Although I loved Doug Trumbull’s post-2001 and pre-CGI special effects and the Peter Schickele score (See? He can do things besides P.D.Q. Bach) and the lovable Drones Huey, Dewey, and Louis that undoubtedly helped inspire R2D2 and Lucas’ other “droids” , I thought that Silent Running was really, really stupid.
All the plants are put into orbit on cargo ships?
Why?
What are people on Earth breathing?
Where’s the gravity come from?
Even if the average temperature in space at our orbit is close tpo 300K, you get masive heating on one side and cooling on the other. Making the domes opaque and insulating them would probably be a good idea
Our eco-hero doesn’t realize that the plants are dying off as they get further from the sun because they’re not getting enough light? Really?
That thing about the average temperature dropping as you go away from the sun still holds. It’s not just light the plants are going to need – it’s heat, too.
Where’s the power for those light bulbs coming from? Does the nuke that’s embedded in the dome serve as a power source as well as a bomb?
Isn’t using a nuke to destroy a relatively small dome kind of overkill?
The Day After Tomorrow was stupid in all respects, but still a fun watch. Most egregious was the terrible geography. Most notably, it shows a tsunami hitting NYC with Brooklyn nowhere to be seen – Manhattan is right on the ocean. The reason that NYC is such a good harbor is that Manhattan is protected from storms.
Then the wave goes right up the avenue, which means it had to originate in New Jersey.
And ever more ridiculous: the silly flash freezing winds are coming from the north. This is mentioned many times. But they hit the Empire State Building (34th St) before they hit the Public Library (42nd St).
Oh, then there’s the flash freezing wind, too.
The movie is big dumb fun, with the emphasis on dumb.
I’ve mentioned it before on this Board, but 10,000 B.C. is an epically stupid movie with gorgeous CGI.
It’s not just the gross historical errors and geographical lunacy. Or its not being sure if it’s about Ancient Astronauts or just hyper-developed ancient civilizations. Even if you take the story at face value and don’t ask questions about its background, just going by the internal logic, it makes precious little sense. Or logic.
The Pyramid-builders kidnap people from the Yagahi tribe to act as laborers for them. In order to do this, they travel a helluva long way down a river, over deserts, and through a swamp filled with giant killer birds. The Yagahi must be damned good slaves
Not only do the pyramid builders kidnap people, evidently they steal wooly mammoths, too. I’d love to see how they get them onto those boats. If they’re just stealing mammoth babies, I want to know how they get them past the giant birds.
At one point Our Hero is running after game and falls into a Tiger Pit. We know it’s a Tiger Pit, because there’s a Saber Toothed Tiger in it. You’d think that when the 15-foot tiger fell in, it would’ve taken whatever was camouflaging the trap with it, leaving a pretty substantial hole in the ground. But our hero, the wily hunter, apparently didn’t notice this.
Not only that, but the people who set the trap wisely embedded punji sticks in the bottom to spear whatever fell in. But the Saber Toothed Tiger evidently didn’t impale itself on any of these. Neither did Our Hero. But the deer, which was smaller than both of them did get stuck. Nice trap building, guys.
Our Hero, overcome with compassion – or stupidity – doesn’t just extricate himself from the pit. He helps the giant, ravenously hungry tiger out, too.
The Tiger evidently knows his Aesop’s Fables, and doesn’t eat Our Hero. Nice of him. It’s even nicer that he didn’t follow Our Hero’s scent trail back to where his injured companion is waiting. Hey, guy, thanks for getting me out of that trap. And for lunch, too.
I forgot I watched Geostorm on a plane a couple of years ago. Man, what a piece of shit that was. It makes the “science” in The Core look absolutely legit by comparison.
My baby got killed by a tornado
Big old tornado
Gonna get that tornado!
I can’t see how those little sensors can tell anything without each one having a GPS device that gives its position to about a foot. How can you tell what the internal windspeed and pressure is, if you don’t know where the sensor was when it gave the data. Gawd this movie was stupid!
I’m watching the film and thinking, which woman is he going to end up with? The one with the biggest boobs, of course! No, they’re about the same. The blonde! Yup.
