Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Movies Media

"Red Planet": Stay Here 256

Reader and raconteur doonesbury passed on this review of Red Planet, which he viewed in what can only be termed a noble experiment. As a survivor of both Mars Attacks and Battlefield Earth, I know how deadly movie trauma can be. Thanks, doonesbury. (Oh, and nothing below sounds like a serious spoiler, but YMMV.)


I can sum the movie up in one sentence: It's worse than both Mission to Mars and Waterworld.

Skip the wrong-headed science. Forget the problems with the dialogue. Let's just concentrate on the most simple thing you expect from a movie: a coherent story.

We start the movie off with a voiceover: The earth is dying, we've trashed it, and now we can't fix it. So, we it's decided that we'll start terraforming Mars, by bombarding it with genetically tailored algae, etc. The algae start to disappear, and we have to send people to Mars now to find out why the algae have disappeared.

It's a fairly standard plot, not a bad start at all -- but at no point do we get any idea of who the characters are. For the rest of this movie, we're kept in the dark: no character is explored in any detail, characters are inexplicably offended and say weird statements which have little or no rational value to them. No scene ever gets to the meat of who these people are, why anyone might be doing what they're doing, or even some clue as to the dynamics which connect them. It's nearly a half-hour into the movie before we even start to know what kind of person Val Kilmer's character is -- and he's the star of the show! By the end, it's hard to like, dislike or even much care about these characters. No sympathy, no tension, no nothing. It's banality at its extreme.

Even the discovery by one of the characters that he's dying from the stress of the emergency evac to Mars is anti-climatic. It's definitely not interesting. Certainly not scary, frightening, or even a tear jerker.

To get some emotion into this scene, I guess the director though he'd put in some scenes in flashback shown not more than 5 minutes ago -- except the flashbacks are longer than the original. In fact, the flashbacks are actually critical to the plot -- but this jerk of a director doesn't mention these scenes until just before they're needed. No sense of poignancy, no sense of grace, no building. The director just drops this "Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention ..." scene as the guy's doing something meant to be meaningful. Truthfully, it ruins what could be an interesting point about philosophy and science at this point, by practically shoving the moment in the viewer's face and telling him what he/she should get out of it.

At this point his fellow characters leave him to die. No problem, his injury might kill them. But those rotten jerks all say, "OK," and start walking. I mean, a moment of pause or at least a few seconds of "Well, we could do this," and then a few minutes to say goodbye to this guy they've been living with for six months would be nice. But no dice, it's hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to save our own rears we go.

The rest of the movie has similar, stilted moments when the characters just don't act ... well, like humans. People start fighting without any reason, people go insane without any reason, characters fall in love without knowing one another (oh, yeah -- the director forgot something again. Another flashback to justify that scenario). People see other people die, and no one's even slightly moved by it.

Lots more happens -- but none of it makes sense. Every bit is just a strange mess of half-created emotions, special effects that, while cool, aren't very coherent, characters flat as cardboard, situations so artificial they are still wrapped in plastic, and a really, really wasted set of decent actors.

Now for the usual bad science rant. OK, I know the actual science of physics has only been around for around 50-75 years, but it's pretty well documented; and you can get an excellent primer from many, many books, and see it used properly in a story in many science fiction novels. Gravity, mass and velocity aren't magic -- so you can't make them suddenly appear, disappear, or become less or greater then they were originally. Same goes for the biology of humans, biology of algae, and how life could and might appear in the universe. Same with pyrotechnics, meteorology, ballistics (although they didn't try the "turn left when you get to the planet" maneuver that Mission To Mars did -- Small blessings!), electronics and telecommunications. Simplify, fine. But make major mistakes, center your plot on things that couldn't possibly work, and then it's just embarrassing and sloppy.

The usual dazzling special effects and panoramic vistas -- including a well-modeled animated robot -- at least give some visual pleasure to the whole thing, and the dialogue is at least not so stiff you could use it as shingles.

But overall, if you have to miss one movie this year, make it this one.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

"Red Planet": Stay Here

Comments Filter:
  • Right. That was no nematode, that was my ex-wife! It looked more like an arthropod than a nematode, or I'm an allotherian.
  • None of the astronaut food that i've ever seen looks like it would be any good to ferment. you would have to save up alot of mushed peas before you could get a whole litre of alcohol. and where did they get the yeast? you would think it would have been easier to sneak a couple bottles onboard. and what kind of alcohol comes out of a still coloured yellow anyway. I wouldn't drink it. And even if the mission commander chose to look the other way, I doubt she would let the entire crew get 'faced at once.
    ^. .^
  • I'm just trying to point out some more of our trademark Slashdot hypocrisy that turns up every few weeks.
    "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.
    I am large, I contain multitudes."
    -Walt Whitman

  • Hmmm.

    That's pretty though-provoking, but I don't think that Star Wars would get as soundly thrashed as the current round of sci-fi nasties.

    Aside from providing us with some actual character, plot, and theme, a story must remain internally consistent in order for us (or for me, anyway) to suspend disbelief.

    By incorporating situations that are known to current physics and whose solutions are known (or at least obvious), Red Planet incorporates some of reality into its own storyline. By muffing the physics, or by having its characters and organizations make mistakes that ordinary geeks can see through, or by lacking any sort of motivation for the crisis-of-the-minute, RP sabotages the disbelief of its own audience. More importantly, the story isn't good enough to offset the egregious errors in the physics. When the physics is lousy, and the story sucks, and the acting is terrible, there's not much left except some cool eye-candy. SW billed itself as a fairy tale ("A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...") and hence had much more latitude with the magic spacedrives and gravity generators and such. That series also seems to remain consistent within its own set of rules (which, admittedly, it can make up as it goes!). More importantly, the first three movies actually had good stories to tell. The stories and characters were interesting in their own right, if a bit stereotyped, and the plots were focused and made a bit of sense. That's why SW didn't suck.

  • Criticising these things is just oh-so-smart intellectual masturbation.

    No, this is /., it's intellectual group masturbation, and is one of the large dangers with huge crowds of geeks (most being male, single, and smart)
    --
  • DRY LAND IS NOT A MYTH! I'VE SEEN IT! Kevin Costner, Waterworld; I don't know what all the fuss was about, I saw that movie seven times, it ruled!!
  • actually, I've seen enough of it for my satisfaction, and I think plenty to get the jist of the movie. The references were not all that subtle;)

    Frankly, I didn't know it was a Tim Burton movie when I went in (I'm forgetful to check things like that, though I should). Maybe that's why I didn't like it -- I thought the Hudsucker Proxy sucked too, despite the very sexy Jennifer Jason Leigh and cool-actor Paul Newman (he was in that, right?).

    I just didn't think it was *funny* -- humor being very personal of course. Just like I thought the 2nd Austin Powers movie was nowhere near as funny as the first, though it had a few moments. MiniMe made me laugh, and Scott Evil is hilarious, Fat Bastard is amazingly gross, and the simple fact of being a sequel allowed certain James Bond jokes to be done. It still didn't grab me.

    timothy
  • I thought about it a bit more, and I think for me it comes down to this: sure, one always has to suspend disbelief to some extent with any movie or even book. But the better movies and books are able to *help* you do this, by providing a complete package including story, plot, characters, context, etc. In the case of movies, this is complicated by the need to create a visual representation of all this.

    Bad movies have problems in at least one, but usually more than one of these areas. I think that criticizing the science in a sci-fi movie may often simply be an easy way to point out the movie's lack of integrity. If one had the time to sit down and write a long analysis and critique of, say, the character development and interaction (or lack thereof), one could demonstrate that a movie was equally weak in those areas; however, on /., simply pointing out gaping flaws in the science is a shorthand for "if they got this wrong, what are the chances they got *anything* right?"

    Red Planet is a bit too new, but search the web for reviews of Mission to Mars, and you'll find plenty like this one [colossus.net]: "director Brian De Palma has reached a new nadir", "Ineptly directed, badly acted, and scripted with an eye towards stupidity and incoherence, the film is worthwhile only to those who are in desperate need of a nap. And, as is often the case when a big budget, high profile motion picture self-destructs, this one does so in spectacular fashion." Now that reviewer is my kinda guy! :)

    As for Battlestar Galactica, well, perhaps we do come from totally different universes...

  • "Hey, I liked Willow!" -- Crow T. Robot

    Personally, I didn't much care for Willow. I really hated Mission to Mars. I had a feeling it was going to be a bad movie (when I saw the `face' in one of the previews). I only went b/c my friend wanted to go. I thought, "well, at least I can watch his reaction". It was an enjoyable experience for me.

    However, unlike the critic, I liked this movie, Red Planet. I can't deny the fact that the characters were just a little too indifferent to the distress of their comrades. Also, and I would've thought this were a no-brainer, if you're gonna have a little droid thingie, that's cool but *don't* have it programmed for things like "search and destroy" when the only targets on the target planet will be friendlies!

    In spite of these things, I liked it anyway. I think I liked it mostly b/c Val and Carrie are cool.

  • First of all, let me say that I like well-made, coherent, and deeply meaningful movies as much as any stiff-necked critic.

