequel, I would have thought this would be terrible and never have gone. The official spoilers made me realise how awesome this was going to be.
Tia and Lulu are under the villain's hypno magic spell, so they turn to the last bit of magic they know: Sunny's book. She uses it to write letters to Celestia, like Twi, only without the need for a dragon. Of course we never learned of this before, but that's okay. They don't know if it will work, but it does, or the movie would end right there.
Cut to the only pony part of the whole movie. Ponyville is as it was after Tirek destroyed it, so weeks, maybe months have passed since the previous movie. The other copy of the book is now in Twi's possession. She reads that her human friends (and Sunny) are in trouble and has to think of a way to help. She reads up on the villains, who turn out to be sirens. Starswirl banished them to Earth (thanks a lot) a really long time ago, which means that even though they look like high school students they're really hundreds of years old, which means they're not jailbait, they're sexy grannies. It also means they are immortal.
Twi hooks the book up to the mirror, says some science-y bullshit, and then bypasses the thirty moons restriction. She tells her friends to stay behind, because it's not like we've had a ton of episodes where telling your friends to stay behind turned out to be a really bad idea. She goes through the portal with Spike and that's the last we ever see of ponies.
She enters human world and is met with a group hug that leaves poor Sunny high and dry. It's so sad how people treat her until the very end. That's a plot point, pay attention.
They figure they have to stop the villains quickly, so they barge into the auditorium and try to do their friendship beam but it doesn't work, because without the crown music is the only thing that can activate magic, for some reason. Now they have to enter the battle of the bands and use a musical "counter spell" to activate the friendship beam. The entire onus of the task is foisted upon Twi, who tries to tell everyone she can't do it alone, but they don't listen because they are preoccupied with previous plot points. These are all plot points, pay attention.
Lyra and Bon Bon are there, together.
Twi goes to sleep in the library, but Pinkie Pie insists she and everyone else, and Sunny, stay at her house. We get to see them all looking cute in their pyjamas (AJ's got feet!). AJ and RD are playing a Mane-iac video game, and just before AJ wins RD turns off the power, then taunts AJ. Dear Lord, RD has become a total jerkass by this point. Why would anyone EVER want to spend time with her?
When everyone is asleep Twi sneaks into the kitchen to write her song, when Sunny comes in and asks if she can help. She opens the refrigerizor to discover it is entirely full of whipped cream, which she eats off her fingers (it's getting hot in here?). They are interrupted by Maud (who is stunning in human form), who seems to have gone full retard, pouring crackers on a "hungry" Boulder, making a mess throughout the house as she walks away. Twi and Sunny almost get to the point where Twi asks for help, but she backs down at the last second.
The next day the song isn't working. They practice in AJ's barn. One of them says "at least we're better than the last time" and Big Mac walks past the window for the sole purpose of saying "nope." People cracked up over that one. Daft Punk reference. Well, without the spell they have to win the battle of the bands the old fashioned way, by being good singers. Those designated arguments start up again. Remember them? You were paying attention, weren't you?
At school Snips and Snails try to rap, badly, and lose right away though they think they're so cool. The mane six sing next, cue next song: "Shake Your Tail" (a different version than the one that was released months ago). Rarity is wearing a coat with metal dangly bits. For some reason Photo Finish uses magnets to sabotage her. AJ doesn't seem to care that it wasn't Rarity's fault. Snips and Snails chase Flutters with a spotlight, Pinkie's party cannon almost chokes Twi to death and something else happens that I don't remember. They argue some more, but they're good enough to move on.
Derpy has a band of what I can only assume are background ponies, and they all play strange quasi instruments: a cow bell and a triangle, and Derpy plays a saw. It's cool.
Cue montage. We're gonna' need a montage! Ooo it takes a montage! Show lots of things happening at once; remind everyone what's going on! To show it all would take too long. Even Rocky had a montage. While The Dazzlings sing "Under Our Spell" we see the progression of the contest. We see the CMC in their Show Stoppers outfits and flashing lights, Snowflake beats Lyra and Bon Bon (who are playing piano together, rubbing cheeks, almost adopting fannon completely) with a violin that is four sizes too small, the mane six beat Octy (who speaks one line, for the first time ever), and Brad's band beats someone, before themselves getting beaten (Brad, under the siren spell, hates Twi, and he made her cry).
The mane six play the Jerk's song about how she's the best person in the universe and everyone else sucks (seriously, what is magic again? I think I know why the friendship beam didn't work the first time). It rots, but RD is so in love with herself that she almost transforms. Sunny can't let the villains see her transform, so she tackles her and everyone gets pissed off. More pissed off.
Trixie plays a song "Tricks up My Sleeve". It is... interesting. And kind of long, and kind of like a filler song. Trixie plays the role of minor villain. This is a plot point, pay attention. Trixie is better, but the villains hypnotise Tia, who lets the mane six win. Trixie gets pissed and the next day, when the mane six are about to perform, she opens a trap door and traps them beneath the stage. Since the mane six can't be found Trixie takes their spot and performs again.
Beneath the stage everyone is fighting even more. This allows the villains to suck up their magic and they use it to transform themselves into anthros (pony ears, tails, and bat wings) with glowing red eyes. It's a very cool transformation. Sunny jumps in and saves the day. She points out the obvious, that all those plot points I told you to remember are the reason they can't make the magic work. Everyone atones. AJ accepts Rarity's outfits, and RD accepts Flutters' song. That door RD had been banging on for hours opens up. Turns out it opens in, not out. Spike brought Vinyl to help. Her headphones cancel out the siren spell. She also has a car that transforms into an amp.
The villains are singing their song and are just about ready to take over when the heroes sing back. The villains release their siren forms (which look like sea ponies) to physically do battle with the mane six, who have transformed into their anthro forms as well, and they almost win, but Twi finally asks Sunny for help and she picks up the mic and starts to sing. She takes her coat off, so you know this shit's just got real, revealing a nice backless top she never wore before. She transforms too, into good mode this time. Together their singing creates a giant alicorn of light which destroys the villains' pendants and busts them down to normal. They try to sing, to regain control of the crowd, but now their singing sucks and they run away in shame.
Brad hugs Twi, and Sunny reveals she's a totally awesome guitar player and she's now a permanent part of the band. Twi leaves. Sometime in the future Sunny is writing to Twi through the magic book, which allows the portal to be opened at any time. It's really sweet.
