KSP Has Spoiled My Enjoyment Of Hollywood Space Movies

[SSgt Baloo]

Now, perhaps you understand why veterans yell at the screen during war movies. When I watched the first episode of The A-Team, Face disguised himself as a lieutenant to infiltrate a military installation. His hair was below the collar. In the real military, everyone he met would have made a snide remark about needing a haircut, and someone who outranked him would have collected him and told him "If you can't show me a waiver for that haircut, you'd better come with me. We're going to have a little talk with your commanding officer about your indifference to grooming regulations."
 

Knowledge works against the willing suspension of disbelief.

[Mjp1050]

... I don't think 2001 was meant to be enjoyed so much as it was to be interpreted.

And, yes, two scenes stand out for me as inaccurate: First, the gravity on the moon was the same as on earth, and second, the jaunt in the moon shuttle to the TMO should have been in zero-g.

I have to say, though, the zero-g scenes in the Discovery are downright awesome.

[Frank_G]

I totally enjoyed the setting of Last Days on Mars... everything in this movie looked so cool... and then... at the end... straight burn up and the info that orbit has been achieved. No.

So indeed... KSP has given me a lot of a different view of science fiction movies these days.

[tater]

Yeah, my wife can't watch most anything medical for the same reason (she's a surgeon).

[SSgt Baloo]

58 minutes ago, tater said:

An alien star gate is just something you have to suspend disbelief on... going into a black hole is NOT something I suspend disbelief on.

Going to see Disney's Black Hole is something I'm glad to have remained in denial about since I saw it in the theaters in 1979. If someone is going to write Science Fiction, I would appreciate there being some kind of science involved somewhere, and not just made-up horse exhaust, using words the author must have seen in a science magazine.

[tater]

That's the thing about movies that act like they're "hard" SF, if you make that claim, I'm going to nitpick, well, everything. If people reviewing it say it's accurate... I'm gonna nitpick. I don't even think about the science of Star Trek or Star Wars, they are fantasy, and I just watch them---then point out only internal inconsistencies, which they are full of.

[Just Jim]

Not really.  But I'm 53, and I grew up on old, campy sci-fi movies that were anything but accurate... lol.  I learned a long time ago sci-fi doesn't have to be accurate to be fun.  Seriously, my childhood hero was some dude wearing a rubber suit stomping around a gigantic burning model of Tokyo..... growing up with that, you learn to ignore the details... 

Edited April 3, 2016 by Just Jim

[Deutherius]

2 hours ago, NeoMorph said:

For example I seem to remember that the Tiangong is in a 350km orbit and the Karman line (edge of atmosphere) is around 100km. Yet if you watch the movie Gravity you see the Tiangong flying right on the edge of the Karman line... and all from some dodgy Kessler Syndrome incident... I... DON'T... THINK... SO....

Just a correction, even if the Kármán line is at 100 km, it's not exactly "the edge of atmosphere". The atmosphere extends way out past that altitude and doesn't work like it does in KSP. Even the ISS is slowed down by atmosphere so much it needs periodic reboosts.

Otherwise I can only agree, knowledge of (mostly) physics will ruin your movies forever. KSP certainly doesn't help in that aspect, but it's aprice I'm willing to pay.

[Nathair]

58 minutes ago, tater said:

 

I remember seeing a quote that said 2001 was a Great movie, but not a good movie. I tend to agree. It was great in the sense it was important, but it is hard to watch, and utterly fails at telling a story, IMO. If you haven't read the book, you have no real idea what happened.

I could not disagree more strongly on all points. No, it's not an easy film to follow. After all, there's no series of Harrison Ford voice-overs explaining what you're seeing, there aren't long chunks of exposition where Anna Kendrick explains to Megan Fox that the neutrinos have mutated and are heating up the planet... I suppose theend3r has the right of it, it may be a generational thing.

[SSgt Baloo]

*Scientist, upon landing, exits ship, inhales deeply, then exhales noisily.*

"Good. There's oxygen on this planet."

Favorite movie line ever, from Flesh Gordon.*

* "Hard" science fiction, but not in the conventional sense of the phrase.

 

[Warzouz]

22 minutes ago, tater said:

Yeah, my wife can't watch most anything medical for the same reason (she's a surgeon).

Same as my father (he's retired now). He found ER totally ridiculous.

My step sister is in the police. Also, all series are ridiculous (us, french, german, english). Mood is different, but all wrong.

[tater]

2 minutes ago, Nathair said:

I could not disagree more strongly on all points. No, it's not an easy film to follow. After all, there's no series of Harrison Ford voice-overs explaining what you're seeing, there aren't long chunks of exposition where Anna Kendrick explains to Megan Fox that the neutrinos have mutated and are heating up the planet... I suppose theend3r has the right of it, it may be a generational thing.

I saw 2001 for the first time... as a rental, VHS, I was alive when it was in the theater, but too young to take myself to the movies. I've read pretty much all of Arthur Clarke, unless I missed something somewhere. I certainly read the short story before I ever saw the movie, and I might have read the book first, as well, it was a long time ago).

It's not generational, it's bad storytelling, at least the ending. The first part makes it clear what the monolith is, and that it beamed a signal to Jupiter (really Saturn in the original short story). Everything up until the ending is fine by me. The ending is too much of an acid trip, and it's tedious, bad storytelling, IMO.