    We run into a problem, however when we apply the same standard to all movies. For example, if I were to watch The Matrix and expect American Beauty I would be sorely disappointed. And I would miss the enjoyment of a great movie.

    The difference, and I think most people apply this to some extent, is that I go into different movies with different expectations. I enjoyed Waterworld --Believe it or not! But I went to the movie (granted, I payed $1.50 at a late-run theatre) with knowledge that the movie was considered a bomb. However, I expected a little half-assed fantasy and some nifty special effects. I got just what I expected, plus the bonus of seeing Costner drink his own urine...

    Anyway, the point is that you can enojoy a much broader range of movies if you go into each one with appropriate expectations.
  • I found the info on the Canadian group that is helping set up film societies -- if you're looking for great independent and foreign films, give them a call!

    "The Film Circuit: A division of the Toronto International Film Festival Group, a charitable, cultural and educational organization devoted to celebrating excellence in film and the moving image. The Film Circuit is generously sponsored by: Alliance Atlantis, Cineplex Odeon, Famous Players Canada, Telefilm Canada, and the Ontario Film Development Corporation."

    Now, in Vernon, what we have is a small collection of people (perhaps a dozen) who are organizers for the incoming film shows. Each show is being held on Mondays (sometimes with a second showing on Wednesday) at the local six-plex Famous Players. Tickets are six bucks a pop. Shows are packing the seats to overflowing.

    The also maintain a collection of videos at the local Art Gallery. There are a couple hundred videos there, for rent for a couple of bucks.

    I know that Cineplex Odeon is in dire financial straits. I'll bet that you can get them to sponsor the showings pretty darn easy, given the floods of people the shows are attracting -- although, on the other hand, it may be a year before word of mouth really makes them popular.

    Anyway, *have a go at it!* You've got nothing to lose, and a *lot* to gain!


    --

  • I am so disappointed to see yet another movie about Mars reduced to a poorly-written action flick. Maybe this is what it takes to get the concept into the general public's collective consciousness. But still, so many people think that humanity has no imperitave to spread out from our world to others. Shitty movies like this can't help change ideas like that.

    For me, my attitude changed once I read the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson [sfsite.com]. It was one of the first set of books I had read that made me believe that we really do have a future in space, and that despite the scoffing of politicians, the reality of things is that this future can begin immediately.

    Anyone who is depressed by this latest batch of Martian science fiction would be well-advised to look at these books for a pick-me-up.
  • From Tom Sizemore's character:

    "I'm a biologist. A coder, I put together the G's, the T's, the A's, the P's". (Its actually GTAC C, buddy, C, or GUAC if we are talking RNA).

    Another gaff: Measurements show the oxygen all gone, but when they land, they are mysteriously able to breath (I also saw the same plot device on Amazon Women on the Moon, great flick, especially the part with the missing heart). See, the probes they sent, before they mysteriously failed, showed decreasing levels of O2. They scientists just assumed that Mars had no breathable atmosphere as opposed to looking a spectroscopy through a telescope, kinda like how we do it now.

    The bug gaffe: there's these bugs right, and only instead of consuming oxygen, they make it. Well, you're kinda on the wrong end of the energy curve there. Where do they get all the energy to split CO2 into O2? I know, they have little fusion reactors in them!

    The warbot gaffe: who's bright fucking idea was it to take a terminator warbot on the mission?

    The interchangeability of parts gaffe: aforementioned warbot has a nuclear power cell the size of a soda can they, miracles of miracles, just happens to be compatible with a Russian lander from 50 years ago which has ran out of power. There are several other instances of similar parts compability (radios for example).

    The artificial gravity gaffe: I guess it works kinda like it did in Armageddon. If we had a way of making artificial gravity, we could build O'Neil colonies and screw the earth and screw mars.
  • Sorry, but if you listen in one of the scenes right after they get out of the landing pod, the computer explicitly says, "External oxygen detectors offline"(or something to that effect), so their suits couldn't tell them there was oxygen. As to the review, maybe the author should try watching the movie, instead of getting up every 5 mins to go to the bathrom or get another pop. It sounds like he didn't even try watching it, maybe he was too busy taking notes about what he thought he was seeing.
  • I think python said it the best (re: Philosophers that is)

    Immanuel Kant was a real piss-ant who was very rarely stable. Heideggar, Heideggar was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table.

    David Hume could out-consume Schoppenhauer and Hegel. And Whittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.

    There's nothing Nieizsche couldn't teach 'ya 'bout the raising of the wrist. Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.

    John Stewart Mill, of his own free will On half a pint of shanty was particularly ill. Plato they say could stick it away, Half a crate of whiskey every day.

    Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle, And Hobbes was fond of his dram. And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart. 'I drink, therefore I am.'

    Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed; A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed.

    (bruces philosopher song [montypython.net])

    - monty python

  • I agree with you on this one. I'm saying that you should make the attempt to be 'childlike' while viewing the film. The better the film is, the easier this will be. But if you fail in your attempt, then the film is probably crap.

    The reason I am suspicious of critics, and dislike a certain type of film criticism (intellectual type) has been motivated by a certain film critic I used to read in my Sunday paper.

    She is called Anne Bilson, and writes in the Sunday Telegraph here in the UK. An example of her film criticism occured when 'Top Gun' was shown here in the UK a few months ago. She said that the film was an extended metaphor for Homosexuality. The relationship between Val Kilmner and Tom Cruise was clearly homosexual, she said. Tom Cruise's girlfriend is trying to keep him thouroughly heterosexual. But in the end, he goes the gay way "You can ride my tail anytime" says Kilmner. "No, you can ride mine" replies Cruise. I think she got this from a Tarantino skit, but she was serious. And all her film reviews are like that.

    She just can't help inserting her own feminist opinions into the review. Anyway, I don't read her anymore, because that kind of criticism spoils the film and puts idiotic ideas in ones head.

    My method is to approach each film as though I am a child. It usually leads to greater enjoyment. I only engage in some sort of intellectual analysis after I have seen it, and only if it was interesting enough to promote such thinking. (the Matrix might be a good example of this - it has some very interesting ideas).

    As for BG, well, all I can say is that you must be a Silon if you don't appreciate its genius ;-)

    KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.

  • As with the eternal hacker v. cracker argument, the fact that most of the population gets it wrong doesn't mean we should just accept this as The Way Things Have to Be.

    Honestly, scientific accuracy (or any sort of realism in story telling) is orthogonal to having a good story. To the average moviegoer, the only thing that matters is that there be a story they like. Well, sure, if you don't know the difference between good science and bad science, then it's easy to accept inaccuracies; but some of us who *do* know bad science when they see it wouldn't mind, once in a while, having a movie that has a good story that doesn't fall apart when you aim a telescope at it. And why should we settle for less?
  • For lifting big things into orbit, and for living in them for a long time, the Russians developed the best tech. However, if you are looking for something to work first-time, you have to remember that they crashed and just plain blew up a lot along the way. I admire their dedication and sacrifice, but, IMO, there's enough history to justify the comments.
  • And it also had Carrie-Anne Moss in a nice tight t-shirt most of the movie, and even nude at the start :)
  • You can detect such a vast amount of breathable air from orbit, or while you are halfway there. They had six months to get there and they never bothered to do spectroscopy, which part of the reason why they went in the first place?

    And even if the oxygen detecters were gone, the pressure should have been detectable. They were wearing pressure suits for goodness sake - any such decent suit should be able to detect external pressure!

  • Well, there was actually a fair amount in addition to the ones you mention. Also on the suits, I saw IBM, GM, and Nokia. All the displays on the ship were labled AMX, which is a company that makes controllers for AV gear, (for conference facilities, etc. see www.panja.com [panja.com]).
  • Absolutely. Divirging into games for a moment, IMHO it was realism that ruined Frontier and First Encounters - Elite was much better for ignoring the laws of physics in favour of conceptually simple but challenging combat.
    Fictional films should be based on stories, not on documentaries - I can't imagine many people go to the cinema to learn anything these days.
  • Was won by Herr Einstein, which suggests he must have studied it. Britannica.com sez "Physics, in its modern sense, was founded in the mid-19th century as a synthesis of several older sciences--namely, those of mechanics, optics, acoustics, electricity, magnetism, heat, and the physical properties of matter." God I hope Doonesbury was kidding.
  • So to you, there's no such thing as good and bad movies - all moving images on a screen with a soundtrack are created equal?

    The incompetence of movies of this kind merely reflects the limited ability and intellect of their creators, and the mass market which consumes them. These movies aren't unpretentious - they're actually hugely pretentious failures. With Mission to Mars, for example, it's clear that Brian de Palma was trying, decades after it had already been done, to copy the effects and feel of movies like 2001.

    As for Star Wars, I think you're again demonstrating your lack of discrimination if you can't tell that Star Wars was really good cinema, especially compared to, say, Battlestar Galactica which came out shortly thereafter, IIRC. If /. had existed then, I suspect the majority would have liked Star Wars, much as they like The Matrix today, while BG would have received the panning it deserved.

