I usually say bad things about most movies — you have to admit, it’s not exactly a testimony to creativity or intellectual accomplishment when most of the movies coming out of Hollywood seem to be a) remakes, b) movies based on comic books, or c) remakes of comic book movies. Or worse, the movie version of a video game. I won’t say we’ve reached the nadir, though, because they can always sink lower, but now there’s a movie of a cell phone game, The Angry Birds Movie. I’m skipping it. I’m waiting for Pong: The Movie, or perhaps I’ll even hold out for Pong III: The Paddling.
But you’ll never guess who loves this movie: white supremacists. Finally, someone is catering to the simple-mindedly violent and bigoted Americans, because no other movie has managed to tap so deeply into simple-mindedness. The VDARE review is amusing, in a horrifyingly stupid sort of way.
“Angry Birds” is funny, entertaining, and best of all, right wing and hated by SJWs. It’s PG, so it might be a bit too edgy for very small children, but if you are ok with that, take your kids to see it today!
Dude. It’s a cartoon based on a simplistic, repetitive phone game, and you’re projecting your racism onto it. Most SJWs don’t even care enough to hate it, so that’s even more projection. You couldn’t be projecting more even if you were a little red cartoon bird loaded onto a catapult.
But I’m happy for you that finally the intelligence of movies have descended to your level. Now just wait for the Tetris movie to be made, which you’ll interpret as a horror story about weird sexual combinations.
I cannot believe you wrote that last sentence without a link to last Sunday’s Oglaf.
I’m confused — aren’t all the birds of different colours?
I wish it was mostly an April Fool’s joke, but not only is the Tetris movie an actual thing, it’s part of a trilogy and being branded as a Sci-Fi Thriller…
http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/05/17/tetris-movie-will-be-a-sci-fi-thriller-part-of-a-trilogy
Whoa, you’re right: that Oglaf would be a perfect rationalization for a Tetris movie.
Wait… I saw a joke trailer a few years ago for a “Tetris Movie”, but that was intended as parody… did some studio exec see it and think it was a serious proposal?
It is? It isn’t hated by this SJW. This SJW is going to bother watching it. Projection simply doesn’t cover this, we need a new word.
The closest I’ve gotten to anything Angry Birds was watching the Apocalyptica video for On Finn Ice.
#3: Holy crap. An $80,000,000 movie.
That should be isn’t.
I remember so many people talking about how “addictive” the AB game was. I tried a couple of rounds and found it utterly childish and totally uninteresting. And the movie trailer has done nothing to pique my interest.
I’m afraid that reading the movie as xenophobic is perfectly plausible. Watching it with my son, the whole theme of “our beautiful island is overrun by teeming masses of pigs, and why won’t anybody do anything about it?” definitely struck me that way.
And I’m far from alone in this interpretation; a number of critics cited by Rotten Tomatoes had the same reaction.
Hmm… Now I want to see David Cronenberg’s “Tetris,” though I’m pretty sure I’d have to scour myself with steel wool afterward.
In an almost on-topic tangent, I read that the Soska sisters may be remaking Cronenberg’s “Rabid.” That’s one remake I definitely want to see.
If we said “SJWs agree Manos: the Hands of Fate is an awful, painful movie” would it suddenly get rave reviews from white supremacists?
Someone convinced me to watch “X-Men, Days of Future Past” on Netflix this weekend. What an awful movie that was. I couldn’t continue to watch, and just gave up. I think I should be paid to sit through an ordeal like that. Bwerk.
On a related note, someone recently tweeted that he had seen an advance screening of the new Ghostbusters film, and was promptly denounced by the “anti-SJW” folks as “shitting on the original.” Which was ironic given that the positive tweet came from Dan Akroyd.
The X-Men movies are an over-stuffed, godawful mess. What kills me about them is the pseudo-science: whoever writes them doesn’t understand evolution, genetics, or molecular biology.
Just give up. Call it “magic”. I could just sit back and accept it if they weren’t constantly trying to pretend mutations can give you the power to shoot laser beams out of your eyeballs, as long as you aren’t wearing sunglasses.
They aren’t laser beams. They’re concussive force blasts :P
(yes, I’m aware that makes no sense either)
#10 Matthias Neeracher: “I’m afraid that reading the movie as xenophobic is perfectly plausible. Watching it with my son, the whole theme of “our beautiful island is overrun by teeming masses of pigs, and why won’t anybody do anything about it?” ”
Because Blue Lives Matter.
