December 2008 Archives

Yay!

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I hate comment spam.

 Well, that was a waste.

I took the Godson to see The Day The Earth Stood Still and we were both disappointed. I understood everything, I do not think he did at all, except the part where people are bad and need to be destroyed. So, you know....spoliers ahead.

President Obama will appear in more Hollywood productions either acting as himself in a cameo appearance, or as film footage, than all other presidents before him combined. 

 So The Day the Earf Stood Still And Was Eaten By Gort-nanobots was released today, and not just in select theaters:

Twentieth Century Fox makes history by transmitting the first motion picture in to deep space, making THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL the world's first galactic motion picture release. The first deliberate deep space transmission of this highly anticipated science fiction thriller will begin this Friday, December 12, 2008, to coincide with the film's opening day on Planet Earth. If any civilizations are currently orbiting Alpha Centauri, they will be able to receive and view the film approximately four years from now in the year 2012.

Wonderful. That's all we need, 60 years or so down the line when some advanced species gets the signal, warps into low orbit and demands an expianation for Keanu Reeves. Or, "Bob" forbid, we frighten some similarly developed species into catatonia thinking we've transmitted out dying historical record so that others can save themselves.

I'm so leery about going to see this movie. I know the plot, I know that it is all environmental handwringing and pseudoconcern over our ecological survival. (Busybody extraterrestrial nannystaters with superior biological technology unleash the grey goo on humanity for not cleaning up the bedroom when told. That's the story.) But it is entitled with one of the greatest movies ever made...and I am filled with a compulsion to get off my duff and watch it on the big screen. (This is almost the same sort of compulsion that strikes when a new zombie flick comes out.)

The original movie was essentially a booster film for the United Nations. If we all banded together and governed ourselves peaceably, all would be well and we would not have to worry about a robotic police force bent on enforcing peace through total conversion weaponry. As a bonus, there would be, well, peace. Now, I can understand the concerns of a dogmatic galactic confederation worried about the clever monkeyspawn developing technologies that could ge tthem out of their local system. It isn't too far a jump from fission to fusion to antimatter production in larger quantities and if this sort of thing isn't nipped in the bud, someone could get hurt. (As if humans, noncitizens, could legally be considered sapient anyway, we can hurt ourselves to our heart's content)

I'd always thought that humans simply wouldn't take this lying down. The US military already knew something of the threat after the Roswell crash in '47, and when an identical craft arrived a few years later on the Mall in DC, the US knew something had to be done. And Klaatu made a mistake contacting Gort to let him in the ship...Gort's transmission was copied, and later, when Klaatu left, it was used to open the saucer in Hanger 18, and the United States began reverse engineering the damaged Gort and saucer.

The saucer, of course, had two drive systems. The planetary drive, used for landing from orbit, clearly was magneto-gravitic in nature, and useful only against large bodies with a significant magnetic field of their own. The other drive was used to render the ship inertialess for interstellar flight. Given that the Gort cruisers were all identical, there would be places the ships would have a hard time going, namely smaller bodies, such as asteroids.

After the battlecruiser manufacturing base was completed on Ceres, the United States started pumping out warships powered entirely by total conversion, armed with total conversion weapons and filled with troops in powered armor ready to take on the galactic despotism. And naturally, we won. (Just like the biological genocide committed against the Martians after their ill advised invasion in an alternate timeline.)

Despite the slightly different motivations of the new movie's alien, the result would be exactly the same. Rather than the overthrow of a stagnated utopian society, this would be the casual dismissal of overwrought tree huggers...all we'd have to do is drop a crushed Pepsi can on their own planet's surface and there would be total capitulation.

Both films underestimate the human desire to tell perceived authority to go straight to hell . Like Heinlein said, the universe will tell us eventually if we weren't meant to do these things, but there will always be cap troopers about, in one shape or another, on the bounce and swinging away for our side. So having technologically superior beings dictate to the human race just how we are going to behave will have unimaginably bad consequences for the species involved. They'll all end up in zoos, or worse, be used to test hairspray and wood glue for toxicity in consumer goods testing.

Anyway, I'll probably go see it because I'm a sucker for the title and for a fleeting glimpse of a CG Gort. I'll reluctantly swallow my suspension of disbelief, for a while at least, and enjoy my pap.

I was looking at a list of Hollywood actors that were Scientologists...it was kinda depressing.