There is no pony bit at the end like last time. We go straight to the credits, and they are lovely. Last time there were just scrolling words, with Derpy at the very end, but this time there are a series of very lovely drawings of many of the characters. The song "Shine Like Rainbows" plays.
At the very end, after the credits, we see someone looking over a wall of pictures and charts centered around Canterlot High. It is human Twilight with her real dog Spike (first alluded to by Pinkie Pie in the previous movie). She is certain that something profoundly unusual is going on there.
They took a lot more risks with this movie than the last one, which was mostly bronybait. Sunny actually says she transformed into a demon and in the final song battle the word soul is used. In this fundamaterialistic naytheist progressive age anything that even remotely resembles religion is strictly forbidden, no matter how non-specific, so that was something to see. Adagio calls her comrades idiots, and in this progressive age where words don't mean things anymore anything that sounds like shaming people who are not "neurotypical" (a bullshit, made up word for normal people) is strictly forbidden. Lyrabon shipping. This one actually has nothing to do with progressivism, it has to do with how fandoms work. Shippers will go down with their ships, and anytime one particular ship is even hinted at officially it is going to piss a lot of people off. Lastly, there is a whole lot of sexy movement and camera angles. That is what surprised me most. It was nothing compared to actual high school (which would have to have a lot of stuff cut just to get an R rating), but for My Little Pony, I never expected that.
But none of that bothered me. They were the good kind of surprises (not the bad kind, like IRS surprises). There were three things I didn't like: 1. the movie was really short, 2. Maud, who is writing her PhD dissertation on geology, can't be so retarded that she would dump crackers on Boulder expecting him to really eat them, and 3. RD has turned into a total jerkass for no evident reason. I can't imagine how RD could have gone from where she was at the end of the first movie, at most a couple months earlier, to being a complete jerk, who is so unbelievably mean to all her friends that she makes the rumors Sunny spread in the first movie look small in comparison. Seriousry? She's Gilda bad. Her jerkness was the only thing that turned me off, and the only thing that deducted points from an otherwise perfect movie.
My final rating is 94/100. I can't possibly recommend seeing this in person enough (or at least buying the Blu-ray when it comes out 28 October).
Saturday, June 28, 2014
Dante's Peak
I watched Dante's Peak today for the first time in years. Did you know you have to wait about 40 minutes before anything happens? They want to set up the bullshit love story between the single mom and Pierce Brosnan, who is one of the least convincing scientists I've ever seen. It's a movie about a volcano, I came to see the volcano, I don't care about what all these humans are doing.
Anyway, there is a subplot with a NASA robot that looks like it's wasting a lot of time (and it is), but the radio transmitter turns out to be something useful during the last five minutes. It's kind of an ass pull solution to having Pierce and his new family survive.
Oh look, another subplot with the stubborn mother-in-law, who dies anyway, to inject even more unneeded melodrama into the story! Pierce and his new family go out of their way to rescue her, twenty minutes go by, they get trapped by the volcano, and wouldn't you know it the old woman jumps into the acid lake for no reason, gets seriously burned, and dies two minutes later. But they needed a way to get Pierce and his new family trapped so they could use the stupid NASA thing that they wasted another twenty minutes explaining, so they had to do this, right?
Pierce's boss justifiably refuses to go against all reason, evidence, and the opinions of nine other scientists, and order an evacuation of the town because of Pierce's gut reaction. It doesn't matter that Pierce has NOTHING supporting him (except the old frog in the pot aphorism, which he pulls out of nowhere and looks ridiculous compared to the nine other geologists real life stories of hundreds of real life volcanoes that did the same thing and didn't erupt). It doesn't matter that there has been no activity for a week and that Pierce comes off as a lunatic who is trying to score with the mayor (and probably does when they're trapped in the convenient cave). Nope. Pierce's boss is evil (and FAT! They have to make the designated villain the fattest person in the whole movie, because we all know fat people are evil and sexy beefcake Pierce Brosnan is good because he's sexy.). Pierce's boss MUST die in a mudslide, get flipped over, and girly scream before being crushed to death. He's probably the only person in the whole movie we actually see get killed and they had to give him a comical death because if you EVER disagree with Pierce Brosnan about ANYTHING you MUST DIE! It's not even enough that he apologised on the phone to Pierce before getting killed. Nope. You must die. And girly scream. I'm surprised they didn't show him peeing his pants, given everything else they did to humiliate him.
But the dog has to live, right? THE DOG HAS TO LIVE! And hey, it looks like it was never in any danger ever. Good job. You saved the dog that was in maybe thirty seconds of the movie. The humans who did absolutely nothing wrong? Nope. Kill them with extreme prejudice. But the totally unimportant dog has to live.
The volcano has liquid lava and then explodes, which I'm not saying could never happen, but I don't think it ever has. Sure, it can happen. The atoms in my body can quantum tunnel into orbit around Jupiter and I can freeze to death, but it probably will never happen. Having highly fluid lava pretty much rules out the possibility of an explosive eruption, which requires very thick lava that traps all the gas inside until it blows.
Pierce finds an abandoned truck with no keys and hotwires it in two seconds. Because all geologists can hotwire all vehicles if they are sexy enough.
Pierce then drives his magic truck through a lava flow safely. I'll give you a few minutes to let that sink in. Pierce drives his magic truck through a lava flow safely. The tires should have burst the second they touched the lava, and everyone inside should have been killed by the heat at the very least. We see the wheel wells raging with flames, for five minutes while he's driving through lava, LAVA, and nothing happens. He just drives through lava and nothing happens.
They outrun the 800 mph pyroclastic flow which instantly obliterates the whole town, but we all know an abandoned truck caked with volcanic ash that Pierce Brosnan hotwired then drove through lava can travel at 801 mph. He drives it into a cave, which should have been a death trap, but he's Pierce Brosnan, so he lives. And now he has a new family because there's nothing traumatising about surviving a volcanic eruption. Nope. Pierce gets to bang the single mom and gets to play daddy to her two kids who are the reason the whole second half of the movie even happened, because they are too dumb to live. And how did the 8 year old boy even reach the peddles on the truck, let alone drive it ten plus miles up the volcano to rescue the stubborn mother-in-law? Doesn't matter, because happy ending.
This movie really blows.