Only trailer that I’ve seen involves an eagle pissing and aside from being utterly crass, invokes in my mind the transphobic scene from Ace Ventura. Is this directed by Uwe Boll? Please tell me it is, I want to see the perfect storm of badness.
I have only seen this one movie, but I totally agree. The easy computer effects, the terrible acting, the nonsensical “science” claims … Sure, it’s fiction, but should it not have some degree of believability? It is so irritating, I feel I should be paid to endure such idiocy.
The Tetris movie budget is probably necessary. It must be very expensive to do CGI that mimicks 256 colours VGA faithfully. They’ll probably run out of money before they can finish the movie theme on a PC speaker.
Well then, I demand recoil. The guy’s glasses slip after a particularly bad sneeze and he is thrown back through several concrete walls by the recoil, breaking his spine in 157 places.* Oh, and three quarters of New York are vaporised by the errant blast, but the movie is really about Guy’s tragedy.
*Owing to miraculous mutations this only leaves him unable to wriggle his left big toe. Well, not unable, really, but it’s not as responsive as it used to be. Sometimes he gets phantom toe syndrome and he has an act as a contortionist. Every movie must have a happy ending.**
**This is still pretty high-brow by superhero movie standards, I say! An emotional rollercoaster of Guy struggling through years of physical therapy to regain partial toe movement.
Other movies that SJWs hate:
* Battlefield Earth
* Ishtar
* Birdemic
Come on, all you patriotic Americans, it’s your duty to prop up these films.
Is “hated by SJWs” a selling point now? There was a guy on a Steam forum thread thing a few weeks back who said he made a point of eating at Chick-Fil-A because those terrible SJWs didn’t like it. I don’t understand that at all. Who has the time to be so obsessed with sticking it to someone that… you’ll do something they won’t notice and which won’t have any impact on them out of spite? I don’t get it.
I can’t say I’m particularly eager to go see Angry Birds. I occasionally play one of the games on the bus – Stella, because I’m a dirty SJW who likes the girl one – but it’s not exactly packed with story or interest. I might try to find out if Worms is available for Kindle, actually, since that has similar, but more complex and more varied ballistic trajectory dealies going on. Erm, yeah, anyway, I don’t hate the movie, but I’m pretty much definitely not going to go to see it. I think I’ll probably just wait for Ghostbusters & Star Trek in July. I’m tempted to be tempted by Warcraft, because I kinda like the lore and I want to believe that it’s based on the stories that grew up around the original 2 games with Medivh, Ner’zhul, and other nerdily named characters, but something tells me it’s probably fluffy stuff, designed only to reinvigorate the player base of WoW, and not actually worth watching. Of course, having said that, there’s not much else on this month. Maybe I’ll just watch a dvd if I get the urge?
Do you know what else Essjaydubyas hate? Nitric acid.
Every ratio-logic alpha patriarch should guzzle that stuff and stick it to the cultural marxists.
I’d just like to point out that, as bad as Angry Birds is, it’s still bound to be better than the Street Fighter or Mario Brothers movies.
….really?
Let’s recap: an isolated, relatively stable, community with a relatively egalitarian system of government and a diversity of different appearances suddenly finds a sailing ship, unlike anything they’ve ever seen before, pulled up on the beach. A small number of people who all have basically the same skin tone and characteristics, a noticeably pale-ish and “unnatural” complexion, depart the boat and offer friendship and trade, including demonstrations of technology the community hasn’t thus far developed. Then not only does it turn out the first ones off the boat lied about how many had come, suddenly there are more and more of them arriving, and when they decide they want a resource the community isn’t willing to give up to them, they take it by a combination of force and deception, leaving ruins behind them. Then, when the birds counter-attack to take bake their eggs, the pigs’ dialogue with each other paints the birds as the aggressors and accuses them of betrayal.
And there are white people who watch this and see it as an endorsement of anti-not-white-person immigration and racism? O.o
Because I’m getting a VERY different allusion here.
So am I. But then, one doesn’t expect the anti-SJW folks to do very deep thinking. Maybe a couple of microns at best.
