The local theater has been running a nominally SF movie for going on two weeks, and I have been tempted. I do love a glossy, shiny science fiction action movie with spaceships and derring-do and all that, but I have resisted, for two reasons.
It’s a Roland Emmerich movie. He’s a hack whose every movie has been an insult to the viewer’s intelligence, and while I can enjoy mindless entertainment, I cannot stomach anything as stupid as the trash he churns out.
It’s called Moonfall. I saw the trailer, and I swear to god, the premise is that the Moon…falls…into the Earth. I’m a mere biologist, but I am educated enough in basic physics to know that the idea is absurd. The whole idea of the movie smacked me hard in the brain, erasing all desire to actually see it.
But then, a third reason to avoid it popped up in my browsing. The Moon falling into the Earth? Ha ha. Do you think that was idiotic enough for Emmerich? No it was not. Here’s more.
When the moon’s orbit is found to be getting closer to Earth, it sets off tidal waves, upsets gravity, and interferes with the atmosphere. The moon is discovered to be an artificial megastructure, rather than an organic body, that is hollow inside, with the Apollo 11 mission having discovered its abnormalities and kept it secret. It transpires that a hostile artificially intelligent nano swarm has been drawing energy from the megastructure’s energy source – a captured white dwarf at its centre – which is the cause of the moon’s destabilization.
A small team including John Bradley’s conspiracy theorist, Halle Berry’s NASA executive, and Patrick Wilson’s disgraced former astronaut, heads inside the moon with the intention of destroying the nano swarm using an EMP device. While there, they discover that the megastructure was built by humanity’s technologically advanced ancestors as a way of conserving life and repopulating after their AI became sentient and intent on destroying them. The trio learns that the moon – and other megastructures like it – was constructed and seeded with their ancestors’ genetic code as a kind of ark designed to seek out new hospitable parts of the universe in which to rebuild life. The nano swarm, we are told, is programmed to seek out organic matter in electronic environments, its primary purpose to seek out humanity and destroy it.
Did I just spoil the movie for you? Too bad. Tough. I’ve done you a favor. You don’t really want to see it anyway, do you? Unfortunately, someone read that script and decided to plop down millions of dollars to actually make it. The only question I have is whether it will out-stupid The Core.
Further spoilers: I haven’t seen it, and haven’t read any other plot summaries, but I predict that at the end our intrepid heroes will stumble across a techno-gimmick that abruptly and completely ends the threat, and everyone lives happily ever after. I don’t need to see it to know that. It’s a Roland Emmerich pile of shit.
Oh boy. For his next movie, Emmerich is going to feature a dim witted villain based entirely on you. (e.g. the incompetent NY mayor in Godzilla based on Roger Ebert who gave a scathing review of Independence Day.)
It’s going be replaced in the theater later this week with Uncharted, which looks like a mindless stupid Mark Wahlberg vehicle.
I may never go to the movies again, at this rate.
“Spaceships and derring-do” Have you heard of the Space Captain Smith novels by Toby Frost?
It is set in a universe where the British Empire is still going strong,and Captain Isambard Smith
is the dashing hero,a decent granite jawed cove,and all round good egg.
There are not any spiders,but there are Ants.
I liked Stargate.
This sounds about as bad as the Doctor Who story Kill the Moon, so filled with inaccuracies the writer was criticised as incapable of thinking logically or using Google (paraphrase).
So, a Mark Wahlberg vehicle.
@ 4
I know! It wasn’t Oscar material but it was pulpy fun.
Someone is also minting MoonFall cryptocurrency. Just FYI. and Lion’s Gate created some Moonfall NFT’s as ads.
But … butt … but Halle Berry.
Also, we gots yer techno-gimmick right here — it’s Applied Phlebotinum.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppliedPhlebotinum
I really don’t like these big budget films that try and fail to be psychotronic. Mars Attacks! is the only one in this vein that msotly work but even there the film is too professional.
The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra series is the best I have seen for intentional psychotronic films.
That’s just what we need right now while thousands of people are dying because they believe stupid conspiracy theories – a movie about a scientific conspiracy with a conspiracy theorist as a lead character. Very responsible filmmaking.