Anyway, there is a subplot with a NASA robot that looks like it's wasting a lot of time (and it is), but the radio transmitter turns out to be something useful during the last five minutes. It's kind of an ass pull solution to having Pierce and his new family survive.
Oh look, another subplot with the stubborn mother-in-law, who dies anyway, to inject even more unneeded melodrama into the story! Pierce and his new family go out of their way to rescue her, twenty minutes go by, they get trapped by the volcano, and wouldn't you know it the old woman jumps into the acid lake for no reason, gets seriously burned, and dies two minutes later. But they needed a way to get Pierce and his new family trapped so they could use the stupid NASA thing that they wasted another twenty minutes explaining, so they had to do this, right?
Pierce's boss justifiably refuses to go against all reason, evidence, and the opinions of nine other scientists, and order an evacuation of the town because of Pierce's gut reaction. It doesn't matter that Pierce has NOTHING supporting him (except the old frog in the pot aphorism, which he pulls out of nowhere and looks ridiculous compared to the nine other geologists real life stories of hundreds of real life volcanoes that did the same thing and didn't erupt). It doesn't matter that there has been no activity for a week and that Pierce comes off as a lunatic who is trying to score with the mayor (and probably does when they're trapped in the convenient cave). Nope. Pierce's boss is evil (and FAT! They have to make the designated villain the fattest person in the whole movie, because we all know fat people are evil and sexy beefcake Pierce Brosnan is good because he's sexy.). Pierce's boss MUST die in a mudslide, get flipped over, and girly scream before being crushed to death. He's probably the only person in the whole movie we actually see get killed and they had to give him a comical death because if you EVER disagree with Pierce Brosnan about ANYTHING you MUST DIE! It's not even enough that he apologised on the phone to Pierce before getting killed. Nope. You must die. And girly scream. I'm surprised they didn't show him peeing his pants, given everything else they did to humiliate him.
But the dog has to live, right? THE DOG HAS TO LIVE! And hey, it looks like it was never in any danger ever. Good job. You saved the dog that was in maybe thirty seconds of the movie. The humans who did absolutely nothing wrong? Nope. Kill them with extreme prejudice. But the totally unimportant dog has to live.
The volcano has liquid lava and then explodes, which I'm not saying could never happen, but I don't think it ever has. Sure, it can happen. The atoms in my body can quantum tunnel into orbit around Jupiter and I can freeze to death, but it probably will never happen. Having highly fluid lava pretty much rules out the possibility of an explosive eruption, which requires very thick lava that traps all the gas inside until it blows.
Pierce finds an abandoned truck with no keys and hotwires it in two seconds. Because all geologists can hotwire all vehicles if they are sexy enough.
Pierce then drives his magic truck through a lava flow safely. I'll give you a few minutes to let that sink in. Pierce drives his magic truck through a lava flow safely. The tires should have burst the second they touched the lava, and everyone inside should have been killed by the heat at the very least. We see the wheel wells raging with flames, for five minutes while he's driving through lava, LAVA, and nothing happens. He just drives through lava and nothing happens.
They outrun the 800 mph pyroclastic flow which instantly obliterates the whole town, but we all know an abandoned truck caked with volcanic ash that Pierce Brosnan hotwired then drove through lava can travel at 801 mph. He drives it into a cave, which should have been a death trap, but he's Pierce Brosnan, so he lives. And now he has a new family because there's nothing traumatising about surviving a volcanic eruption. Nope. Pierce gets to bang the single mom and gets to play daddy to her two kids who are the reason the whole second half of the movie even happened, because they are too dumb to live. And how did the 8 year old boy even reach the peddles on the truck, let alone drive it ten plus miles up the volcano to rescue the stubborn mother-in-law? Doesn't matter, because happy ending.
This movie really blows.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
20 Things I Learned From Star Trek Nemesis
1. The Enterprise is only as powerful as it needs to be to defeat the bad guys
2. When a hole is blown in the Enterprise Captain Picard just sits there while several red shirts get sucked into space
3. Shields only block whatever it is convenient for them to block
4. The bad guy super ship with unlimited shields and weapons can resist all of the Enterprise's weapons but if the Enterprise rams it the super shields become useless and the Enterprise ploughs straight through the bad guy ship completely unharmed
5. It's boring because you know who will win
6. Bad guy super weapon is so slow it would take forever to kill someone with it
7. Bad guy super weapon is so slow there's no point having it
8. Bad guy super weapon that can destroy an infinite number of planets can blow up right next to the Enterprise, destroy the bad guy ship, and leave the Enterprise completely unharmed
9. Even though Picard is a terrible captain who makes suicidally bad decisions the show cheats so he will win
10. Paying any amount of money to see "Star Trek Nemesis" is a waste
11. Even illegally downloading "Star Trek Nemesis" is a waste
12. Bad guys can't aim and good guys can't miss
13. The bad guy in "Star Trek Nemesis" wanted to free his people from enslavement. He dies and his people remain enslaved by the evil empire and this is the good guys winning
14. The message of "Star Trek Nemesis" is that slavery is good under certain circumstances
15. The message of "Star Trek Nemesis" is that slavery is good if the people enslaved are the designated villains
16. The message of "Star Trek Nemesis" is that slavery is good if the people enslaved are people Picard doesn't like
17. "Star Trek Nemesis" was inappropriately aired on TV on the 150th anniversary of the Civil War
18. The only character who is allowed to die is the robot, who was never alive to begin with, and there is an identical unit with the same memories on stand by, so his death doesn't even matter
19. The new Star Trek is different from the original Star Trek
20. The new Star Trek lets the obviously bad people win
2. When a hole is blown in the Enterprise Captain Picard just sits there while several red shirts get sucked into space
3. Shields only block whatever it is convenient for them to block
4. The bad guy super ship with unlimited shields and weapons can resist all of the Enterprise's weapons but if the Enterprise rams it the super shields become useless and the Enterprise ploughs straight through the bad guy ship completely unharmed
5. It's boring because you know who will win
6. Bad guy super weapon is so slow it would take forever to kill someone with it
7. Bad guy super weapon is so slow there's no point having it
8. Bad guy super weapon that can destroy an infinite number of planets can blow up right next to the Enterprise, destroy the bad guy ship, and leave the Enterprise completely unharmed
9. Even though Picard is a terrible captain who makes suicidally bad decisions the show cheats so he will win
10. Paying any amount of money to see "Star Trek Nemesis" is a waste
11. Even illegally downloading "Star Trek Nemesis" is a waste
12. Bad guys can't aim and good guys can't miss
13. The bad guy in "Star Trek Nemesis" wanted to free his people from enslavement. He dies and his people remain enslaved by the evil empire and this is the good guys winning
14. The message of "Star Trek Nemesis" is that slavery is good under certain circumstances
15. The message of "Star Trek Nemesis" is that slavery is good if the people enslaved are the designated villains
16. The message of "Star Trek Nemesis" is that slavery is good if the people enslaved are people Picard doesn't like
17. "Star Trek Nemesis" was inappropriately aired on TV on the 150th anniversary of the Civil War
18. The only character who is allowed to die is the robot, who was never alive to begin with, and there is an identical unit with the same memories on stand by, so his death doesn't even matter
19. The new Star Trek is different from the original Star Trek
20. The new Star Trek lets the obviously bad people win
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Why "The Walking Dead" Can't Happen
UPDATE: Everyone's infected! Problem solved. (18 March 2012)
Let's get it out first that this will be dealing only with the television series, not the comic book. The comic book nicely avoids this problem all together by having everyone who dies for any reason except brain injury reanimate.