Eh, I kind of liked the Silent Hill movie and even the first Resident Evil one wasn’t that awful. But video game movies usually suck, yeah. Even the ones I enjoy are mostly guilty pleasures. Then again, movies are made about any kind of nonsensical and distant source. Think Battleship.
#24 that’s a very interesting interpretation, and one I hadn’t really considered. However, even if you interpret the Pigs as “white”, the movie still has xenophobic undertones. Consider this exchange:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpw37HP1e1U&feature=youtu.be&t=1m15s
“You are making our guests feel unwelcome” — “And you’re not asking basic questions”.
Is it really unreasonable to see this as a nod to anti-immigrant bigotry, rather than taking a brave stand against colonialism, as your interpretation would suggest?
I watched Sparrows (Lillian Gish) but it wasn’t about birds.
Yep it is a nod to anti-immigrant, either the immigrants are Europeans, or they are brown-skinned folks from many countries in the last century.
It all depends on who you think the angry birds should represent. I’ll go with the First Nations as the angry birds.
Getting mad at the X-franchise for including comic-book mutation ‘science’ is silly; it’s about as valid a complaint as griping that Star Trek uses FTL travel. There’s lots of legitimate complaints to make about the movies, but griping about the on-the-cover premise, which has been set for roughly half a century, is just petty-mindedness.
@Athywren
The same kind of people who turn on as many lights and electrical devices and faucets as they can during Earth Hour, or who “roll coal” simply because Barack Obama is in favor of alternative fuel. Right-wingers who are so wrapped up in ideology that they’ll act in a manner completely contrary to their own best interests if it means they can feel they’ve bloodied the liberals’ noses somehow.
American culture in general and American cinema specifically have enough issues, don’t put Angry Birds on us.
That shit is a problem with Finnish culture.
Oh and because you mentioned pong…
Remember the recent Starbucks-is-killing-Christmas-with-their-atheist-cups brouhaha? There was a flurry of smug guys telling the hapless baristas their name was Merry Christmas so they had to write it on the cup. Then they filmed their cups. Take that Obama!
re #4:
I too was puzzled. Akroyd tweeted a compliment of the movie, tweeting [paraphrased], “pretty damn funny, maybe funnier than the original, and I was one of the originals. kudos” To which some asshat accused Dan of shitting on the original.
Like there is no reasonable gradation of funniness. That to say something is funnier than something else is equivalent to calling the first a piece of crap. Even if one thinks the original was funnier, to say something is funnier does not mean the original was awful.
[ugh. sorry to start getting too long winded to say practically nothing]
@30
Agreed. Sorry, sometimes I really don’t want scientific accuracy at all. Let me dream of a world where stuff like easy space travel or superpowers are possible, please. The world’s awful, and I’d much rather have fanciful escapist media than shitty realism.
For the record, I actually enjoyed most of the X-Men movies, save the third one and the first wolverine spinoff. The casting was pretty great and they had everything I want out of a superhero movie.
@#23, microraptor
To be fair, the people who financed the Super Mario Brothers movie wanted a kids’ movie based on the games, gave the project to a couple of directors who wanted to make an R-Rated sci-fi film without realizing it, and only came back to check on things after said directors had already spent essentially all of the budget on Blade Runner-style sets and props, so that their replacements couldn’t afford to change the visuals back and had to improvise a story around what had been built already. Strange, but apparently true.
Hollywood is out of ideas. They resort to every other medium for ideas to put into movie form.
Reboots, sequels, continuations, were just the first hints of this pathology. After exploiting comic books and children stories (EG Paddington Bear, and the upcoming Winnie the Pooh, etc) They’ve descended onto video games. Even children’s toys. EG Transformers, Lego. Even board games; eg Battleship. Even card games, eg: Magic: The Gathering.
Tron was the precursor of the current trend, resulting in PacMan as a movie’s invading monster, and the impeding Warcraft,
Now Angry Birds? They’ve moved passed video-games-from-video-consoles to time-filler-apps-from-mobile-phones (smart?hones [defocus the ? to make it approximate a P])
ack. rambling
That is my impression as well. I also think they have dumbed down their stories to the bottom and can’t go any lower. Special effects are no longer special. These are just cheap computer graphics, and they don’t even make any effort anymore to make them look believable because the TwitFace generation is too shallow to even notice.
