What happened to awesome space movies?

[kerbiloid]

31 minutes ago, Earthlinger said:

Wait, so am I the only one who really enjoyed LIfe (2017)?

Please, specify your astrobiological self-identification.

P.S.
Two more space-happening movies reached me this month: "Solis" and "Origin" (series).

Spoiler

Currently haven't watched them, but at the first glance Solis looks somewhat like Sunshine but with definitely more limited funds.
Origin visually looks somewhat like Dark Matter but just visually, instead of an "adult-rogues-road-movie-and-Jodelle-Ferland-unexpectedly-at-the-light-side" it's "teens-in-space-recall-the-Earth-and-press-funny-highlighted-screens".
Both have a lot of sci-looking-fi, but I definitely wouldn't call them a hard sci-fi.
_{(Also visually I was absolutely sure that Origin's main heroine is portrayed by Natalia Tena, but the cast list says no. It's strange. Astral twins?)}

 

[Superfluous J]

13 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

I was absolutely sure that Origin's main heroine is portrayed by Natalia Tena

Wikipedia agrees with you.

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, Earthlinger said:

Wait, so am I the only one who really enjoyed LIfe (2017)?

Not bad, but I think I enjoyed Europa Report more.

[lajoswinkler]

On 11/14/2018 at 12:27 PM, GearsNSuch said:

Well, really realistic sci-fi would just be a lot of waiting and failure due to small factors so...

There is no really realistic sci-fi. When it's realistic and well made, it's called SF, which is the proper abbreviation for science fiction.

Sci-fi is a name for fiction with topics regarding science, but done in a casual, or downright goofy reckless style.

Also, to comment on someone mentioning it, films like "Star wars" aren't either of these. They're fantasy genre that happen to occur outside Earth.

[tater]

Just watched a few minutes of Gravity (on TV right now). It was the bit right when they find out about the debris, then it hits. I'd forgotten how bad it was. They're working on Hubble, yet somehow near ISS (that's later, but same thing). The capcom says the debris is headed "up to their altitude" which makes zero sense at all. Then there is some comment about it taking out communications (and a crack about facebook)---which I guess assumes that TDRS is not a thing, and that for some inexplicable reason people get their internet from LEO sats.

I turned it off.

[Ozymandias_the_Goat]

Unfortunately good space movies demand a level of technical accuracy that is usually incompatible with drama. Movies that retell actual events ie. Apollo 13, need not come up with new technical details, and the drama is of course more in the personal interactions than in the grandeur of space exploration. Movies that do attempt to amaze with science, ie. Interstellar, are either bound to get too many things wrong in the name of drama, or simply be uninteresting to a wide audience. The science is “speculative” at best and just “wrong” at worst. So “awesome space movies” has never really been a thing, at least to me. 

 

[DAL59]

On 11/14/2018 at 1:26 PM, tater said:

Foundation is being done as an Amazon series right now, apparently. I think a reboot will do it good (the tech and the Mad Men in space doesn't fly any more).

It will probably end up being explosions and ship to ship battles, and not psycohistorical conversations.  I'm not sure how that book can be adapted to tv.    

Also, not fiction, but First Man shows how you can have drama without sacrificing realism.  The spin malfunction was scary!

[tater]

8 hours ago, DAL59 said:

It will probably end up being explosions and ship to ship battles, and not psycohistorical conversations.  I'm not sure how that book can be adapted to tv.    

Foundation was people realizing they were agents of change at the predicted moments Hari Seldon predicted. It's frankly not much other than political intrigue when it comes down to it. There are loads of places to fill in gaps (characters were pretty 2D, frankly). The merchant stuff at the end of the first book is perhaps more action-packed. There's not much fighting in Foundation, actually.

[Superfluous J]

40 minutes ago, tater said:

Foundation was people realizing they were agents of change at the predicted moments Hari Seldon predicted. It's frankly not much other than political intrigue when it comes down to it. There are loads of places to fill in gaps (characters were pretty 2D, frankly). The merchant stuff at the end of the first book is perhaps more action-packed. There's not much fighting in Foundation, actually.

Which doesn't mean Amazon won't screw it up and make it about scantily clad space marine teens fighting for the prophet Hari Seldon to save the Galaxy from the Mule People.

[tater]

True. I just reread Foundation a couple months ago... it really doesn't hold up well, almost any change would be an improvement.

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, tater said:

True. I just reread Foundation a couple months ago... it really doesn't hold up well, almost any change would be an improvement.