Aside from the first half of season two being about two episodes stretched out to seven and not getting anywhere for no apparent reason (money?), and the improbable aiming skills the characters have (try making a head-shot every single time while both you and your target are moving top speed - bet you can't!)*, and the glaring inconsistencies with how the zombies work**, the whole business of zombification would render the story completely impossible from the start.
In the TV series "The Walking Dead" the only way someone becomes a zombie is to be bitten by a zombie, escape, die, and then reanimate. It doesn't help to be bitten and then devoured because there's nothing left to reanimate. You have to kill the zombie (kill, they're already dead!) or run away, and then go croak somewhere because a zombie bite is always fatal. Then when you die you have to be far enough away from the zombies to not have your body eaten, because reanimation isn't instantaneous. Dr. Jenner stated that it takes a few minutes to a few hours before the brainstem starts up again, so if you're eaten within that window you won't zombify.
Anyone who dies but is not bitten will not zombify, as the mess of bodies in the traffic pile up attest to. This leads one to wonder if the process of zombification takes so long and requires a bite from a creature that certainly won't say "he's dead, I'll attack a living now and leave his body to zombify," you're going to have a hard time reaching plague proportions. Consider next the fighting abilities of humans and zombies. Zombie to human kills are at least eight to one. Anyone with a gun will kill as many zombies as they have bullets, guaranteed. Unless a minimum of eight zombies attacks any person, no matter how big or strong or fast or smart or well armed, that person will survive. When we combine these two problems there is absolutely no way we can have a global zombie pandemic with only a handful of humans left. The mathematics just doesn't work. If zombies are so damn difficult to make and so damn easy to kill there is absolutely no way to get a zombie apocalypse going. Maybe a couple towns will be caught off guard, but not an entire country, and certainly not the whole planet.
Don't say that maybe one zombie bit ten or twenty people before being put down. They don't do that. A zombie will keep attacking someone until they eat the person or are destroyed. They are not smart enough to sacrifice themselves by biting several people to spread the plague before being killed. Zombiism doesn't spread fast enough for a zombie to bite someone, have them turn, and then move on to someone new. Unless we eliminate one or both of the above facts - the dificulty of zombification or the kill disparity - there is no way "The Walking Dead" can happen. That's what you get when you try to have dead zombies who spread like living zombies.
*Andrea is the only one that has ever missed, and only because missing was relevant to advance the story, and she still very nearly killed Daryl (with a head shot, as if I needed to mention it) at 200+ yards, from an unsupported prone position, facing the sun, with an unknown number of head winds, with five friendlies just feet away from Daryl, on the second time she's ever fired a gun. Damn! Now that's beginner's luck! Her stupidity could easily have killed one or more of six people. Even if there was a zombie there's no way a thinking person would have attempted a shot like that.
**Sometimes they hunt by smell, other times they don't; sometimes loud sounds like gunfire will attract them, other times you can teach people how to shoot all afternoon and attract no attention at all; whatever reanimates them only restartes the brainstem but people can hit them anywhere in the head and still bring them down, going so far as to have Daryl shoot one with his crossbow up through the jaw and hard palate into the nasal cavity and kill it after it started gnawing on his boot even though the bolt would have only gone through the frontal lobes, which were explicitly stated to not restart with zombification.
Let's get it out first that this will be dealing only with the television series, not the comic book. The comic book nicely avoids this problem all together by having everyone who dies for any reason except brain injury reanimate.
Aside from the first half of season two being about two episodes stretched out to seven and not getting anywhere for no apparent reason (money?), and the improbable aiming skills the characters have (try making a head-shot every single time while both you and your target are moving top speed - bet you can't!)*, and the glaring inconsistencies with how the zombies work**, the whole business of zombification would render the story completely impossible from the start.
In the TV series "The Walking Dead" the only way someone becomes a zombie is to be bitten by a zombie, escape, die, and then reanimate. It doesn't help to be bitten and then devoured because there's nothing left to reanimate. You have to kill the zombie (kill, they're already dead!) or run away, and then go croak somewhere because a zombie bite is always fatal. Then when you die you have to be far enough away from the zombies to not have your body eaten, because reanimation isn't instantaneous. Dr. Jenner stated that it takes a few minutes to a few hours before the brainstem starts up again, so if you're eaten within that window you won't zombify.
Anyone who dies but is not bitten will not zombify, as the mess of bodies in the traffic pile up attest to. This leads one to wonder if the process of zombification takes so long and requires a bite from a creature that certainly won't say "he's dead, I'll attack a living now and leave his body to zombify," you're going to have a hard time reaching plague proportions. Consider next the fighting abilities of humans and zombies. Zombie to human kills are at least eight to one. Anyone with a gun will kill as many zombies as they have bullets, guaranteed. Unless a minimum of eight zombies attacks any person, no matter how big or strong or fast or smart or well armed, that person will survive. When we combine these two problems there is absolutely no way we can have a global zombie pandemic with only a handful of humans left. The mathematics just doesn't work. If zombies are so damn difficult to make and so damn easy to kill there is absolutely no way to get a zombie apocalypse going. Maybe a couple towns will be caught off guard, but not an entire country, and certainly not the whole planet.
