That’s a perfectly good reason not to enjoy the film but it’s kind of a crazy reason to say it’s not really sci fi. I mean Firefly and Star Wars weren’t “about a sense of wonder, about interesting questions about the impact of science and technology on us”.
The gems being biological in origin makes sense as an explanation for why you’d have to go to space to get them. Diamonds and sapphires are diamonds and sapphires anywhere, but only on Earth can you get pearls. And likewise only on that planet can you get whatever those gems are.
Good point.
A lot of people do say “Star Wars” and “Firefly” are not really sci-fi, and I actually think the argument there is stronger than it is here.
But I’d wonder what movies *do *count as SF, then. “2001”? Not with all that woo at the end. “Gravity” and “The Martian”, okay: but those are very near-future SF. What about the further future? The only one I can think of that strictly qualifies is “Passengers” (one of my favorites BTW). And even then, maybe scr4 would be able to think of a non-science-y way to make that story happen.
Last three. 98% of the stuff I want to watch is not on streaming, both old stuff and recent stuff.
Have to check this thing out.
I just looked at the Netflix reviews. Manos, Hands of Fate probably did better. There were lots of complaints about the sound quality - how was it?
I’ll still watch, it’s not costing me anything after all.
Not sure that’s proof that it wasn’t his own ship though, because he was at least partly.lying. Just before they detached there was some kind of flashing indicator and something looked messed up but he went for it anyway. Not exactly Father of the year.
The writer/directors on the commentary track explicitly said that it wasn’t their ship, it was the equivalent of a U-Haul. That is absolutely what they intended to convey.
Ok, but when he said "I don’t know " about what went wrong it was at least a lie of omission. He knew something was messed up before he detached.
Good catch, I didn’t notice that.
It was interesting to listen to the panel discussion on the WIRED Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. One panelist really excoriated him as a bad father. The others were more ambivalent. Personally, I was generally positive toward him. He’s obviously not literally the Father of the Year, but given their apparently difficult financial straits, I am not judging him very harshly. I think he did love his daughter and fundamentally was a well-meaning person.
I didn’t have any trouble with the sound. What does the “Manos, Hands of Fate” sentence mean? 
There are actually still nearly three million of us:
We are “stubborn”, LOL. Apparently it is expected to last until 2022-25, somewhere in there.
At first I misread this as “IMDb reviews” and was confused:
1.9 Manos: The Hands of Fate
6.1 Prospect
But looking now at Netflix reviews, the reception there is a mixed bag. The 6.1 IMDb rating sounds about right, I’d say. I had no sound issues.
EDIT: And yeah, he was a terrible father. Just the fact that he’s shown doing what I interpreted to be the equivalent of shooting heroin in front of his adolescent daughter isn’t great.
I just checked out the Netflix reviews: they reinforce a sense that the taste of the people who review on the site has gotten worse and worse over the years (yet they still keep renting movies they have no business going anywhere near). But as I said in my review, they are entitled to their own taste. To opine, however, that the movie is so obviously terrible the positive reviews must come from shills?!? :smack: Are they not aware that it has a 90% Rotten Tomatoes rating, from 40 reviews (meaning only four were negative)? Sheesh.
Good thing you’re not actually the gatekeeper to all of SF, then, I guess?
I went back and rewatched the sequence several times. I don’t see any signs of trouble until after they detached and the “ferry” was receding in the distance.
Oh, was this the wrong place to state my impressions and opinions of a movie?
Maybe I misremembered the exact sequence but I sure had the feeling he still had time to abort the mission. I’ll look again later.
Never heard of it before - might have to check it out. Here’s more:
Most of the reviews were so negative that I’d think if I looked at the reviews for Manos (the original, not the MST3K version) they’d be better.
I trust Dopers more than random Netflix reviewers, so no worries.
I don’t usually read Netflix reviews. These seemed like a battle between people who made the movie and trolls who had it in for the people who made the movie.
I saw the short at SXSW 5 years ago and was very impressed. While it was clearly a proof-of-concept endeavor (with only a partial story), I found the cinematography and production design very effective in the world-building that occurred over those 15 minutes.
So when I saw it was playing at my local cinema, I recognized the project immediately and while it hits some familiar beats, the writing and acting was a lot better than usual efforts that are made this much on the cheap, and I thought the film was very effective in making use of limited resources and deploying them in a way that never makes the film feel overly thrifty.
I’m guessing I’m the only one here who saw it in the theater, but am glad that I did (mostly because streaming and online portals aren’t available to me).
Wow, in the theater, very cool. I don’t think it came here.
Would the filmmakers even think about the Netflix disc-by-mail site in promoting their movie? I am skeptical of those accusations that the positive reviews were from shills.
In any case, the most bizarre complaint was about Sophie Thatcher’s acting. She was amazing! I guess they can’t appreciate subtle acting, and/or have a melodramatic concept of how all teenagers must react to a parent’s death.
My father died when I was in high school. I laid on my bed and bawled for fifteen minutes (and I didn’t have the pressing life-and-death concerns See does), and I am still periodically sad about it thirty years later. But later that night he died, I was hanging out at a party with a couple friends and also many teenagers I didn’t know. I was somewhat subdued, but not obviously grieving if you didn’t know. (One of the many reasons I love the show “Six Feet Under” is that in the pilot, a teenager goes to a party the day her dad dies.)
And of course See has already lost her mother before the movie begins, so it’s less of a new, shocking experience.