I think it might be best for Samwell Tarly to go back to the wall after this turd of a movie.
“I swear to god, the premise is that the Moon…falls…into the Earth.”
Pffft!
Space 1999 provided the true physics of the Moon’s orbit: a nuclear waste dump on the Moon (because, why wouldn’t you?) explodes. Said explosion does not seriously damage the moon, nor Moonbase Alpha, nor the people living there, but it does accelerate the Moon out of orbit and into interstellar space fast enough to visit a new solar system each week, but not so fast that the tinkertoy rockets from the moonbase can’t visit new worlds in said solar systems and have adventures and still get back to the moonbase.
moarscienceplz@12 You’d still need a lot of propellant relative to the mass of the moon to change the orbit by that much. I only watched a few episodes of Space 1999 but I doubt they got it right.
I have been trying to think of how this could actually work, and it’s not literally impossible, but it requires a lot of implausible assumptions about what’s inside the moon. Maybe equal parts baking soda and vinegar in separate sections. Oops, somebody breached the divider and OMG the moon is being accelerated into the earth by a giant baking soda volcano on the lunar far side. Not too believable, but at least no nanotech is needed. If you replace the baking soda with antimatter previously contained by [mysterious alien technology] you might get the energies you needed, but you also need to propel it in one direction as opposed to just blowing up into pieces.
The most believable way to shift the moon’s orbit would be for an asteroid to hit it, and even then it wouldn’t change all that much. Also, it would just be another movie about a killer asteroid.
@wcaryk
“But … butt … but Halle Berry.”
I see what you did there.
davidc1@3,
“The tea must flow!”
wcaryk@8 OT I am really stuck on the hyphenation of “con- trolling” the weather in that comic.
It’s a con! It’s a troll! No, it’s both. We’re being con-trolled. (Years ahead of its time too.)
PaulBC @#13
Ah, but you forget about the green cheese! I hypothesize that an enormous chamber full of cheese gas was breached by the explosion, thus causing a lunar fart of hyperluminous speed. Of course, the smell of such a fart would certainly have extinguished all life on Earth, a quarter of a million miles away, but such is the price that must be paid for a Gerry Anderson telly masterpiece!
Almost all space opera SF violates special relativity by assuming FTL travel. I suppose you could argue that special relativity is not “basic physics”, but I’d like to read/see more* that admits that no, we really can’t travel, or send information, faster than light, and that means space is really big.
*Recent favourite along these lines: Charles Stross’s Neptune’s Brood (succesor to Saturn’s Children, but stands on its own), which I have a hunch he wrote in response to a challenge such as: “OK Charles, write a novel that includes intelligent cephalopods and an interstellar banking scam, but without FTL!”.
@3 davidc1 (are you me? signed, davidc2) Thank you for the Toby Frost recommendation; I had not heard of him but after reading the blurb for book 1 (of 6) I am hooked:
That is edging up to Hitchhiker’s territory. “Fugitive sex toy,” snerk.
KG@18
“banking scam” must have primed my brain to see “FTL” as “NFT” for a second.
Now I am wondering if you could have a science fiction scenario with relativistic limits in which the interstellar economy consists entirely of trading NFTs through blockchains. It seems unlikely to me, but it might be just the right time to publish such a novel to a receptive audience.
I once had a discussion with a coworker in which I claimed that economic value can’t really grow exponentially (adjusted for inflation), because accessible commodities grow at most cubically with an expanding sphere at lightspeed. He argued that the value could exceed that of the raw materials by an arbitrary factor, and now I wonder if my instincts are as primitive as a gold standard advocate. Assuming P != NP, there could be an informational artifact, provably solving a satisfiability problem that would in principle require more than the lifetime of the universe to compute. What would be the value of that? Maybe interstellar trade could consist of such discoveries, assuming at least that they had some use (unlike cryptocoins and NFTs).
Back to reality, market value requires a buyer, and even if you think you have uniquely valuable IP, you can’t buy, say, a star system with it unless someone is willing to sell it to you. It’s a white elephant. So I still don’t see how you have value that exceeds its conversion into commodities.