  • Lots pissed me off about this movie but one thing keep geting to me. Every time the got in to some sort of trouble the would just leave someone behind. It all ways went like this, "oh, ok well thanks and good luck chap" and that would be it, you didn't do that, it should only happen once and it should be at the end, and we should really like him before they do it. Just my $0.02

    ________

  • LOL!
  • by iamsure ( 66666 ) on Sunday November 12, 2000 @07:21AM (#629027) Homepage
    I gotta distinctly disagree. I went, worried that the whole movie would be "Robot kills all"..

    It wasnt that. Sure, it wasnt a character-driven movie, but hey, this isnt Dangerous Liaisons.

    This was a great vehicle to show off Carrie-Ann's GORGEOUS body (SOooo close to seeing what we want), alot of action, and a GREAT set of special effects.

    As to the 'sympathy' level of the astronauts, BULL. You are being spoonfed too many movie astronauts. They have a mission to accomplish, and are generally military men. They analyze the situation, and act.

    This was a pretty good movie in my opinion. It sounds like you had unrealistic expectations for an action movie to be a drama.

    When is the last good action movie with a SOLID plot and character development? T2? Even that had its problems..

    Maybe the Matrix, but that is the hand of god, blessing the silver screen, and truly, one of a kind. :)

  • P is also the phosphate in the DNA/RNA "backbone".
  • by ethereal ( 13958 ) on Sunday November 12, 2000 @07:23AM (#629029) Journal
    As a survivor of both Mars Attacks and Battlefield Earth, I know how deadly movie trauma can be.

    You are aware that Mars Attacks was a comedy, right timothy? It was supposed to be sort of hokey and rely on cliches from other sci-fi movies. It really fit the Tim Burton mold - if you like his movies, you liked Mars Attacks. OK, I wouldn't have seen it in the theater (and didn't, in fact) but it was OK on video.

    I have no such excuses for Battlefield Earth, but on the other hand I could tell it was lousy from the previews and didn't go see it 'cause I don't want to encourage L. Ron Hubbard :)

    ...ethereal, not-so-patiently waiting for the new Dune movie on Sci-Fi in December...

  • by SMN ( 33356 ) on Sunday November 12, 2000 @10:10AM (#629030)
    Is it me, or does every single movie that bends the laws of physics even slightly get trashed here on Slashdot? I can understand how ridiculous Mission to Mars was in that department, but a little "Suspension of Disbelief" can make a slightly imperfect movie quite enjoyable.

    In fact, I think that if the old Star Wars movies were first released today, we'd trash them, too. Even worse, look at how far Star Trek has drifted from the real of reality. Babylon 5's attempts to maintain at least a little realism wouldn't make it through here, either.

    Instead, we're so imbued with certain stereotypes that we even let The Phantom Menace's "midiclorians" - the "tiny organism that inhabit every cell in your body and channel the Force" - slip by with little complaint.

    So here we are, trying to get people to try and accept a new operating system - even thought it isn't perfect - but meanwhile, we can't accept a few flaws in our movies. I'm not really trying to defend movies abusing the laws of physics, I'm just trying to point out some more of our trademark Slashdot hypocrisy that turns up every few weeks.

  • But overall, if you have to miss one movie this year, make it this one.

    Thanks for the advice. I'll go check out "The Grinch" instead.

  • Doesn't anyone go to the movies for things other than a intricate, complex plot that would satisfy any geek's craving for a fantasy Mars? I mean, come on, people. Maybe it's just the Slashdot community that has to have everything just perfect so that they can feel good about seeing a movie that really conveyed what they wanted to see, and not really what the director/producer intended.

    I guess that since I enjoy most movies, I'm either stupid and ignorant, or I'm simply not part of the /. community.

    Flame me all you want, but at least my panties aren't in a bunch...

  • What other movie can you think of where the director actually bothered to demonstrate a gravity differential by having the intrepid heroes take a piss? The director got his reaction mass principles basically right, and best of all, the characters actually seemed to think in scientific terms.

    I enjoyed the film, but that scene pissed me off. Given their situation, the fact that it looked like they were going die of thirst, they would have saved their piss. At the very least, their suits would have recycled it. into drinking water. When you're on a dry planet with no other source of water, you can't afford to be squeemish.

    The character development was some what weak, but Carrie Ann Moss did a good job of showing us that she can be a bit more feminine than Trinity, and the shower scene was, as mentioned earlier, pretty much worth the price of admission.

    Yeah, thin white tank-tops have been standard issue for females in space since Ellen Ripley - a trend I do not wish to discourage. Frankly NASA's TV broadcasts would become more popular if they'd adopt it.

    As I said, though, that's a pretty small list compared to such rancid pieces of science-hating crap as Armaggeddon.

    ...or Mission To Mars, which had people audibly snickering when I saw it. At least, for the most part, these people behaved as if they possessed an IQ closer to a scientist than a Hollywood Screenwriter.

  • I wasn't taught anything about homosexuality in school -- and yet I still came to the realization that I am in fact gay. It took 10 years of self-torment before I realized this. IF the schools that I went to had awareness programs, then I wouldn't have had to go through that (I would have figured things out MUCH earlier). I was brought up as a Christian, went to Church every Sunday and prayed to God each night. From the age of 11 on, a GREAT number of those prayers concerned my sexual orientation. I REALLY didn?t want to be gay, and I thought that it was unfair that I had been attracted to the same sex since at least the age of 7. NOBODY MADE ME GAY. It was not a choice that I made. If I had a choice, I most certainly would have chosen a heterosexual orientation. It is utterly stupid to think that any intelligent person (I am a graduate student with an IQ of 136) would CHOOSE to be part of a misunderstood, persecuted and even hated class. Why would anyone want to risk their life to have FEWER civil rights than everyone else? Where do you get your ?facts?? ?Virtually 100% of youth who "turn gay" do so after having been taught about it in public (government) schools? This statement is both factually false and logically incoherent. FACT: 5-7% of the US adult male population is gay (conservative figure). FACT: Historians have estimated that 5-7% of the adult male population was homosexual during Classical times in Greece (they took a partner, not a wife). FACT: The ancient Greeks ENCOURAGED young men to have sex with one another so that young girls could be married as virgins. FACT: Almost all Greek men stopped having ?homosexual? contact after marriage. So this proves that there is no link between ?learning? and orientation. Otherwise, there would have been a far larger percentage of homosexuals in ancient Greece than in the present-day West. In other words; It was OK to be gay in ancient Greece and yet 93-95% of all young men turned out to be straight. And yet, it is NOT OK to be gay in the West and the percentages are the same. None of us CHOOSE our orientation (if such a choice existed, I would not be writing this because I would be straight) ? we are pre-wired to be oriented straight or gay (or some combination thereof) during embryonic development and VERY early childhood (or so the American Medical Association says ? but what do they know, they?re only a bunch of doctors and scientists!). Twin studies have proven this ? If one separated at birth identical twin is gay, then there is a 50% chance that the other twin is also gay, just a 25% chance that a non-twin brother is gay and a mere 5-7% chance that a random friend is gay. So the greater the number of shared genes, the higher the probability that another person has the same sexual orientation. Further, these probabilities stay the same regardless of environmental factors and upbringing. Therefore, the lost 50% of the probability indicated above CANNOT be attributed to anything that the affected person thinks, believes or consciously wants (it is probably due to random differences in how the brain organizes itself during development ? genes can only define fractal patterns for brain organization, not an exact blueprint). So go ahead and trust your Scriptures. I?ll continue to trust the cold hard facts of science over a document that says that the planet is only 6000 years old ? ludicrous nonsense.
  • ...then everyone would be heaping on it. And yet here we have yet another piece of shit from corporate, fake, brain-cell impoverished Hollywood, featuring the usual array of bad actors...It's weird reading some of the earlier posts actually defending the idea of dumbing down movies - didn't any of Jello's speech the other day tweak any neurons out there? -s- find: God: No such file or directory
  • Actually, the Sojourner robot DID have a cheap
    Motorola radio modem for comms to the larger
    lander - that was a big part of NASA's "smaller,
    cheaper, faster" thing...re-use of standard parts.

    However, I agree with all your other points.

    Some others...

    * What is the probability of the Hab module, the
    Sojourner and the Russian sample return mission
    all being within convenient walking distance of
    the crashed mars transfer craft?

    * Why the heck would you program AMEE with
    techniques for killing humans? She can sense
    your detailed anatomy - and has been programmed
    with complex strategies of geurilla warfare
    but nobody taught her "Killing Crew == Bad" ?

    * But by far the worst gaffe is the lack of
    spectroscopy. Why didn't they know the
    up-to-the-minute distribution of O2 in the
    martian atmosphere?

    * Why would an unmanned Russian probe have
    a voice synthesiser and a cute control panel
    on it? (I liked the bear in the spacesuit
    though!)

    Well, for all that, there are worse ways to
    spend $4 and a couple of hours - the popcorn
    was *great*. Picking holes in the movie is
    an entertainment in it's own right.