That's sad, it was one of my favorite books in the 80s. Asimov was always better at plot and setting than he was characters and dialog.

[tater]

9 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

That's sad, it was one of my favorite books in the 80s. Asimov was always better at plot and setting than he was characters and dialog.

The big issues (IMHO) was that the characters sound like they should be wearing suits and fedoras--like Mad Men, only without any women, which leads to: boring characters. They seem like cut outs. No deep characterization. The tech issue is "atomics." When written in the 50s, that was on people's minds, but ut needs a serious tech update, it just sounds silly, so it's hard to get past that.

I read it in the 80s as well, but to be fair it wasn't my fave then, either (I can't even accurately count the SF I read back in the day, I have boxes filled in storage, over 500 books, easy)

[Bill Phil]

1 hour ago, 5thHorseman said:

Which doesn't mean Amazon won't screw it up and make it about scantily clad space marine teens fighting for the prophet Hari Seldon to save the Galaxy from the Mule People.

That reminds me of a Stargate SG-1 episode where a teenage version of the team is shown. It’s pretty funny. Another bit was a joke about Farscape.

[Kerbinchaser]

Went to the theater for the 50th anniversary of 2001 a few months ago. Forgot how freaking weird that movie is. 

Also fabulously made. 

[lajoswinkler]

On 11/19/2018 at 6:26 AM, tater said:

Just watched a few minutes of Gravity (on TV right now). It was the bit right when they find out about the debris, then it hits. I'd forgotten how bad it was. They're working on Hubble, yet somehow near ISS (that's later, but same thing). The capcom says the debris is headed "up to their altitude" which makes zero sense at all. Then there is some comment about it taking out communications (and a crack about facebook)---which I guess assumes that TDRS is not a thing, and that for some inexplicable reason people get their internet from LEO sats.

I turned it off.

Why the hell are you so jaded? Holy negativity Batman.

If you remove those issues, the whole scenario falls apart. The whole possibility of making a film about such thing falls apart.

Just shut up and enjoy the film, the rest has been made extremely well.

[0111narwhalz]

There's a thing called "willing suspension of disbelief." It comes more readily to some of us than it does to others.

Apparently, it comes very hard indeed to tater.

[tater]

1 hour ago, lajoswinkler said:

Why the hell are you so jaded? Holy negativity Batman.

If you remove those issues, the whole scenario falls apart. The whole possibility of making a film about such thing falls apart.

Just shut up and enjoy the film, the rest has been made extremely well.

Then write a better screenplay.

There was no reason for Hubble at all. Same scenario works minus Hubble, they could have had Shuttle placing a free-floating science platform (hand wave, whatever) near ISS (ahead or behind in same orbit). That at least stops the thing from being silly instantly. If it was working on a GEO sat, would you say the same thing? No, that orbit would just be too far to suspend disbelief. Anyone who knows the orbits at all should have the same issue, it's needlessly there.

What about the dialog? Why does capcom say the debris is heading for their altitude, implying that the debris is somehow in an orbit changing altitudes? Again, needless. Dump the altitude line (literally a word less would do), fixed, easier to suspend disbelief. The comms issue is clearly a plot device, but one that makes no sense. I'll look the other way for a plot, but don't beat me over the head with 3 self-evidently wrong things in 2 minutes.

The debris should also be in a crossing orbit. Crossing debris won't happen on the time frame they suggest (longer, unless a whole orbit is a cloud of debris, then they should cross it 2X every ISS orbit or so). That doesn't hurt the plot, they can work around that (the debris need not hit them every time they cross, if they still want 90 minutes, have the one halfway through have close calls with no hits. Hurts nothing about the plot.

You're welcome to enjoy it, I can't, I won't tell you to shut up about saying it's OK, either.

 

1 hour ago, 0111narwhalz said:

There's a thing called "willing suspension of disbelief." It comes more readily to some of us than it does to others.

Apparently, it comes very hard indeed to tater.

It's only hard when it's stuff I know about, and they literally beat me over the head with being wrong, in the case of Gravity, repeatedly in the space of a few minutes they say/show one thing after another that is flat out wrong. The Hubble thing in re-watching the movie is something that would not occur the first viewing, since you don't yet know they will head to ISS, BTW. In a first viewing, you might forget that, after the action of the debris).