Sometimes interstellar trade makes me think of the Silk Road. Romans valued silk, but knew virtually nothing about their trading partners. I’m sure that premise has been explored in science fiction somewhere, but I like the idea of being linked to other extraterrestrial civilizations through trade without any feasible means of actually visiting them.
@15 Indeed it must.
@19 Happy to help.Ever since that ratbag Terry Pratchett done up and died on us I have been
trying to find,not a replacement Author,but someone with a mad imagination like his.
So far I have found three other mad bastards.
Toby Frost.
Jasper Fforde.
Robert Rankin.
Can’t be doing with serious fiction anymore,if I need to feel depressed I have got loads of History books for that.
How many of the ignorant individuals who believe Apollo 11 was fake will happily see this? I’m neither a biologist nor physicist and know the moon is moving away from the Earth (re: the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment).
In the Guy Pearce film “The Time Machine”, the detonation of a moon base causes it to fracture, leading to environmental destruction and humans dividing into two species (those above and below ground). That was pure fantasy, yet sounds more believable than “Moonfall”.
Oh gads, Space 1999, I’d totally forgotten that travesty. If I’m recalling correctly (albeit incompletely), that was the garbage which once used something like “nanometre” as a unit of time, and also as a unit of mass(? weight?). Something absurd like that… I (vaguely) recall an article / critique which looked into that particular error, and (as I now recall) found that the writer simply liked the word, and someone (the producer?) claimed its inaccurate use didn’t matter because the series was obviously fiction.
I’d like to know what happens to the moon’s angular momentum. It’s conserved, so the Earth would acquire an enormous amount of added spin.
OK, I actually watched the movie. Didn’t pay anything, other than time to watch it, hell, the fuckers owe me money, as that’s time of my life I’m never getting back.
Nor would I want that time back, lest the distilled stupidium contaminate my three remaining functional brain cells!
So, there’s a white dwarf powering the lunar space station/battleshit EccentriaGallumbits, which makes it the same physical size as earth, with half to three quarters of the mass of the sun and magic makes the gravity cease to exist. Probably the Space 1999 RonCo MagicNuke, which fixes everything from rogue flies on the wall to annoying Russian cities and propelling moons at acceleration rates sufficient to dismantle said moon in microseconds.
The moon then not only passes its Roche limit, but actually physically grazes the earth, while entirely forgetting to generate even a modest sonic boom, reverses course and parks its lunar mass back into its orbit and negating all of the effects the entire fucking movie accumulated instantly.
Oh, while the moon is grazing the planet, incinerating everything and tossing shit about, helicopters are taking off to rescue Halle and Patrick, because NASA somehow is tracking them while the moon refrained from becoming a ring system and impersonated a moon sized wrecking ball that didn’t do much environmental damage and also mysteriously grew over double in physical size and not changing appearance one iota, Patrick “joining the moon” and literally hand waving commands to the base infrastructure, their busted to hell and gone spaceship being brand new in two minutes flat and the fifth wheel “scientist” suddenly joining the moon, despite not getting LunarWhammy powers and Patrick’s whammy disappearing as soon as he got near the spaceship that now flies like it’s a super fighter aircraft.
No, Space 1999 made more sense than this movie, despite MagicNuke propelling the moon at a rate that would disrupt the entire body into glowing dust – to velocities approaching zero tau, but refraining from any Lorentzian contraction.
Shit, Misfits of Science got science better, which is not to say that they ever approached right or correct.
Seriously, I’m highly upset! I misplaced my WhamCo Whammy so that I could smite everything and everyone who had anything to do with that entire misbegotten creation from the smacked lagoon.
So, I chose to instead sit on, in an attempt to hatch it, a Marshall Island cesium-137 and strontium-90 coconut. Maybe I’ll get superpowers or something… Well, me and my trusty sidekick, Magma Mutt, whose superpower is to melt fire hydrants in one lift.
Or to quote Ripley in Alien Resurrection (aka Alien 33 1/3), “Kill me, PLEASE!”… Let’s take off and nuke the site from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure…
Only because I’m lightly seared on the reality grill.