    :-)
  • "You can make people believe the impossible, but not the implausible." -Alfred Hitchcock
  • I was thinking it was either the storms or the bug things, because when the killed that guy he said they were eating through his suit...
  • What is a reviewer supposed to say?

    I'm not asking for miracles. Subjective opinion and point-by-point analysis are not only valid, they're often very useful to the movie watcher. What's totally worthless is an overall recommendation to not go and see it yourself, even if it's in the general subject area that you'd normally enjoy.

    On the other hand, maybe one should examine the premise behind your question entirely. Perhaps we've been deluded into thinking that reviews do actually serve a useful purpose, on balance. Maybe the benefit is not so clearcut, maybe analysis without assessment should be the goal. It's academic though, because today's reviewers would not tolerate the suggestion that their personal emotional response is of no interest to anyone else.

    I think I'll vote for diversity and support the existence of even the most extreme of reviews as general input. It's worth noting though that the only reason why the film industry does frequently produce masterpieces despite them not being box-office hits is because critics are generally ignored by everyone with a mind of their own. If it weren't so, the studios simply couldn't afford to produce the films, since nobody would go and see them after the first negative review.
  • Oh yeah...and

    * What destroyed the Hab module (we never
    found out). "Nematodes"?

    * How come they didn't check telemetry
    from the Hab module earlier?
  • When I saw ads for the movie "Red Planet" I hoped it was a movie-ization of the Heinlein book of the same name. You know the one -- a progenitor of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" with Boy Scouts and lots of guns.

    Heinlein's science may not always have been plausible, but at least it was almost always internally consistent. (And for those of you who don't know how to read: no, "Starship Troopers" the movie was nothing like "Starship Troopers" the book; the book was squared away.)

    I sure as hell wish some of those old Heinlein books would be made into movies. I'd also like to see R. A. Lafferty's "The Reefs of Space" and A. E. Van Vogt's "Voyage of the Space Beagle" on screen.

    Wait! I forgot! Gene Rodenberry stole "Space Beagle," lobotomized it, and turned it into a half-assed TV show called "Star Dreck" or something.

    You know, literacy is a curse, especially if you like science fiction. I have yet to see a TV or movie SF plot that wasn't done to death in novel form before WW II.

    There is a whole Galaxy (and Analog and F&SF) full of good science fiction books out there waiting to be made into thoughtful, dramatic movies, but we get George Lucas and similar crud instead.

    And no, it's not "sci-fi." Call it "science fiction" if you know what you're talking about and you're not TV-moronized since birth.

    - Robin Miller

    "science fiction fan since 1959"

  • yes, good point! all you matrix-bashers should pay attention to this, they made the matrix with the intent of making a movie that was a combination of old kung fu movies and comic books, the sci-fi is secondary.

    ----------

  • I'm really not surprised at the awfulness of this movie. In fact, it's exactly what I was predicting. I can't think of a single good movie that was based on a novel by Heinlein. Take Starship Troopers and the made for TV Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters for instance. Neither movie was worth the film they were printed on.

    Heinlein is a master writer and I am a big fan of his. In fact, I consider Starship Troopers to be one of his best novels, what for all the interesting view it presents about society in the future. However, the movie really did not do justice to the novel. In fact, it took all the best points of the novel and trivialized them, turning the film into yet another Sci-fi Action flick.

    It is for just this reason that I never wish to see a movie adaptation of Heinlein's master work, and possibly most famous, A Stranger in a Strange Land. IIRC, there have been talks about it, but this is such a great novel that I'd hate to see the movie industry trivialize it by butchering the book into some kind of mass intertainment pice of crap.

    But enough of my ranting. This is jsut my $.02.


    --------------------------------------

  • Hey,

    OK, I wouldn't have seen it in the theater (and didn't, in fact) but it was OK on video.

    I might not have paid for it, but it was funny on public TV, for free.

    I have no such excuses for Battlefield Earth

    Ah, but there is one good review here [pointlesswasteoftime.com].

    Michael

    ...another comment from Michael Tandy.

  • It wouldn't be very hard for someone on Earth to figure this out with some spectroscopy. A spectroscope is very simple. You can get a real cheap one for like $10. Anyone on earth with access to a good one could have been tracking the build up of oxygen. One doesn't need a "external oxygen detector."

    I actually didn't see the movie, but I have been frustrated by such things in the past. Like this one movie where a creature had like "30% human DNA and 70% gecko DNA" which is of course crap because neither humans nor reptiles have DNA that unique. If they simply hadn't mentioned how they know the monster was composed as such it wouldn't be so bad.
  • In Red Planet, we have a bunch of intelligent scientists sent to investigate a supposedly oxygen depleted planet. They do everything - discuss sex, talk about God, fly through space etc except try to accomplish their mission. At least, in Star Trek, Data would announce that the the neutronium detector was broken and no telemetry of the planetary composition was possible.

    They did announce that the "science package" was destroyed. They did not intend a bouncing landing, that was the backup. Their original intention was a normal rocket-assisted landing, but they had to blow the landing package.

    No, the main groaner for me was - why the hell woundn't they remove the military programming from the robot before they put it on the ship?

  • Waterworld changed directors in mid-stream, and you can tell: the scenery and the atmosphere is done imaginatively and well, the background plot is semi-plausible, the first half is pretty damn good. In the middle of the movie, they went "whoa! we have no more money" and hauled in a cheap-ass director to finish up what the first guy began (sorry, don't recall names) - and so the whole business with the pyrotechnics and the ship blows chunks.

    It had great potential - what a f***ing waste. I still liked the atmosphere, though.

  • It is not the bad physics which bothers me. It is the idea of trying to be realistic, getting it wrong, which results in a ridiculous story that gets me.

    It is not the idea that Mars can sustain a breathable atmosphere. That can be ignored. It is the idea that these smart scientists did so little to deserve the label of "smart scientists".

    If they did everything they could, but failed becuase of mysterious circumstances, that would make for a fine rousing story. But these guys were bumbling idiots. An astronaut in similar circumstances wqould not do what they did. This spoils the characterization. It makes the "left to die" plot device trite and banal. And the gimmicky nature of the central plot device becomes apparent, which spoils the suspension of belief we were willing to grant it initially.

  • Note to self, NEVER take movie advice from somebody who actually admits to going to see BOTH Battlefield Earth AND Waterworld...
  • Well that too. But you see, these astronauts spent 6 months getting to Mars, and they did not even try to do some science from space before heading down? Smart people always plan. Even if they did not, Houston in Earth would. What was their excuse for heading down to surface that quickly?
  • . In the middle of the movie, they went "whoa! we have no more money" and hauled in a cheap-ass director to finish up what the first guy began (sorry, don't recall names) - and so the whole business with the pyrotechnics and the ship blows chunks.

    Right, and you know, they shoot movies in order, shot for shot....
  • The loads of scientific/engineering problems would have been OK, if it weren't for the ham-handed treatment of the humans and the horrifyingly banal friendly-drone-turned-monstrous subplot. The plot itself read like a parody of the worst of Star Trek: random crises thrown into the plot with gibberish technobabble explanations and no particular technical accuracy, plot justification, or human value.

    At least the producers of Battlefield Earth had an excuse -- they're $cientologists.

    Technical errors which are too glaring to ignore:

    • Why try to terraform mars if the Earth is dying? Why not try to terraform Earth? (Even if all the best ecosystems crash, terraforming Earth is bound to be a lot easier than terraforming another world).
    • Why the big ship?
    • Why the 1-woman, 6-horny-guy crew? 0%, 50%, and 100% seem like much better F/crew ratios for a yearlong mission, than the 18% they flew.
    • Spacecraft with gravity-feed plumbing?
    • Centrifugal gravity with razor-straight floors? (at least 2001 had a nice curved hallway in the station interior)
    • Solar flares that make the whole spacecraft shake? And that with no warning at all from Earth? (it should be hours after the flare that the first protons arrive; and days after that when the solar wind shock wave arrives. Neither have enough power to shake the spacecraft!)
    • Why did they have to visit the planet to find out that the GIGANTIC GREEN PATCHES they expected weren't there?
    • What, no O2 spectroscopy from Hubble?
    • Why didn't they have radio contact with the Hab computers?
    • The effing radios in their effing suits can't reach the station, but a tiny 100mw radio can reach the Earth?
    • No O2 sensors on the lander? Come on folks, they're cheap! Most modern *cars* have O2 sensors in their exhaust systems. Instead people have to asphyxiate in their own suits to discover they can breathe outside?
    • The captain has to tell Houston that there are people on the surface, moments after they tell her to tune in the surface signal?
    • The effing mystery storm
    • The effing exploding explorer-robot-turned-Terminator
    • Too many problems to count with the Russian probe

    The direction and screenplay sucked, sucked, sucked, and it didn't even swallow. Wooden characters; gratuitous ham-handed sex; subplots that are introduced and forgotten in seconds; dumb, stereotyped, dumbass dialog; inexplicable choices for the crew (come on, are these really the best and brightest? Or did NASA just wander down to the nearest pool hall and pick up a few buffoons to head to Mars?); horrible flashbacks; random inexplicable crises; and feeble attempts at heroics are just a few of the more egregious problems with the directing.

