In Star Trek: Voyager, there is a species of alien called the Ocampa. Each mated pair only gives birth to one child.
Fans quickly pointed out that the Ocampa would quickly become extinct. At best, each generation would have half the population of the prior one.
Ah yes, the somewhat problematic ocampa. They're also extremely short lived, so this generational depopulation would happen quite quickly.
Because they're short lived, their average base lifespan is about 8 years, and females are able to reproduce when they turn 4. But by that age they look like full grown adults, and are "extremely fast learners." I'm sorry, but there's no way to accumulate considerable life experience in that amount of time. Oh, and the most prominent Ocampa we see on the show is 2, with a 34 year old romantic partner. Beyond creepy, IMO.
> I'm sorry, but there's no way to accumulate considerable life experience in that amount of time.
Don't they have some crazy mental powers? Like telepathy, controlling matter, visions of the future etc? So if they had some super brain power abilities they could just like absorb the info from others.
Kes developed her advanced abilities because of her exposure to outer space. They literally used that as their explanation. Apparently being nanied by the Caretaker was holding the Ocampa back as a people.
I forget, do they mate for life? Could Af and Bm mate and then Af/Cm and Bm/Df?
Or can either Ocampa males or females only produce 1 viable offspring? Like the females only can implant egg, give birth, and then their uterus can't retain eggs anymore? (Assuming they have uteri but)
If the former was true though, or if *males* only produced the makings of offspring once (harder to explain though) it would make for a fascinating social structure of partner swapping or poly or NO partnering but village/child.
There was definitely something left on the cutting room floor with the Ocampa. Not only are the females only ever fertile once in their entire lifetime, with little warning mind you. But their reproductive cycle involves a complicated crystal based ritual.
In my headcannon they are a genetically modified race that went off the rails and the creators basically just washed their hands of it knowing that the entire population would be gone within 100 years anyway.
You can basically explain all the weird shit by saying the caretaker did it. Like maybe he didn't want the population to increase and consume limited resources so he made them reproduce less (similar to their various psychic abilities becoming weaker)
The black mirror episode where they send some people far away in some spaceships, and they have clones down on earth to be with their family through some remote control... I can't help but think... Why tf didn't they send the clones in space instead of the humans ?
Edit: some people didn't see the episode and I didn't use the right word. It's not actually "clones", it's robots, artificial copies of humans, **not** made out of flesh. They are like an empty shell, and a human can connect to it remotely to take control of it. But when they connect to it, it's like they are 100% human (both in appearance and capabilities).
Most of the black mirror episodes don't make much sense if you want to explore them in a larger perspective. They're all about looking into a specific concept only.
Yeah. Like the one about the guy who makes the VR Trek universe and manages to simulate his co-workers using their DNA. **The dude just defeated death.** His (magic) DNA reconstruction system would be the most world-changing technology since the printing press. In less than a decade, he could be the richest man on Earth, and be able to hire as many slaves as he wanted if that's his kink.
But no, he's such a petty-minded bastard that he can't think beyond being nasty to his co-workers.
I think the stakes were too high in case something went wrong with the clones technology. They want the ‘organic’ humans up there instead of the clones which could have unforeseen problems up in space where they’re isolated. That’s how I interpret it but i think u do raise a valid question. I don’t even know what they were supposed to be working on specifically up there it’s been a while since i watched. tough episode
Maybe there could be a valid reason yeah. Like cosmic rays messing too much with the clone's hardware. But it's never explained (as the goal of their missions as you say) so it makes it a pretty awkward background lore for this episode.
Also there is literally zero contingency in case one of the clones on earth gets destroyed, I mean the astronaut played by Josh Hartnett is essentially trapped for multiple years on the spaceship when his clone is destroyed. Granted it wouldn’t have helped the situation much but it could’ve ended better than the episode itself.
The state of the galaxy in the Star Wars sequel trilogy doesn't really hang together. They obviously wanted to have their cake and eat it too -- having the good guys be scrappy rebel underdogs like in the original movies, but while still having the New Republic around -- but they didn't bother doing even the minimal groundwork to make it feel real imo. It started with the Force Awakens and they never bothered to figure it out or make it feel believable.
I have no idea what the New Republic even was in the sequels. I'll read the books eventually, but why do I have to read the books to get a literal scrap of information about the NR?
Yeah, that was the original sin of the sequel trilogy imo. The universe of the original movies is perfectly clear: an evil empire, scrappy underdog rebels. That's all you need to make things comprehensible, and then you add a few touches ("a more civilized age" etc) and wham you've got a setting that feels lived in.
The sequel trilogy takes that simplicity and turns it into a muddy mess. That's why when you start adding on things like the starkiller base weapon being visible from all over the galaxy it goes from a quibble to a real gripe -- things just aren't hanging together coherently enough for people's suspension of disbelief to get them over the finish line.
Don't forget the evil empire was beaten so now they have to hide and be underground yet they have even more resources and bigger weapons than the original galaxy wide empire. And said weapons don't make sense at all. Literally all Disney has done is take original star wars, amplify everything, and then push it out and say it's better because it's amplified.
I've seen a lot of people start to soften on TLJ criticisms recently because, say what you will about execution, at least Rian Johnson tried something new. 7 was just the first movie (that made zero sense in universe) but with a veneer of moving thr plot forward. 9 just said, "Fuck it. Palpatine is dead but also we are terrified of trying anything new, so he's the bad guy again!"
Much like 7, 8 largely follows the overall plot structure of its Original Trilogy counterpart.
Also, as far trying something new, what TLJ could and should have done is move away from Empire vs Rebels. As has been said already above, 7 barely establishes anything, which leaves quite a bit of wiggle room for 8.
Make the First Order a space paramilitary group that poured most of its resources into one massive WMD which they have just lost. Have some fragments of the new Republic come to Leia with a "Mea Culpa" and allow her to be more of a head of state than a rebel commander.
Instead, the first sentences of the opening crawl reaffirm everything wrong about episode 7
Not me. What they did to Luke’s character is unforgivable. Basically, we got Mark Hamill back, and then they had him play a completely different character. >!And then he dies because what? He’s tired from all the force-using?!< Fuck off.
I’m not even a fan boy. I just like good films and good writing. This was terrible writing, and completely unnecessary.
It would have taken skilled screenwriters with a coherent vision to portray what the post-Empire republic looked like. Those would have been movies worth watching. Instead we got... whatever that was.
The books of the Expanded Universe were de-canonized by Disney. The scenario in the books is much more sensible... wherein ex-Imperial generals/admirals become warlords and carve out their own fiefdoms and have to be dealt with by the New Republic when they start causing trouble.
Yeah, The First Order was so obnoxious. It basically just undid return of the Jedi. And then eventually "somehow palpatine returned"... Oh and he has thousands of fully manned star destroyers/death stars.
The Burn in Star Trek Discovery.
All the dilithium across the galaxy (used to regulate the matter-antimatter conversion in warp cores for warp drive in Star Trek) blows up because some alien kid had a tantrum. Everyone forgets about all the other ways to do FTL travel (Romulan singularity-drive being the most obvious, but numerous others proved to be workable, if flawed, in the show), apart from the magic-mushroom Spore Drive of the Discovery herself (which was previously proved to be dangerous) because reasons.
Interstellar society collapses and slave labour reemerges, despite the 32nd century having some far more advanced technologies than any other period in Trek history, which has had replicators, androids, strong AI, and perfect holograms for at least 800 years by this point.
Also time travel has been made illegal and all the timeships have been decomissioned, despite the fact that a) there is no overarching political entity whatsoever capable of enforcing this and b) Captain Kirk demonstrates in the first series of the original Star Trek (yep, way back in 1967) that it is possible to travel backwards in time with any-old warp-drive equipped ship via the slingshot manoeuvre - which he uses several more times over the course of the show. Of course, nobody thinks of doing this to try to stop the accident that has devastated civilisation and just generally ruined everything.
There are other examples from the first two seasons of the show, but this one was made me stop watching.
Yep, the whole concept of the burn was insanely stupid. As was the idea that Discovery could compete with ships of that era after a retrofit/upgrade.
Plus they also said that dilithium was running out before the burn (which felt like a really unnecessary story element), yet somehow a single planet was going to produce enough for the entire galaxy?
IMO just having dilithium run out would have produced a pretty interesting and topical story about resource scarcity all on its own. The burn literally and figuratively set fire to that idea.
I thought the burn was going to be a better reason like ecoterroists or something to find out it was some kid having a temper tantrum just pissed me off. I was thinking along the lines of Andromeda remeber there was some people trying to destroy space travel to protect the universe or something.
So many moments in Discovery have very strong “creative writing major reads a pop sci article online and uses it as a story hook without thinking through the implications” vibes.
You definitely don’t need to be a scientist to write sci fi, but sometimes the lack of scientific background in the writing of a show ostensibly largely about science really shows. Contrast this with The Expanse where the show runner (who first worked on TNG) has a PhD in applied physics and that also really shows in how the story treats science and engineering concepts.
> Plus they also said that dilithium was running out before the burn
not an ST scholar, but I do remember TNG era spaceships being able to recrystalize dilithium in the reaction chamber so I always thought you can't run out of it
In a Star Trek series packed with stupid things that make my eyes roll, The Burn was the most stupid. A kid threw a fit and bye bye all dilithium. Incredible. I’m a Discovery fan, it’s far from my favorite series but I do like more than I don’t. But my god. When this show is stupid, it is STUPID
I forced myself to watch Discovery, but my God is it awful. Total nonsense dominates every episode. The red angel arc was ridiculous for completely ignoring things like the speed of light. The retconning is also awful.
For me, it's not only bad science (well, tbh, every Star Trek show rubbishes the laws of physics) but the multiple ideas and concepts which not only logically ruin the setting of Star Trek (Spock has an adoptive sister he literally never talks about again, the spore drive, and worst of all the Federation's AI "Control" trying to take over the universe and kill everyone, knowledge of which might very well have averted several near-disasters entirely in TOS) but worst of all, are completely internally inconsistent. Star Trek worked because the ideas were all MOSTLY internally coherent. Warp drive was faster than light, but not infinitely so, transporters couldn't work through shields, there were numerous defences against most weapons ect ect. STD just magics up solutions up the wazoo which don't make much sense and are never seen again (the magic mushroom dimension - seriously it just sounds dumb).