3 minutes ago, Warzouz said:

Same as my father (he's retired now). He found ER totally ridiculous.

My step sister is in the police. Also, all series are ridiculous (us, french, german, english). Mood is different, but all wrong.

Yeah, I remember people liking House, we watched it once, and my wife was immediately wondering why some medicine doc was in the OR in a real hospital.

ER was a joke, they show them doing more than getting on the phone and calling in a consult, lol. They treat very little, they just call the people who know what to do. Gunshot? Call the trauma surgeon, etc.

[tater]

To be clear, it's not like the Clarke ending would not have filmed well. The monolith full of stars, a bustling nexus of spacecraft on the other side... it clear that aliens are trying to make him feel at ease with the hotel room, etc. It could all be done visually (no words at all, other than "my god, it's full of stars!"), using just the time to took for the acid trip, lol.

[Andem]

This thread reminds me of my father. He fought in Vietnam, and seeing him watch Apocalypse Now made him... frustrated...

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

46 minutes ago, SSgt Baloo said:

Going to see Disney's Black Hole is something I'm glad to have remained in denial about since I saw it in the theaters in 1979. If someone is going to write Science Fiction, I would appreciate there being some kind of science involved somewhere, and not just made-up horse exhaust, using words the author must have seen in a science magazine.

The spacecraft docking to the spacestation is fairly realistic, IIRC.  After that, it's only worth watching it for the special effects.

 

[tater]

It's generally true that if you have a small understanding of a given subject area, it's hard to watch mass media about that subject (or the news, for that matter).

The people who make that sort of media generally know little about what they are filming, or worse, they know a lot, but it's wrong, lol, so they tend to make a mess of it.

[merlinux]

1 hour ago, Skybird0 said:

Personally, 2001 A Space Odyssey wasn't that good of a movie anyways...

While I respect your opinion, 2001 was made in 1968 and is considered a wonder of cinematography not by its story or orbital mechanics, but by its revolutionary artistic footage, music, pacing. To me, it isn't my favorite movie, but I cant deny it is a piece of art.

[jarmund]

2 hours ago, dangerhamster said:

Common sense ruins more movies than knowledge..... have you seen Red Tails?

The P51 brake/stall maneuver that may as well have been a handbrake turn with skid-audio.... the cringe..

Such a great story ruined by horrible directing

[HebaruSan]

2001 was Kubrick In Space. Ponderously grand long shots and memorable otherworldly enigmas are par for the course.

Steps to success:

1. Start any Kubrick movie
2. Gradually get more and more simultaneously amused, entertained, and puzzled
3. "Wait... This is Kubrick, isn't it?"
4. Check VHS box, DVD box, or IMDB depending on the year and means of acquisition
5. "Ahh, OK."
6. Enjoy, suffer, or ragequit to taste

[merlinux]

3 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

1. Enjoy, suffer, or ragequit to taste

The slow-ness of Kubrick's work mostly make me do the latter

 

[HebaruSan]

1 minute ago, merlinux said:

The slow-ness of Kubrick's work mostly make me do the latter

On the bright side, if you get hungry or need to use the bathroom, there's no need to pause it.

[SSgt Baloo]

When I saw 2001 with a friend at the Base Theater at McClellan AFB when I was 12, I was the most popular fellow in the auditorium. I had read the book a few years earlier, and I was therefore, the only person who understood what was happening and could explain what the cryptic scenes* were about.

* Most of them were. 

 

Edited April 3, 2016 by SSgt Baloo

[merlinux]

3 minutes ago, SSgt Baloo said:

When I saw 2001 with a friend at the Base Theater at McClellan AFB when I was 12, I was the most popular fellow in the auditorium. I had read the book a few years earlier, and I was therefore, the only person who understood what was happening and could explain what the cryptic scenes were about.

The books are awesome, read the trilogy when I was 14 and I much preferred it to the movie(s).

[Rocket In My Pocket]

The only thing I can't stand is other space games where as soon as you stop accelerating you just drift to a stop, like you're driving a boat.

Oh and space ships with asymmetrical engine mounting that obviously would never work, and would just send the ship flying in silly circles.

Movies usually don't bother me, most of them are close enough to the truth. I don't like to be "that guy" and poke holes in all the niggly details.

[Columbia]

I was pretty much okay with the "inaccuracies" of Gravity (that I only read about and wasn't too bright to actually realize.) I assumed that the debris cloud was going in erradically different paths and crossed with those of Hubble, the ISS and Tiangong (thats.. rare.). Much like a rendezvous, except the rendezvous isn't deliberate, it's at high speed and the Shuttle's a sitting duck.

And if all else fails, the OST and CGI is glorious.

32 minutes ago, jarmund said:

The P51 brake/stall maneuver that may as well have been a handbrake turn with skid-audio.... the cringe..

Such a great story ruined by horrible directing

What? What maneuver is this?!

I mean, why did the German stay there flying straight? How did the P-51D or the pilot go through those intense G-Forces? In fact, how does the P-51 -- a WW2 Propeller-driven fighter -- do such a maneuver? It would be in an immediate stall afterwards, Jesus! It isn't even a matter of "Scientific Accuracy" but common sense?

There were numerous other things in the movie, too, that were pretty bad, too. Buuut let's stay on the topic of Space.