    Yuck.

    My friends and I snuck into "Best of Show" immediately afterward. Much better movie (albeit with no special effects)! We laughed our asses off.

  • I took a great class while an undergrad at USC [usc.edu]: CNTV-466, taught by Leonard Maltin (the movie critic guy). The nature of the class is a discussion unto itself, but my point here is Maltin's philosophy of watching movies, which you have hit on the head of the proverbial nail.

    Maltin's philosophy is to try to understand what the intentions of a particular movie are, so that it can be reviewed in that context. As you and others have mentioned, most movies are not of the caliber of American Beauty (which we screened a month before opening night, with Anette Benning as the guest!). Yes, comparatively, Mars Attacks! is a pile of mindless drivel -- but as a hokey comedy, I don't think it gets much better. And for me, Waterworld is a decent movie (average plot, nice scenery), if you ignore the whole "smokers" sub-plot as well as the end of the movie, when all of the lame-ass morallity sub-plots come to fruition.

    Yes, there are some truly horrible movies out there. These tend to be the ones that fail to live up to their own intentions. (Waterworld, for example: in a world without dirt -- a major plot element and intention of the movie -- how were they growing the tobacco for their cigarettes? Hydroponics? In the dark bowels of the Exxon Valdez? Get rid of the whole "smokers" thing and it isn't so bad...) But summarily judging against a movie because it is not Academy Award(tm) quality is stupid and shortsighted.

    Most movie critics are idiots. But after that class, I have respect for what Maltin says -- even if I later disagree with his opinion.

    And for the record, I saw Red Planet last night. The shower scene does not live up to my expectations, but there are enough gratuitous "nippy" scenes to keep me happy. The only two "errors" that really stood out in my mind were the DNA code messup (ATGC, not ATGP) and calling the little critters "nematodes" -- they look a lot more like crustaceans or insects, not little worms.

    With respect to the above, this movie is much better than Mission to Mars. I would rather have limited, unemotional dialogue (RP) than hokey, overly emotional dialogue (M2M), and the only product placement that I noticed were the technical labels on their space suits (Toshiba and Hughes are the only two I can recall). And the dramatic scene where one person EVA's to rescue the other while tied by umbillicus to the main ship: a nice, happy ending in RP. That one scene in M2M is what pushed me over the edge -- I was willing to forgive its faults until that point, and after that I was looking at my watch, waiting for it to end...

  • Classically, science fiction is split into 2 camps. There's the real-world variety (Arthur C. Clarke, Kim Stanley Robinson, etc) which is true science fiction (sometimes called "hard" science fiction), and then there's the fantasy variety - Star Wars, Buck Rogers, etc. The fantasy variety is known as "space opera".

    Each must be internally consistent. Hard science fiction requires that things follow the laws of physics we know (or at least that it looks like that). If spaceships make noise as they go past, or objects in space slow down from friction, then you're screwed. The film of 2001 became impenetrable by introducing the flashy graphics display, which you only understood what he was trying to show if you'd read the book, since it emphatically DIDN'T follow our known science (being alien technology).

    Space opera on the other hand can have its universe run on any set of rules you care to choose, but you have to stay consistent to those rules. Had Luke Skywalker suddenly been able to shoot fireballs at Darth Vader, that's not something any Jedi has been seen doing, so it breaks the rules (unless of course he's some kind of "new breed", in which case that's an essential plot feature). Incidentally, are episodes 2 and 3 going to explain how the Emperor gets to do this? cos that was dodgy in RotJ.

    The problem is the overlap. Concepts like "the physics of Star Trek" miss the point, which is to get the crew in a pressure situation then get them to dig themselves out through what looks like ingenuity. It's all complete rubbish ("So if we set up a positive feedback positronic hyperdimensional wave" or shit like that), but it's fantasy and we accept that it's possible. The problem comes when the writer/director tries to inject real world into it. The 2 classic examples here are Phantom Menace's "Jedi cooties" and the Matrix's "human Duracells". Star Wars had managed 3 episodes with the Force as a universal field surrounding everything, and that worked, but suddenly Lucas tries to say what causes it, and the suspension of disbelief breaks down bcos he's not being internally consistent (... and cos it's a crap idea in the first place, but anyway). The human Duracell is a nice image, but it's real-world intruding again - energy processing just doesn't work that way. Suppose (as an example I've just thought up) the Matrix had said, "the humans are actually part of the computer - the real world is just a screensaver to keep the brain occupied while the computer uses each brain's processing power for its own purposes, after it was found that pure processing-only with sensory deprivation causes people to become psychotic and corrupts the computing process". Now that's consistent with what we know about the brain, it gives the computer a reason to supply a meta-world to people, and best of all it doesn't attempt to explain HOW the computer does it.

    Any time a film pulls something out of it's ass just to fill a plot-hole, it's failed. I can think of 5 places where Phantom Menace did this without even trying (and I only saw it once). Matrix was a kick-ass film, but that human battery bit interfered with my enjoyment of it. Trekkies have slated Voyager for the "magical photon torpedo generator" - if you notice these things, it'll bug you. If a script-writer, director, continuity man and a team of actors between them don't notice this, they deserve to have their films crash and burn.

    Grab.
  • You obviously have a lot of misplaced faith in Hollywood.
  • Isn't "Felicia's Journey" directed by Canada's own (by way of Armenia and Egypt) Atom Egoyan? Of course, in this day and age, there are lots of movies that are not easy to peg to one country.

    BTW, I also highly recommend Egoyan's "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter".

    Bit of trivia: His father named him "Atom" in honor of Egypt's first nuclear reactor. How funky is that? So who among you will be the first to name your kid "Linus", "Linux", or better yet, "Kernel"?
  • We did the zero-g fire here at Hammerhead Productions. We had some fun doing research, zero-g fire is something that NASA and others are pretty interested in, as you might imagine.

    Unfortunately, real zero-g fire pretty much goes out right away as, in general, there is no draft to bring fresh reaction products in. The only unintentional fire in a spaceship was the one on Mir, a few years ago, discussed in Linenger's book -- what was burning there was an 'oxygen candle', which of course could supply its own oxygen to the flame.

    Of course, the studio just wanted something that looked cool, so we made some assumptions that made reasonable scientific sense and still looked cool -- the fire was usually a surface the moved through the atmosphere, the idea being that the fire would oxidize the fuel as it went; but it didn't just sit in one place and burn.

    For the (other) nerds out there, the animation was all done with my own Z animation system [hammerhead.com] and rendered with Pixar's Renderman on our Linux render garden (5 machines doesn't count as a render farm.)

    thad

  • That was Pathfinder, yeah. They also used some off-the-shelf radios for rover/base comms. They then spent a few million bucks qualifying the hardware for space use.

    However, they didn't run the hardware through the ringer. If we had a strong solar flare it could have wiped out those radios. It was a calculated risk, to save money.
  • What are you talking about? I really liked Battlestar Galactica ;) Especially the robotic pet dog - I was watching it the other day, its just like an Aibo - and the death of that honey Jane Seymour has just too much pathos for words. Pshaw! I defy anyone to say that Battlestar Galactica was bad.

    More seriously, as I haven't seen Red Planet I'll have to bow to your opinion on that one.

    But more generally I think my comments have some validity. I'm not saying that one should be undescriminatory about films, rather that one should rely on ones gut instinct. (I'm sounding a bit like the Queen now;). You should just sit down, watch a film and try and enjoy it for what it is, rather than starting an intellectual critique, which will spoil any film if taken too far, IMO. And if you don't like it on those terms, then it is awful.

    KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.

  • Well that too. But you see, these astronauts spent 6 months getting to Mars, and they did not even try to do some science from space before heading down? Smart people always plan. Even if they did not, Houston in Earth would. What was their excuse for heading down to surface that quickly?

    They had just entered orbit, and were just getting ready to start the process then a massive solar flare blew a huge amount of their equipment and blinded their insturments. The original reviewer was way off the mark; this is one of the least scientifically offensive SF films in a while. Especially as compared to "Mission To Mars".

  • "oh crap, these are metric algae, not Imperial-measured algae!"

    Tell me again, were we meant to send 100 TONS of algae, or 100 TONNES?

    --
  • by (void*) ( 113680 ) on Sunday November 12, 2000 @07:28AM (#629103)
    [WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS]

    Is the idea that the bacteria produced enough oxygen to envelope Mars entirely. OK - let's pretend that it is possible. Still these bunch of scientists approaching the planet to find the cause of the supposed oxygen depletion never bother to do basic simple spectroscopy to discover this, until they had to take off their helmets to breathe to discover it!

    Whoever wrote the script had no idea about how science is done. Scientists are not technical workers who go to Mars to fix an oxygen problem like plumbers turning up in your home to fix a leaky pipe. They are curious people who will go to great lengths to VERIFY that Mars does indeed have no oxygen before embarking on such a trip. And you think they would do something so simple as to point a spectrometer or send probe to get close to it first!

    The scriptwriter is an absolute moron.

