Think I'm joking? Click here:

http://www.sunshinedna.com/videos/8

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Wikipedia: A MMORPG for self-denialists.

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

Is it ok to start crying now?

Too bad if the answer is no because I already started...

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Could be a good trivia question in the future. What movie consistently made the top 10 worst films of all time....before it was even made lol

Why? Why why why?

Fred

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"For shame, gentlemen, pack your evidence a little better against another time."
-- John Dryden, "The Vindication of The Duke of Guise" 1684

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

It's science-FICTION. Sci-fi should be fun first!

If they were to actually make a sci-fi film that only applied the most rigorous and realistic elements possible, do you know what you would have?

THRILL TO...committees locked in weeks of monotone discussions over funding!
SHUDDER AT...the mind-numbing tedium as an army of technicians pore over reams of data without end!
BE IN AWE OF... setback after setback as measurement conversion mistakes bring everything to a standstill!
FACE THE TERROR OF... Congressional interference!
BE ASTOUNDED AS... vital components are damaged by lousy shipping protocol!
YOUR BLOOD WILL RACE AS... weather concerns delay test flight again!
MARVEL AT... thousands of man-hours wasted as ignorant politicians pull funding!
BRACE YOURSELF FOR... the end - as the engineers go back to their teaching jobs.

No thank you...I don't cough up the serious gelt to sit in a theatre watching some Science Channel bore-you-mentary, I'll stick with the FANTASTIC VOYAGEs!

The funny thing is the screenwriter of The Core has a degree in Physics...

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When I die I want to go peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror, like his passengers.

Soylent green obviously hasn't read much lately. There's a whole crop of hard SF writers around now who can make a cracking tale without stretching rubber science until it snaps. Some of them even featuring budget meetings!

I just don't see the point in making an SF film without any science content. Hey, let's make a western, only cows are stupid-looking so we won't have any, our cast would look better in cut-offs and halter tops, we'll replace the horses with dirt bikes and six guns with uzis and have a multicultural cast, and of course that whole gunfight and ride-into-the-sunset thing is stale so we'll have a funny romantic triangle with psychic possession and a cute baby that talks.

Or let's set a film in Paris, only everyone speaks English, and we'll use London landmarks like Tower Bridge because the audience knows them better, and instead of food or fashion let's make it all about Hollywood -- we'll just claim the French have one that looks just like the one in America.

And why does Merchant Ivory insist on all that period stuff when their films would be a lot more cool with black leather and kung-fu fighting?


I heard about Sunshine from a friend. Let's hope the whole sun mission is just a subplot. If they concentrate on the psychological disintegration of the crew then they'll be no worse than any other pop-psych soft horror film made with lots of hand-held cameras by a thirty-something art-house poseur.

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"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

"The Core" isn't science fiction. It is bad skiffy. Science Fiction is fun. This is just sad.

I've read lots of very fun, very hard science fiction. It's too bad there isn't more of it on the screen, but I don't insist on that. On the other hand, there does come a point when the plot and fake science are just so bad they aren't fun, but insulting.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Yep, the example I've used: Imagine you are going to a movie about football, and you watch in horror as the first scene unfolds with the players going onto a circular field, throwing basketballs (several of them), and hitting them randomly with baseball bats. The movie gets worse after that, but you hardly notice because you've lost interest. Then after the movie, when you say why that was all wrong, you hear, "It's just a sports film!" and "But what about the great character interaction?"

The Core makes almost as much sense.

There comes a point where it just becomes ridiculous, where you wonder if the producers and writers went out of their way to be insulting. That's where I get ticked off with a "skiffy" movie. (And, these are the ones that usually have bad plots too.)

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Or let's put Tom Sawyer at 20-something into a movie where, by internal chronology, he ought to be 60- or 70-something. Also, history schmistory.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

You guys are ridiculous. To have become so jaded over the scientific merit of fantasy flicks seems a bit preposterous. Not only that, your mixing up the definition of a genre with your own personal opinions of specific films. Wanna see where that gets ya? Check IMDB.

With the criteria some of you have, how do you accomodate these...
DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE
DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
WAR OF THE WORLDS
MYSTERIOUS ISLAND
JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH
FANTASTIC VOYAGE
THIS ISLAND EARTH
every STAR WARS film
every STAR TREK film
every ALIEN film(especially as they went on!)
MEN IN BLACK
V
TRANSFORMERS


and if you can't figure out that THE CORE was just a Jules Verne tale with modern dressing...well, I'm glad none of you are in charge of making sci-fi films.

You have to accept that CONTACT, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and PLUTO NASH all occupy the same genre, for better or worse.

I'm not sure if you know this, but this forum is the product of the merging of two seperate fora; the Universe Today and the Bad Astronomy fora.

Bad Astronomy's stated goal is the revealing and debunking of bad astronomy facts in the media, therefore the bad science in an SF film would be of interest to members of that forum.

As to your list:

DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE- don't know

DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL- ludicrous "thousand kph" spacecraft, but science really wasn't the point of this movie anyway.

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE- Yes, that had some bad astronomy

WAR OF THE WORLDS: original novel was based on very current astronomy for its time; our modern knowledge of Mars didn't take root until after this movie came out

MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH: Jules Verne operated within the scienific knowledge of his day, and strove to make his stories accurate. If science has moved on in the last hundred years, that's not his fault.

FANTASTIC VOYAGE: not bad, actually. Not a lot of detail but no overtly stupid mistakes that I can see. The science behind miniaturisation is never really explained, but that's understandable, since there isn't any.