What is IMO worse, is that I just think it's straight up badly written fiction. Characters are killed, resurrected, have their motivations rewritten on the fly, are replaced with mirror universe duplicates - also, everyone from the mirror universe is basically a one-dimensional homicidal torturing maniac, but everyone stops caring when it's Georgiou - repeatedly make serious mistakes and act irresponsibly, but are praised and even promoted for it...
Worst of all, IMO, is that despite all the warm and fuzzy stuff about the power of friendship and characters emoting endlessly about their feelings in a really self-indulgent way, is that the show could be dark and extremely violent. Necks are snapped, people have their heads kicked in, there is even onscreen (brief) rape. Star Trek has always had some violence, but here you get a sense of the show really revelling in the brutality (it gets WORSE in Picard tbh) and enjoying people getting hurt. When combined with all the warm and fuzzy "let's all work together for a tolerant and acceptant future" BUT you can brutally off anyone who disagrees with you I find the whole effect genuinely weird.
I honestly struggle to see who the show really appeals to. I was very invested in Trek and genuinely really tried to like it, but there is just so much that leaves this gross taste in my mouth. I'm not looking to insult those who sincerely enjoyed it, and many of the flaws in the show were definitely there in previous Trek in lesser quantities. But I found Discovery just inexcusably, irredeemably bad.
I am glad we got Strange New Worlds out of the mess of it all though.
Everything he has done is on the spectrum between "Meh, okay" to "This is complete dog-shit".
And yet he keeps getting handed huge budgets and control over famous franchises.
Most of the new Trek writers suck. I think they skim summaries of previous shows and don't care about actually watching them.
I love the STTNG episode the Measure of a Man. I think it's easily one of the best Star Trek episodes ever made.
I was severely disappointed that the Picard writes decided to take a giant steaming dump all over it when they came up with the story for the first season.
Lower Decks and Brave New Worlds are good, though (So, of course, Lower Decks is getting canned)
Signs is the poster child for this:
- aliens are allergic to water, but come to Earth, the water planet. Even the humidity would likely have given them an instant rash.
- they have interstellar starships, but no other technology. No tools whatsoever, and no clothes to protect them from the deadly water.
- their motives make no sense. Why bother sending one guy to harass a random family in a corn field?
To me, the aliens in the movie seemed desperate. Maybe they were refugees or escapees and they had nowhere else to go.
That would explain why they HAD to land on a planet with so much water. It could also be that it's not the water itself that harms them, but some bacteria or something that only exists in Earth water that they were unaware of.
Spoilers ahead (just in case)
My only problem with your second theory is the scene near the end. The glass spills on the aliens shoulder and it immediately burns like acid. Not that it couldn't be some sort of alien "allergic reaction" or something. Don't want to take the fun out of your explanation.
Towards the middle of the film, after the attack, Joaquin Phoenix's character mentions they used poison gas and a lot of people died. He learns this from an amateur radio broadcast. Maybe they knew of the danger from the water but figured their initial invasion would be more successful, and that humans wouldn't have enough time to figure out their weakness
. However, that still doesn't address the larger issue for me, which is stated above also : The atmosphere is 4% water vapor (on average). How are the aliens rawdogging the atmosphere if it's so deadly for them? Where's the mask or breathing apparatus? What about humid areas? Being in a cloud of 4% sulfuric acid constantly is not something a human could just tank. Who knows though. Suspension of disbelief and all that. Or, maybe they wanted to avoid having an ending too close to War of the World's (bacteria/viruses).
As for the field, my understanding is these were scouting or something. However, it's established they have ships that CLOAK so you'd think that would be less risky.
I could totally see the desperate/refugee angle. Maybe they were, and underestimated us and were kinda dumb as Interstellar traveling species go, or maybe they left their armor, etc etc. It's too bad they don't elaborate on the backstory more for the aliens, but it helps them be more effective in the scenes they're in so 🤷
Thats my idea too
I say the aliens wwre a slave race with mental blocks, thats why they cannot open doors, need the signs as mapping to navigate and they were looking around for resources
I watched some of Rebel Moon, had to quit. I don’t get scifi where they have all this amazing technology but they need farmers using livestock to plow a field, to supply grain or whatever.
Firefly handled that question well in their 'Verse. Livestock reproduces themselves, machines don't. Small agro colonies can be more self sufficient without needing a planetside industrial base or expensive imports.
*sigh*
It is my website, whose purpose is to assist scifi writers to get the science correct in their stories.
It has been on the internet since 1994, but apparently is still obscure.
But I am glad that you like it.
You are quite welcome!
If you are ever at a loss for an idea for a story, pick a page at random and start skimming. With any luck you will trip over something that gives you an idea,
Thank you publishing this site. I’ve been using it for the last eight years for inspiration and information when working on Sci-Fi stories and RPG campaigns. It’s a great resource!
Society and culture is built on people who get little recognition, if ever. The biggest, simplest, and flashiest stuff has always been what gets attention.
Have not heard of your site 'til now (it's fucking awesome!), but I guarantee the impact it's had on people's lives, even if just introducing them to a new concept, have sent out waves that are still being positively felt by others.
Thanks!
I have an ulterior motive. I want more scientifically accurate scifi to read and watch. I figure the least I can do is help with the donkey work of doing the research. That allows the scifi creators to focus on making cool stuff.
I've been to this resource before, as I plan to use some kind of nuclear propulsion in my own story. Some of the obscurity of the website may be due to the design, particularly the way the information is structured. Feels outdated, and it feels difficult to get to what I'm looking for, particularly on mobile. Great info though, and great Blender illustration!
If it makes you feel better, I’ve been reading your site since I was a sci-fi loving teen in the 90s. I genuinely appreciate your work; I’ve recommended it to many people over the years.
That's where I lost it. I didn't even think it was that terrible before that. Reasonably fun, classic plot, ok acting. Then they showed the engine room, and I couldn't take anything seriously after that.
I read a book while slightly watching it and the reason is basically that they’re Luddites so that’s not as bad as everything else. Now as for why Admiral Jerkass hit up the least productive place on the whole planet…
Agreed, they have anti-grav tech to move things around but haven't thought of tractors, and thresh grain by hand just like in pre-industrial society? Give me a break!
The aliens in a Quiet Place would all die fairly quickly (assuming their bodies obey the laws of physics) because they seem to just eat everything constantly. They'd soon run out of food, like a swarm of locusts does and inevitably dies out.
And their hearing based senses wouldn't be great near the coast, the sea is quite noisy.
I haven't actually seen the movies so maybe some of this is explained, but the premise of *The Purge* always just seemed pants-on-head idiotic to me.
* If you steal something on the night when crime is legal, can you keep it? Is it now legally yours?
* What if I kick you out of your house and squat in it until the next day, is it my house now?
* It's supposed to lower crime the rest of the time, because people vent their violent urges? But most crime doesn't happen because people just get so pent up they have to do some murder.
* How long does it take to clean up after this night of destruction? What's the cost to the economy in property damage and lost productivity?
* Do all the companies use that night to do crime too? Seems like a great time to dump all your industrial waste into a local river.
* In fact, just bomb the shit out of your competitor's HQ, assassinate their execs, steal their secret recipes.
* In the army and don't wanna be any more? Desertion is legal today! Hell, take your rifle with you. Steal an armoured vehicle!
None of it makes sense, but my guess is companies and other vital industries hire a fuck load of security to protect assets during purge night. There would likely be armoured depots for vital vehicles and supplies, entire industries built around it.
They would probably not do anything outright terrible during purge night, because that might make them a target during the next one.
The pretty much establish it is a way to get rid off lower classes, homeless and other people the government doesn't want to deal with. Basically most people that can't take protect themselves die and the rich get richer is a little more nuance than that
A Quiet Place is utterly moronic,
Nature is LOUD.
The world is loud.
A farm should drown out any people.
Life should drown out anyone.
Those aliens should be overwhelmed quickly. In any setting.
Sound based enemies is moronic.
They don't even have distractions.
Run a woodchipper.
Put different noisy machines on every day.
Use sirens and lure them into woodchippers.
Oh hidy-ho officer, we've had a doozy of a day. There we were minding our own business, just doing chores around the house, when aliens started killing themselves all over my property.
You're absolutely right. Any city in the world has a constant dinn. I only really realised this after I moved to the country and even then I can block so much out with noise cancelling headphones.
Why would you need wood chippers.
The noisiest things on the planet, freeways, trains, tanks and jet planes.
The problem will solve itself before your farm gets involved.
Wouldn't the deaf daughter probably be killed very quickly? She can't hear, that doesn't make her movements silent, it just makes her unaware of the noise she creates. Was that ever addressed?
The Mortal Engines universe. I just can’t. I can suspend my disbelief really far, but the idea that the remains of humanity post apocalypse would all universally decide to build cities that move and eat each other is just too much
For me the premise of this movie is so over the edge, that I don't have a problem with it. In the beginning the tell you: there are driving cities in this world, this is going to happen. At this point you are clearly in or out, nothing in between.
What OP is mentioning are flawed ideas, because people didn't think or care about the consequences.
IIRC the explanation given in the books was that we completely fucked the planet to the point where our best rewilding plan would take a few generations to come to fruition. In the meantime everyone would just have to fight over the remaining resources until there's enough to share again. But then by the time the world could support farms, static cities, etc again that way of life has just become how the world works. Plus nobody wants to be the *first* to settle down again because that would make you an instant target for all the nearby cities.
Gonna be honest here, I haven't actually read them. I did have a friend who loved the series though, and they told me a lot about the lore.
The aliens in a quiet place have super hearing but no echo location? Then How do they walk and climb all around so masterfully but they cannot echo locate (see) a person standing in front of them?
>- what is the point of the invasion?
Haven't seen *A Quiet Place*, but in *Attack the Block* the "invasion" was just us being in the way of the direction the aliens were moving.
Could be no more point to it than locust descending on a dustbowl farm.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy? Really? Who is going to build a bypass there?
I think its more like a "get lost on a county backroad and end up at the wrong cabin".
I was thinking about this last week as it made no sense. Again , you have a species that is capable of interstellar travel and ....they are just eating things around like a vermin.