An obvious sign of lack of inspiration is that – in many movies – they have to fuck every other word. “Fuck” generally has the same effect on me as exclamation marks in written texts: it indicates that there is no message worth paying attention to, and I dutifully fall asleep during such movies. The only thing I still seem to be enjoying to some degree are documentaries, but even those contain so much sensationalism, obvious trickery and cheap Ram-Silverado manly-man voices I feel like puking much of the time.
Theater is out of ideas. It’s all the same shows over and over again. How many times can you remake Hamlet. Hell, they don’t even bother to change the script, they just get a new cast and do it again.
I like that remark. It is exactly what I am doing when playing music, dancing and singing.
The difference would probably be that theatre and others generally try to present the best performance they can, whereas it seems to be going in the opposite direction where movies are concerned.
If Hollywood is so out of ideas, perhaps they should look to some of those diverse, less-represented demographics among themselves for some fresh material. I hear some of them are pretty good.
I now love being called a Politically correct and a Social Justice Warrior.
Because I would rather be correct than wrong and I do not want to be a Social Injustice Thug
I’m waiting for Bart B. Van Bockstaele to start yelling for the kids to get off his lawn.
It’s your time to waste. Bart B. Van Bockstaele happens to love young goats; on his lawn, and – sadly – in a stew as well.
How in buggeration is the Angry Birds movie, of all fucking things, meant to be construed as some right-wing anti-SJW hit-piece? Last I heard, Angry Birds was subversive approval of martyring yourself in the act of destroying illegal settlements built by fascist pigs, and as such was conveying a distinctly pro-Palestine, anti-Zionist message. At least, that’s how I phrased it in a whimsical facebook post.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s “unreasonable” but given the prevalence of the cultural markers/trappings of colonialism in the story it’s kind of reaching,
….is there some reason this “request timed out” thing hasn’t been fixed yet?
Hollywood is only a tiny part of movie making. The mainstream is what it always was; an industrial machine creating an output with broad appeal in order to maximise profit.
Remakes have existed for as long as movies have existed. Adaptations of popular cultural sources have been around just as long. Although remake/reboot/adaptation shouldn’t be dirty words – Scarface, The Thing, Heat, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Lion King.
Perhaps not all to your taste, but all with some merit, and all considered greats.
Good remakes find new audiences who aren’t receptive to an older style
Perhaps even the lesser ones can introduce people to the source material.
There are more movies being made now than ever, and the subject matter is much more diverse than ever. We have mainstream audiences attending films which would previously have been seen much more as special interest subjects, and that can only be good. Even if the subject isn’t handled that well (e.g. The Danish Girl). LGBT issues are better represented in the mainstream than ever, although not greatly. Aging, loneliness, disease, mental health, are all given much better treatment. Foreign language films are more widely distributed. Indie films can find an audience through VOD, where previously they would have languished on a shelf for want of a distributor.
Diversity is even being taken seriously – at least in the sense that it is seen as a reasonable topic for study and debate – by staid institutions such as the Academy and BAFTA, etc.
There will always be big studios chasing populist crowds, but the reality is that there has never been such an abundance of diverse filmmaking, you may just not be able to access it your local Multiplex.
The death of creativity as an old concern, and often heralded. Part of the problem is that, once you’very lived enough life, nothing is very surprising any longer.
Oh fuck off with this shit. No, young people aren’t uniquely awful. There have been crap movies before, and there will be in the future, and the special effects not being believable is a particularly stupid criticism of current movies, given that that’s one thing that has generally got better.
Re. remake: I want to see a David Lynch remake of The Hunger. With Marilyn Manson in the role previously played by David Bowie.
And I want a plausible explanation to how the discarded undead suddenly got the energy to revolt (BTW, the Tea Party types will probably identify with the rising undead, even though they are formerly vampiric mass murderers that have decayed and succumbed to progeria).
Suggestion: A remake of Plan Nine From Outer Space. I would love to see the idea being rejected by studio executives for being “too high-brow”.
PZ, I’m not *on* your lawn — I’ve never even been to Minnesota!
I have worked a bit on film special effects though. By definition, you’ll mostly only notice the ones that don’t look good. There’s a lot of special effects in movies now that you simply can’t see.
birgerjohansson, too late… http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2014319/
Precisely. The only good special effect is one that is so believable it goes unnoticed. It seems to me that many movies violate that principle, which is one of the reasons many people don’t like them.