THIS ISLAND EARTH: No one will watch this movie and come away thinking that they've had an astronomy lesson.


every STAR WARS film: fantasy, not scifi. But still, the "ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs" line gets a fair airing on this forum let me tell you.

every STAR TREK film: Star Trek has made some howlers (neutronium being one of the biggest) but on the whole it has striven to retain a level of scientific credibility not seen in shows like, say, the original Battlestar Galactica.


every ALIEN film(especially as they went on!): The original Alien was actually fairly good hard scifi. There was little in the way of "magic tech" (except, of course, for warp drive and artigrav, but every scifi movie has that); the planet was fairly plausible (except for its astonishingly high gravity) and seemingly modelled on Saturn's moon Titan.

MEN IN BLACK: A satire. It's not meant to be taken seriously.

V: A parable. Some very bad astronomy (water is one of the most common substances in the universe; no alien invasion fleet would come to our world looking for it, and Sirius could never evolve an intelligent civilisation; it hasn't been around long enough) but again, not really the focus.

TRANSFORMERS: Given that the entire premise of this show is fairly ludicrous to begin with, astronomy isn't really the main issue.

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Wikipedia: A MMORPG for self-denialists.

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

~If you are wondering how they eat and breathe,
~And other science facts, just repeat to yourself,
~"It's just a show, I should really just relax!"


I knew the Core was cheesy, still liked it, probably like Core 2.


I'd go see this movie too. :P

"Hey, let's make a western, only cows are stupid-looking so we won't have any, our cast would look better in cut-offs and halter tops, we'll replace the horses with dirt bikes and six guns with uzis and have a multicultural cast, and of course that whole gunfight and ride-into-the-sunset thing is stale so we'll have a funny romantic triangle with psychic possession and a cute baby that talks.

Or let's set a film in Paris, only everyone speaks English, and we'll use London landmarks like Tower Bridge because the audience knows them better, and instead of food or fashion let's make it all about Hollywood -- we'll just claim the French have one that looks just like the one in America.

And why does Merchant Ivory insist on all that period stuff when their films would be a lot more cool with black leather and kung-fu fighting?"

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Ranger Brad: Oh, say... You don't believe those old legends about the Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, do you?

Dr. Roger Fleming: Ranger Brad, I'm a scientist, I don't believe in anything.

Actually, I haven't seen anything to support the notion of an FTL drive in the first couple of Alien movies. Artificial gravity, yes, though never mentioned, since it's irrelevant to the plot.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

There are two, completely separate problems here.

The first, and most important, is suspension of disbelief. A movie initiates a contract with an audience. If it says right up front, say, that things that whoosh go faster and things that are cool win more battles (like Star Wars) then fine, we understand, and we can sit back and enjoy the sword fights and scenery.

On the other hand, if a movie says up front, say, that it is going to be historically accurate, and makes a visible effort to stay in period, the audience will react badly if at the climax a modern machine gun or airplane appears to rescue the heros.

It's a violation of basic story-telling. If you are making a film about a good cop in a corrupt town, you've fired him, turned the rest of the department against him, and hammered over and over that he has no allies anywhere, you can't have a bunch of FBI men suddenly run in at the climax.

So we get to science. If you've established a premise based on, well, basic third-grade science, you set up an expectation in the audience that the plot will unfold within those bounds. The Core was particularly good about giving with one hand and taking away with another; such as the scene where someone mentions the core is "A mass of iron the size of Mars!" and the answer is "Okay...we'll use SEVERAL nukes!"

And a further subtlety. Fiction thrives on the "Logical Surprise." Returning to our ex-cop, above, if instead of the FBI some of his brother officers show up, having had a change of heart, that is something the film could have set up. You didn't see it coming, but in hindsight you realize you should have. It fits the story, it doesn't harm the narrative flow, it doesn't violate anything that was shown before, and yet it is a new and exciting development.

Oddly enough, The Core did set one of these up; the "Unobtantium generates electricity" bit. For me, the biggest violations in The Core were not when the ship was first described (who was it who said, "Get the reader to accept one impossible thing at the start of the story. Then stay within plausibility for the rest?") but when how the ship was said to function was then violated over and over by later events.

It's like that old rule of fantasy. Once you've established the heroine needs a feather to cast her flying spell, you can't save her from falling off a cliff unless you've made sure there's a feather within reach.

So the first problem is a narrative disjunct. You've established ground rules in order to build tension -- then when your characters got into a hole you cheated. You violated the audience's trust, put their belief on permanent suspension, and told them, basically, that the author was playing a god game with the characters and there's no reason to actually care about any of them.


The second problem is the loss of an opportunity. If I was making a film set in Paris I'd make sure to get a couple frames of Notre Dame, the Opera House, Arc de Triomphe, and that spikey thing with all the cast iron. If I was doing a Western I'd be drawn towards steam trains and silver mines, horses and cattle.

So when a film says it's going to be about, well, The Core, you hope to get a chance to see some of the things and concepts painted up real nice and splashed on that silver screen. You want to see what Nova could do with 70mm film and a Hollywood budget. Of course we all know better than to expect any of that. But it is, still, a special disappointment every time a film comes around trumpeting that it is going to have "Real, accurate science!"

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"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

We are? Your defending a terrible film, when a film is made to be taken seriously it should be taken seriously when being written...The Core was not taken seriously, there are countless mistakes in the film. And if it was taken seriously, the producers are on some really good drugs. To an uneducated group the movie was cool, but to the rest of us it was just plain loopy and silly, you can NOT blame us for that.

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Clearly, there is no shortage of willing suspension of disbelief around here, given just how many of us watch Firefly, Doctor Who, and other sci-fi. Or even fiction, really--I've got a lot of historical fiction on my shelves.

There are, however, places where we shouldn't have to suspend disbelief. Like the laws of physics or the historical record. Heck, even there, we make certain allowances--we watch superhero flicks, and I'm fascinated by certain works of alternate history. However, the better works of alternate history are clearly