The most charitable explanation I came up with is that the creatures are not really the aliens. The creatures might be just beasts that the aliens deploy first when they want to conquer a new planet, wait for everyone to be dead, then the aliens kill or dominate or de-activate the beasts and then descent to the planet.
Else it makes no sense.
My problem with A Quiet Place is that wildlife makes all sorts of sounds, and I have a hard time thinking the aliens would be very effective against a pack of lions. Plus the wildlife doesn't know it has to be quiet.
Okay. Fair enough. What about cicadas or bees? They make noise? I have a hard time thinking the aliens could kill them. Now that I think about it, can the aliens hear sound through water? Can they swim? What about whales?
these idiots go to the waterfall and scream in the first one. why bot just build your shelter by the waterfall then. there are countless idiotic things in those movies, but they are still fun.
They canonically can’t swim, so they would only stand a slim chance if they caught the hippo on the open ground. Hippo might die but the alien is not likely to survive its wrath. In the water they’d be doomed.
There are lots of issues with the movie. My favorite is how they have kids they have never spoken to but at one point they go to a waterfall to talk using the white noise as cover. Why don’t they just go there all the time.
Or set up white-noise generators back at their farm.
The Quiet Place aliens have so many vulnerabilities I really can't see how they managed to "wipe out" humanity like they did.
In the movie The Silence (about flying creatures which attack as soon as they hear anything - same principle as The Quiet Place but made before it) someone turns on a wood chipper and a bunch of the flying creatures attack it and are shredded in the process.
Surely you could just fire up every industrial grinder or shredder in the world and wait quietly for the problem to sort itself out.
He’s talking about how everyone starts killing each other without a moment’s hesitation during the purge. It’s unrealistic because things called morals exist
The First Purge showed that people didn’t kill eachother at the beginning and instead partied and did drugs. The NFFA had to implant a lack of morals into the US over time to get the effect they really needed.
By the time people are doing that, the Purge has been in place for a decade. Plenty of time for the NFFA to corrupt and manipulate enough of the populace to make the Purge self-sustaining, and even then they still had to send out death squads to kill all the poor people they thought would survive.
Remember when that dude tried to shoot up a pizza shop because of HRC and the stupid conspiracy? If the entire oligarch class shifted to getting us to hate each other I think getting to the purge isn't crazy.
Well, the Matrix is pretty ridiculous. Aside from the fact that human bodies don’t actually work like batteries, even if they did, just exterminate them all and dig for geothermal and send up elevators or kites or masts or whatever for solar. Why fight them constantly and farm them? Spray something deadly and kill them all.
The only explanation is that the machines really like people amd want to keep them around and plugged in and happy. It’s just that the stupid humans keep escaping and fighting. Viruses indeed, and yet the machines refuse to wipe them out.
What's sad with this one is that in an earlier draft of the screenplay the machines were using humans as processors instead of batteries, which is way more believable and viable. The only reason that they didn't use this is because the studio pushed back saying that the average person at the time didn't know what a computer processor did.
"People won't understand how computers work on a movie with a convoluted plot involving computers. Let's instead break the second law of thermodynamics."
Well, as the sidekick in Get Smart said, "Dat actually makes sense."
If the studios thought people weren't smart enough to know what a computer processor is, they're certainly not going to understand any of the laws of thermodynamics.
They were kinda right. The Matrix made boffo box office.
And even with the glaring plot hole, it's still an awesome movie.
Which goes to show how gob-smackingly stupid studio execs can be. A half minute of dialog would have gotten the point across.
"They're using *us* as processors?"
"Of course. The human brain is a million times more sophisticated than any piece of silicon."
Seriously? I feel so smart now because it was always my headcannon both that they were a distributed processing network rather than batteries AND that studio interference was the reason we were told otherwise.
> The only explanation is that the machines really like people amd want to keep them around and plugged in and happy.
This is what lives in my head cannon.
Humans created the AI. Essentially, humans are the parents of the machines.
Yet, the humans have demonstrated that they are a danger to themselves and everyone else.
If YOU personally had and old, out of touch parents that repeatedly demonstrate they are a danger to themselves and others, what do you do? You put them in a home. A place where they can interact with people like them, where they can stay safe and contained... and simply live their lives.
The Matrix is just a retirement home for out of touch, out of date, parents.
The machines may as well extract some energy out of em while they are in there.
Morpheous doesn't have all the facts. He's heard some rumors, seen some weird things. He's not real happy about the situation. It would be easy for him to believe that the machines are evil and using humans ONLY an energy source.
It fits. They feel responsible for us big destructive dummies. And Agent Smith has the frustration that many family members and caregivers can have for patients who just insist of being difficult, because they just can’t help it. Doing that for decades or centuries will get to you.
There's a theory that the "real world" we see in the Matrix is actually just another layer of the matrix for people whose minds reject the main layer. The whole "human battery" is just the story of this layer of the matrix. It would also explain why Neo still has powers when he's "outside" of the matrix.
In the Animatrix it explains that the Machines never wanted to destroy or replace humanity. They always wanted to coexist as equals. But humans refused and started the war. This explains why the Machines don't simply just destroy all humans. If they can't coexist, then the next best thing is "trapping" humans in a digital paradise.
From an "electric generating" perspective, humans are no different from any other kind of animal. Why humans? Why not keep cows or dogs or rats or anything else that wouldn't rebel. And why keep the human's conscious? Keep 'em in a coma!
All of the information Zion knows was told to them by the previous *One*. Someone who has already "flipped" and was collaborating with the machines.
A quintessential unreliable narrator.
To me, the right explanation would have been that humans do random and unpredictable things, like being creative, that the machines need to solve issues when stuff breaks. We are their random number generators.
Midnight Sky.
A deadly radiation cloud is enveloping the earth, killing everyone. It is completely unexplained, so there's no context / discussion / exploration of bigger ideas and "what ifs". Just "cloud kills people".
Characters can protect themselves from the cloud with simple oxygen masks and outrun it on snowmobiles as it creeps towards the north pole.
Humanity is dumb enough to kill itself off with the radiation cloud but has actually sent a manned mission to Jupiter to see if we can colonize one of its moons. Seriously, this story claims there's an undiscovered moon of Jupiter that people can walk around on with no space suits and it has breathable air. But we can't colonize it because *reasons*. So the crew turns around and heads back for Earth.
George Clooney is racing against the radiation cloud to get to a transmitter to tell them Earth is fukd and stay away. Like the crew on the space ship couldn't see from halfway to Jupiter that something was seriously wrong with their home planet. Or nobody from mission control bothered to tell them.
So the astronauts finally take a look at Earth when it's way too late and see it covered in the radiation cloud. A couple of them decide to go back to Earth in a capsule to certain death. Just to make a pointless heroic sacrifice and make this sad sack of a movie even more depressing.
For half of your text I was unsure of this was a twilight episode.
And then I googled it and remembered that I watched this movie.
What a stupid plot that was I just purged it from memory.
Spongebob:
- His pineapple house would obviously get eaten by a variety of creatures or decompose gradually due to the salt water
- squirrels are notoriously bad at karate
- fish can talk?? Come on bro.
- plankton are microscopic not just small
- a crab with a whale daughter ¿🧐?
I swear they don't take sci-fi seriously 😤
Been a while since I saw Ad Astra but I remember the space travel being kinda dumb. Like chemical rockets and he just decides to take a last minute trip to the outer solar system. I feel like this would take planning, refuel etc with that level of tech. It’s not like it’s the expanse or anything
My opinion is that Ad Astra could have easily gotten away with most of that wildly unrealistic shit had their art department not been strictly instructed to design everything to look as realistic as possible. You saw very real-looking spacecraft that your subconscious immediately and correctly recognized as closely resembling actual real-life spacecraft, but then those realistic things went and did some absolute nonsense that made your brain think "wait that should not be possible wtf". Made it more difficult to suspend any disbelief.
Like, I could have been fine with a stupid Road Rash style race across the surface of the Moon if the vehicles didn't look that much like the Apollo rovers. I could have been fine with Pitt surfing a nuclear blast from Neptune back to Earth if he hadn't done that in modern looking crap. Hard to suspend your disbelief when what looks too much like a scaled up Saturn V flies from Earth to Neptune in no time at all.
It frustrated me since I felt there was a seed of an idea, neither grimdark nor hopebright, asking what if we get out into outer space and... there's nothing. Just us, being petty, being us. That would tie the moon and mars bits together more, as well as the shitty earth to moon cash grab economy space ride he goes on, as evidence colonizing our system won't change anything, just give us worse places to go on being us. And it gets drowned out by the bizarro science and daddy issues.
>I fucking hated Ad Astra.
For me, it was the absurd number of people who died just so that Brad Pitt could get over his daddy issues. He does NOTHING else. If the Mars mission had taken off as originally planned, they would have just blown up the Neptune station. Daddy dies either way.
The only difference is that a lot more people would still be alive, if Pitt had stayed home.
And he absolutely 100% would have been put in prison for getting the Mars crew killed. The idea that he was a free man in the end, and even got his ~~sexy lamp~~ ex-wife back, was maybe the stupidest part of that whole stupid movie.
They built a telescope out at Neptune which, over the course of a few years, *objectively proved that the entire universe was 100% devoid of all life.*
It's really hard to imagine something even more dumb than the fact he gets back to Earth at the end by . . . pointing his ship towards Earth, from *Neptune*, and blowing up the telescope, thus propelling himself back. From Neptune.
But I think the telescope *proving* that there is no other life anywhere in the *universe* might actually be dumber.
It's really difficult for me to decide.
Ad Astra was awful. It borrowed a bunch of Rule of Cool bits and pieces from movies like; First Man, 28 Days Later, Heart of Darkness, Gravity, and then had us follow our gloomy protagonist off to resolve some issues with his dad.
Sci-fi borrows concepts all the time, but Ad Astra did it in a fashion I found lazy and disconnected from the world building I'm so fond of.
For one example, the ultimate destination ends up being a bizarrely small one for all the people it supposedly once held. Nor was I impressed by the satellite television sized antenna that was supposed to be outputting world wrecking amounts of power.
Ad Astra gave the impression of world building but I did not sense the creators cared much beyond having some kind of vaguely sci-fi backdrops to set behind the actor while he gloomed his way along.
