SLIGHT HIJACK
Which Stadium is “erased” in the preview?
/SLIGHT HIJACK
Just a hunch here, but after seeing the previews I get the feeling Klaatu is not the only visitor this time (That or there are a whole bunch of Gorts - one on each sphereship) and Klaatu ends up siding with Earth against his colleagues.
I don’t support all the Keanu hating. He is a limited actor who knows his limits and has had a spectacular career within them. Plus he’s really, really pretty. 
I will be going to see this movie, like I see all post-apocalytpic/massive disaster movies, and I will be thankful for it in a sea of Hollywooded-up rom-com and tv series remake crap*.
*Although “Get Smart” wasn’t actually that bad.
Gah, I misread that as 12/8/08.
Sorry, too much LDS in the '60s.
Yeah, man…those Mormons will fuck you up every time.
The Day the Earth Stood Still, not “World”. Though the “Whoa” allowed me to guess what the thread was about.
I always wonder about the board full o’ math you see in so many movies – how often is it just a random jumble of calculus? One nice thing about the show The Big Bang Theory is the real math on the boards. (Although I did note somebody had written “Movement of inertia” instead of “moment of inertia” in one of the episodes – though that might have been a deliberate joke.)
It’s usually gibberish and technobabble. One notable exception is It’s My Turn, which contains a completely valid proof of the snake lemma.
I saw Good Will Hunting with a colleage of mine who is a bit of a math book (MS-EE from MIT), and she told me that the first blackboard equations she saw that Will solved looked legit, but she only got a short glance and wasn’t positive. Though she said she had no idea what the second series, the one where the solution involved radiating lines and circles, was supposed to be.
According toRoger Ebert’s review, it is
Shea Stadium
So it is possible…
you CAN wake up the next morning moaning “Man, I had too much Jesus last night”
And possibly facing an army of Tedites.
Probably the best moment in Spider-Man 3 was when Peter was in physics class, and they were discussing real quantum mechanics. It’s really easy to use quantum mechanical terms for technobabble, but from what I remember, Peter’s answer actually made sense.
Blackboard technobabble was one of the details which ruined The Time Machine of a few years ago. That movie was almost awesome, if they had just payed attention to the details, but as it is, it stunk. It wasn’t even random calculus, that they could have copied out of any textbook or gotten any physics student to write up for them in five minutes; it was just random symbols strung together in nonsensical ways.
One of the things I love about the comic strip Foxtrot is that his math and physics are always correct. If you see an equation in the strip, it means something, and is always appropriate. Quite a change from the technobabble in things like The Far Side.
Movies and Television shows these days hire technical advisors, so their random equations should be accurate, and often are (as in the aforementioned Good Will Hunting – I’ve read an article about the use of advisors for that film). But apparently they still manage to screw things up.
The important thing is that you retrieve the whales.
The math in Good Will Hunting was correct but irrelevant to what sort of math it was supposed to be, as I understand it.
I’m told the first problem really was a Fourier series, as the actor’s dialog stated. Which I wouldn’t know from a hole in the ground, so I’m relying on my cow-orker’s say so.
Reviewers typically go to advanced screenings, if allowed. It’s a bad sign when a movie doesn’t have advanced screenings for reviewers.
Regarding the destruction in the previews,
[spoiler]Those are megagazillions of flying nanorobots heading from the compound where they took Gort, back to the mothersphere in Central Park, just happening to destroy everything in their path. Gort was made of these things, and disintegrated into them, which is how he busted out of the underground complex.
What a dismal and disappointing film. I happen to like Keanu and he was perfect as Klaatu. The movie, which left most of the thoughtful, thought-provoking stuff out of the script or on the cutting room floor, let him down. [/spoiler]
With a 23% on RT and a 41 on Metacritic, it looks like math is definitely not this film’s friend…