Don't say that maybe one zombie bit ten or twenty people before being put down. They don't do that. A zombie will keep attacking someone until they eat the person or are destroyed. They are not smart enough to sacrifice themselves by biting several people to spread the plague before being killed. Zombiism doesn't spread fast enough for a zombie to bite someone, have them turn, and then move on to someone new. Unless we eliminate one or both of the above facts - the dificulty of zombification or the kill disparity - there is no way "The Walking Dead" can happen. That's what you get when you try to have dead zombies who spread like living zombies.
*Andrea is the only one that has ever missed, and only because missing was relevant to advance the story, and she still very nearly killed Daryl (with a head shot, as if I needed to mention it) at 200+ yards, from an unsupported prone position, facing the sun, with an unknown number of head winds, with five friendlies just feet away from Daryl, on the second time she's ever fired a gun. Damn! Now that's beginner's luck! Her stupidity could easily have killed one or more of six people. Even if there was a zombie there's no way a thinking person would have attempted a shot like that.
**Sometimes they hunt by smell, other times they don't; sometimes loud sounds like gunfire will attract them, other times you can teach people how to shoot all afternoon and attract no attention at all; whatever reanimates them only restartes the brainstem but people can hit them anywhere in the head and still bring them down, going so far as to have Daryl shoot one with his crossbow up through the jaw and hard palate into the nasal cavity and kill it after it started gnawing on his boot even though the bolt would have only gone through the frontal lobes, which were explicitly stated to not restart with zombification.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
An Exercise In Debunking Documentaries
A program called "5th Dimension" does an hour show on debunking reincarnation. It includes a case study of Shanti Devi, a girl born in India in 1926 who was tested by Gandhi and Ian Stevenson and became a media sensation in her time. Next is a segment with Stevenson's research, followed by a story from Pueblo, USA, of Bridey Murphy. It ends with a segment about the Dalai Lama.
Of course people like the head of the Indian (ir-)Rationalist Association Sanal Edamaruku like to say it's all fake (he actually does say that). He says that belief in reincarnation was created to explain the caste system, and, by extension, "takes away the sense of enterprise in people." Does it? Untouchable (Dalit) K. R. Narayana became President of India, and fellow untouchable K. G. Balakrishnan became Chief Justice of India. That's about as far from having their sense of enterprise taken away as you can get. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the highest level Brahmin, strove to destroy the caste system, as did Gandhi, another Brahmin. If the lowest of the low and the highest of the high can work together, both achieving great things, how is it that belief in reincarnation destroys their desire to strive and better their lives? In light of that it is safe to say that Edamaruku's criticism falls apart.
As a side note, the term "rationalist" means someone who believes true knowledge cannot be attained through the senses, only through the rational mind. This is in sharp contrast with people like Edamaruku who believes that the mind doesn't exist, that everything is dead matter, and that knowledge can only come from the senses. Fundamaterialist skep-dick debunkers like to hijack the word "rationalist" and "rational" to mean its opposite, just like they like to hijack the word "nothing" to mean "the quantum vacuum that has existed forever into the past".
There's also Prof. Phillip Sharp (or Shar or something, the narrator has a thick accent and no spelling is given and none of the people interviewed are acknowledged in the credits!), a white guy who uses a version of Bob Couttie's argument against Devi's case (see page 14 in my Forbidden Knowledge). Couttie said that just because a record of a chemical plant's bad safety existed somewhere several hours before the plant exploded (the report was filed on the same day it exploded) coupled with fear of chemical plants that a housewife some distance away having a premonition of the explosion can be explained away by cryptamnesia of her hearing about this report. Even though there's no evidence that the housewife or indeed anyone in the town in which she lived or anyone she knew had any knowledge of this report, and no evidence that even existence of this report got out before the accident, Couttie says that the mere existence of the report justifies the extreme likelihood of a Rube Goldberg nonpsychic explanation for how the housewife had the premonition. Similarly Prof. Sharp says that just because Devi's husband in a former life visited her neighborhood in Delhi to do business means that Devi likely overheard the man and that's how she got the idea of her past life, and correctly identified people she never met, and made a great deal of correct statements of a city she never went to. For skep-dicks as long as a non-psychic explanation is not impossible that means there is at least a 99.999% chance that the non-psychic explanation is the correct one. Actual scientists, on the other hand, like Ian Stevenson, conduct huge amounts of actual research to produce cases suggestive of reincarnation.
Archskep-dick Chris French chimes in, saying children with past life memories are all cultural dependent, which conveniently ignores children with past life memories who come from cultures that are neutral or hostile to belief in reincarnation. If pressed he would come up with some bullshit response.
Overall if a student gave me this to grade I would give it a D+, maybe a C- but only because of the stuff at the end with the Dalai Lama and Robert Thurman. This should serve as an example of how NOT to do a documentary.
Of course people like the head of the Indian (ir-)Rationalist Association Sanal Edamaruku like to say it's all fake (he actually does say that). He says that belief in reincarnation was created to explain the caste system, and, by extension, "takes away the sense of enterprise in people." Does it? Untouchable (Dalit) K. R. Narayana became President of India, and fellow untouchable K. G. Balakrishnan became Chief Justice of India. That's about as far from having their sense of enterprise taken away as you can get. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the highest level Brahmin, strove to destroy the caste system, as did Gandhi, another Brahmin. If the lowest of the low and the highest of the high can work together, both achieving great things, how is it that belief in reincarnation destroys their desire to strive and better their lives? In light of that it is safe to say that Edamaruku's criticism falls apart.
As a side note, the term "rationalist" means someone who believes true knowledge cannot be attained through the senses, only through the rational mind. This is in sharp contrast with people like Edamaruku who believes that the mind doesn't exist, that everything is dead matter, and that knowledge can only come from the senses. Fundamaterialist skep-dick debunkers like to hijack the word "rationalist" and "rational" to mean its opposite, just like they like to hijack the word "nothing" to mean "the quantum vacuum that has existed forever into the past".