  • Reasonable science fiction, but weak story telling. The plot is plausible. The special effects are reasonably good for Y2K (but may look hokey in a couple years).

    I almost walked out of the theatre when I heard the starting narration. A sign of very bad story telling is have to begin with a lecture. Then came Stamp's hokey philosophizing.
  • Mars Attacks was one joke repeated again and again for an hour and a half. It's truly mystifying just how terrible it is considering the incredible talent of both the director and the cast.

    Maybe Tim Burton was over-inspired by the true schlockmeister after directing Ed Wood...
  • In Romeo Must Die, Jet Li did the 360-kicking thing. He's the fucking *man*, and I have no problem whatsoever with that.

    You've got me on the MI2 one though.

  • by gelfling ( 6534 )
    Even NASA says now that anyone who has anything to learn about keeping shit up in space for VERY long periods of time have to learn from the Russians. Their program failed not because it was flawed but because it ran out of money. Damn if anyone else could keep a functioning Mir in orbit for 11 years. The great story I like is the $500K Fisher space pen that NASA commissioned so that astros could writ during an EVA. The Astros showed it to the Russians on Soyuz who whipped out a pencil!

    They got a working lander on the moon first, they go a remote piloted lander on the moon first, they got the first 1 and 3 man crews in space and they built the largest launch vehicles. True the program never had the high tech gee-whiz bells-n-whistles of the American program but it did prove its point with comparitively little funding which is just what Americans are demanding of their space program now.
  • Perhaps you should read Kant's "Critique of Judgment" for a some insight into those value judgments that you circularly refute yet engage in yourself......

    That would indeed be a possible counter argument, if it weren't for the fact that I did not refute the reviewer's value judgements about the film. What I said was that his judgements were not of universal relevance. Undoubtedly his judgements are completely valid in so far as he applies them to himself.

    The question here is not the validity of the value judgements, but of the scope of their validity.

    As for Kant, he was the ultimate universalist, a position which he somehow managed to defend while accepting the impossibility of direct knowledge of hard reality because our only access to it is empirical. Good observation, but questionable and dangerous deduction, in view of where it led his successors through Fichte. If he were alive today my reply to him would be "Fine, just as long as you don't impose your inferred universals on those who beg to differ." Ultimately it leads to absolutism, and coercion at the point of a gun.
  • If the next POTUS is GWB then we'll be treated to moooovies about satanic communist child molesting foreigners from another dimension who are stupidly battling Christ's new army for the souls of all the CHIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLLLLDREN !!!!!
  • It's been over ten years since I saw it and I don't remember too much about it, but I remember it was so long that if for nothing else it should get marks for trying so hard.
  • by Johnny Starrock ( 227040 ) on Sunday November 12, 2000 @07:35AM (#629122)
    Does anyone really expect much going into these movies? You know what? 9/10 people find "realistic" space action scenes boring. Just ask Johnny Sixpack what he thought about 2001.

    You will never go broke underestimating the intelligence of your audience. Most people go to films like this for the same reason I'm about to spend all day watching football, for action and maybe if I'm lucky, some drama. Not a coherent story. Not for scientific accuracy. And they certainly don't want to think. "Who Wants To Be A Millionare" is popular for the same reason. Zero substance and questions that would make a 3rd grader feel smart.
  • The great story I like is the $500K Fisher space pen that NASA commissioned so that astros could writ during an EVA. The Astros showed it to the Russians on Soyuz who whipped out a pencil!

    Can you say Urban Legend [128.242.205.65] boys & girls?

  • You're right, that homosexuality take comes straight from Tarantino's "Sleep With Me" (see this transcript [godamongdirectors.com]). As it says on the same page, of Top Gun, "It's also the most unintentionally gay movie ever made by a big studio, so homoerotic it's like some kind of camp joke." You can kinda see their point - who knows, perhaps a scriptwriter was having some fun. Still, I seriously doubt Tarantino intended that to be anything more than poking fun. BTW, the actual (non-Tarantino) line from the movie was "You can be my wingman anytime", I think.

    But there's a big gap between warmed-over Tarantino satire being regurgitated as pop feminist criticism, and poking holes in a plot. The former is pretty ridiculous, especially in the context of a blockbuster action/romance movie. The latter, even a child does.

    I had to look it up, not having seen BG for a very long time, but you have to admit, if the Silons would just get on with it and destroy all these pesky humans, at least the flow of bad movies and bad criticism would stop!

  • by Enoch Root ( 57473 ) on Sunday November 12, 2000 @07:35AM (#629126)
    I think you meant Mission to Mars. M2M was that other atrocious sci-fi movie that came out recently. Mars Attacks! was a clever comedy by Tim Burton which, although not universally liked, certainly doesn't deserve to be tossed in the "atrociously bad" movie heap.
  • *grin* One of the best trash films recently, following in the fine footsteps of the great B movies. If we talk about movies being a star vehicle, then 5th Element was definitely a Jean-Paul Gaultier vehicle - more high camp than an expedition up Everest...

    Grab.
  • by Morgaine ( 4316 ) on Sunday November 12, 2000 @06:22PM (#629133)
    Are you sure that that article was by Bertrand Russell, rather than Eugene Wigner? (I'd like to know. It didn't seem to have the clarity of expression typical of BR.)

    In any event, the author of The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences doesn't seem to have gone to Philosophy of Science 101. He writes:

    The argument could be of such abstract nature that it might not be possible to resolve the conflict, in favor of one or of the other theory, by an experiment. Such a situation would put a heavy strain on our faith in our theories and on our belief in the reality of the concepts which we form. It would give us a deep sense of frustration in our search for what I called "the ultimate truth."

    Any half-decent introduction to Science would have told him that Science is not a search for "the ultimate truth" -- that dodo is in the realm of philosophy. Furthermore, scientists seek agreement between their models and the behaviour of reality only because that makes their theories useful as opposed to being merely mathematically interesting. The inability to distinguish between two theories is nothing to shed tears about, since scientists know that their models and reality herself are two different things entirely, so there might well be multiple equally effective theoretical representations. One can only approximate to how reality behaves with the models of Science, and they never pretend to represent The Truth. They'll always be subject to revision and replacement by tomorrow's improved versions, and you certainly couldn't throw away The Truth with such impunity if you had it in your hands.

    The relationship between theory and reality is very carefully crafted coincidence, nothing more. And that's a very powerful observation, because it means that reality will continue to surprise us forever, so mankind's future is potentially unbounded.

    In writing about the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics", the author was merely being mystical. It was a good read, but the sense of wonder doesn't really add anything useful to the discussion, even if he hadn't fallen into the trap of thinking of theory as (tentative) reality.
  • ...it's a movie, an action movie at that.

    I've given up on action movies making too much sense. As a geek (by profession) and a rocket scientist (by degree) I don't mind when a movie doesn't have every little detail correct. I would be ecstatic if I did find a movie that dotted every i and crossed every t.

    If you want realism take a hike. If you want realism in movies...good luck. In fact go watch "Men of Honor", that's the most realism you'll get in a movie.

    Red Planet had stunning visuals and special effects. As has been posted, the robot animation is amazing. I would recommend it as a matinee, but not a full-price action movie necessarily.

    Grab your Coke, get your Goobers, sit back, and enjoy the show.
  • by the red pen ( 3138 ) on Sunday November 12, 2000 @07:43AM (#629156)
    • OK, I know the actual science of physics has only been around for around 50-75 years, but it's pretty well documented;
    Wow, you're off by almost an order of magnitude on the age of the science of physics -- and that's if you ignore Plato and Aristotle's efforts.

    ...or did Al Gore's father invent physics?

  • I know the actual science of physics has only been around for around 50-75 years, but it's pretty well documented; and you can get an excellent primer from many, many books, and see it used properly in a story in many science fiction novels. Gravity, mass and velocity aren't magic -- so you can't make them suddenly appear, disappear, or become less or greater then they were originally.

    That's funny, I thought that whole field had been around for a lot more than 75 years. I must have been hallucinating about that Newton guy.
  • I'm absolutely aghast to see that some readers liked this movie. This movie blew like a five dollar crackwhore. I haven't seen so much shit since I was 11 and our septic tank backed up.

    Not for a second did I care about any of these characters. I didn't care whether they lived or died. I take that back. I wanted them to die. Quickly. Watching them on screen was more painful than #40 sandpaper briskly rubbing my nipples (hey, it happens more often than you might think.)

    At the start of the movie the narrator says, "This is so and so. He's a hothead. Next to him is so and so. He's the soul of the crew." I can remember being in the fourth grade and having my teacher say, "Don't tell us your character is wise. Show us." Apparently the screenwriters who vomited up this bit of pablum should go speak with Mrs Ritchie, my fourth grade teacher.

    Now if there's one thing I loathe in a sci-fi movie, its a robot. If a robot is going to be a central character, its going to suck my ass. And this one rimmed me long and deep. The moment they wheeled that stupid thing out I knew it was going to be awful. And the instant they showed it had a "military mode" you could pretty much tell the thing was going to go apeshit.