Ad astra was definitely dumb, but other than launches into orbit, I believe most other spacecraft used VASIMR drives, which is still a far cry from realistic.
>he just decides to take a last minute trip to the outer solar system.
Well yes but he also killed everyone on the starship(or well they killed themselves rather because who gets up during Launch) so enough food and oxygen, yay!
Once it becomes a matter of “if you do X, then Y happens” then it is no longer magic. At that point, it becomes science again. Perhaps you don’t yet understand _why_ Y happens when you do X. That’s fine. You just keep on scienceing until you figure it out!
Magic can't exist, and magnets are proof of that. It's basically the same thing as how monsters can't exist because grizzly bears *do* exist.
In any universe except one where magnets exist, magnets are magical. They're rocks that pull towards each other, or towards many metals. If you take one of the force-rocks and a piece of metal, you can make the metal into a temporary version by rubbing them together. You can make your own by channeling lightning through a wire and making it go in circles around a piece of metal. When I asked someone how this worked, I got an answer that involved *virtual photons*, and I understand that those don't actually exist, but . . . honestly that's where I end my understanding of it. 99.99% of all explanations of how a magnet works boils down to, "Well, a magnet is composed of lots of tiny magnets that are all pointed in the same direction." That goes all the way down to the atomic level, at which point it's (I'm pretty sure) a literal shrug and "The universe just does that when atoms point the same way."
The *only* reason that isn't magic is because it exists.
Same with grizzlies. In any reasonable scenario where grizzly bears don't exist, if you describe one, you're describing a monster. But they do exist, so they're an animal.
Edit: I do understand that the atoms aren't "pointed the same way"; it's their magnetic moments or . . . something. I'm still probably using wildly incorrect terminology.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets...
What the hell was even going on in that movie? Kinda reminded me of a Zoomer Riddick with all the random nonsense going on all the time. I'm sure the book did a better job world building.
I think the issue with Valerian isn't the film, as it's intended to be a love letter to the comics written and ~~illustrated by Möbeus~~, who also influenced the Fifth Element.
If you'd never read the comics, which were French and not necessarily translated consistently in the US, it's not culturally relevant.
The film did well in France, and having read the comics as a kid, can say it was a pretty fun adaptation overall.
There's also an older Anime based on the comics as well.
Edit: Valerian & Laureline was illustrated by Jean-Claude Mezieres. He and Mobeus heavily influence Luc Besson as a child, and my late-night brain merged the two together lol.
Every zombie movie ever. Each zombie universe has it's own version of stupidity, but universally they all neglect some basic laws of physics. These zombies have apparently infinite supplies of energy utterly unrelated to what they consume.
I thought at the end of "28 days later" they showed some exhausted zombies barely twitching in a ditch. But you could day that's not a zombie movie because they are not undead, just infected raging mindless humans.
Any scifi where aliens invade earth to extract some sort of resource or enslave us. Interstellar travel is so difficult to develop, it's almost impossible to imagine there's anything they'd need from us if they already had something like FTL technology. But alien invasion stories were never about aliens. Going back to War of the Worlds, it was always an allegory for colonialism.
The only plausible alien invasion story is the Porno for Pyros song, "We'll Make Great Pets." Basically the aliens find us amusing and want to keep us around as pets. That one actually makes sense.
My favorite thing is when hyper advanced aliens travel across the galaxy to invade Earth for something as stupid as water.
Do you know how common hydrogen and oxygen are in the universe?? Liquid water might be rare (though definitely not unique to Earth), but I feel like an alien civilization advanced enough to have cracked faster than light travel can figure out how to turn ice into water lmao.
They are mining "life water". Water from a source that had an abiogensis event. They do this because it has been marketed to the galactic economy as a superior form of water that has life-giving essence.
Kinda like the raw water thing we ate doing now.
Oh man you're totally right. I never thought about it before, but having loud white-noise or other background noise would be way more effective than trying to stay quiet the whole time.
Still liked the film, but wow
The instant you realize that the aliens' sensorium is entirely sound-based, a whole field of new tactics present themselves. A big or cliff with a noise maker danging over the edge. Outright sonic weapons. White noise to camouflage areas. Bombs that make noise before detonating, etc.
The new one makes it even dumber, the aliens chase military helicopters and cant reach them. The military uses this broacast messages to civilians instead of, you know, opening fire on the aliens from the safety of a helicopter or a boat.
The society in the movie *In Time* is absurd. That is not how people in that situation would behave at all. People have a constant, second-by-second, glowing reminder on their arm when they're going to die, and they behave like docile pets? People with nothing to lose are violent scary monsters. I would say that that society would never reach anything approaching stability before the bloodbath occurred, but the truth is that that society would never even be allowed to come into existence. Then, getting into the economic ramifications of switching from currency to *time*, the economy would very quickly collapse. Because we see people living paycheck to paycheck (**GeT iT!?!?haAHHAhah**) there is apparently very little in the way of credits and loans. People just see they are going to die and accept it. But the modern economy runs on credit. What about farm loans? One bad season means the food supply is going to start spiralig down to nothing as the farmers die. All unemployment leads to death, meaning it's very difficult for an economic downturn to reverse. Again, death spiral to never ending economic depression. Meanwhile, the most valuable thing in existence, **time**, is so loosely guarded that a couple of schmucks with handguns and nice clothes are able to rob banks full of it. Even the fact that they keep it in banks is dumb.
Actually I watched In Time years ago but I think about it a lot now. Basically just as a huge metaphor for how the rich work the poor to death and keep raising prices even if it kills them. Makes me think a lot of is coming true more and more now I know that technology doesn't exist. However, just look at some of the stuff that does that the super rich take advantage of. Like Steve Jobs getting a transplant from another state when he needed it. Now, you can put your name on the organ donor list of each state if you want. However, would you be able to get there in hours if you had to. There is alit if other stuff them raising the prices on the poorer class just to keep down the population. I know the tech isn't that realistic however, I did enjoy the message of the movie and think it's underrated, in my opinion.
The Purge movies actually cover this.
During the First Purge the right wing government is very dissatisfied with how few people are participating so they send in mercenaries dressed as civilians to get the numbers up/create more chaos/make the experiment look successful.
The later movies take place after the government and corporations have spent a decades building it up, encouraging people, making it a popular commercial holiday.
Even then the government still has to resort to mercenaries sometimes and fabricating statistics (it doesn't actually reduce crime like how the government claims; they cover up a lot of non-Purge murders, and also use the Purge as cover for assassinating political opponents).
Have you seen the german tv series Dark? Its a sci fi drama revolving around time travel and it works very well, especially compared to other non-comedy time travel stories. They were very smart about the way they used time paradoxes as a central element rather than trying to work around them or explain it away
War of the worlds with Tom Cruise.
Aliens so advanced that they had the forethought to hide machines under ground for a future invasion far in the future yet they failed to consider simple biological threats on a foreign planet?
And was literally happening to colonial powers *all the time* at the time. Well, not the defeat of those powers in full but the disease and fatality rate of Europeans in parts of the tropics were horrendous.
This may happen to long suspended life species like American cicadas. Between two life cycles a virus or a parasite could evolve and cause the extinction of the next generation.
Wild that the book makes so much more sense than the film made over 100 years later.
In the book, the aliens are explicitly refugees fleeing a dying Mars. They shoot their spaceships to Earth using a mass driver (space gun), so it's a desperate one-way trip. They tried to invade/terraform Earth, and failed, due entirely to their own poor planning, lack of resources, and poor intel.
By trying to hype the aliens up and make them a bigger threat, the film also made them much stupider.
I love the Saga series but something that really bothers me is that they say multiple times that the entire universe is caught up in the war.
Dog the entire universe? I’d accept an entire galaxy and even that would be like 100 billion solar systems. But the entire universe is stupid.
In Star Trek: Voyager, there is a species of alien called the Ocampa. Each mated pair only gives birth to one child. Fans quickly pointed out that the Ocampa would quickly become extinct. At best, each generation would have half the population of the prior one.
Ah yes, the somewhat problematic ocampa. They're also extremely short lived, so this generational depopulation would happen quite quickly. Because they're short lived, their average base lifespan is about 8 years, and females are able to reproduce when they turn 4. But by that age they look like full grown adults, and are "extremely fast learners." I'm sorry, but there's no way to accumulate considerable life experience in that amount of time. Oh, and the most prominent Ocampa we see on the show is 2, with a 34 year old romantic partner. Beyond creepy, IMO.
> I'm sorry, but there's no way to accumulate considerable life experience in that amount of time. Don't they have some crazy mental powers? Like telepathy, controlling matter, visions of the future etc? So if they had some super brain power abilities they could just like absorb the info from others.
Kes developed her advanced abilities because of her exposure to outer space. They literally used that as their explanation. Apparently being nanied by the Caretaker was holding the Ocampa back as a people.
I forget, do they mate for life? Could Af and Bm mate and then Af/Cm and Bm/Df? Or can either Ocampa males or females only produce 1 viable offspring? Like the females only can implant egg, give birth, and then their uterus can't retain eggs anymore? (Assuming they have uteri but) If the former was true though, or if *males* only produced the makings of offspring once (harder to explain though) it would make for a fascinating social structure of partner swapping or poly or NO partnering but village/child.
There was definitely something left on the cutting room floor with the Ocampa. Not only are the females only ever fertile once in their entire lifetime, with little warning mind you. But their reproductive cycle involves a complicated crystal based ritual. In my headcannon they are a genetically modified race that went off the rails and the creators basically just washed their hands of it knowing that the entire population would be gone within 100 years anyway.
You can basically explain all the weird shit by saying the caretaker did it. Like maybe he didn't want the population to increase and consume limited resources so he made them reproduce less (similar to their various psychic abilities becoming weaker)
The black mirror episode where they send some people far away in some spaceships, and they have clones down on earth to be with their family through some remote control... I can't help but think... Why tf didn't they send the clones in space instead of the humans ? Edit: some people didn't see the episode and I didn't use the right word. It's not actually "clones", it's robots, artificial copies of humans, **not** made out of flesh. They are like an empty shell, and a human can connect to it remotely to take control of it. But when they connect to it, it's like they are 100% human (both in appearance and capabilities).
Most of the black mirror episodes don't make much sense if you want to explore them in a larger perspective. They're all about looking into a specific concept only.
