I really hated the movie. And that’s all I have to say 'bout that…
Just so’s you know, I’m working on a Bad Astronomy review. No, a 20 megaton explosion (or even a few million of them (well, I haven’t done the math, but that’s reasonable)) won’t blow up the Moon. But the MP said the orbit was “screwed up”. That is still impossible, of course, but if the Moon got too close to the Earth, the tides would rip it apart. It’s probably an accident-- correct astronomy in movies usually is-- but messing up the orbit can in that case destroy the Moon.
But then, 800,000 years later the Moon would either be a series of clumps strewn throughout its orbit (likely), or else would have re-coalesced into a Moon again (less likely). Either way, you wouldn’t get a lump half the size of the original Moon (with the same markings, as I recall!) but all jagged, surrounded by other lumps. The tidal stretching would heat the Moon a lot, and probably remelt it (again, I haven’t done the math, so this is conjecture).
Hopefully I’ll get my review up in a day or two.
The Bad Astronomer, I knew you’d be along sooner or later. Why wouldn’t some of the Moon-chunks clump together? They’d still be gravitationally attracted to each other, wouldn’t they?
And is it credible that some of the chunks would fall to Earth?
It’s been a long time since I’ve read the novel. I know that at the end the Time Traveller went back home to the 1890s and took the girl with him, but then…something happened, right?
I don’t recall if she was freaked out by urban London, ran into the street and was killed by traffic, or if she was freaked out by urban London, the Time Traveller realized she couldn’t adapt and took her back to the future. Which was it?
No, the TT never brought any of the Eloi with him. He returned to his own time briefly and told his tale to friends, then took off again in his time machine. In the 1960 film version he said he was going to help the Eloi build a new civilization in the far future, but the book leaves his goal and destination a mystery.
Neither, in the book (I can’t speak to the George Pal version, as I haven’t seen it). The TT took Weena the Eloi chick on one of his excursions to the museum, where he picked up a few chunks of camphor, which he planned to use as a night-light, should it become necessary, as he was low on matches. They stayed out too late and were in the woods being hunted by Morlocks during the night. TT had the bright idea of setting the woods on fire while they eluded the Morlocks, but while he was able to outrun the smoke and flames, Weena fell behind, and was killed (smoke inhalation, I think, although Wells wasn’t too graphic about it). The only thing the TT brought back to his on time was a pocketful of flowers that Weena had given him in gratitude for him saving her life upon their first meeting (she was downing, IIRC).
…his own time…
Damn spell check can’t even correct it to what I WANT to say.
Okay, kaylasdad99 and lamia, you’ve each just given me contradictory accounts of the end of the novel. Which one of you is correct?
It’s been a while since I read the book, too, but I remember this much of the ending: First, Weena dies in her own time: The Traveller is moping over her at the end, and wondering about the logic of mourning someone who won’t die for thousands of years. It ends with him leaving for times unspecified, but I seem to remember the implication that he might have been going to the distant prehistoric past, to see extinct animals (dinosaurs?).
BadAs, while the Moon could be destroyed by tidal disruption, and such would (I think) take less energy than blowing it up outright, I’m still pretty confident that a 20 Mton blast wouldn’t be enough to shift the orbit sufficiently. Calculations to follow; does anyone know the energy content of a ton of TNT, offhand?
If you could bring the Moon down to the Roche limit (the critical orbital distance for tidal disruption), then even though the clumps of moon would still be attracted to each other, the tidal forces would be stronger, so they would be strewn out in a ring. The largest pieces, though, would be of a size that could be held together by their own internal strength, and the internal strength of rock is insignificant by the time you get to something the size of the Moon, or even of half the Moon. None of the chunks would orbit directly into the Earth, but you’d be likely to get a number of collisions, especially at first, which could send rocks flying in just about any direction, including down.
One megaton of TNT is 4 x 10^22 ergs.
Mind you, 20Mt explosions have occurred here on Earth with no noticeable effect. Well, besides a crater, deaths, radioactivity, political and emotional concern, etc. But no orbital effects. It’s way too small to affect something with as much mass as Earth.
Chronos:
As was mentioned earlier in this thread, it was not implied anywhere in the movie that there was only one such blast.
We are told about one blast, which happened to be 20 megatons, but I got the distinct impression that there had been many blasts and would be many more, to accommodate the Moon’s growing population.
Whether any number of blasts of any size could cause the damage we saw in the movie is a good question. But claiming that one 20 megaton detonation did it is not one of the movie’s faults.