There's also Prof. Phillip Sharp (or Shar or something, the narrator has a thick accent and no spelling is given and none of the people interviewed are acknowledged in the credits!), a white guy who uses a version of Bob Couttie's argument against Devi's case (see page 14 in my Forbidden Knowledge). Couttie said that just because a record of a chemical plant's bad safety existed somewhere several hours before the plant exploded (the report was filed on the same day it exploded) coupled with fear of chemical plants that a housewife some distance away having a premonition of the explosion can be explained away by cryptamnesia of her hearing about this report. Even though there's no evidence that the housewife or indeed anyone in the town in which she lived or anyone she knew had any knowledge of this report, and no evidence that even existence of this report got out before the accident, Couttie says that the mere existence of the report justifies the extreme likelihood of a Rube Goldberg nonpsychic explanation for how the housewife had the premonition. Similarly Prof. Sharp says that just because Devi's husband in a former life visited her neighborhood in Delhi to do business means that Devi likely overheard the man and that's how she got the idea of her past life, and correctly identified people she never met, and made a great deal of correct statements of a city she never went to. For skep-dicks as long as a non-psychic explanation is not impossible that means there is at least a 99.999% chance that the non-psychic explanation is the correct one. Actual scientists, on the other hand, like Ian Stevenson, conduct huge amounts of actual research to produce cases suggestive of reincarnation.
Archskep-dick Chris French chimes in, saying children with past life memories are all cultural dependent, which conveniently ignores children with past life memories who come from cultures that are neutral or hostile to belief in reincarnation. If pressed he would come up with some bullshit response.
Overall if a student gave me this to grade I would give it a D+, maybe a C- but only because of the stuff at the end with the Dalai Lama and Robert Thurman. This should serve as an example of how NOT to do a documentary.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
60 Things I've Learned from the Movie "Megafault"
1. Earthquake killed ten miners instantly but took its time to chase the foreman, even waiting for him to get in his truck
2. An earthquake movie is sponsored by Quaker Oatmeal
3. Earthquake in Kentucky knocked over the Washington Monument but none of the windows in Washington shattered and nothing in the hundreds of miles between the two places were damaged
4. Earthquakes don't "move" and they don't have "paths"
5. When the foreman is rescued from his truck five hours later he can still run faster than anyone else even though he hasn't moved that whole time
6. After the foreman is rescued the earthquake comes back and chases him some more
7. Earthquake tries to suck a helicopter from the sky
8. Only buildings in the "path" of the earthquake get destroyed, all surrounding buildings are spared
9. Earthquake can toss a car like a toy in a wind tunnel but can't even shake the people trying to outrun it on foot
10. Buildings break into large jagged pieces like in children's drawings
11. When planes lose contact with the control tower they immediately crash because they're "flying blind" even on perfectly cloudless days
12. The earthquake is very slowly moving across the United States and will split it in half
13. Earthquakes do not work that way
14. When planes lose contact with the control tower the "transponder" causes the engines to explode, even though they're not connected and a transponder is just a radio transmitter and you can turn it off with no ill effects to the plane
15. A satellite from 1989 has a beam that can instantly freeze the water table of an area, causing an earthquake, somehow
16. "Megafault" is the least accurate movie ever
17. "Megafault" is the most cornball movie ever
18. Earthquakes can chase things with fireballs
19. "Stop the truck!" "I can't there's an earthquake on our tail!"
20. Government building is built on a "gyroscope" so earthquakes can't get in
21. The people who made "Megafault" (The Asylum) don't know what words mean or how anything works
22. "Megafault" is less accurate than the movie where an electric demon brought a black hole to earth ("The Black Hole" 2006)
23. There's only one seismologist in the world and she's the main character
24. The only things that can stop an earthquake are another earthquake or the Grand Canyon because it's already a hole in the ground so it absorbs earthquakes
25. A helicopter can outrun a laser
26. Earthquakes are only as fast as whoever they chase
27. When a laser shuts off the beam sucks back in
28. Thermodynamics means nothing in the world of "Megafault"
29. "P-waves have dissipated to 40" doesn't mean anything
30. Earthquakes can be frozen
31. A geologist said "mantle, what mantle" even though he's 60 years old and should know the earth has a mantle by now
32. Destabilizing the mantle with an ice laser causes people to spontaneously combust, leaving all their clothes unsinged.
33. An ice laser can set off a volcano
34. SyFy movies areeven much worse than SciFi movies
35. "Why can't we move the Grand Canyon?"
36. One miner created an entire series of interconnected coal mines in Wyoming
37. Coal mines do not work that way
38. It is possible for one team, given only two hours, to fill 35 mines with a few crates of explosives and create a canyon
39. Earthquakes like to follow certain people and kill others who just appear in one scene instantly
40. "You can't outrun these explosives" but he can outrun five earthquakes in one day
41. 20 million tons of TNT
42. 20 million tons of TNT looks like a few small crates
43. Earthquakes really hate certain people
44. "Megafault" ends with a satellite image of a hundred mile deep split in the country
45. In movies redemption = death
46. In "Megafault" redemption = death
47. To make up for his crappy life the foreman had to die to save the world
48. The Asylum made "Megafault"
49. The Asylum made "Megafault" so that explains but in no way excuses it
50. "Birdemic"
51. "Birdemic" is a zero-budget 2009 ripoff of "The Birds"
52. "Birdemic" is even worse than "Megafault"
53. The miner foreman is appropriately named Boomer
54. "Megafault" is a mockbuster of a made for TV movie "10.5"
55. Even though "the President" is mentioned throughout the first half of "Megafault" he never makes an apperance in the movie
56. The whole meeting "the President" theme of the first half hour of "Megafault" is mysteriously dropped and never mentioned again
57. The Asylum had to contact NASA to calculate how bad "Megafault" is
58. "Megafault" has more stupid things than "Paycheck"
59. Good actors are willing to perform in crap movies
60.
2. An earthquake movie is sponsored by Quaker Oatmeal
3. Earthquake in Kentucky knocked over the Washington Monument but none of the windows in Washington shattered and nothing in the hundreds of miles between the two places were damaged
4. Earthquakes don't "move" and they don't have "paths"
5. When the foreman is rescued from his truck five hours later he can still run faster than anyone else even though he hasn't moved that whole time
6. After the foreman is rescued the earthquake comes back and chases him some more
7. Earthquake tries to suck a helicopter from the sky
8. Only buildings in the "path" of the earthquake get destroyed, all surrounding buildings are spared
9. Earthquake can toss a car like a toy in a wind tunnel but can't even shake the people trying to outrun it on foot
10. Buildings break into large jagged pieces like in children's drawings
11. When planes lose contact with the control tower they immediately crash because they're "flying blind" even on perfectly cloudless days
12. The earthquake is very slowly moving across the United States and will split it in half
13. Earthquakes do not work that way
14. When planes lose contact with the control tower the "transponder" causes the engines to explode, even though they're not connected and a transponder is just a radio transmitter and you can turn it off with no ill effects to the plane
15. A satellite from 1989 has a beam that can instantly freeze the water table of an area, causing an earthquake, somehow
16. "Megafault" is the least accurate movie ever
17. "Megafault" is the most cornball movie ever
18. Earthquakes can chase things with fireballs
19. "Stop the truck!" "I can't there's an earthquake on our tail!"