    Of course, the biggest insult to the moviegoers intelligence was that inspid deux ex machina of oxygen being present on Mars. When Val Kilmer was choking and dying, I though, "Ah! I hope he dies so I can go home," I knew that he was gonna pop off his helmet and breathe. What an insult.

    Val Kilmer made me chuckle once or twice. The name of his character was Gallagher. Christ on a bun, why couldn't they have gotten the comedian of the same name to smash up some watermelons. That would have improved this flick more than I can describe.

    Anyways, this movie made Mission to Mars look like 2001. It really did. Do yourself a favor and avoid this movie. As for myself, I'm going to hunt down the director and smash a lamp in his face for the two hours of my life I'll never get back.

  • I think we're probably all looking at this problem from the wrong angle. Look at it like this. When you go into a book store it's neatly divided into book types Fiction/Non-fiction/Biography/Reference etc. Most book stores have the Sci-Fi section but if you look at that area closer it's set up with sub-sections (Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Sci-Fantasy, and sometimes various horror). All the AD&D books are together as Fantasy, Star-Trek is usually under the Science-Fiction, Star Wars sometimes under Sci-Fi but usually under Science-Fantasy. You get the idea.

    The book store keeps all of the harlequin romances, quick sales, junk books and stuff they'd rather not categorize up front where people can get it quick and get out quick. The majority of the shoppers shop here. In to get a mag or cheap romance novel, maybe a present for a friend but not in far enough to need to make sense out of how things are categorized on the shelf, much less how the "sci-fi" books are categorized

    See to 99% of the population Lord of the Rings is Sci-Fi along with Chronicles of Narnia and Dungeons and Dragons. That 99% doesn't think about the distinctions between books nor really the distinction between movies. To them it's "I want something to scare me... make me laugh... look cool... with lots of fighting... with hot chics... romantic..." They don't even hear the first word in 'dark-comedy', they just hear 'comedy' and then are disappointed when the movie wasn't funny the way they wanted it to be (cable guy).

    To me it appears that critics of Red Planet are guilty of the same thing. This was so not a Sci-Fi movie. Personally it's border line even being a Sci-Fantasy movie. Cool special effects, liked the suits, the ship, the robot, etc. But in the end it didn't rely on the hard science that true Sci-Fi's typically rely on. That's where the problem lies. So many of the movies that we see today are clasified by the media and the people who watch them as 'Sci-fi' when in reality they are 'Sci-Fantasy'. Did Star Wars ever explain how the light saber worked or why Obi-Wan dissappeared like that? Hell No! Why? Cuz it was science fantasy, just enough realism to be believable but enough fantasy to make you forget about realism for awhile.

    I personally liked Red Planet, I think it succeeded where Mission to Mars failed. Mission to Mars tried to rely to heavily on the science but would chuck it out the door when necessary just to do something neat. That went beyond what I would call artistic liscense. Red Planet didn't focus on the science, nor did it focus on the people really. By the end of the movie you knew that one dead guy had a granddaughter, the other dead guy was too cocky, another dead guy (the nice guy) wasn't quite so nice (spineless), and that dead guy number four 'the jerk' was probably a pretty good guy after all, taking one for humanity and all. We find that the lead character is more resourceful than given credit for and that the female co doesn't need 'rescuing'. Do we really need to know that Kate came from a long line of Navy, or Burchenal was a drunk, or Robby's wife died two years ago, or that Ted had an abusive father. No because it doesn't really help any with the story line. None of their jobs or skills really even help with the story line, because in the end they are stripped down to only one thing, surviving with their humanity. And that in the end is what this movie is about. Humanity, how easily some of us give up on it all, how those of us who seem to have given up really haven't, how the meek sometimes aren't, all the flaws and accomplishments that we have as a species, right there for people to take a look at if they weren't so damned interested in Carrie-Anne Moss's or the fact that oxygen levels could be easily detected well before reaching the planet.

    Truth is movie goers are stupid, even the 'smart' ones.

    Personally I've read a lot of science fiction and it just fucking bores me to tears sometimes. You know those 6 pages that you have to skip here and there because the author starts talking about singularities, gravitational forces, and space time. YAWN. You know that 99% of the people would leave the movie theater if that happened and that nice three hour long 200million$ science accurate sci-fi would be considered the 2nd Ishtar.
  • by Kiss the Blade ( 238661 ) on Sunday November 12, 2000 @07:48AM (#629184) Journal
    Quite right. I don't go to the pictures to see a film that is scientifically correct in every detail. Who cares if its utterly wrong on every count? It's about suspension of disbelief.

    I know that the people who read /. are among the most sceptical people on Earth, and rightly, but if you let that get in the way of watching some cheap film you're just an idiot.

    Imagine if the original Star Wars was released today. Lots of people here on /. would doubtless flame it because of it's pathetic interpretation of physics and it's architypal characters.

    But so what? doesn't anybody remember what it was to be a child and take these things at face value, for 90 minutes at least? If you let your intellect get in the way of enjoying a simple, unpretentious film & you don't enjoy it then I have no sympathy, I'm afraid. Criticising these things is just oh-so-smart intellectual masturbation.

    KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.

  • I liked waterworld!
    Am i wrong? Oh no, I'm going against groupthink, arrrgggghhhh!
  • Red Planet had some rather massive problems, but it wasn't as bad as Mission To Mars. Not much is as bad as Mission To Mars; Battlefield Earth and Armageddon being some notable exceptions.

    There were a number of similar attempts, as in Armageddon, to include pointless catchphrases in a sad attempt to bulk up the script and provide cute fodder for trailers and teasers. There was an annoying Terminator 2 style monologue delivered for no particular reason over the intro.

    However, on the plus side, the nationalistic propaganda wasn't in evidence, as it was in Mission to Mars. You've just crash-landed on a distant world with nowhere to stay, no way to get home, and you come over a hill to see the equipment from a previous mission. Rather than go see if there might be some oxygen, food, or maybe a rocket booster or two, you stop and pick up your flag and stare at it for a while, killing off your oxygen. That alone makes Mission To Mars worse than Red Planet; let's not even mention the lame ending with the tearful alien.

  • Didn't you watch the season premier of the Simpsons? The correct term is now Johnny 12-pack.
  • Is it me, or does every single movie that bends the laws of physics even slightly get trashed here? [...] In fact, I think that if the old Star Wars movies were first released today, we'd trash them, too.

    No, and no. I for one have two completely separate categories for my sci-fi enjoyment:

    1. Hard Science Fiction -- generally set in the present or near-future, heavily based on reality with specific changes. I absolutely expect this category to get the facts right, and will smack them silly if they fail. Don't use science in a story if you don't know science.
      Example of a success: Earth, by David Brin

    2. Science Fantasy -- often set in distant parts of time, using technology that is nearly indistinguishable from magic. I absolutely expect this category to ignore the facts, and will smack them silly if they fail. Don't use science half-assed if it breaks the illusion.
      Example of a success: The Uplift War, by David Brin
    we even let The Phantom Menace's "midiclorians" slip by with little complaint.

    Not me. I thought that was the single worst part of the whole movie. He took the biggest mystical concept in all of sci-fi-dom's belief structure and turned it into fucking nano-symbiotes straight out of a bad ST:TNG episode. Much worse than the virgin birth, Jar-Jar, and Jake Lloyd's acting.

  • > The algae start to disappear, and we have to send people to Mars now to find out why the algae have disappeared.

    Well, duh, if NASA sent the algae, it kinda goes without saying they'd disappear!

    (I mean, I'm all for sending people to Mars, but really, couldn't we find a more interesting excuse than "oh crap, these are metric algae, not Imperial-measured algae!" ;-)

  • by FFFish ( 7567 ) on Sunday November 12, 2000 @08:01AM (#629202) Homepage
    ...and go support your local reperatory (sp?) theatre. If you don't have one, start one.

    Up here in Canada, the Famous Players chain of big-box cinemas has become a member of an independent releases self-help group. So FP is willing (nay, eager!) to work with community groups to bring single-showing foreign and independent films to the theatre.

    It's worth noting that over the past six months, the *only* screens that are jam-packed with viewers have been these indie films. The other week I was in the lineup for twenty minutes to get in -- and saw *not one person* walk in the door to see any other film.

    My town has a population of about 40K. Another nearby town (~45m drive away) has a pop. ~20K. Both towns have a film society... so *your* hometown can have one, too, if you get off your duff and organize it!

    Recent films:
    "East is East" (UK) -- Very funny story of an East Indian immigrant who is trying to raise his family as Pakistani in England... in particular, in marrying off his sons traditionally. They want none of it! A touch dark, a touch funny, a touch painful.

    "New Waterford Girl" (Cda) -- Hilarious. Poor Moonie Potter lives at the edge of the earth, somewhere on Cape Breton, in a cramped, bleak little Catholic community. She's a renegade artiste-type, unappreciated and misunderstood. Things turn around when a new neighbour -- refugees from the Bronx, hiding out from the law -- shows up at about the same time she gets a scholarship to an Fine Arts school -- a scholarship her parents won't let her take. Moonie and her new girlfriend hatch a plot to get her out of Cape Breton...