In Apollo 13 I was completely pulled out of the movie for a few minutes when the countdown was wrong. I watched all the Apollo flights, live. When many here think of crew flights, they can play back Shuttle (or Soyuz) launches in their memory, as a kid, if my toy rockets had a countdown, it included something like, "Ignition sequence, start" in the midlle. If a shuttle launch had the SRBs light, then it sits on the pad for a few seconds because the director liked the smoke/steam, you'd notice. A few minutes later you might forget, but you'd be booted out of the plot for a second by it being obviously wrong (and for no good reason at all when doing it right was no harder to do).

Hunt for Red October was on the other night and I saw part of it. There is a scene where a damaged plane lands on Enterprise. The aircraft is like an F9F (?). Old footage of a real crash they used. So old it is clearly nonsense, not even close, or even the right color for a modern USN aircraft (it was navy blue). Jarring, and takes you out of the plot for a bit. These days they could have animated it. Back then, maybe better to show footage of a fire on deck, and not the crash.

 

Edited November 21, 2018 by tater

[XB-70A]

3 hours ago, tater said:

There is a scene where a damaged plane lands on Enterprise. The aircraft is like an F9F (?). Old footage of a real crash they used. So old it is clearly nonsense, not even close, or even the right color for a modern USN aircraft (it was navy blue).

It is, if I remember correctly the shot was taken in 1951, when a USMC Panther came back damaged by AA. The bad point about the story being... that two videos of Tomcat lost at sea (1981 and 1986) were available at the time the movie was realized, both being lost on the Constellation.

The Alfa-class SSN (Project 705), with its Ramius' ex-disciple-mad-commander hunting the Red October is funny too, as this project was never intended to be used on patrol, but as fast SSBN interceptors, with only 32 men on board (all officers).

But the presence of Connery (my favorite actor) made me like the movie, and McTiernan was good to make brain-dead but enjoyable action movies.

[Cydonian Monk]

Wow. I had no idea until today the F9F was retired in 1958. I knew it was out of service by when Red October was set, but didn't know it was by that much.

Suspension of disbelief is often a requirement even for good quality "hard" science fiction, but I agree excessive errors in universe will pull me out of a story quick. 

Language is most likely to break me out of that "movie zone" - as in bad translation or horrid pronunciation of languages of which I have a decent understanding. Best scene in Red October is when the crew just straight up ditches their badly spoken Russian and goes to full English. "Armageddon." Except they then go into "stereotypical terrible accent mode" (except Connery who couldn't be arsed to not be Scottish...). I'm not sure which was worse.

(And don't get me started on the standard WV "hillbilly" sound that Hollywood and greater America just doesn't grok.... I've been "corrected" with 5,000 different wrong ways to mispronounce the name of my home, and it's 1000x worse at the moment since Fallout 76 is a thing.....)

For "Gravity" I've just come to accept that Hubble, ISS, and Tian-gong were all three in the same orbit in that movie's peculiar universe. It has other issues, but... whatev. Like crash landing the Space Shuttle in the LA River in "The Core", sometimes you just have to roll with it. Especially if the movie in question is already bad. 

(Except I'm a bit biased as I enjoy terrible movies, especially the ones that know they're terrible. Apollo 18, Ghosts of Mars, Iron Sky.....)

Edited November 21, 2018 by Cydonian Monk

[XB-70A]

32 minutes ago, Cydonian Monk said:

(Except I'm a bit biased as I enjoy terrible movies [...] Ghosts of Mars)

This! Pam Grier (......), Ice Cube, and Statham in an artwork of the Master of Horror, it can only be bad, but deliciously bad. 

[SiriusRocketry]

Maybe I'm a little weird here, but I actually didn't mind Gravity. Some scenes were ridiculous (why is Tiangong in exactly the same orbit?) but it was OK overall. I also loved Interstellar and the Martian, and Life (2017) was pretty good too.

[Gargamel]

You guys know we have a whole thread solely for complaining about bad science in science fiction right?    I'm drawing a blank on what it's called though........

[kerbiloid]

Let me recommend that post to everybody

(Please, put your "likes" to that post, not to this one.)

The movie is perfect.

 

Edited December 1, 2018 by kerbiloid

[tater]

Forget realism, Galaxy Quest is on right now, and I think it's literally the best SF movie, ever. Certainly the best Star Trek movie (or show), ever.

[TheSaint]

2 hours ago, tater said:

Forget realism, Galaxy Quest is on right now, and I think it's literally the best SF movie, ever. Certainly the best Star Trek movie (or show), ever.

"I see you've managed to lose your shirt."