In regard to films, today would have been the 90th birthday of the Norma Jean of Elton John fame, aka Marilyn Monroe, a much underrated person who got typecasted as a “dumb blonde”.
Bart@55: basically every film these days has VFX. Here’s a demo reel for a local VFX shop:
http://vfx-montreal.com/fr/studio/alchemy_24/
The octopus monster thing, sure, that’s obvious. The port scenes, it’s not obvious that it’s green-screened; there’s a couple where I have to think to figure out which is real and which is VFX. So if you think that special effects are obvious, that’s because you’re not even seeing a lot of special effects.
Sure. That is not a problem, I think. The problem is when they are obvious. A noticeable special effect is, in my opinion, a bad effect. It is probably why Jurassic Park was such a compelling movie. While the dinosaurs are obvious fakes, they were so well done, that the fakery wasn’t quite so noticeable at the time. Unfortunately, the effects haven’t improved (much) since the original movie. Also, in the past, when models were hanging from ropes, that was OK. It became far less OK when they were visible. A good example of that, I think, would be Logan’s Run. The ropes the people “on carousel” were hanging on are so obvious the illusion is destroyed.
Thanks for the interesting link. While I have gone in a completely different direction, I am not unfamiliar with that business. virtual special effects. I used to be a commercial developer for the long defunct Amiga computer.
On originality:
When J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books first came out many Neil Gaiman fans noted a certain similarity between Harry and Time Hunter, Gaiman’s protagonist in The Books of Magic, a young British boy, bespectacled and unimposing, largely ignored in his home-life, who was destined to become the greatest mage of the modern era.
When asked about the rather obvious parallels, Gaiman (always a class act) replied, “Honestly, I thought we were both cribbing from E. B. White.”
The remakes of Fright Night, The Thomas Crowne Affair and The Karate Kid were all at least as good as the originals (and honestly, I’d rank two of them far above their progenitors).
And “Hollywood” gave us Zootopia just this year, a film that teaches children that social justice is both difficult AND vitally necessary, which is a message most modern adults should’ve gotten more in their own childhoods.
Finally: Anyone complaining about the generation after theirs is basically saying, “My generation made inept parents.”
So when you said:
You really meant that they make herculean efforts to make special effects look believable nowadays, but sometimes they don’t quite succeed and they release the film anyway, and the modern audience excuses the B-grade graphics for being only somewhat better than the absolute best films you remember from 20 years ago.
I’m not on your lawn either, and your teeth are probably on the side of the sink in the bathroom.
i want to retract my previous rant against hollywood. That rant was based only on a cursory view of the offerings from hollywood. Remakes/reboots/sequels, etc. can be good and sometimes are better than the originals. Hollywood can be a cash grabber by producing any drivle they think will make money. So of course they go after whatever is popular in other media. Angry Birds being a prime example. Some remakes try to be a little too exact, such as the shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, which was a totally pointless homage. Others try to inject a little creativity, such as West Side Story being a modernization of R&J.
The new Ghostbusters is ~odd~. Before complaining, see it first then informed criticism is valid.
I see the appeal…those RWNJs should love to play suicide bomber via this game. Sounds perfectly hypocritical…but what better way to see both sides of asymmetrical warfare…
I used to think that claiming to know what is going on in someone’s head, was a religionist exclusive. Thank you for making it clear to me that I was mistaken.
I went to see the Angry Birds movie this past weekend.
I found it to be quite amusing.
I also thought the messages in the movie weren’t exactly terrible.
The bird civilization, while very egalitarian also hero worships an absentee ‘god’ (of sorts) who turns out to be utterly fucking useless. They are also intensely against expression of negative emotions, much to their detriment.
As alluded above they are ‘discovered’ by ocean going asshats who trick them into friendship while completely destroying their homes and pillaging them for prized resources.
How dare they take a cultural phenomenon and build a story around it and then present that story to the masses? Frankly this is about the first game to movie build that has been anything other than painful to view (although the final credits of Doom almost made the whole movie worth it…)
@21 athywren — oh man, it kills me at food courts and in airport terminals how there will be fifteen other options, all with limited or no wait, and yet there will be thirty people in line at Chik-fil-A. And nearly all of them will be sporting tribal markers — a Harley-Davidson t-shirt, a Christian message t-shirt, a ZZ Top beard, some sort of assertive Promise Keepers sort of totem, that arms crossed stance, that tight-jawed furrowed-brow look of constant constipation, to show that they are a Stupid White Male, goddamnit. Plus a few pissy little church ladies punctuating the half hour wait.