I won’t disagree on the overall stupidity or not of the film, but these aren’t really strong problems,
The plants are on cargo ships because people on earth 1) need space, and 2) don’t care any more. Also, I have this theory, never considered in the film, that “they” never intended to bring the plants back. Putting them into space pods instead of just bulldozing them was a sop to people like Freeman, who still cared. After ten years, or whatever it was, people just forgot that plants ever existed. Why else would they have self-destruct capability? It’s not like they’re a danger, or in danger and need to avoid capture.
(weirdly, wikipedia calls it a “post-apocalyptic” film. I don’t know where they got that. The plants weren’t gone from earth because of any apocalypse, but because that’s what the people of earth wanted)
The people on earth are breathing machine processed air. There was a comment that every place on earth has 72 degree temperature (IIRC). There’s no need for trees, because machines do all the work. People LIKE this in their “glorious” future.
The gravity on the freighters comes from the same place it does in Star Wars, Star Trek, BSG, the MCU, etc.
And lightbulb power? Seriously?
Why freeman doesn’t realize it’s dark can be as simple as he isn’t that bright. He may be the most qualified botanist of his day, but maybe his day isn’t that bright. maybe they’re living in Idiocracy. Or the writers were.
Very seriously. You need power to keep the plants illuminated. You don’t do that with a few packs of “D” cells.
And this is clearly the near future – if we make a breakthrough significant enough to create artificial gravity, it would be a world changer. I can buy it in A Galaxy A Log Time Ago and Far Away, or in a few hundred years, but not in the Near Future.
And I think you seriously underestimate the cost (in all ways) and power required to artificially re-oxygenate our air. A “Minor” problem that is not.
It’s never stated, but I think this is many hundred years in the future.
Of course, part of my reasoning is that they have 100% effective, reliable climate control for the entire planet. So, somewhat circular reasoning - they have power for the ships because they have enough power on earth. And the evidence they are have enough power on earth is they have enough power to run ships.
My complaint of the movie isn’t the tech, it’s that it tried too hard to be emtionally manipulative. It’s a subtle as a brick in the face. And that Joan Baez song is the kicked puppy of excess.
I’m not a movie re-watcher so I haven’t seen this in 40 years. However it was so over the top silly I really enjoyed it. I would probably enjoy it again if I had to watch it.
I know where you live.
Yeah, not top of the class but not bad for it’s genre. Plus, the nuanced acting of Charles Bronson. He is literally the man of a thousand faces.
I don’t watch a lot of movies so I try to screen out bad ones but I’ll have to think about it, none occur to me right now.
I was expecting someone to mention Quest for Fire and I’m happy they haven’t (yet), but I’ll preemptively say that I have a soft spot for this film. From the “making of” videos, they clearly put some level of effort into trying to get things right, although the cave bear was really, really embarrassing costuming. The actors (the whole crew, really) suffered for their art, too; challenging conditions. But I can certainly see how someone coming across this while channel-surfing would be aghast at the apparent ridiculousness (hey! they didn’t even need to write dialog!).
The recent Jarmusch film The Dead Don’t Die was, grading on a curve, the most apparently bad film with excellent talent. I know there is a substantial subset of people that love this thing, but it really comes off as a lot of actors owed Jarmusch a favor. The fourth-wall-breaking was embarrassingly heavy-handed and flat.
I’d nominate Ad Astra, as I just saw it and its stupidity offended me. Though in this case its stupidity is magnified by the fact that the movie thinks its really really deep and smart, but is in fact really really dumb.
In would in fact have be a pretty decent movie, if instead of having Brad Pitt do some kind of navel-gazing Kubrick-esque meditation on humanities place in the universe, they just cast some action star like The Rock and turned the action sequences into flat-out over the top mindless fight scenes. Pretty much the only movie ever thought that about.
One I got roped into in high school that made me want to claw my eyes out was The Perils of Gwendoline with Tawny Kitaen (1984). Only reason I went was because a buddy worked for the theater and got us in free. I still wanted to ask for my money back.
The stupidest movie i have ever seen is Evil Bong 666 and it is not even close. I would say it’s impossible to make another movie that stupid, except that there are other movies in the Evil Bong series.
My baby got killed by a tornado
