Aw, c’mon, let’s rip up Armageddon! That movie depresses me with its awe-inspiring badness. I’ll leave the errors like force of impact, the “slingshot” maneuver and whatnot to the physicists among us, but here’re the ones that bug me:
If I recall correctly, a small point was made during the training scene that the Far-Out Space Nuts would have to use some kind of jet system to create a workable gravity-like environment. Anyone see any jets being used? Even better, anyone see any problems with the gravity while they were inside the shuttles?
How can guns fire in a vacuum? Why would they bring weapons along anyway, since every pound of payload means additional pounds of fuel burned?
My favorite is the “gravity environment” created by the spinning Russian space station. The station starts spinning and suddenly there’s gravity throughout the structure, even along the axis of spin. Neat trick. I liked the icicles, too; just how would water “drip down” to form icicles without gravity?
Anyone else like how quickly they could get in and out of their space suits? Doesn’t that take, like, four hours with the help of two men and a strong horse?
And you show me an astrophysicist willing to calculate the so-called “zero barrier” to an accuracy within an hour, much less a few seconds.
No modern gun would have any trouble firing in a vacuum. In fact, the ideal physical environment for using a firearm is a vacuum. The oxygen used in igniting the propellant is present in oxides which are part of the propellant. There isn’t usually a significant amount of air in the case of a smokeless powder cartridge.
OK, so it’s not in a movie, but it still bugs me. During the 10:00 pm news broadcast on KTVU Channel 2 here in the Bay Area (which is an otherwise excellent local newscast), you can hear a teletype rattling in the background. This is 1999, for christ’s sake. Teletypes haven’t been used by a major TV station for years. I guess it makes people happy to have that Walter Cronkite-era feel to the newscast.
It was a very elaborate dance scene, if I’m remember what I read about it correctly. That scene was cut before the film was released, because they thought the movie was too long. I believe the strip of film was found in an old vault somewhere, but I could be wrong. I’ve seen still pictures of the Jitterbug scene in books.
The idea was that the jitterbugs would make them dance until they died, but like in the poppy field, Glinda intercepted. The Wicked Witch’s line is still in the movie, too, when she sends the flying devil monkeys to capture Dorothy. She tells the head devil monkey something like “I’ve sent a little bug to slow them down.” They cut the scene, but left the line in. So, it’s very possible that a scene with them getting their weapons was cut with it.
Maybe they had the bug sprayer to ward off anymore Jitterbugs? I’d sure love to see that scene.
Glitch, this was a very noble attempt to defend the movie, and I applaud you for that. The GUI for IRIX is called “IRIS”. For over a year, my primary workstation was an SGI Indy, and I did a lot of admining for O2s, which are another common SGI workstation.
Let’s just say that the IRIS interface is not like what we saw in the movie. That’s a bit of an understatement as a matter of fact. I don’t want to knock IRIS. It’s an excellent GUI, but it ain’t like that. It certainly doesn’t have a “virtual reality” style interface. It has a bunch of flat windows and menus, like most GUIs. It isn’t really very different for other common UNIX GUIs like CDE and GNOME/Enlightenment.
The file system navigator shown in Jurassic Park does/did exist. It’s called “fsn”, and SGI used to have it in with the other goodies on their FTP and web sites. Not sure if it’s still there or not, or if it works on newer releases of the operating system.
However, I think it was either written specifically for the movie, or possibly it existed internally at SGI and they only released it after the movie. I know I hadn’t ever seen it BEFORE the movie came out.
In any case, what was on the screen would definitely not have been anything immediately recognizeable as UNIX. Well after the movie, this fsn thing that you speak of was still certainly not something in normal use by IRIX users.
SGI definitely was trying to push VRML interfaces a few years ago (mebbe they still are), but they weren’t very popular, and what I saw was basically just a browsing tool. In the process of trying to get us more into loving SGI, an SGI guy made a VRML interface to look at one of our computer rooms. You could use it to get info about each system. In reality is was less efficient than a spreadsheet.
I thought Speed was very funny. How many times do you think a person can jump on and off a speeding bus before he doesn’t make it alive?
Speed 2 is just not worth the effort.
White Wolf
“Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.”
“Half the world is composed of idiots, the other half of people clever enough to take indecent advantage of them.”
I just watched “The Mummy” last night. I enjoyed it as mindless escapism, but…
*** Spoiler Alert ***
WHERE DID THE FREAKIN’ CAMELS COME FROM?
The heros get to the evil city at the end by airplane. The bad guy gets there in a sandstorm. At the end of the movie, when they escape the city there are three camels standing there waiting for them, all saddled and ready to go. What’s the deal?
There is a scene towards the end of “Doctor Strangelove” where Peter Sellers (as the doctor) is banging on his mechanical arm, trying to make it go down. But don’t watch him; watch the guy who plays the Russian ambassador. You can see that he’s trying, almost in vain, not to crack up watching Sellers.
HubZilla, I assume your question about “why did the Titanic sink?” was sarcastic; and I can’t answer the ratings-related one.
But yes, when ladies wore sleeveless dresses, they did shave under their arms in 1912. Depilatories were already in use by the 1890s, though they were pretty darned harsh.
And all passenger ships had first, second and third-class accomodations; that’s how they covered their costs. Third class on the Titanic, by the way, was hardly as shabby as the movie made it seem; it was actually much nicer than flying most commuter airlines today.