Sadly, I think the public gay-bashing has probably increased business for Chik-fil-A. Meanwhile, Hylah (at Cooking With Hylah) can show you how to make your own perfect mock-up of their signature sandwich, without giving them one red cent. You can Google it. I’d watch it on her own website rather than YouTube, if you want to avoid the godawful comment abuse she received from Libertarians (who hate demsefs any liberty for Da Gayz!).
Regarding CGI:
I don’t see it as much of a problem, even if it doesn’t look perfect. It can be distracting but doesn’t really ‘ruin’ a movie for me. A while back Mano Singham had a post showing pictures of movie scenes before and after the green screens went into effect. It surprised me to see how much is being done on a computer because you (or at least I) don’t notice it at all.
When the effects are more obvious that isn’t a problem either. What is most disconcerting, in my opinion, is when you mix picture perfect effects with really bad ones. A pertinent example was the second Hobbit movie: perfectly good effects all the way until you see the liquid gold at the end, which looked like it might be a cheesy* screensaver. Quite a step down.
I think it’s the same with all types of immersion. As long as the level of realism or the quality of the effects is constant it’s usually fine. It may not be perfect but it is the norm for the movie or show. It’s the jarring transitions that break the immersion. As long as a movie manages to avoid that it’s not much of an issue.
*not literally, of course. Although…
So much the better. There certain less-than-perfect computer graphics I can live with as well, usually because the effects are not central to the story. The space station in Babylon 5 would be an example of that.
One of the Hulk movies was filmed in my Toronto neighbourhood. It was funny to see how they used a few sticks with markers on them for what was to become the Hulk later on. I still have pictures I made while they were filming. Since I am not a fan, I have never seen the movie so I don’t know what the end result looked like. I may have seen a trailer, but I’m not sure it was of the same movie.
That’s a good comment. I haven’t seen any Hobbit movies, but it certainly reminds me of the X-Men movie I saw a few days ago. Many effects weren’t half bad, a lot were quite good, but when the people turn blue, the effect is just terrible.
The Angry Birds game is itself a remake/ripoff of a game about catapulting castles – I played it but can’t look it up on this device. So much that the right wing likes is stolen.
Yeah, but how many people are aware of the history of colonialism versus people being aware of the current narrative of horrible immigrants overrunning the Western world? BTW, blood libel stories are very popular among the extreme right*.
*In Germany muslims apparently rape white girls en masse, kill them and then turn them into Döner Kebap.
Also, it’s OK. You can have Angry Birds, we keep Ghostbusters
@ Bart 55, 58, 63:
Okay, SERIOUSLY, me? You’ve closed a brazillion blockquote tags in your life, and you choose your first comment here to be when you finally forget to?
I think it would be interesting to go back and read criticism of movies in the past to see how a similar critique is repeatably made from time to time.
In the “golden days” of Big Hollywood Studios they made many unimaginative crap movies maybe mostly dumb movies but Hollywood has from the very beginning been about making money and not art. That the occasional artistic classic gets made may be just dumb luck.
As far as all the effects go much of the time what you are seeing is mostly a cartoon , with the intoxication of the newness of high quality and relative ease of using CGI supplanting story and writing.
Time well tell how much “art” will get made in the near future, Hollywood is about the money after all.
I for one would like to see heroic realism depicted once in a while even if it turns out to be a little grim. Even an epic Sci-Fi movie that was “realistic” and faithful to science (I wont hold my breath)
A plug I saw “Money Monster ” last weekend and am sure there was some nu-noticed CGI but its right out of next months headlines!
uncle frogy
I always think that for all that the biology of the organism is complete nonsense, the Andromeda Strain does a remarkable job of showing how systematic deductive study could tackle such a global threat.
Equally, I think that although it has convenient plotting and anot early McGuffin which is clearly unrealistic, The Martian displays many elements of a scientific and engineering approach to resolving a survival drama.
Both of these films do a very good job of demonstrating the mundane process of developing applied technologies. Nothing is easily achieved, and it is very clear that luck as well as inspiration play roles in outcomes.