I kinda liked the Core but then I like silly movies and I had a little crush on the blond guy who played one of the geologists. . Yeah it was a stupid movie , I mean unobtainium, really !
I just watched an interesting little science cartoon on YouTube that explains what happens of the moon actually tries crashing into earth . Long story short it causes havoc then crumbles and forms a ring around the planet. The username is the German word for in a nutshell but I can’t spell it (or for that matter even pronounce it , ) so … . I’m not a astronomer or physicist so I’ll take their word until I get a better understanding of both fields
It’s very difficult to out-crazy David Icke when it comes to inventing theories about the Moon — he only believes it’s a trans-dimensional portal used by the reptilian shapeshifting aliens who have infiltrated the ruling classes of Earth — but Emmerich may have just done that.
This is the same guy who gave us “2012,” “Independence Day,” “The Patriot” (huh?), “Stargate,” and “The Day After Tomorrow.” And a few other things that were even sillier. Oh, and also “Midway,” which I thought was pretty decent.
It’s been some time since I watched a sci-fi film I actually enjoyed. The aliens attacking earth genre has devolved into a mind-numbing sameness. Ever notice that when the earth is attacked by advanced, space faring aliens their weapon systems are just a teeny-weensy bit more advanced than ours? Then a band of plucky loners, divorcees and outcasts finds their weakness and does them in? Did I mention space faring? These beings travel light years, in real time, in ships the size of small cities and all they can come up with are projectile weapons? Sometimes they do use directed energy weapons, but, as there is no god in heaven, are they ever shitty shots. Or, the writers fall back on the H.G. Wells theme of aliens succumbing to our diseases. En masse. WTF, the aliens might say, who knew that an earth virus would take us out? All that scouting we’ve been doing for the past century and we missed our Achilles heel. Even though we’re silicon based lifeforms the common cold was too much for us. Or maybe it was Covid to the rescue.
Now we have a film about the moon falling into earth? How does that even work? Does it come straight down like a ball into the Pacific, or does it slowly circle the earth in a death spiral? That could be cool and terrifying at the same time. As the moon passes overhead and it grows ever closer do people get pulled into the atmosphere only to fall to their deaths like millions of shrieking raindrops? Maybe I’ll give it a go when it comes to Netflix. Weed is now legal where I live. That could help. A lot.
@27,
The channel’s name is Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell.
@#30, R. L. Foster:
There are many reasons why you might not like the (comedy) anime series Mahou Tsukai Tai!, but not only does it have invading aliens who have weapons far, far beyond humanity, it gets the “no sound in outer space” part of the initial space battle right. (And also: the aliens are smart enough that they observe humanity instead of just immediately setting out to obliterate everything. Somewhere in the series there’s a scene of a levitating big jet-black alien orb waiting patiently at a pedestrian crossing for the lights to change.)
@ PaulBC :
Actually, the mostbelievable ways are those that ar ealready happenening where the Moon’s orbit is shifting now due to the tidal effect from earth – its gradually drifting away.
There’s also the miniscule but real change cause dby orbgravitatational slingshots by spaceprobes and passing comets and asteroids.
The very slow loss of mass by our sun due to fusion and the solar wind is also b>very gradually shifting its orbit along with others. A process that will accelerate when our Sun becoms a Red Giant star but probly won’t be enough to save our globe from being consumed along with Mercury and Venus.
Although Mercury’s eccentric orbit coyuld get more so and lead to a chaotic set of possible fates including impacting Earth or, I guess, our Moon..
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13757-solar-system-could-go-haywire-before-the-sun-dies/#ixzz7L0wdOwtZ
Then there’s this actual serious if speculative proposal :
https://www.livescience.com/65535-how-to-move-planet-earth.html
Which I guess would shift our natural satellite with it as well?
Then too there’s the also extremely remote especially for the short term potentail for our planet’s orbit tobe shifted bya passing rogue planet :
https://www.space.com/rogue-star-kick-earth-out-solar-system.html
Or I guess a passing brown dwarf or star instead. Soemthing that’s been discussed in better SF if memory serves.
^ Typo fixes for clarity with my apologies :
Actually, the most believable ways are those that are already happening
There’s also the miniscule but real change caused by gravitational slingshots by spaceprobes and passing comets and asteroids.
