My paper’s giving it three stars out of five today. I plan to see it.
I don’t know what from math, but this was one of the only nicely subtle scenes in the film. It felt like Klaatu and the Professor were having a conversation with math, which makes a lot of sense. It would be interesting to know if that conversation makes sense, since it is entirely written out, not spoken at all.
The rest of the movie pretty much blows, though. Gort is cool.
I saw a preview of it Thursday, and just in that paragraph (I haven’t read the rest of the review) Ebert is mistaken about two things: The nanobot infection begins in West Virginia, not “the mountains of the Southwest” and the stadium is Giants Stadium, not Shea.
The section on Good Will Hunting explains the problems with the math in it:
http://world.std.com/~reinhold/mathmovies.html
The problem that’s supposed to be wildly difficult for math grad students isn’t really that hard.
This website has lots of interesting insights about math in the movies. It praises The Seven Samurai, for instance, because the heroes start by counting the number of opponents that they have to fight and the number of guns that the opponents have. The leader decides that the enemy is too strong to be resisted at that point, so the first thing he does is to have one of his men go out secretly and kill two of the enemy and steal two of their guns. Then a second one of his men also goes out and kills two more and steals two more. At that point the enemy’s advantage is decreased sufficiently to make it at least possible for the heroes to fight them. The leader of the heroes is smart enough to know that it doesn’t matter how brave they are, if their opponents are sufficiently numerous and well armed, the heroes can’t defeat their opponents. This is vastly more intelligent than the average action movie where the heroes think they can win against overwhelming odds.
Yep, Roger got the stadium wrong–strange, because the big sign with its name is so clearly visible in the scene.
I saw it last night and found it enjoyable…as a Jennifer Connelly movie. Don’t go to see it as a remake of the original, but as a wanna-be blockbuster that happens to share the same title.
Hell, they even screwed up most famous line, because
Klaatu never refers to the robot as GORT. It’s a military acronym that stands for “Genetically Organized Robotic Technology”
Two points.
As a side note in the original book TDTHESS Klaatu was revealed as the servant of Gort not the other way around.
The script was not apparently not checked by anybody outside of Hollywood as several reviewers are pouncing on the notion of the scientist receiving a Nobel prize for “biological altruism”. If the script is really that bone headed it’s a pass.
I saw it last night and while it was pretty enjoyable to look at, as soon as it was over I turned to my friend and said, “I hope if aliens ever come to our planet, they aren’t actually that stupid.”
It sucked, really. Keanu really did a great job for what was needed for the role (someone very alien and seemingly uncomfortable with his own body). The film set up the suspense of it all very well and you’re on the edge of your seat several times. The problem, however, was the actual reasoning behind it all was outrageously dumb.
A basic rundown of the idiocy:
[spoiler]Planets that can support life are very rare in the universe, so Klaatu has been sent to check Earth out and decide whether or not humans should be wiped out, in order to preserve the planet. Okay, fair enough. Except he does this by showing up, getting shot, telling the Secretary of Defense, “I won’t talk to you, only the UN,” and then he goes on the run.
He never actually gives the message of, “Hey, humanity. GO GREEN.” He only explains his mission to people who have no influence whatsoever. There’s no tapping into satellites to communicate with all people at once or anything that would have been a bit more helpful than refusing to talk to a single official from a single country.
In the end, his heart grew two sizes that day and he decides people are worth saving after all. The only way to stop his nanobots of death, however, is to technomagically stop all human technology on the planet, seemingly forever. No one will ever know why this happened or that they’ll be wiped out if they’re not nice to Mother Nature. Just, bam, humanity is thrown back to the stone age and Klaatu takes off for space. The end.[/spoiler]
Seriously, if Klaatu had just been aware of YouTube, the whole thing could have been avoided.
…
Hah! 
Linking to the embedded site here, I’d be pretty damned impressed if a school janitor could solve this, difficult or not for a math grad student. Which I think was the point of the whole movie sequence, no?
My point was that the professor put the problem up claiming that it was an incredibly difficult problem for his grad students. It wasn’t. It was an ordinary homework problem in difficulty for them. That’s a hole in the plot. The technical consultants for the film could have come up with a problem that was truly difficult for grad students if they had been asked for one. Instead, they were just told to come up with any old problem. As it is, the plot of the film makes less sense. The professor is raving after seeing the solution to the problem that this means that some genius has solved his challenge problem, when in fact any good grad student could have solved it.
My favorite line, ever. I use it all the time!
Further information: The paper they used is Quantum fields and “Big Rip” expansion singularities. Apparently the Big Rip plays some role in the movie (is that what Klaatu is trying to warn us against, I guess?). And it’s only the last two lines of the derivation on the board that are theirs; the rest is previous work that they were building on.
This didn’t say what I thought it would say, because the phrase
Klaatu Barada Nictu (sp?)
isn’t in the new movie either.
Actually, I don’t recall exactly what was humanity’s problem to begin with. I was expecting a green message, but it wasn’t really indicated. It seemed more that they didn’t like us because we were violent, but not even that was stated. It was more like:
Klaatu: “You people suck. We’re going to lay waste to your civilization.”
Whatever her name was: “Please don’t - give us a second chance!”
Klaatu: “You don’t deserve a second chance (even though my species got one - HAH!)”
Kid: “Hey, mister. I used to think you were a dick, but now I think you’re pretty cool and all that.”
Klaatu: “I was wrong - humanity DOES deserve a second chance. Let’s run to my spaceship so I can stop your genocide (because spacefaring species who commit genocide are REALLY MORALLY SUPERIOR AND SO NON-VIOLENT WE MAKE GANDHI GASP!!)”
You’re right–that is the command that Klaatu gives Helen the original. To me, the quote doesn’t seem complete without Helen’s panicked exclamation–“GORT!!” before she can get the words out.
Klaatu does speak to Gort in the new version, but in alien lingo (that some people think is the original quote backwards).
In the DVD commentary on the 1951 version, Nicholas Meyer asks Robert Wise about the math on the chalkboard. Wise doesn’t give an impressive answer, saying, “We got a student from UCLA or someplace to put something up.”