    "The Colour of Paradise" (Iran) -- Poignant, tragic story of Mohammed, a blind eight-year old (the actor really is blind), his bitter, widowed father, and his loving grandmother and sisters. Fascinating look into a small Iranian town, and utterly heart-wrenching.

    "Felicia's Journey" (UK) -- Bob Hoskins is a meek and mild child-killer. A psychological thriller, and the *only* film I've ever seen that has caused me to curl up in the theatre seat, hands to face and horrified. Hoskins is a brilliant actor. Felicia is an Irish lassy who comes to Britain to find her run-away boyfriend, and hitches a lift from Bob. He insinuates himself into her life, and it's not going to go well for her. Mortifying, absolutely mortifying.

    Anyway, point is, every one of the Film Society films I've seen over the past two years has been an order of magnitude better than the shit that is being pumped out of Hollywood.

    You owe it to yourself to at least search for or create alternatives.

    www.vernonfilmsociety.bc.ca, if you want to poke 'round my local viewing. Do a search for "Princess Theatre Edmonton Alberta Whyte Avenue" or somesuch, and I'm sure you'll come up with a treasure trove of info ('cause Princess Theatre rocks the film world, IMO).

    --
  • "I stopped being analytical about movies ... I was being ripped off by my own intellect." - Jack Cameron

    By over-analyzing and being super-critical of movies, I was missing the WHOLE point of watching ... to ENJOY the darn thing.

    You can nit-pick ANY movie, but is it really fun? It's like dissecting a joke, to find out what makes it funny.
  • I mean, at least they tried. The zero-G fire was handled well, and aside from a number of misstatements and silly oversights, everything seemed like it had been done by someone who had passed high school, unlike the vast majority of Hollywood 'science' fiction movies.

    What other movie can you think of where the director actually bothered to demonstrate a gravity differential by having the intrepid heroes take a piss? The director got his reaction mass principles basically right, and best of all, the characters actually seemed to think in scientific terms. Having the characters understand that the circumstances they find on Mars are wrong and need serious explaining, and showing them determined to find it out through investigative means is worth a hundred factual errors that might go over the heads of 95% of the American audience.

    Nonetheless, a selection of my favorite misstatements and science goof-ups, forthwith:

    • Nematodes are microscopic worms.
    • I don't believe Pathfinder had a radio capable of reaching orbit.. that's what those fancy antennae on the lander pod were for.
    • Solar power tends not to work at night, and even during the day, you need more power than they would have gotten from their rig. See those big petals on said lander pod?
    • A modem on a space probe? Why? I bet NASA has never, ever, audio-encoded telemetry return, unless sound was the actual data of interest.
    • Nice up-to-the-minute touch, putting an Aerospike engine on the mars transfer craft. Unfortunately, the whole reason an aerospike is valuable is because it is effecient over a range of atmospheric pressures. No atmosphere, no need for an aerospike. Looked cool, though.
    • I don't believe 'P' is one of the bases used in DNA (CGAT), but it may be used in RNA.

    As I said, though, that's a pretty small list compared to such rancid pieces of science-hating crap as Armaggeddon.

    The character development was some what weak, but Carrie Ann Moss did a good job of showing us that she can be a bit more feminine than Trinity, and the shower scene was, as mentioned earlier, pretty much worth the price of admission.

    The whole thing felt like a throwback to 1950's science fiction.. some nice morality plays in a setting where the characters have to use science and engineering to solve their problems, and feelings are sublimated under the stress of a high IQ. All of which dooms it to a lousy box office, but I liked it.

  • Waterworld was fine, except that section in the middle where all they did was sail the boat and look at each other. For an action move, it was bad drama. For a dramatic movie, it was bad action.
    -russ
    • he means modern physics
    Really? 'Cause he says, in the very next sentence:
    • Gravity, mass and velocity
    These were widely understood before Einstein described objects moving through space curved by mass. Nuclear physics, quantum physics, relativity and special relativity are fairly new (but not even 50-75 years new), but that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about good ol' Newtonian physics. As in Sir Isaac Newton, the 17th century mathematician.
  • by taniwha ( 70410 ) on Sunday November 12, 2000 @08:38AM (#629217) Homepage Journal
    But overall, if you have to miss one movie this year, make it this one.

    But, but, but .... I already missed Battlefield Earth .... does this mean I have to go see it now? (shudder) .... you're evil ...

  • So what DID you like about the movie? I saw it, and I'm really wondering. It was poop. And I even agree with you that movies can be enjoyed even if they're filled with "Slashdot errors".

    But the reviewer is dead on with this review. The movie is filled with moments that just made me confused. Every five minutes one of the characters would do something completely out of context.

    And the bad science wouldn't be an issue if the movie wasn't taking the science so seriously. One of the themes of the movie is hard science. The writer seems to be trying to impress us with hard science. But the science is awful! All of it.

    Everything that happens is either physically impossible or contextually implausible.

    Jon Sullivan
  • by OlympicSponsor ( 236309 ) on Sunday November 12, 2000 @08:17AM (#629222)
    Even if we restrict "modern" physics to Einstein, that's 100 years, not "50 to 75". Let's face it, the reviewer gave us no reason to care about the review and got all his physics wrong. I give it a 5/10.
    --
    MailOne [openone.com]
  • by Morgaine ( 4316 ) on Sunday November 12, 2000 @08:22AM (#629233)
    I can sum the movie up in one sentence: It's worse than both Mission to Mars and Waterworld.

    I can sum the review up in one sentence: it suffers from the usual problem with critics, subjective myopia. Belief in the universality of values seems to be mandatatory for film reviewers, presumably because otherwise it would admit the possibility that their critical judgements are irrelevant to anyone except themselves. Sigh.

    The fact of the matter is, watching a movie is a different experience for different people, and no single value judgement applies. One man's charisma is another man's overacting, and one man's scientific accuracy is another man's lack of imagination.

    And it gets even worse when the critic somehow manages to synthesize a number of failings into an overall recommendation to avoid the show at all costs. Among other things, that's scientifically inaccurate, because a movie is definitely more than the sum of its parts.

    I liked Mission to Mars, Mars Attacks! and Waterworld, all for different reasons (haven't seen B.E. yet) which may or may not match the experience of others. The perfect movie doesn't exist [well, apart from possibly The Matrix :-)], but it's a rare film that doesn't have some good qualities and some very committed fans.

    And hey, some people don't like The Matrix. Would we listen to them if their profession happened to be film critic?
  • I _Liked_ "Mars Attacks!" I mean, it went up against "Independence Day" for the Hugo award that year!

    Besides, I think that it's fair that cowboy yodelling could cause one's brain to explode...

    "Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
  • You don't get it. Full realism is not to be expected, but the key plot idea, aka the gimmick must be coherent.

    • In the Matrix, the idea is VR. This makes it the perfect excuse for the eye-popping, outlandish special effects.
    • In the Terminator, the idea is a relentless killing machine sent back through time. Sounds stupid, but once you accept the premise, the idea of a soldier being sent back as a protector and Father of the future leader is not crazy.
    • In Back To The Future, the gimmick is a car that is a Time Machine, sent back to the 1950s. Once you accept this fantastic idea, it stands to reason that if broken, you could not fix such a machine in the 1950s, when you could in 1980s. Everything else follows or is an elaboration of that premise.
    In Red Planet, we have a bunch of intelligent scientists sent to investigate a supposedly oxygen depleted planet. They do everything - discuss sex, talk about God, fly through space etc except try to accomplish their mission. At least, in Star Trek, Data would announce that the the neutronium detector was broken and no telemetry of the planetary composition was possible.

    You tell me if that is an excusable plot device.

  • I have no problem with movies that get science wrong. A certain amount of leeway is fine in order to portray an interesting story.

    Unfortunately, hollywood has started making movies which are all about the science. They play up how "accurate" the science is, and make it an integral part of the plotline. BUT THEY GET IT HORRIBLY HORRIBLY WRONG!!!

    Star Wars was never meant to be about science. They never even try to explain the cool tech they have. And that's fine, it falls under the category "not important to the plot to try to explain."

    Doug

  • "Red Planet" rules, "Red Planet" stinks, yadda yadda yadda...

    What I want to know is where these critics are hanging out? I mean, where are these real world people that make so much sense? Most of the people I meet "are inexplicably offended and say weird statements which have little or no rational value to them". Kudos to the director for putting realistic characters in the movie, avoiding the unbelievable and cliche "rational" type that Hollywood usually serves up.

    "No sympathy, no tension, no nothing. It's banality at its extreme". Hmmm. sounds like my life. I guess I should get out more.

  • For an action move, it was bad drama. For a dramatic movie, it was bad action.

    But despite the simplifications of film critics, movie watchers don't necessarily pigeon-hole themselves into single-genre consumers.

    I liked Waterworld because it was a combination of drama and action, and of other things as well. Just like The Matrix. Just like virtually all films.

    Real life is more complex than our tools of analysis might have us imagine.

If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments. -- Earl Wilson

Working...