It’s sc-fi. Various premises have included FTL, time travel, wormholes, uploading consciousness, and dog knows what else.
Advanced culture builds a megastructure which starts falling towards Earth for some reason? Ho-hum. I suspect Doctor Who does far sillier stuff on a regular basis.
When I watch/read sci-fi, I take off my physics hat*. All that matters (well, mostly) is whether it’s a good yarn, with interesting characters, even with the ‘bad physics’.
*So, for example, the stuff about a white dwarf inside the Moon; I just forget what I know about white dwarves for the duration, and replace it with ‘super-duper power source’. The Roche limit? Artificial structures needn’t have the same limit as a rocky moon.
Rob:
Well, then, it’s just fi.
Without science, it ain’t science-fiction, it’s just fiction.
(I do wish more people would grasp this blatantly obvious point, but alas…)
What a maverick you are, John! You come up with your own peculiar definition and simply call it “blatantly obvious”. Do you think “historical fiction” is a contradiction in terms?
Not even Sci-Fi’s most out-there writers would have come up with that crapfest. I saw a commercial for it and immediately despised the creators of it.
Rob, sometimes your reflexive contrariness amuses me.
Well, if being pertinent and accurate is unorthodox these days, I can’t dispute I’m a maverick.
(Perhaps it’s true that expecting science in my science-fiction is a maverick move — to some)
Is it really that peculiar to you that science-fiction should include science?
(Why do you imagine the term is there, if so?)
You are attempting to intimate that supposedly I hold science-fiction to be a contradiction in terms. Weak. Of course there is actual science-fiction — it just has to somehow incorporate science.
As for “historical fiction” [sic], of course it’s not a contradiction in terms. It’s fiction plausibly set in a historical milieu, but of course it should not be anachronistic to merit the term.
Apparently, for you, romantic fiction need not include actual romance. Horror fiction need not include horror. And so forth.
As is often the case, you assume far too much. Your apparent reasoning seems to be that science fiction must involve only established science. By that reasoning, historical fiction should involve only established history. But that cannot be, because it’s fiction. You can’t seem to recognize your own petards as they hoist you.
Science is a human activity. As with all human activities, the places it might take us can be imagined. “Where might science take us” is a vast sub-genre of sci-fi, which you apparently refuse to recognize as such. Weird.
Nope, your own claim is that “for example, the stuff about a white dwarf inside the Moon; I just forget what I know about white dwarves for the duration, and replace it with ‘super-duper power source’.”
So… a white dwarf (Wikipedia):
“A white dwarf, also called a degenerate dwarf, is a stellar core remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. A white dwarf is very dense: its mass is comparable to that of the Sun, while its volume is comparable to that of Earth.”
(Think mass-energy conservation, think orbital mechanics; but sure, one can pick up an elephant inside an ant and not notice any weight in the hand)
Clearly, in your estimation (if you’re being honest, rather than just argumentative, which I don’t for one second believe) “Where might science take us” is somewhere where orbital mechanics and astronomy as we know it today are utterly wrong. Not just incomplete — wrongity-wrong wrong. And magic is a thing.
(Basically, Deepak Chopra territory. It’s quantum!)
Just for fun: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallARabbitASmeerp
A bit bored, so a bit more fun. Thanks, Rob!
me: “Is it really that peculiar to you that science-fiction should include science?”
you: “Your apparent reasoning seems to be that science fiction must involve only established science.”
me: “As for “historical fiction” [sic], of course it’s not a contradiction in terms. It’s fiction plausibly set in a historical milieu, but of course it should not be anachronistic to merit the term.”
you: “By that reasoning, historical fiction should involve only established history. But that cannot be, because it’s fiction.”
you: “You can’t seem to recognize your own petards as they hoist you.”
me: The irony is strong in you.
Two comments. One. In my formative years as a science fiction fan, the fans I knew all eschewed “sci-fi” (pronounced derisively as “sciffy”, and associated with “wearing Spock ears to the Trekkie con”) (“Trekkie” was also eschewed–in favor of “Trekker” I think.) It was typically shortened it to SF (which is problematic, because that’s what I call the city just north of me). Also, it was the style to wear an onion on your belt, but I digress.