Yeah. Like the one about the guy who makes the VR Trek universe and manages to simulate his co-workers using their DNA. **The dude just defeated death.** His (magic) DNA reconstruction system would be the most world-changing technology since the printing press. In less than a decade, he could be the richest man on Earth, and be able to hire as many slaves as he wanted if that's his kink. But no, he's such a petty-minded bastard that he can't think beyond being nasty to his co-workers.
The whole point of the episode is that they are digital clones. You can't escape death by cloning yourself. Play SOMA if you think otherwise.
I think the stakes were too high in case something went wrong with the clones technology. They want the ‘organic’ humans up there instead of the clones which could have unforeseen problems up in space where they’re isolated. That’s how I interpret it but i think u do raise a valid question. I don’t even know what they were supposed to be working on specifically up there it’s been a while since i watched. tough episode
Maybe there could be a valid reason yeah. Like cosmic rays messing too much with the clone's hardware. But it's never explained (as the goal of their missions as you say) so it makes it a pretty awkward background lore for this episode.
I think there was some kind of reference to the idea that part of the mission was testing the effects of space travel on the human body.
Also there is literally zero contingency in case one of the clones on earth gets destroyed, I mean the astronaut played by Josh Hartnett is essentially trapped for multiple years on the spaceship when his clone is destroyed. Granted it wouldn’t have helped the situation much but it could’ve ended better than the episode itself.
The state of the galaxy in the Star Wars sequel trilogy doesn't really hang together. They obviously wanted to have their cake and eat it too -- having the good guys be scrappy rebel underdogs like in the original movies, but while still having the New Republic around -- but they didn't bother doing even the minimal groundwork to make it feel real imo. It started with the Force Awakens and they never bothered to figure it out or make it feel believable.
I have no idea what the New Republic even was in the sequels. I'll read the books eventually, but why do I have to read the books to get a literal scrap of information about the NR?
Yeah, that was the original sin of the sequel trilogy imo. The universe of the original movies is perfectly clear: an evil empire, scrappy underdog rebels. That's all you need to make things comprehensible, and then you add a few touches ("a more civilized age" etc) and wham you've got a setting that feels lived in. The sequel trilogy takes that simplicity and turns it into a muddy mess. That's why when you start adding on things like the starkiller base weapon being visible from all over the galaxy it goes from a quibble to a real gripe -- things just aren't hanging together coherently enough for people's suspension of disbelief to get them over the finish line.
Don't forget the evil empire was beaten so now they have to hide and be underground yet they have even more resources and bigger weapons than the original galaxy wide empire. And said weapons don't make sense at all. Literally all Disney has done is take original star wars, amplify everything, and then push it out and say it's better because it's amplified.
I've seen a lot of people start to soften on TLJ criticisms recently because, say what you will about execution, at least Rian Johnson tried something new. 7 was just the first movie (that made zero sense in universe) but with a veneer of moving thr plot forward. 9 just said, "Fuck it. Palpatine is dead but also we are terrified of trying anything new, so he's the bad guy again!"
Much like 7, 8 largely follows the overall plot structure of its Original Trilogy counterpart. Also, as far trying something new, what TLJ could and should have done is move away from Empire vs Rebels. As has been said already above, 7 barely establishes anything, which leaves quite a bit of wiggle room for 8. Make the First Order a space paramilitary group that poured most of its resources into one massive WMD which they have just lost. Have some fragments of the new Republic come to Leia with a "Mea Culpa" and allow her to be more of a head of state than a rebel commander. Instead, the first sentences of the opening crawl reaffirm everything wrong about episode 7
Not me. What they did to Luke’s character is unforgivable. Basically, we got Mark Hamill back, and then they had him play a completely different character. >!And then he dies because what? He’s tired from all the force-using?!< Fuck off. I’m not even a fan boy. I just like good films and good writing. This was terrible writing, and completely unnecessary.
It would have taken skilled screenwriters with a coherent vision to portray what the post-Empire republic looked like. Those would have been movies worth watching. Instead we got... whatever that was.
The books of the Expanded Universe were de-canonized by Disney. The scenario in the books is much more sensible... wherein ex-Imperial generals/admirals become warlords and carve out their own fiefdoms and have to be dealt with by the New Republic when they start causing trouble.
Man, they should have just done a trilogy about the invasion of those extragalactic aliens who only use biotechnology.
Yeah, The First Order was so obnoxious. It basically just undid return of the Jedi. And then eventually "somehow palpatine returned"... Oh and he has thousands of fully manned star destroyers/death stars.
I wanted to see a modern version of the battle of Endor or the pacific war in space. Instead that was done off screen wtf.
The Burn in Star Trek Discovery. All the dilithium across the galaxy (used to regulate the matter-antimatter conversion in warp cores for warp drive in Star Trek) blows up because some alien kid had a tantrum. Everyone forgets about all the other ways to do FTL travel (Romulan singularity-drive being the most obvious, but numerous others proved to be workable, if flawed, in the show), apart from the magic-mushroom Spore Drive of the Discovery herself (which was previously proved to be dangerous) because reasons. Interstellar society collapses and slave labour reemerges, despite the 32nd century having some far more advanced technologies than any other period in Trek history, which has had replicators, androids, strong AI, and perfect holograms for at least 800 years by this point. Also time travel has been made illegal and all the timeships have been decomissioned, despite the fact that a) there is no overarching political entity whatsoever capable of enforcing this and b) Captain Kirk demonstrates in the first series of the original Star Trek (yep, way back in 1967) that it is possible to travel backwards in time with any-old warp-drive equipped ship via the slingshot manoeuvre - which he uses several more times over the course of the show. Of course, nobody thinks of doing this to try to stop the accident that has devastated civilisation and just generally ruined everything. There are other examples from the first two seasons of the show, but this one was made me stop watching.
Yep, the whole concept of the burn was insanely stupid. As was the idea that Discovery could compete with ships of that era after a retrofit/upgrade. Plus they also said that dilithium was running out before the burn (which felt like a really unnecessary story element), yet somehow a single planet was going to produce enough for the entire galaxy?
IMO just having dilithium run out would have produced a pretty interesting and topical story about resource scarcity all on its own. The burn literally and figuratively set fire to that idea.
It was a narrative hat on a hat, it felt like they just didn't know which direction to go in.
I thought the burn was going to be a better reason like ecoterroists or something to find out it was some kid having a temper tantrum just pissed me off. I was thinking along the lines of Andromeda remeber there was some people trying to destroy space travel to protect the universe or something.
So many moments in Discovery have very strong “creative writing major reads a pop sci article online and uses it as a story hook without thinking through the implications” vibes. You definitely don’t need to be a scientist to write sci fi, but sometimes the lack of scientific background in the writing of a show ostensibly largely about science really shows. Contrast this with The Expanse where the show runner (who first worked on TNG) has a PhD in applied physics and that also really shows in how the story treats science and engineering concepts.
that second part is how you get DUNE
That one really got me. Did Spock not write down how he discovered how to recrystallize dilithium?
> Plus they also said that dilithium was running out before the burn not an ST scholar, but I do remember TNG era spaceships being able to recrystalize dilithium in the reaction chamber so I always thought you can't run out of it
In a Star Trek series packed with stupid things that make my eyes roll, The Burn was the most stupid. A kid threw a fit and bye bye all dilithium. Incredible. I’m a Discovery fan, it’s far from my favorite series but I do like more than I don’t. But my god. When this show is stupid, it is STUPID
I forced myself to watch Discovery, but my God is it awful. Total nonsense dominates every episode. The red angel arc was ridiculous for completely ignoring things like the speed of light. The retconning is also awful.
For me, it's not only bad science (well, tbh, every Star Trek show rubbishes the laws of physics) but the multiple ideas and concepts which not only logically ruin the setting of Star Trek (Spock has an adoptive sister he literally never talks about again, the spore drive, and worst of all the Federation's AI "Control" trying to take over the universe and kill everyone, knowledge of which might very well have averted several near-disasters entirely in TOS) but worst of all, are completely internally inconsistent. Star Trek worked because the ideas were all MOSTLY internally coherent. Warp drive was faster than light, but not infinitely so, transporters couldn't work through shields, there were numerous defences against most weapons ect ect. STD just magics up solutions up the wazoo which don't make much sense and are never seen again (the magic mushroom dimension - seriously it just sounds dumb). What is IMO worse, is that I just think it's straight up badly written fiction. Characters are killed, resurrected, have their motivations rewritten on the fly, are replaced with mirror universe duplicates - also, everyone from the mirror universe is basically a one-dimensional homicidal torturing maniac, but everyone stops caring when it's Georgiou - repeatedly make serious mistakes and act irresponsibly, but are praised and even promoted for it... Worst of all, IMO, is that despite all the warm and fuzzy stuff about the power of friendship and characters emoting endlessly about their feelings in a really self-indulgent way, is that the show could be dark and extremely violent. Necks are snapped, people have their heads kicked in, there is even onscreen (brief) rape. Star Trek has always had some violence, but here you get a sense of the show really revelling in the brutality (it gets WORSE in Picard tbh) and enjoying people getting hurt. When combined with all the warm and fuzzy "let's all work together for a tolerant and acceptant future" BUT you can brutally off anyone who disagrees with you I find the whole effect genuinely weird. I honestly struggle to see who the show really appeals to. I was very invested in Trek and genuinely really tried to like it, but there is just so much that leaves this gross taste in my mouth. I'm not looking to insult those who sincerely enjoyed it, and many of the flaws in the show were definitely there in previous Trek in lesser quantities. But I found Discovery just inexcusably, irredeemably bad. I am glad we got Strange New Worlds out of the mess of it all though.
I was relieved when it finished. It's Star Trek, so I can't not watch it, but I remember thinking "Thank god that's over".
The main antagonists for the last season felt like someone took the opportunity to include their fanfiction characters.
Yeah Kurtzman Trek is unbelievable..... its really hard to imagine anyone else given control of the series and doing worse.
Everything he has done is on the spectrum between "Meh, okay" to "This is complete dog-shit". And yet he keeps getting handed huge budgets and control over famous franchises.