20. Government building is built on a "gyroscope" so earthquakes can't get in
21. The people who made "Megafault" (The Asylum) don't know what words mean or how anything works
22. "Megafault" is less accurate than the movie where an electric demon brought a black hole to earth ("The Black Hole" 2006)
23. There's only one seismologist in the world and she's the main character
24. The only things that can stop an earthquake are another earthquake or the Grand Canyon because it's already a hole in the ground so it absorbs earthquakes
25. A helicopter can outrun a laser
26. Earthquakes are only as fast as whoever they chase
27. When a laser shuts off the beam sucks back in
28. Thermodynamics means nothing in the world of "Megafault"
29. "P-waves have dissipated to 40" doesn't mean anything
30. Earthquakes can be frozen
31. A geologist said "mantle, what mantle" even though he's 60 years old and should know the earth has a mantle by now
32. Destabilizing the mantle with an ice laser causes people to spontaneously combust, leaving all their clothes unsinged.
33. An ice laser can set off a volcano
34. SyFy movies are
35. "Why can't we move the Grand Canyon?"
36. One miner created an entire series of interconnected coal mines in Wyoming
37. Coal mines do not work that way
38. It is possible for one team, given only two hours, to fill 35 mines with a few crates of explosives and create a canyon
39. Earthquakes like to follow certain people and kill others who just appear in one scene instantly
40. "You can't outrun these explosives" but he can outrun five earthquakes in one day
41. 20 million tons of TNT
42. 20 million tons of TNT looks like a few small crates
43. Earthquakes really hate certain people
44. "Megafault" ends with a satellite image of a hundred mile deep split in the country
45. In movies redemption = death
46. In "Megafault" redemption = death
47. To make up for his crappy life the foreman had to die to save the world
48. The Asylum made "Megafault"
49. The Asylum made "Megafault" so that explains but in no way excuses it
50. "Birdemic"
51. "Birdemic" is a zero-budget 2009 ripoff of "The Birds"
52. "Birdemic" is even worse than "Megafault"
53. The miner foreman is appropriately named Boomer
54. "Megafault" is a mockbuster of a made for TV movie "10.5"
55. Even though "the President" is mentioned throughout the first half of "Megafault" he never makes an apperance in the movie
56. The whole meeting "the President" theme of the first half hour of "Megafault" is mysteriously dropped and never mentioned again
57. The Asylum had to contact NASA to calculate how bad "Megafault" is
58. "Megafault" has more stupid things than "Paycheck"
59. Good actors are willing to perform in crap movies
60.
Monday, September 5, 2011
The Son I Should Have Had
The following is intended to become an episode of The Urban Mystic Show (episode 302):
Twenty-six minutes into the movie Gladiator, the emperor Marcus Aurelius asks his general, Maximus, to become emperor following his death; to fulfill the one thing that he was unable to do. Marcus Aurelius says: "I will empower you to one end alone: to give power back to the people of Rome, and end the corruption that has crippled it." This request is problematic for several reasons, least of all having to do with the structure of the Roman senate itself.
First of all, to get the pesky problem with the senate out of the way as quick as possible, it should be noted that the senate of Rome did not function the way it is portrayed by the filmmakers. Senators were never elected by the people at all, they were appointed, and one had to be fairly wealthy in order to even be considered eligible for appointment. The senators did not represent the people of Rome at all, but a very minute group of elites at he very pinnacle of Roman society. Aside from having to endure the foul smell and terrible racket of chariot wheels on cobblestone streets of the city itself, senators really had nothing in common with the people. Returning the empire of Rome to a republic would not end the corruption – senators were always corrupt and looked out for their own potential benefit from political dealings – and it would certainly not give power back to the people because power never rested in the hands of the people to begin with.
More importantly, the very idea of handing power over to the people of Rome would be a profoundly stupid idea with extraordinarily disastrous results. One would expect Marcus Aurelius, the great Stoic philosopher whose Meditations are still quoted today, would have realized this. Of course, one cannot fault the emperor for this error; Ridley Scott appears to be crafting a vision of "Rome" that will appeal to the great idea of American of a government of the people, by the people, for the people, instead of creating something accurate that would be completely alien to a modern audience.
Just who is to be included under the banner of "the people of Rome?" Are the people of Mauritania and Moesia to be given equal say in the governing of the empire as the Latins themselves? Or is it just the people inhabiting the city itself that will rule, as a great many-headed tyrant over the vast conquered masses of the empire? At the rate it took to travel the vast spans of the empire anything more than the confines of the city would be too great a territory to permit any governance within a reasonable time frame. Should the Parthians invade it would be suicide to wait for the inhabitants of Britannia to decide whether to go to war or seek diplomatic means of crisis resolution.
The average Roman was preoccupied with more important matters, like securing food, and could not possibly have been educated in the finer points of governance. The average Roman was cold, hungry, illiterate, fearful. They desperately held on to their customs and traditions, their rituals and routines just to carve out mere subsistence. For as bad as the emperors were, as corrupt the senators, it was the people of Rome who were perhaps the worst possible choice as for who should rule. While Marcus Aurelius' vision makes for a wonderful story, and a wonderful picture of 21st century America, for second century Rome the idea would be absolutely nonsensical, and would be the farthest thing from Marcus Aurelius' mind.
Twenty-six minutes into the movie Gladiator, the emperor Marcus Aurelius asks his general, Maximus, to become emperor following his death; to fulfill the one thing that he was unable to do. Marcus Aurelius says: "I will empower you to one end alone: to give power back to the people of Rome, and end the corruption that has crippled it." This request is problematic for several reasons, least of all having to do with the structure of the Roman senate itself.