And now I’m wondering if I hallucinated this time in the 80s when “sci-fi” was frowned upon, because I hear it a lot now from seemingly serious people with an interest in written science fiction. Or maybe the prohibition was local to my region. Anyway, old habits die hard, so I have to type out science fiction in full, avoiding both “SF” and “sci-fi.”
OK, second comment. I have no problem at all pulling in exotic, made-up science for whatever reason, or even the surreal (is Being John Malkovich science fiction? I would say it is, in the tradition of Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, though self-consciously mocking).
But if you’re going to run roughshod over science it ought to be in the service of something less pedestrian than “the moon falling out of the sky.” I mean, you have all this alien technology and it’s just a big collision disaster? I haven’t seen it so I could be wrong, but it doesn’t sound promising.
@36 John Morales
It arguably would have been better for the film’s writers had they firmly kept it in the “fantasy, but in space” category. Instead it’s a B-movie with bad science. Not just bad science, but conspiracy theorists who reject the scientific consensus and they’re proven right.
The best we can hope for is something bad yet entertaining to watch, like Troll 2. We’ll probably get another The Core.
PaulBC, you recollect correctly.
Back in the day, us nerds would distinguish between SF (hard science-fiction) and sci-fi (popular fiction but ostensibly in space or with smeerps).
(BTW — back in that day, high fidelity sound systems were popularised as lesser, “hi-fi” systems)
Then, of course, came the New Wave (ick!) and SF became Speculative Fiction.
But then, pretty much all libraries and shops have perennially conflated SF/sci-fi with fantasy, horror and supernatural fiction, so…
(I mean, C. S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy was classified as SF, rather than theology fiction)
—
Me, I don’t doubt this movie is SF — Silly Fiction.
@ PaulBC #44
So call it George, instead.
(It’s an Alien Nation reference.)
Space 1999 might have worked if the Moon was oscillating in and out of hyperspace, I think the book version went that road.
That said, it was made by the same company that made superanimatronic TV for kids and them went on to make the early seventies “UFO”.
The latter is great fun in a camp way, but makes no sense whstsoever.
.
För real, over-the-top insane SF, read the stuff by van Vogt.
PZ, to regain your faith in film, go and watch a film by Andrei Tarkovsky, preferably the 1972 version of Solaris!
(it is three hours long but is worth it. BTW there is a ten-minute sequence of a car travelling along a superhighway -shot in Japan. The reason for this sequence being inserted is, for a film team to travel abroad from the Soviet Union, they had better produce a result, but the site they really wanted to film was no longer available)
I’d pay to see a decent movie version of Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers.
Sci-fi at its finest! ;)
In terms of science fiction, the stuff that’s handwavium about things that we haven’t proved are not completely impossible (though astoundingly unlikely) such as FTL, wormholes, hyperspace etc. I accept as a shortcut to get the characters over astoundingly long distances in a short time. It’s when it does things that contradict fairly solid science for no real reason that I get cranky. (Like the Doctor Who kill the moon episode, which apart from the weird gravity effects apparently had the earth rotating on its axis in an hour. Not that anything had happened to it, they just assumed that’s how long it would take to see everyone’s lights.
Ignoring momentum is something I find difficult to believe so orbiting things falling straight down don’t work for me.
Better or worse than an elevator that goes through the center of the Earth? Or restarting the sun with a nuclear bomb? Or Something something Bruce Willis and an asteroid the size of Texas?
Ray, rhetorical questions? No worries. Count me in.
“Better or worse than an elevator that goes through the center of the Earth?”
Worse.
“Or restarting the sun with a nuclear bomb?”
Same.
“Or Something something Bruce Willis and an asteroid the size of Texas?”
Worse.
It’s almost as if the makers of this movie didn’t even try to get it past peer review. Next, comedians will start making jokes on stage too… not everything needs to be serious all the time.
Suggested “so bad it is good” film with astronomy content:
The islamic apologist film “Day (sic!) When Sun Rises In The West; Film That shocked the world”.