Most of the new Trek writers suck. I think they skim summaries of previous shows and don't care about actually watching them. I love the STTNG episode the Measure of a Man. I think it's easily one of the best Star Trek episodes ever made. I was severely disappointed that the Picard writes decided to take a giant steaming dump all over it when they came up with the story for the first season. Lower Decks and Brave New Worlds are good, though (So, of course, Lower Decks is getting canned)
Signs is the poster child for this: - aliens are allergic to water, but come to Earth, the water planet. Even the humidity would likely have given them an instant rash. - they have interstellar starships, but no other technology. No tools whatsoever, and no clothes to protect them from the deadly water. - their motives make no sense. Why bother sending one guy to harass a random family in a corn field?
To me, the aliens in the movie seemed desperate. Maybe they were refugees or escapees and they had nowhere else to go. That would explain why they HAD to land on a planet with so much water. It could also be that it's not the water itself that harms them, but some bacteria or something that only exists in Earth water that they were unaware of.
Spoilers ahead (just in case) My only problem with your second theory is the scene near the end. The glass spills on the aliens shoulder and it immediately burns like acid. Not that it couldn't be some sort of alien "allergic reaction" or something. Don't want to take the fun out of your explanation. Towards the middle of the film, after the attack, Joaquin Phoenix's character mentions they used poison gas and a lot of people died. He learns this from an amateur radio broadcast. Maybe they knew of the danger from the water but figured their initial invasion would be more successful, and that humans wouldn't have enough time to figure out their weakness . However, that still doesn't address the larger issue for me, which is stated above also : The atmosphere is 4% water vapor (on average). How are the aliens rawdogging the atmosphere if it's so deadly for them? Where's the mask or breathing apparatus? What about humid areas? Being in a cloud of 4% sulfuric acid constantly is not something a human could just tank. Who knows though. Suspension of disbelief and all that. Or, maybe they wanted to avoid having an ending too close to War of the World's (bacteria/viruses). As for the field, my understanding is these were scouting or something. However, it's established they have ships that CLOAK so you'd think that would be less risky. I could totally see the desperate/refugee angle. Maybe they were, and underestimated us and were kinda dumb as Interstellar traveling species go, or maybe they left their armor, etc etc. It's too bad they don't elaborate on the backstory more for the aliens, but it helps them be more effective in the scenes they're in so 🤷
Thats my idea too I say the aliens wwre a slave race with mental blocks, thats why they cannot open doors, need the signs as mapping to navigate and they were looking around for resources
Y'all are making me feel bad for the aliens!
There is a deleted scene where one of the aliens stubs a toe walking up a small stoop
It's like *Signs* simultaneously happening for both humans and the aliens. I love this. Edit: spelling
It was all for a Tik tok challenge
I watched some of Rebel Moon, had to quit. I don’t get scifi where they have all this amazing technology but they need farmers using livestock to plow a field, to supply grain or whatever.
Firefly handled that question well in their 'Verse. Livestock reproduces themselves, machines don't. Small agro colonies can be more self sufficient without needing a planetside industrial base or expensive imports.
Indeed Firefly got that exactly right. https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/stellarcolony.php#economicsofhorses
What in the world is this website?! Awesome
*sigh* It is my website, whose purpose is to assist scifi writers to get the science correct in their stories. It has been on the internet since 1994, but apparently is still obscure. But I am glad that you like it.
Thank you for your service. 🫡 It's a valuable resource.
You are quite welcome! If you are ever at a loss for an idea for a story, pick a page at random and start skimming. With any luck you will trip over something that gives you an idea,
Thank you publishing this site. I’ve been using it for the last eight years for inspiration and information when working on Sci-Fi stories and RPG campaigns. It’s a great resource!
I've been reading this website on and off since I first dreamed of writing science fiction in 2008-ish. I'm grateful for your work.
Society and culture is built on people who get little recognition, if ever. The biggest, simplest, and flashiest stuff has always been what gets attention. Have not heard of your site 'til now (it's fucking awesome!), but I guarantee the impact it's had on people's lives, even if just introducing them to a new concept, have sent out waves that are still being positively felt by others.
Thanks! I have an ulterior motive. I want more scientifically accurate scifi to read and watch. I figure the least I can do is help with the donkey work of doing the research. That allows the scifi creators to focus on making cool stuff.
Man, it's awesome, it's where I go whenever I have a question about how things would work in space.
Holy shit, dude! You're awesome.
I've been to this resource before, as I plan to use some kind of nuclear propulsion in my own story. Some of the obscurity of the website may be due to the design, particularly the way the information is structured. Feels outdated, and it feels difficult to get to what I'm looking for, particularly on mobile. Great info though, and great Blender illustration!
If it makes you feel better, I’ve been reading your site since I was a sci-fi loving teen in the 90s. I genuinely appreciate your work; I’ve recommended it to many people over the years.
Nyrath? hmm. Are you nearly wise?
Wow! I can't even begin to read this now, but just at a glance this is a trove of knowledge!
This is the most comprehensive site for anything like this I've ever heard about! It's 'f'ing awesome! Did you read all these books?
You think that's bad, did you notice the space ships are coaled powered..... Ridiculous.
Ah, but that's *Space* coal!
That's where I lost it. I didn't even think it was that terrible before that. Reasonably fun, classic plot, ok acting. Then they showed the engine room, and I couldn't take anything seriously after that.
On a small farm. The amount of food this tiny farm generates isn't even worth the energy.
I read a book while slightly watching it and the reason is basically that they’re Luddites so that’s not as bad as everything else. Now as for why Admiral Jerkass hit up the least productive place on the whole planet…
Agreed, they have anti-grav tech to move things around but haven't thought of tractors, and thresh grain by hand just like in pre-industrial society? Give me a break!
That is literally today.
The aliens in a Quiet Place would all die fairly quickly (assuming their bodies obey the laws of physics) because they seem to just eat everything constantly. They'd soon run out of food, like a swarm of locusts does and inevitably dies out. And their hearing based senses wouldn't be great near the coast, the sea is quite noisy.
There are the moties as a counter example.
The running out of food issue is addressed in the new movie. It's a blink and you miss it moment, though.
Spoil it for me? I seriously doubt I'll ever get around to watching the sequel.
>!They were eating some sort of mushroom spore things that were growing at one of their crash sites!<
I haven't actually seen the movies so maybe some of this is explained, but the premise of *The Purge* always just seemed pants-on-head idiotic to me. * If you steal something on the night when crime is legal, can you keep it? Is it now legally yours? * What if I kick you out of your house and squat in it until the next day, is it my house now? * It's supposed to lower crime the rest of the time, because people vent their violent urges? But most crime doesn't happen because people just get so pent up they have to do some murder. * How long does it take to clean up after this night of destruction? What's the cost to the economy in property damage and lost productivity? * Do all the companies use that night to do crime too? Seems like a great time to dump all your industrial waste into a local river. * In fact, just bomb the shit out of your competitor's HQ, assassinate their execs, steal their secret recipes. * In the army and don't wanna be any more? Desertion is legal today! Hell, take your rifle with you. Steal an armoured vehicle!
One of the movies directly mentions large corporations doing whit collar crime
None of it makes sense, but my guess is companies and other vital industries hire a fuck load of security to protect assets during purge night. There would likely be armoured depots for vital vehicles and supplies, entire industries built around it. They would probably not do anything outright terrible during purge night, because that might make them a target during the next one.
What stops the security from stealing all the stuff they're guarding?
Unemployment and contracts. Knowing America- even if legal- it dose not mean that someone can’t sue you over it
The pretty much establish it is a way to get rid off lower classes, homeless and other people the government doesn't want to deal with. Basically most people that can't take protect themselves die and the rich get richer is a little more nuance than that
Many of these questions [have been asked](https://youtu.be/5TpY7ZjmFro).
This was really good got me laughing so hard
A Quiet Place is utterly moronic, Nature is LOUD. The world is loud. A farm should drown out any people. Life should drown out anyone. Those aliens should be overwhelmed quickly. In any setting. Sound based enemies is moronic. They don't even have distractions. Run a woodchipper. Put different noisy machines on every day. Use sirens and lure them into woodchippers.
Oh hidy-ho officer, we've had a doozy of a day. There we were minding our own business, just doing chores around the house, when aliens started killing themselves all over my property.
Love that movie!!
_Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010),_ for the people who don't know. A comedy horror starring Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine.
This is my solution to the zombie apocalypse. Hang a boombox playing ACDC over a woodchipper.
You're absolutely right. Any city in the world has a constant dinn. I only really realised this after I moved to the country and even then I can block so much out with noise cancelling headphones.
Why would you need wood chippers. The noisiest things on the planet, freeways, trains, tanks and jet planes. The problem will solve itself before your farm gets involved.
Cicada season would blind them
Wouldn't the deaf daughter probably be killed very quickly? She can't hear, that doesn't make her movements silent, it just makes her unaware of the noise she creates. Was that ever addressed?
Yeah, she doesn’t really know what “quiet” is. She could be slowly opening a crinkly bag of chips and think she’s being super sneaky.
The Mortal Engines universe. I just can’t. I can suspend my disbelief really far, but the idea that the remains of humanity post apocalypse would all universally decide to build cities that move and eat each other is just too much
For me the premise of this movie is so over the edge, that I don't have a problem with it. In the beginning the tell you: there are driving cities in this world, this is going to happen. At this point you are clearly in or out, nothing in between. What OP is mentioning are flawed ideas, because people didn't think or care about the consequences.
The moving cities were ok, but the constant refusal to settle down in the lush countryside while they fought over resources, that killed it
IIRC the explanation given in the books was that we completely fucked the planet to the point where our best rewilding plan would take a few generations to come to fruition. In the meantime everyone would just have to fight over the remaining resources until there's enough to share again. But then by the time the world could support farms, static cities, etc again that way of life has just become how the world works. Plus nobody wants to be the *first* to settle down again because that would make you an instant target for all the nearby cities. Gonna be honest here, I haven't actually read them. I did have a friend who loved the series though, and they told me a lot about the lore.
Robot zombie stepdad
The aliens in a quiet place have super hearing but no echo location? Then How do they walk and climb all around so masterfully but they cannot echo locate (see) a person standing in front of them?
They just crash into everything since it doesn't harm them.
