Frank Poole dead body floating in Space is resurrected 1000 years in the future, where he discovers paragliding, engineered dinosaur butlers, and that women are grossed-out by circumcision. Turns out the mysterious Monoliths are…Alien Computers there to kill us based on 1000 year old information about how terrible we were in the 20th century. Frank gets in touch with Bowman the sentient computer ghost and convinces him to give the monolith a computer virus. Which he does. And which works. The End. Yes that’s right, the entire Odyssey series boils down to a Deus Ex Melissa.
It’s not really the end of the novel, but it almost is. The whole Utah / Mormons backstory which is the second half of Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study In Scarlet is one big far-fetched, melodramatic snooze. It’s such a relief in the final chapter or two to get back to the story that everyone cares about - the London murder mystery.
I’m not keen on the similar pattern in The Valley of Fear, either.
Gad, no one has mentioned Michael Crichton’s Sphere in this thread? That was the one that turned me off MC’s work forever more.
Humans find strange spaceship. Humans find out it is a human ship from the future. Humans find out it captured some strange alien device on the far fringe of the galaxy. Humans slowly acquire mental powers from the device. Humans give each other a terrifying ride with their new powers. In the last wto pages, surviving humans use powers to forget everything about the ship and its contents. The End.
(I ground through most of what followed, but with only the grimmest and usually fulfilled expectations.)
Intolerence, 190 minutes or so. I occasionally have a fairly bad patch of insomnia, I have been training myself to fall asleep to the soundtrack [I pop it on netflix streaming and go to sleep. I don’t care if my tablet turns itself off after I am asleep.] So far, the soundtrack is becoming so familiar that it is starting to be able to drone me to sleep.
Not that it is a bad movie, mind you, it just has a very predictable soundtrack and no dialogue.
The movie “Phenomenon”. Excellent cast, Travolta, Duvall, Sedgwick. A small town man sees strange lights in the sky and suddenly develops mystical powers. He’s saving people, can suddenly speak several languages, telekinesis, etc. He even predicts an earthquake. It a really fascinating movie - up till about half way. Of course Sedgwick is the romantic interest.
Not really. One of them didn’t. One of the survivors is a woman who, at various times in the book, had been described as homely, not pretty, etc. A few of the last lines mention the other survivors (after they supposedly collectively used the powers to forget everything) mentioning how pretty she is. She kept the power.
