Worst Sci Fi Ever

[Donegeal]

JohnT... please... don't mince words... how do you really feel?

[Hueij]

The rest of the movie is (relatively) faithful to the book

That should be "relatively" with a capital R. Where were the others that made the trip?

[Daz]

Ok. Here we go:

- second half of Stargate was like from another movie...
- the 3 "new" Starwars sequels...
- Matrix 2 and 3...

[JohnT]

Originally posted by Hueij

The rest of the movie is (relatively) faithful to the book

That should be "relatively" with a capital R. Where were the others that made the trip?

That's what I was thinking of, but I didn't allow that to bug me as there is a difference between the two mediums (film and books) and a movie with 5 main characters would've been too confusing w/o knowing the source material (ala Dune).

But the message... you can change all the rest and still have the message.

But not in Zemeckis-land.

[Last Conformist]

Re: Waterworld; as far as I'm concerned, Costner expelled himself from humanity with that one. Cruch him like the bug he is!

[JohnT]

A Public Service Announcement...

I'm going to spoil the end of the novel Contact. If you don't want it spoiled, don't read this post.

Spoiler:

When Ellie met her "father" she actually asked him if the aliens believed in God. He said that in the hundreds of millions of years that they've been investigating the universe, it seems obvious that it has been designed (he gives some examples of mathematical ratios, also claims that the "subway system" that Ellie went through is part of the original design) but they've yet to figure out who or why.

End of visit, Ellie and the others (dropped from the movie) get back to Earth where the same thing happens as in the movie: they don't seem to have gone anywhere, the recordings are blank, etc.

However Eleanor Arroway does NOT ask people to take her on faith - that is the entire point of the book, for Gods sake. She doesn't come out and insist that she's correct: rather, she tells Palmer Joss

"... if I had hard evidence, I'd speak up. But if I don't have any, people like Kitz will say that I'm lying. Or hallucinating...." (she hands him a manuscript detailing the voyage, JT) "...When we find what we're looking for, that manuscript will confirm our story. If we find evidence of a double black hole at the galactic center, or some huge artificial construction in Cygnus A, or a message hiding inside pi, this" - she tapped him lightly on the chest - "will be my evidence. Then I'll speak out."

Taking a hint from her "father" she programs her computer to factor Pi far beyond anything that mankind has attempted before. The book ends with the following passage:

' The Argus computer was so persistent and inventive in its attempts to contact Eleanor Arroway that it almost conveyed an urgent personal need to share the discovery.

The anomaly showed up most starkly in Base-11 arithmetic, where it could be written out entirely as zeros and ones. Compared with what had been received from Vega, this could be at best a simple message, but its statistical significance was high. '

(Sagan then describes how the computer plots the numbers on a square raster and what the raster looks like - a bunch of 0's and 1's that, plotted correctly, form a circle.)

' Hiding in the alternating patterns of digits, deep inside the transcendental number, was a perfect circle, its form traced out by unities in a field of naughts.

The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle - another circle drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages futher in. It doesn't matter what you look like, or what you're made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you'll find it. It's already here. It's inside everything. You don't have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers** and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe.

The circle has closed.

She has found what she had been searching for. '

The premise of the book was a womans rational search for the evidence of God, not a rational womans descent into irrationality, accepting that which cannot be proven.

Totally different message. Goddamn him.

[Sandman]

I hate DS9. I'll never understand the love for it.

The space battles resembled nothing so much as a side-scrolling arcade space shoot-em-up. With the Defiant as the player ship.

[Aabraxan]

My $0.02:

Movies:
Yor: Hunter from the Future
Starship Troopers
Starship Troopers 2
Dracula 3000
John Carpenter's Vampires
Judge Dredd
Waterworld
The Postman

Television:
Lexx
Firefly
Hercules

[Traianvs]

Originally posted by Geronimo


I've never seen starship troopers but there's got to be A LOT more wrong with it than that! Most sci fi seems to make the same mistake that you noted. Everything from Warhammer 40k to Star wars (although i suppose the "death Star" might be considered rather heavy "artillery").

True enough, but in Starship Troopers it simply wasn't credible. Alien for example is great because it's played indoors, and obviously it's impossible to blast the alien to pieces with large weaponry. Starship Troopers on the other hand, featured some outdoors battles with large numbers of enemy aliens engaging large numbers of infantry... I don't see why on earth anyone would do such a thing. It's not about realism; most sci-fi is completely ridiculous. It's merely the fact that it doesn't look feasible to do. That's also why I hate manga stuff in which characters swing axes that are exactly the same size as the wielder etc... However, a fighter using a large sword making some intricate (but slightly unrealistic) moves is okay (even though heavy armour would restrict that)

PS: There's actually a starhip troopers 2?

[Drake Tungsten]

I'm going to spoil the end of the novel Contact. If you don't want it spoiled, don't read this post.

Spoiler:

So the alien is still her goddamn father? Man, the book doesn't sound any better than the movie...

[JohnT]

The idea, as explained by the aliens, was to have the humans "meet" the person that you loved the most - having had hundreds of chances to do the same thing to newly nascent civilizations, the aliens had some idea of what they were doing.

Of course, this is poorly explained in the movie (it didn't help the explanation that the other voyagers were missing so you could see who they conjured up), but makes more sense in the book.

[JohnT]

...

[JohnT]

dp... and no, not the good kind.

[Harry Tuttle]

Originally posted by Traianvs


True enough, but in Starship Troopers it simply wasn't credible. Alien for example is great because it's played indoors, and obviously it's impossible to blast the alien to pieces with large weaponry. Starship Troopers on the other hand, featured some outdoors battles with large numbers of enemy aliens engaging large numbers of infantry... I don't see why on earth anyone would do such a thing. It's not about realism; most sci-fi is completely ridiculous. It's merely the fact that it doesn't look feasible to do. That's also why I hate manga stuff in which characters swing axes that are exactly the same size as the wielder etc... However, a fighter using a large sword making some intricate (but slightly unrealistic) moves is okay (even though heavy armour would restrict that)

PS: There's actually a starhip troopers 2?

In the book and in the first movie there WAS a clear rationalization as to why they sent the infantry in - the simple fact that the bugs lived in holes and COULDN't be wiped out with nukes. In the movie they even show air support napalming a whole bunch of bugs.

It's a campy take on a very serious "Spartan-like" Heinlein novel and I love it. The simple fact that Doogie Howser is in it amkes it a favorite.

But yeah, Starship Troopers 2 was crap. They even showed it on TV BEFORE it was released to DVD. The main hero was a look alike of Robert Hatch, the gay guy from Survivor.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Dougie Howser as a Facist .

Neil Patrick Harris just makes everything better.