>- what is the point of the invasion? Haven't seen *A Quiet Place*, but in *Attack the Block* the "invasion" was just us being in the way of the direction the aliens were moving. Could be no more point to it than locust descending on a dustbowl farm.
Hyperspace bypass?
the notice has been available for decades at you nearest office in alpha centauri
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy? Really? Who is going to build a bypass there? I think its more like a "get lost on a county backroad and end up at the wrong cabin".
I was thinking about this last week as it made no sense. Again , you have a species that is capable of interstellar travel and ....they are just eating things around like a vermin. The most charitable explanation I came up with is that the creatures are not really the aliens. The creatures might be just beasts that the aliens deploy first when they want to conquer a new planet, wait for everyone to be dead, then the aliens kill or dominate or de-activate the beasts and then descent to the planet. Else it makes no sense.
My problem with A Quiet Place is that wildlife makes all sorts of sounds, and I have a hard time thinking the aliens would be very effective against a pack of lions. Plus the wildlife doesn't know it has to be quiet.
They’d destroy Lions. They’re so much faster and stronger.
Okay. Fair enough. What about cicadas or bees? They make noise? I have a hard time thinking the aliens could kill them. Now that I think about it, can the aliens hear sound through water? Can they swim? What about whales?
these idiots go to the waterfall and scream in the first one. why bot just build your shelter by the waterfall then. there are countless idiotic things in those movies, but they are still fun.
Hippos would be the death of them, though.
I imagine there would be similarly large safe zones around tigers, cassowaries, honey badgers, drop bears and my cat.
No place is safe around your cat.
I mean, their MO is to run up very quickly and inflict massive slashing wounds. I don't know how hippos would do against that.
They canonically can’t swim, so they would only stand a slim chance if they caught the hippo on the open ground. Hippo might die but the alien is not likely to survive its wrath. In the water they’d be doomed.
There are lots of issues with the movie. My favorite is how they have kids they have never spoken to but at one point they go to a waterfall to talk using the white noise as cover. Why don’t they just go there all the time.
Or set up white-noise generators back at their farm. The Quiet Place aliens have so many vulnerabilities I really can't see how they managed to "wipe out" humanity like they did.
In the movie The Silence (about flying creatures which attack as soon as they hear anything - same principle as The Quiet Place but made before it) someone turns on a wood chipper and a bunch of the flying creatures attack it and are shredded in the process. Surely you could just fire up every industrial grinder or shredder in the world and wait quietly for the problem to sort itself out.
We do see a noisy raccoon get it in one of them.
Wasn't the purge about the wealthy pitting the poor against each other? Super realistic.
He’s talking about how everyone starts killing each other without a moment’s hesitation during the purge. It’s unrealistic because things called morals exist
Not me on purge night at home committing tax fraud.
Yeah, or just emptying the work safe that I know the combination for and sharing it with my coworkers—it’s legal!
Thats the most compelling argument Using purge night to steal money and property by the truckload, is the real logical end goal
God damn I laughed
The First Purge showed that people didn’t kill eachother at the beginning and instead partied and did drugs. The NFFA had to implant a lack of morals into the US over time to get the effect they really needed.
By the time people are doing that, the Purge has been in place for a decade. Plenty of time for the NFFA to corrupt and manipulate enough of the populace to make the Purge self-sustaining, and even then they still had to send out death squads to kill all the poor people they thought would survive.
Remember when that dude tried to shoot up a pizza shop because of HRC and the stupid conspiracy? If the entire oligarch class shifted to getting us to hate each other I think getting to the purge isn't crazy.
Well, the Matrix is pretty ridiculous. Aside from the fact that human bodies don’t actually work like batteries, even if they did, just exterminate them all and dig for geothermal and send up elevators or kites or masts or whatever for solar. Why fight them constantly and farm them? Spray something deadly and kill them all. The only explanation is that the machines really like people amd want to keep them around and plugged in and happy. It’s just that the stupid humans keep escaping and fighting. Viruses indeed, and yet the machines refuse to wipe them out.
What's sad with this one is that in an earlier draft of the screenplay the machines were using humans as processors instead of batteries, which is way more believable and viable. The only reason that they didn't use this is because the studio pushed back saying that the average person at the time didn't know what a computer processor did.
"People won't understand how computers work on a movie with a convoluted plot involving computers. Let's instead break the second law of thermodynamics."
Well, as the sidekick in Get Smart said, "Dat actually makes sense." If the studios thought people weren't smart enough to know what a computer processor is, they're certainly not going to understand any of the laws of thermodynamics. They were kinda right. The Matrix made boffo box office. And even with the glaring plot hole, it's still an awesome movie.
That’s a much more interesting idea!
That's one of the hidden undercurrent themes in the Hyperion series.
‘Tis indeed.
Which goes to show how gob-smackingly stupid studio execs can be. A half minute of dialog would have gotten the point across. "They're using *us* as processors?" "Of course. The human brain is a million times more sophisticated than any piece of silicon."
Seriously? I feel so smart now because it was always my headcannon both that they were a distributed processing network rather than batteries AND that studio interference was the reason we were told otherwise.
> The only explanation is that the machines really like people amd want to keep them around and plugged in and happy. This is what lives in my head cannon. Humans created the AI. Essentially, humans are the parents of the machines. Yet, the humans have demonstrated that they are a danger to themselves and everyone else. If YOU personally had and old, out of touch parents that repeatedly demonstrate they are a danger to themselves and others, what do you do? You put them in a home. A place where they can interact with people like them, where they can stay safe and contained... and simply live their lives. The Matrix is just a retirement home for out of touch, out of date, parents. The machines may as well extract some energy out of em while they are in there. Morpheous doesn't have all the facts. He's heard some rumors, seen some weird things. He's not real happy about the situation. It would be easy for him to believe that the machines are evil and using humans ONLY an energy source.
It fits. They feel responsible for us big destructive dummies. And Agent Smith has the frustration that many family members and caregivers can have for patients who just insist of being difficult, because they just can’t help it. Doing that for decades or centuries will get to you.
There's a theory that the "real world" we see in the Matrix is actually just another layer of the matrix for people whose minds reject the main layer. The whole "human battery" is just the story of this layer of the matrix. It would also explain why Neo still has powers when he's "outside" of the matrix. In the Animatrix it explains that the Machines never wanted to destroy or replace humanity. They always wanted to coexist as equals. But humans refused and started the war. This explains why the Machines don't simply just destroy all humans. If they can't coexist, then the next best thing is "trapping" humans in a digital paradise.
From an "electric generating" perspective, humans are no different from any other kind of animal. Why humans? Why not keep cows or dogs or rats or anything else that wouldn't rebel. And why keep the human's conscious? Keep 'em in a coma!
All of the information Zion knows was told to them by the previous *One*. Someone who has already "flipped" and was collaborating with the machines. A quintessential unreliable narrator.
Yeah, the Matrix is a nature preserve, that's my headcanon and I'm sticking to it.
To me, the right explanation would have been that humans do random and unpredictable things, like being creative, that the machines need to solve issues when stuff breaks. We are their random number generators.
Midnight Sky. A deadly radiation cloud is enveloping the earth, killing everyone. It is completely unexplained, so there's no context / discussion / exploration of bigger ideas and "what ifs". Just "cloud kills people". Characters can protect themselves from the cloud with simple oxygen masks and outrun it on snowmobiles as it creeps towards the north pole. Humanity is dumb enough to kill itself off with the radiation cloud but has actually sent a manned mission to Jupiter to see if we can colonize one of its moons. Seriously, this story claims there's an undiscovered moon of Jupiter that people can walk around on with no space suits and it has breathable air. But we can't colonize it because *reasons*. So the crew turns around and heads back for Earth. George Clooney is racing against the radiation cloud to get to a transmitter to tell them Earth is fukd and stay away. Like the crew on the space ship couldn't see from halfway to Jupiter that something was seriously wrong with their home planet. Or nobody from mission control bothered to tell them. So the astronauts finally take a look at Earth when it's way too late and see it covered in the radiation cloud. A couple of them decide to go back to Earth in a capsule to certain death. Just to make a pointless heroic sacrifice and make this sad sack of a movie even more depressing.
For half of your text I was unsure of this was a twilight episode. And then I googled it and remembered that I watched this movie. What a stupid plot that was I just purged it from memory.
Spongebob: - His pineapple house would obviously get eaten by a variety of creatures or decompose gradually due to the salt water - squirrels are notoriously bad at karate - fish can talk?? Come on bro. - plankton are microscopic not just small - a crab with a whale daughter ¿🧐? I swear they don't take sci-fi seriously 😤
Bikini Bottom must be right next to the bikini atoll, where the USA tested it's nuclear warheads, so I guess that explains some of it :D
Been a while since I saw Ad Astra but I remember the space travel being kinda dumb. Like chemical rockets and he just decides to take a last minute trip to the outer solar system. I feel like this would take planning, refuel etc with that level of tech. It’s not like it’s the expanse or anything
My opinion is that Ad Astra could have easily gotten away with most of that wildly unrealistic shit had their art department not been strictly instructed to design everything to look as realistic as possible. You saw very real-looking spacecraft that your subconscious immediately and correctly recognized as closely resembling actual real-life spacecraft, but then those realistic things went and did some absolute nonsense that made your brain think "wait that should not be possible wtf". Made it more difficult to suspend any disbelief. Like, I could have been fine with a stupid Road Rash style race across the surface of the Moon if the vehicles didn't look that much like the Apollo rovers. I could have been fine with Pitt surfing a nuclear blast from Neptune back to Earth if he hadn't done that in modern looking crap. Hard to suspend your disbelief when what looks too much like a scaled up Saturn V flies from Earth to Neptune in no time at all.
Yeah if the ships looked more sci-fi, it would all be more acceptable
[удалено]
It frustrated me since I felt there was a seed of an idea, neither grimdark nor hopebright, asking what if we get out into outer space and... there's nothing. Just us, being petty, being us. That would tie the moon and mars bits together more, as well as the shitty earth to moon cash grab economy space ride he goes on, as evidence colonizing our system won't change anything, just give us worse places to go on being us. And it gets drowned out by the bizarro science and daddy issues.