My impression of the moon thing was that, a la, the San Andreas and, well, Armageddon, that there was a fault line or something similar in the moon, and that the 20 megaton explosion, combined with the fault line cracked the moon in half. Is that at all plausible, or do faults in stone just not work the way I think they do?
A fault line would be a region of decreased structural strength… But when doing calculations for things like binding energy or tidal disruption, astronomers usually assume that the object has no structural strength whatsoever. Once you’re looking at something the size of a planet, material strength doesn’t matter at all, compared to gravity. You could just as easily have a big pile of gravel in orbit.
Even granted that there were multiple detonations (reasonable; the billboard in the movie says “…the first of the 20-megaton detonations…”), we’re still talking about one detonation doing the damage. They’re presumably doing the detonations one at a time, right? Well, suppose they do the first one, and it changes the orbit by a small amount. They’re going to say “Whoa, that changed the orbit! We’d better be careful with those!” They’d then either scale back on the size of the second detonation, or plan it such that it would correct the orbit. If they found that that didn’t work, either, they’d stop excavating until they could figure out what was going wrong.
I thought the same thing. After I saw her get killed twice in different ways, I figured that maybe the movie was borrowing from South Park’s way of killing Kenny in every episode, and in a different way each time.
Overall I liked the movie, but then I tend to be less critical of movies than other people.
This is my favorite book ever and I just read it, like, yesterday, so be prepared:
[nitpick, nitpick, nitpick]
Weena fainted or something during a very close encounter with the morlocks. TT scared them off with fire, then curled up to rest and accidently fell asleep. When he woke up it was dark and he couldn’t find Weena anywhere, it was implyed she was carried off for a little morlock-picnic.
[/nitpick]
This is my favorite book ever and I just read it, like, yesterday, so be prepared:
[nitpick, nitpick, nitpick]
Weena fainted or something during a very close encounter with the morlocks. TT scared them off with fire, and then curled up to rest his eyes for a moment and accidentally fell asleep. When he woke up the fire had gone out, morlocks were all over him, and he couldn’t find Weena anywhere. It was implied she was carried off for a little morlock-picnic.
[/nitpick]
Don’t read the first post! Spelling errors and such! Nooooooooo!
(Wow, my first double post. The emotions…sniff)
Here’s one thing I haven’t seen anybody bring up yet:
While Alex is sitting there in his time machine in the middle of New York City, why does nobody seem to notice that he’s there? Think about it, while he watches several years pass by him in a matter of seconds, to the rest of the people living in real time, he would be virtuallly motionless, moving so slowly that such movement is imperceptible. I don’t remember if it was ever explained in the movie that his time machine was not visible to other people while it was “moving.”
“Time Machine” is an outline of interesting concepts that never seem to be given enough time to properly develop out of fear that the audience’s attention span might not be able to take it.
The movie seemed really rushed. I really wanted to see the Professor go back in time to save Emma a few more times, so that we could experience the pain with him of watching the love of his life die over and over again, motivating him to go into the future. Instead, after one tripe back, he “gets it”.
I also really wanted to see more about how he labored to build the time machine. I would have been patient with this since I realized he was doing it out of love. It would have been fun to watch him fail a couple times, and have some weird things happen because he messed with the time/space continuum.
Instead, it’s like his fiancée dies, 2 scenes later PRESTO he builds a machine that even 100 years later, we still can’t even theoretically figure out. Oh, and when he goes into New York in the future. .NO ONE steals the Time Machine when he goes into the library??? I would have likes to see more of the moon scene . . that was kinda scary.
I thought the Morlocks were well done, s well as the Library Dude. Though the last half of the movie was as predictable as ever, with Guy Pearce the hero of course able to beat up the Morlocks, and fall in love with the black haired woman. I found it annoying that in the book, the Earth people were actually very gentle and innocent. These people came across more as picked on Injuns.
Another scene that was where Jeremy Irons was able to make the Professor hallucinate being married to Emma and the kids. I would have liked to see more of that, and perhaps Irons offer him that forever if he would help him, and Pearce has to make the choice.
I don’ know whats more frustrating- a really bad movie, or a fair one that could have been an epic classic. Maybe there will be a directors cut . . .
I don’t think a director’s cut would help you, Vinnie Virginslayer, because I think the movie we saw is the movie the director wanted to make.
Interesting note about the director: he’s Simon Wells, and he’s H.G. Wells’s great-grandson.
The ending of the movie didn’t really give us the decisive, he’ll-never-travel-in-time-again closure the director probably intended. Because we already know Doc Brown was able to start over from scratch and build his Time Locomotive…
Ah, and this movie will unleash Samantha Mumba upon you all 
She’s Irish, BTW