A good science article about a movie before it's release.

I wonder if this is instigated by the studio trying to avoid some kind of documentary stigma... Possibly head off the pre-debunking at the pass.
Whatever the reason, it's a good thing.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

It's certainly an improvement on "cavemen and dinosaurs in the same movie".

Carnivorous flightless birds (diatryma?) seem to have the place of dinosaurs here. And, it's hard to tell in the trailer, but I think birds in this movie are a lot bigger than they were in reality.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

From the 30 second promo I've seen on TV, I really don't want to see this. I may be mistaken but it looks as though these cavemen not only keep herds of mammoth but make war with them and also have tame sabretooth cats.

Hey, I just realised, that would make it The Flinstones

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This is not an idea to be tossed aside lightly - it should be thrown with great force

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*

Gee, I never noticed I forgot the missing link. (pun intended)
Thank you. I actually found it on MSNBC... it is the same story.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

I thought the only mammoths alive in Pharonic Times were the ones on that island in Siberia.

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

Yeah, like some dude from Siberia would head down to Egypt and tell them about a woolly elephant he found in the ice.

The promos looked cool, but afte the BTS special from HBO, I don't think I want to see it either. Not only did they put mammoths on pyramid construction sites, but they had 'em galloping like horses at high speed.
Elephants don't 'gallop. They just trot.

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Angel of the Abyss
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"I am Ripper...Tearer...Slasher...Gouger. I am the Teeth in the Darkness, the Talons in the Night. Mine is Strength...and Lust...and Power! I AM BEOWULF!"

So it's basically One Million Years B.C. but without Raquel Welch in a fur bikini.

We do get Camilla Belle, tho

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*

I've seen a bunch of bad reviews for this film. All flash and no substance seems to be the consensus.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

what, you all aren't going to rush out and see this latest masterpiece from the makers of "The Day After Tomorrow"?

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

Heh...reminds of the Simpsons

Homer <after deciding to sell Bart's elephant> :"Here are the keys"

Ivory Dealer: "Elephants don't have keys"

Homer: "Well...I'll just keep these then"

My first reaction was pretty much "Why are there Woolly mamoths in the Egyptian Desert"

Pete

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PJE

There's so much I don't know about astrophysics. I wish I had read that book by that wheelchair guy.

If at all.

And no mammoth could survive in a desert for more than a few hours.

And 10,000 BC was NOT "Pharaonic Times".

And diatrymas were extinct for at least a million years before that.

Need I go on?

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

When Robert E. Howard created the 'Conan' universe, he borrowed heavily from historical places and civilizations, but made it clear that this was a 'fantasy' world.

Throwing prehistoric beasts into the '10,000 BC' movie is just gonna stir up a storm of criticism that the creators don't really need. They're promoting it as if it is a 'real world' with 'fantasy' elements.

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Angel of the Abyss
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"I am Ripper...Tearer...Slasher...Gouger. I am the Teeth in the Darkness, the Talons in the Night. Mine is Strength...and Lust...and Power! I AM BEOWULF!"

Is just a little homework too much to ask? Some of this stuff would be so easy to get right and still be very cool. I don't get it.

If you want those animals - base the story in an area of the world where they existed (even if you are going to play around with the timelines a bit. If you want northern Africa - do a quick search for the megafauna that lived in that area.

Seems simple enough.

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Spock Jenkins of the Vulcan Jenkins'.

My sentiments exactly....

They could've used Deinotheirum instead of mammoths. Deinotherium's range covered parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe. And it lived in the Pleistocene, which ended about 10,000 yrs ago.

Deinotheirum



Time elapsed on Google === 7 minutes. 40 seconds.

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Angel of the Abyss
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"I am Ripper...Tearer...Slasher...Gouger. I am the Teeth in the Darkness, the Talons in the Night. Mine is Strength...and Lust...and Power! I AM BEOWULF!"

I wonder how they figure the big D's trunk was shorter...

No, the feline is wild and being encountered in the wild as a threat to the human who encounters it, and the herd of pachyderms is being hunted.

The big stone monuments are an interesting tidbit for me. The time in the movie's title coincides with when one person I know of says the Sphinx was built (and thus, implicitly, some other things around it too). This is long before history & archeology would say any such construction was going on, but he bases his argument on the erosion of the cliff walls behind it; he says that they would have been a smooth vertical face that long ago but already been rough and eroded by the more recent time historians and archeologists give, and that the pattern of erosion is what you'd get if a significant amount of the erosion the cliffs have experienced was by rain instead of wind, which requires that the cutting have been done when the local climate was wetter than it's been recently. Of course, historians and archeologists say he's a quack, and I know he supports other quacky ideas (mainly that there was an advanced worldwide culture long before the most "ancient" local advanced civilizations we know of), but I know of nobody who refutes his geological claims, and geology seems to be something about which he's more honest/rational instead of sensational (for example, calling the square-looking stones under water near Japan natural instead of calling them the work of an extremely ancient advanced civilization).