First of all, to get the pesky problem with the senate out of the way as quick as possible, it should be noted that the senate of Rome did not function the way it is portrayed by the filmmakers. Senators were never elected by the people at all, they were appointed, and one had to be fairly wealthy in order to even be considered eligible for appointment. The senators did not represent the people of Rome at all, but a very minute group of elites at he very pinnacle of Roman society. Aside from having to endure the foul smell and terrible racket of chariot wheels on cobblestone streets of the city itself, senators really had nothing in common with the people. Returning the empire of Rome to a republic would not end the corruption – senators were always corrupt and looked out for their own potential benefit from political dealings – and it would certainly not give power back to the people because power never rested in the hands of the people to begin with.
More importantly, the very idea of handing power over to the people of Rome would be a profoundly stupid idea with extraordinarily disastrous results. One would expect Marcus Aurelius, the great Stoic philosopher whose Meditations are still quoted today, would have realized this. Of course, one cannot fault the emperor for this error; Ridley Scott appears to be crafting a vision of "Rome" that will appeal to the great idea of American of a government of the people, by the people, for the people, instead of creating something accurate that would be completely alien to a modern audience.
Just who is to be included under the banner of "the people of Rome?" Are the people of Mauritania and Moesia to be given equal say in the governing of the empire as the Latins themselves? Or is it just the people inhabiting the city itself that will rule, as a great many-headed tyrant over the vast conquered masses of the empire? At the rate it took to travel the vast spans of the empire anything more than the confines of the city would be too great a territory to permit any governance within a reasonable time frame. Should the Parthians invade it would be suicide to wait for the inhabitants of Britannia to decide whether to go to war or seek diplomatic means of crisis resolution.
The average Roman was preoccupied with more important matters, like securing food, and could not possibly have been educated in the finer points of governance. The average Roman was cold, hungry, illiterate, fearful. They desperately held on to their customs and traditions, their rituals and routines just to carve out mere subsistence. For as bad as the emperors were, as corrupt the senators, it was the people of Rome who were perhaps the worst possible choice as for who should rule. While Marcus Aurelius' vision makes for a wonderful story, and a wonderful picture of 21st century America, for second century Rome the idea would be absolutely nonsensical, and would be the farthest thing from Marcus Aurelius' mind.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
25 Things I've Learned from the movie "Paycheck"
In the same vein as 100 Things I've Learned from MLP, here's what I learned from watching the movie Paycheck, starring Ben Affleck. Now, it's not 100 things because I've only seen the last 15 minutes, but I think those were probably the choicest minutes.
1. Ben Affleck has ninja powers
2. When Ben Affleck hits someone they stay hit
3. When Ben Affleck hits someone they go flying
4. Ben Affleck can beat four guys armed with machine guns at the same time
5. Ben Affleck built the most advanced computer lab in the world with a miniature pond and smoke machines and palm trees
6. The World's Slowest Man
7. Ben Affleck's enemy is The World's Slowest Man
8. Ben Affleck hacked a computer using only a quarter
9. The World's Slowest Man walks in slow motion when everyone around him runs
10. Ben Affleck can see the future
11. Shooting a liquid nitrogen tank causes an explosion that can destroy a whole giant building
12. Ben Affleck destroyed an entire airport with two marbles
13. In Ben Affleck's world bullets explode in a shower of sparks whenever they hit anything except liquid nitrogen tanks, which they go through like tissue paper
14. In Ben Affleck's world when someone shoots themself in the foot they go flying and do a backflip
15. In Ben Affleck's world robot arms that build computers know Kung Fu and can beat up a whole lot of armed guards and give their weapons to Ben Affleck
16. Ben Affleck can lift two man-sized bags of dirt as if they were empty
17. Ben Affleck did a ninja move where he jumped feet first at a man's legs and knocked him through a window that was placed in the middle of a room for some reason
18. If you hit a bullet nothing will happen; if Ben Affleck hits a bullet it fires
19. He's Ben Affleck, you can't out act him!
20. You can't out act Ben Affleck
21. If Ben Affleck is in a movie you know he wins
22. Ben Affleck can MacGyver things
23. Ben Affleck has a line on his face
24. An explosion that destroys an entire building will just slowly cook The World's Slowest Man while incinerating the walls around him in a second so he suffers more because he's the villain
25. When someone is secretly getting Ben Affleck out of a secret building where everyone is looking for him and someone asks "is that Ben Affleck?" the person he's with just has to say "no, he didn't make it," and none of the twenty guys looking for him will recognize him and they will let him go even though he's not even wearing a disguise
1. Ben Affleck has ninja powers
2. When Ben Affleck hits someone they stay hit
3. When Ben Affleck hits someone they go flying
4. Ben Affleck can beat four guys armed with machine guns at the same time
5. Ben Affleck built the most advanced computer lab in the world with a miniature pond and smoke machines and palm trees
6. The World's Slowest Man
7. Ben Affleck's enemy is The World's Slowest Man
8. Ben Affleck hacked a computer using only a quarter
9. The World's Slowest Man walks in slow motion when everyone around him runs
10. Ben Affleck can see the future
11. Shooting a liquid nitrogen tank causes an explosion that can destroy a whole giant building
12. Ben Affleck destroyed an entire airport with two marbles
13. In Ben Affleck's world bullets explode in a shower of sparks whenever they hit anything except liquid nitrogen tanks, which they go through like tissue paper
14. In Ben Affleck's world when someone shoots themself in the foot they go flying and do a backflip
15. In Ben Affleck's world robot arms that build computers know Kung Fu and can beat up a whole lot of armed guards and give their weapons to Ben Affleck
16. Ben Affleck can lift two man-sized bags of dirt as if they were empty
17. Ben Affleck did a ninja move where he jumped feet first at a man's legs and knocked him through a window that was placed in the middle of a room for some reason
18. If you hit a bullet nothing will happen; if Ben Affleck hits a bullet it fires
19. He's Ben Affleck, you can't out act him!
20. You can't out act Ben Affleck
21. If Ben Affleck is in a movie you know he wins
22. Ben Affleck can MacGyver things
23. Ben Affleck has a line on his face
24. An explosion that destroys an entire building will just slowly cook The World's Slowest Man while incinerating the walls around him in a second so he suffers more because he's the villain
25. When someone is secretly getting Ben Affleck out of a secret building where everyone is looking for him and someone asks "is that Ben Affleck?" the person he's with just has to say "no, he didn't make it," and none of the twenty guys looking for him will recognize him and they will let him go even though he's not even wearing a disguise
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