We follow four slacker 20something men in a muslim land, as portents of the end of days begin to stack up…
I love how they oversleep the event when the Earth starts rotating in the opposite direction!
John Morales @ 46
The trilogy by CS Lewis was hard to get through. Especially the third book sucked. They had a goddamn decapitated head kept alive by tubes and wires. Nuff said.
erik333, ’tis true, this is par for the course.
Um, it’s not that it’s not serious, it’s that it’s scientifically-illiterate and stupid.
After all, not every movie needs to be not stupid, right?
OT
The national butterfly center in Texas has had to close because of threats from Qanon followers who think it is used to smuggle children into the us for liberal pedophiles.
I am not making this up.
Isn’t Emmerick the guy who made the worst Godzilla movie ever? The one that made me want to see Mathew Broderick die a painful death by eviceration?
PZ et al.
There is a film titled “Titan” about a journey to this moon of Saturn, I am told it is decent.
NB it should not be confused with the horror film/Alien ripoff with Klaus Kinski that takes place at Titan.
Emmerich must read conspiracy theory literature. The idea of the Moon being hollow and/or artificial isn’t one he came up with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Moon
Physics so bad it offends a biologist
Which offers a neat bit of balance to creationism, which is biology to bad it offends a physicist.
The premise was immediately crazy, turning me away.
This was unlike the movie “Moon” where it took a while to learn the premise was that Big Business spent lots and lots of money in order to be evil.
Ariaflame @51:
I haven’t seen the film, so it may well be that the ‘explanation’ they give for the Moon spiralling in (or is it “falling straight in”?) is utter nonsense. But it’s supposedly a massive vessel meant to house (and transport?) a large number of humans. That it would have the ability to change its momentum shouldn’t be a huge shock. The most jarring thing I’ve read about the film is that this Ark was constructed billions of years ago by humans. Biology so bad it offends a physicist! Mind you, the same conceit was used in the Stargate TV franchise, and I still enjoyed that.
I still find FTL* more problematic than any of the ‘bad science’ I’ve read about in this movie. Because, you know, causality. But there have been so many stories with FTL that we now just seem to take it for granted. Including me!
As for the “white dwarf”. Meh. The sci-fi film that has some absurdly wrong use of terminology is quite common. Filmmakers aren’t generally particularly knowledgeable about that stuff. George Lucas thought parsec was a unit of time. I just think “lazy bastard” and move on with the story.
*By which I mean any way of getting from A to B in less time than it would take light to travel between them.
Rob
Re FTL. Just pretend that there is a special universal frame from which all FTL takes place. Giant ass pull, but it could be made consistent with special relativity without having temporal paradoxes.
You mean the human-like creatures called “the ancients”?
Ditto. Still my favorite tv show of all time.
Yes, Stargate was decent, at least there were no plot elements that were so silly I puked.
.
The French “Alphaville” from the late 60s might be worth a look, if you want a classic.
.
More Science fiction in film?
God Awful Movies just dropped ‘Atlas Shrugged part 3’ on Youtube, I need this “so bad it is good” stuff like it was drugs.
The peak of Sci-Fi at least on British TV, came with the sitcom, “Come Back Mrs Noah”.
re: FTL, I use some variation of the Niven-Pournelle equipotential thermonuclear poetic license machine. (See “the Mote in God’s Eye.”)
Raging Bee @68:
I like that!
Rob Grigjanis@64 Are you planning to see the movie? If it succeeds as entertainment, I’ll forgive everything else. It just doesn’t sound very promising to me. (And I haven’t even seen the latest Dune adaptation, which got good reviews).
The premise that the moon is a giant space ark has potential. That it’s falling into the earth just sounds stupid. That could be an incidental subplot, yet it’s the title of the movie. It is so close to getting hit by some other big rock, that I couldn’t care less if it’s the moon. Maybe there are people with deep-seated Chicken Little fears that the moon could fall out of the sky. I am not one of them. I am as likely to find myself suddenly “falling” up and away from the earth, and I don’t lose any sleep over that.
Turning the moon into advanced current-physics-defying technology just to change its orbit sounds like putting the cart before the horse.