However, even if he's right about advanced stone construction happening so early in Egypt, the movie still got it wrong by putting that in a desert setting instead of a green one...

Someone over on IMDB is actually more outraged that they aren't calling it 10,000 BP, claiming that "Before Present" is the currently accepted term, despite the fact that a) I'd never heard it before, and b) it's a perfectly ridiculous idea for a dating system. Either you have to keep changing the year in which everything happened (which would, logically, make the film 12,000 BP) or else you're considering a past event to be the defining moment of "present."

I'm also not thrilled with those who think it should be BCE, though it's far less silly. After all, "BCE" is still counting from the same thing; it's just a ridiculous pretence that we're not using a Christocentric dating system. The "common era" started in about 1606, the year that all inhabited continents were in actual contact with one another. To call anything before that a "Common Era" is just denying the facts.

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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!"

The muscles that control the trunk are anchored to the skull. By examining the anchor points in the bone, it tells them how the trunk muscles were arranged and therefore, how long a trunk it could have.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Before Present is used to give dates from the present, it's used all the time on 'Time Team' on Channel 4

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What if we adopted a dating method around the accepted innovation of writing?

What comes before the advent of the written word is generally considered as 'prehistory', and what comes after is 'history'.

So, if you can find an accepted time frame for when that occurs, you can then build a basic dating stem around it.

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Angel of the Abyss
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"I am Ripper...Tearer...Slasher...Gouger. I am the Teeth in the Darkness, the Talons in the Night. Mine is Strength...and Lust...and Power! I AM BEOWULF!"

It's only a damn fantasy movie. What's with all the fuss?

Imagine you're watching a movie about baseball. Now imagine that at the climax of that movie, the protagonist has to hit a home run to win the big game. Then, imagine that the protagonist swings for the ball, and misses. Then, cut to the press box, where the announcer for the game says, "Ooooh, strike one! That means he only has four strikes left!"

Stupid, right? I mean, no one would ever be so dumb to write something like five strikes being needed to strike out a baseball player, would they? But hey, it's only a movie, right?

Well, this is how most of us feel about movies like this.

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Yes, but with only a PG-13 rating, there's just not going to be enough of her to look at, if you know what I mean.

According to Rotten Tomatoes, the reviews are horrible.Maybe it's pining for the fjords.

(BTW, rumor has it the film was supposed to be a stealth prequel to Stargate.)

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We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04
Tuckers! Automotive Oddities! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither. MachineCast Save the planet, by leaving it! "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ.

What kind of bad reviews?
Can you specify some?

I've seen the preview , and it's interesting beside the fact that it's a fantasy movie.

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Jean
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"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." - Albert Einstein

"The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge " - Bertrand Russell

well, I'm in the minority here. I actually saw the movie last night. And I enjoyed it.

Yes the geography was a little confused, and there was a little fantasy element that I didn't care for, and I saw the climatic event coming a mile away. And there was that throwaway reference to Atlantis. (It would take a retcon worthy of the Highlander franchise to tie this to Stargate, btw)

But so what? So it won't get nominated for Best Picture. The cinemantography was good. The CGI critters looked real enough. The plot was a little weak with all those coincidental things that help move it along, but most of these type of movies have that.

As for the Woolly Mammoths, keep in mind the audience. Most of us have heard of and are semi-familiar with them, something more esoteric would look more out of place, since no one would know what it was, even it was more fitting to that time and place.

Now if you really want to nitpick: everyone had straight, bright white teeth!

Somewhere, an anthropologist is crying.

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

The peasants in "A Knight's Tale" also had bright, white teeth...I've just decided to ignore that part of hollywood now

Pete

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PJE

There's so much I don't know about astrophysics. I wish I had read that book by that wheelchair guy.

Sure, you can find "an accepted time frame," but it may be off by a thousand years or more. What's needed for any dating method is one day to start from. Or even one year. We simply don't have that for writing. We don't even really have one century.

And Peter, I deal with the teeth. But the zipper down the girl's back in the last shot? No; it bothers me every time. And I kind of like that movie.

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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!"