I’might not sure that there are obvious examples of Sci-Fi where absolute realism and scientific credibility are adhered to. But how many historical dramas are faithful to history? How many action films realistically portray the use or effects of weaponry? Fiction generally deals first and foremost in entertainment, or at least emotional engagement, rather than strict realism. Verisimilitude, rather than accuracy.
Autocorrelation has something to answer for in my last comment.
*Correction.
My phone has become very obstructive.
The problem with many bad CG effects isn’t always the CG effects themselves. It could be bad choreography (things moving in “impossible” ways), bad scene preparation (insufficient data to properly light the subject the CG is inserting), or just bad motion capture (using motion movement models that would be fine for a game or animated feature, not a live-action film), or simply cheaping out and using CG on parts that would be better served by different methods or mixed methods.
Honestly, I think people just forget that bad practical effects used to be just as common as bad CG is today. How many films had painfully obvious puppets that failed to be expressive, or piss poor props that were obviously styrofoam and cardboard, or easily visible wires, or poorly framed and lit scenes that made everything look terrible? Or how many movies jarringly cut into stop motion for certain scenes (I’m not arguing that all stop motion is bad, only that it is often badly used in films it doesn’t belong in) or bad compositing (either travelling mattes or the pre-CGI blue/screen screen)? The answer is lots, of course.
@#68, Menyambal
Crush the Castle by Armor Games, and its sequel Crush the Castle 2. Interesting graphics (toy soldiers inside the buildings) and there’s a level editor so you can build your own in the second game. I specifically avoid having Flash these days so I can’t play them any more, but they were much better games than Angry Birds, as far as I’m concerned.
Bart B. Van Bockstaele #67
Really?
You stayed around the set, took pictures, felt superior but
didn’t see the movie because you’re ?
In the beginning, before Hollywood was even a thing, movies were literally disposable. The celluloid was recycled to make new films, or was destroyed so the silver in it cold be salvaged. Some studios destroyed films just so rivals couldn’t steal and make a profit from them.
Both Angry Birds and Crush the Castle are just derivatives of old school artillery games, which are some of the oldest computer games around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game
“We used to be dinosaurs.”
Ken Ham will not be pleased!
@80
I was reminded of Gorilla (in basic) were you threw exploding artillery bananas at another Gorilla across a flat cityscape when I watched someone playing Angry Birds.
The difference was you could play against another player and “shoot” at each other.
Seemed an appropriate game for “computers” to calculate artillery banana trajectories .
uncle frogy
@#80, MassMomentumEnergy
I’ve seen that claim a lot, but Crush the Castle’s mechanics are somewhat different from the artillery games I’ve seen. (Usually, you’re trying to cause the structure to collapse, rather than trying to aim for a particular target.)
They are just making the “particular target” a non-obvious solution to a puzzle. Slightly more novel, but given the thirty year time span, they better have come up with something more than snazzier graphics.
You are lying or delusional, possibly both. If it is the first, look in the mirror, your answer is right there. If it is the second, seek help from a qualified psychiatrist. That’s not me.
I hope you’ll feel better soon.
On the Warcraft movie, which I saw this afternoon… it’s actually quite good. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not suggesting PZ should watch it, as I do not think it would, and do think it would not be his cup of tea, but it really was, in my opinion, a pretty good rendering – with far better graphics – of the story of the game, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans from ’95, and the narrative parts of the manual for Warcraft 2. Some bits annoyed me, and I can think of a few criticisms, but it was alright, I think. It ended with the obligatory lead in to a sequel, which I think I might indulge in if they do make it, if only to hear a Goblin yell “I CAN SEE MY HOUSE!” at some point.
@85
You can contradict someone’s assesment of you without doing the shitty “armchair psychologist” act. Cut that out.
@#84, MassMomentumEnergy
Most of the levels can be beaten multiple ways — so there’s no “particular target” — and there’s a certain amount of realistic physics simulation involved (knock away or destroy a piece of the castle and the rest will react accordingly) which traditional artillery games ignore completely.
What part of this is too hard for you to understand?
89.
Apparently, cut-and-paste is too tough for me.
Let’s try again:
What part of ‘That’s not me.’ is too hard for you to understand?
90.
It worked. Yaaay. I am so proud of myself now.
Some days, I miss the porcupine.
@90
Okay, let me make it easier.
Cut that out.