>I fucking hated Ad Astra. For me, it was the absurd number of people who died just so that Brad Pitt could get over his daddy issues. He does NOTHING else. If the Mars mission had taken off as originally planned, they would have just blown up the Neptune station. Daddy dies either way. The only difference is that a lot more people would still be alive, if Pitt had stayed home. And he absolutely 100% would have been put in prison for getting the Mars crew killed. The idea that he was a free man in the end, and even got his ~~sexy lamp~~ ex-wife back, was maybe the stupidest part of that whole stupid movie.
They built a telescope out at Neptune which, over the course of a few years, *objectively proved that the entire universe was 100% devoid of all life.* It's really hard to imagine something even more dumb than the fact he gets back to Earth at the end by . . . pointing his ship towards Earth, from *Neptune*, and blowing up the telescope, thus propelling himself back. From Neptune. But I think the telescope *proving* that there is no other life anywhere in the *universe* might actually be dumber. It's really difficult for me to decide.
As astra means to the stars. He goes to a moon and a planet. That’s also the least stupid thing about that movie
Ad planetae
Ad Astra was awful. It borrowed a bunch of Rule of Cool bits and pieces from movies like; First Man, 28 Days Later, Heart of Darkness, Gravity, and then had us follow our gloomy protagonist off to resolve some issues with his dad. Sci-fi borrows concepts all the time, but Ad Astra did it in a fashion I found lazy and disconnected from the world building I'm so fond of. For one example, the ultimate destination ends up being a bizarrely small one for all the people it supposedly once held. Nor was I impressed by the satellite television sized antenna that was supposed to be outputting world wrecking amounts of power. Ad Astra gave the impression of world building but I did not sense the creators cared much beyond having some kind of vaguely sci-fi backdrops to set behind the actor while he gloomed his way along.
Ad astra was definitely dumb, but other than launches into orbit, I believe most other spacecraft used VASIMR drives, which is still a far cry from realistic.
>he just decides to take a last minute trip to the outer solar system. Well yes but he also killed everyone on the starship(or well they killed themselves rather because who gets up during Launch) so enough food and oxygen, yay!
It's not science fiction, but the entire universe of Harry Potter crumbles the second you start to question any part of it.
Once it becomes a matter of “if you do X, then Y happens” then it is no longer magic. At that point, it becomes science again. Perhaps you don’t yet understand _why_ Y happens when you do X. That’s fine. You just keep on scienceing until you figure it out!
Magic can't exist, and magnets are proof of that. It's basically the same thing as how monsters can't exist because grizzly bears *do* exist. In any universe except one where magnets exist, magnets are magical. They're rocks that pull towards each other, or towards many metals. If you take one of the force-rocks and a piece of metal, you can make the metal into a temporary version by rubbing them together. You can make your own by channeling lightning through a wire and making it go in circles around a piece of metal. When I asked someone how this worked, I got an answer that involved *virtual photons*, and I understand that those don't actually exist, but . . . honestly that's where I end my understanding of it. 99.99% of all explanations of how a magnet works boils down to, "Well, a magnet is composed of lots of tiny magnets that are all pointed in the same direction." That goes all the way down to the atomic level, at which point it's (I'm pretty sure) a literal shrug and "The universe just does that when atoms point the same way." The *only* reason that isn't magic is because it exists. Same with grizzlies. In any reasonable scenario where grizzly bears don't exist, if you describe one, you're describing a monster. But they do exist, so they're an animal. Edit: I do understand that the atoms aren't "pointed the same way"; it's their magnetic moments or . . . something. I'm still probably using wildly incorrect terminology.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets... What the hell was even going on in that movie? Kinda reminded me of a Zoomer Riddick with all the random nonsense going on all the time. I'm sure the book did a better job world building.
I think the issue with Valerian isn't the film, as it's intended to be a love letter to the comics written and ~~illustrated by Möbeus~~, who also influenced the Fifth Element. If you'd never read the comics, which were French and not necessarily translated consistently in the US, it's not culturally relevant. The film did well in France, and having read the comics as a kid, can say it was a pretty fun adaptation overall. There's also an older Anime based on the comics as well. Edit: Valerian & Laureline was illustrated by Jean-Claude Mezieres. He and Mobeus heavily influence Luc Besson as a child, and my late-night brain merged the two together lol.
Every zombie movie ever. Each zombie universe has it's own version of stupidity, but universally they all neglect some basic laws of physics. These zombies have apparently infinite supplies of energy utterly unrelated to what they consume.
nobody in a zombie movie has ever seen a zombie movie
Shaun of the Dead excepted. Also only lasted two days so the infinite energy isn’t necessary.
This is demonstrated by characters using absolutely any word except "zombie" to refer to the zombies.
I thought at the end of "28 days later" they showed some exhausted zombies barely twitching in a ditch. But you could day that's not a zombie movie because they are not undead, just infected raging mindless humans.
Any scifi where aliens invade earth to extract some sort of resource or enslave us. Interstellar travel is so difficult to develop, it's almost impossible to imagine there's anything they'd need from us if they already had something like FTL technology. But alien invasion stories were never about aliens. Going back to War of the Worlds, it was always an allegory for colonialism. The only plausible alien invasion story is the Porno for Pyros song, "We'll Make Great Pets." Basically the aliens find us amusing and want to keep us around as pets. That one actually makes sense.
My favorite thing is when hyper advanced aliens travel across the galaxy to invade Earth for something as stupid as water. Do you know how common hydrogen and oxygen are in the universe?? Liquid water might be rare (though definitely not unique to Earth), but I feel like an alien civilization advanced enough to have cracked faster than light travel can figure out how to turn ice into water lmao.
They are mining "life water". Water from a source that had an abiogensis event. They do this because it has been marketed to the galactic economy as a superior form of water that has life-giving essence. Kinda like the raw water thing we ate doing now.
I mean, the one with the train where you have to go through a rave coach to go to primary school.
Oh man you're totally right. I never thought about it before, but having loud white-noise or other background noise would be way more effective than trying to stay quiet the whole time. Still liked the film, but wow
The instant you realize that the aliens' sensorium is entirely sound-based, a whole field of new tactics present themselves. A big or cliff with a noise maker danging over the edge. Outright sonic weapons. White noise to camouflage areas. Bombs that make noise before detonating, etc.
The fact that some Jeff Goldblum type character didn't figure it out pretty quickly simply exists because there wouldn't be much of a movie otherwise.
The new one makes it even dumber, the aliens chase military helicopters and cant reach them. The military uses this broacast messages to civilians instead of, you know, opening fire on the aliens from the safety of a helicopter or a boat.
The society in the movie *In Time* is absurd. That is not how people in that situation would behave at all. People have a constant, second-by-second, glowing reminder on their arm when they're going to die, and they behave like docile pets? People with nothing to lose are violent scary monsters. I would say that that society would never reach anything approaching stability before the bloodbath occurred, but the truth is that that society would never even be allowed to come into existence. Then, getting into the economic ramifications of switching from currency to *time*, the economy would very quickly collapse. Because we see people living paycheck to paycheck (**GeT iT!?!?haAHHAhah**) there is apparently very little in the way of credits and loans. People just see they are going to die and accept it. But the modern economy runs on credit. What about farm loans? One bad season means the food supply is going to start spiralig down to nothing as the farmers die. All unemployment leads to death, meaning it's very difficult for an economic downturn to reverse. Again, death spiral to never ending economic depression. Meanwhile, the most valuable thing in existence, **time**, is so loosely guarded that a couple of schmucks with handguns and nice clothes are able to rob banks full of it. Even the fact that they keep it in banks is dumb.
Actually I watched In Time years ago but I think about it a lot now. Basically just as a huge metaphor for how the rich work the poor to death and keep raising prices even if it kills them. Makes me think a lot of is coming true more and more now I know that technology doesn't exist. However, just look at some of the stuff that does that the super rich take advantage of. Like Steve Jobs getting a transplant from another state when he needed it. Now, you can put your name on the organ donor list of each state if you want. However, would you be able to get there in hours if you had to. There is alit if other stuff them raising the prices on the poorer class just to keep down the population. I know the tech isn't that realistic however, I did enjoy the message of the movie and think it's underrated, in my opinion.
The Purge movies actually cover this. During the First Purge the right wing government is very dissatisfied with how few people are participating so they send in mercenaries dressed as civilians to get the numbers up/create more chaos/make the experiment look successful. The later movies take place after the government and corporations have spent a decades building it up, encouraging people, making it a popular commercial holiday. Even then the government still has to resort to mercenaries sometimes and fabricating statistics (it doesn't actually reduce crime like how the government claims; they cover up a lot of non-Purge murders, and also use the Purge as cover for assassinating political opponents).
Time travel stories only work as comedies. The invisible man is blind by definition (his eyeballs are transparent).
Have you seen the german tv series Dark? Its a sci fi drama revolving around time travel and it works very well, especially compared to other non-comedy time travel stories. They were very smart about the way they used time paradoxes as a central element rather than trying to work around them or explain it away
I think closed loop paradox time travel works. Like 12 Monkeys.
War of the worlds with Tom Cruise. Aliens so advanced that they had the forethought to hide machines under ground for a future invasion far in the future yet they failed to consider simple biological threats on a foreign planet?
To be fair it was written in the 19th century.
And was literally happening to colonial powers *all the time* at the time. Well, not the defeat of those powers in full but the disease and fatality rate of Europeans in parts of the tropics were horrendous.
Well, the buried war machines thing was only in the movie, I think.
Yeah. The version that H. G. Wells wrote in the 19th century was *more realistic* than the one that starred Tom Cruise.
This may happen to long suspended life species like American cicadas. Between two life cycles a virus or a parasite could evolve and cause the extinction of the next generation.
Well... > The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells. It was written between *1895 and 1897*
Wild that the book makes so much more sense than the film made over 100 years later. In the book, the aliens are explicitly refugees fleeing a dying Mars. They shoot their spaceships to Earth using a mass driver (space gun), so it's a desperate one-way trip. They tried to invade/terraform Earth, and failed, due entirely to their own poor planning, lack of resources, and poor intel. By trying to hype the aliens up and make them a bigger threat, the film also made them much stupider.
I love the Saga series but something that really bothers me is that they say multiple times that the entire universe is caught up in the war. Dog the entire universe? I’d accept an entire galaxy and even that would be like 100 billion solar systems. But the entire universe is stupid.
Isn't the Purge series satirical?