PaulBC @70: I’ll give it a look when it comes to telly, I certainly don’t feel an urge to see it ASAP. But I did just see Dune. Loved it.
Why? If it’s a giant spaceship, with some sort of propulsion, it’s no more stupid than an orbiting manned ship firing its retro rockets to come back to Earth. I’d have to see the in-film explanation to judge whether or not it is stupid, or physics-defying.
Other people have mentioned the Roche limit. But that depends on the composition of the falling body. That the ancient ‘humans’ built a ship capable of withstanding massive tidal forces isn’t that outlandish, in the realm of sci-fi.
@48 I was on youtube last night and the piss take that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore did of all the puppet shows Jerry Anderson used to make came on.
it has become as bad as “western ” movies
The idea of a simple category of to define things like movies and TV is impossible. The edges are all blurry. There should be others, maybe the book stores are correct lumping science fiction in with other types of fantasy fiction.The movie under discussion is surly if anything a space fantasy more technological and less allegorical maybe then C.S. lewis but still clearly fantasy. Even with the fantasy elements in “2001” it was much more anchored in reality then having a white dwarf inside the hollow moon (if that were a thing the earth would have some pretty extreme tides :-)
Rob:
Didn’t you see the quotation in the OP?
Here’s the Wikipedia version:
“As the crew enters the Moon’s interior, they discover that the swarm is siphoning off energy generated by a white dwarf at the center of the Moon, causing the artificial megastructure’s orbit to destabilize as its power source is depleted.
[…]
Houseman uses the EMP and the crew’s lunar module to lure the swarm away from the spacecraft before detonating the device, killing himself, destroying the AI, and allowing Fowler and Harper to escape. With power restored, the Moon begins to return to its regular orbit, bringing an end to the destruction on Earth.”
unclefrogy @73:
2001 was much more “anchored in reality”? Yeah, the space station, the Moon base, and the interplanetary space flight looked “anchored”, but the fantasy elements were basically the core of the story.
It’s Hollywood, FFS! Yeah, it can’t actually be a white dwarf. So substitute ‘mysterious advanced tech power source’. Is that really so hard?
A moon breaks up and bad things happen story I would like to see in movie form is Seveneves by Neil Stephenson. Other than the initial glossing over of how it breaks up (no body knows) the book plays out in a pretty believable way with good physics and better humanity cant help but keep making the same mistakes over and over.. like The Expance series but without alien goo. Best part is the in book version of neil degrasse tyson.. if they make a movie he can play himself.
John @74: How thoughtful of you to take the time to quote things I’ve already seen. I often read reviews, and synopses, of films and books. Perhaps your experience differs from mine, but I’ve often found, after reading or viewing myself, that said reviews/synopses aren’t necessarily accurate regarding details. I prefer to reserve judgement.
one of the things we are required to enjoy fiction and theater the the suspension of disbelief. some times it is just too hard to do. it is really a personal thing
Hollywood is really good at making gilded crap with just a bit or more titillation
And when it loses power, it [the Moon] begins to fall down.
Slowly, of course, because it’s losing power slowly. Sapped by the pesky nanobot swarm!
And when power is restored, it rises back up. Yay!
—
Re 2001, there’s Clarke’s 3rd law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And that’s what the weakly god-like entity in the film represents.
John @78:
So says a review.
In which film? 2001 or Moonfall? Works for both.
Heh.
Anyway, anyone who cares can read about it in the excellent TVTropes site:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/Moonfall
How many individuals will find a whole lot of fault in Jurassic World: Dominion the same way a lot of people find fault in Moonfall?
Arthur C. Clarke ended The nine billion names of God with the sentence
And that story was solid science throughout, as I recall, mostly based on early computer hardware.
So, I can live with “Overhead, without any fuss, the moon had started to fall to earth.” as the opening line in a story. It’s when you attempt to “explain” this with a hidden white dwarf star and nanobots that it gets idiotic. Look, there was a Buffy episode involving a demon summoned from the moon to kill insane people. Sure, why not? At least Joss Whedon (for all his other many faults) knew when actually bothering to explain things makes it a lot worse.