Bill & Ted, passim.
Last night,
Mission to Mars, because I was bored and unsleepy and I'd somehow missed this (and the KSR thread made me think, come on, surely someone can make going to Mars sound better than a daytrip to Basingstoke).
Lordy, was it embarrassingly bad. It should carry some kind of warning. It was a motorway pile-up the entire length of the M1 of a movie. I'm not spoilering it and it's an old movie, and you just need to know. I wasted two hours and a late night.
Look Hollywood, I can take cod-science, I'm not a socially-deficient nerdballer (it's true, I tell you) provided it's done in a devil-may-care manner. I can suspend my disbelief to the extent I'm doing trapeze with it. But if you litter a shit movie with it, then I'm not. The sins of this movie cover all departments. Below is not a full list of the individual turds it dropped on my brain.
- Needless, nauseating smaltzifying.
- I've seen more character development in a nematode. Better acting too.
- In an admirable (and perhaps overzealous) trimming of the traditional NASA bureaucracy, all future missions are now approved by one bloke with a hangdog smile. There will be none of that analysis. They'll go because the astronauts want to. Because Hollywood.
- A spacecraft that looked like it had been assembled by the Blue Peter team out of discarded washing-up liquid bottles.
- Even cars have fuel gauges. I'm no rocket scientist but I think spaceships will have them. Even ones assembled with PVA glue.
- It's true, all astronauts go into space with a stock of Dr Pepper. I am not sure if other soft drinks will detect leaks. At least Blue Peter didn't do product inyourfacement, much to Fairy Liquid's displeasure.
- Momentum and orbital mechanics. They weren't paying attention in that physics class. Erm, you don't just stop in space when your suit runs out of fuel. What happens when you stop accelerating? How do you stop? With a little splurt of a gas? These are questions you would hope would be covered in astronaut school.
- And yes, little space-o-nauts, you could have saved little Timmy Robbins from his terminal date with the vacuum quite easily. If you knew anything about (7).
- I think any married couple will agree with NASA on why it's not a good idea to send them both into space on the same spaceship. Mind you, it was alright, because she forgot little Timmy's vain death within about five minutes. See item (2). I think there would have been more emotion if the spaceship hamster had died (fact: all spaceships should carry a hamster, the only reason this one didn't was because it might have upstaged all the other acting).
- Gravity on Mars is less than Earth. Even Arnie bounces around.
- Windy days on Mars probably don't flap tents.
- Friendly alien, you say? Cool, that'll be the same mutha who tore the other astronauts apart (with special effects that must have looked shit even in 2000) when they had the temerity to send the wrong message. This is like being summarily beheaded for using the wrong USB connector.
- DNA is not chromosomes. You can't look at a snippet of an helix and deduce missing chromosomes (top tip, chromosomes aren't the same thing as DNA). Human chromosomes. Not monkeys. Not nematodes. With a glance, they can say it's human. Had that scene lingered they probably would have narrowed it down to Ms Shirley Jones, of 1434 Wilmington Avenue.
- Alien EMP pulse fries all the navigational hardware on the return vehicle (hold on, where's the rest of that spaceship...) That'll be the hardware engineered to survive the rigours and radiation of a long trip in space. But the computers on the spacebase continue to work just fine.
- Ah, the lovely pause as they rescue the US flag from the Martian dirt. I'm surprised they didn't unearth an entire band to play the anthem while they stood to attention and saluted. See (1). Flag also flaps vigorously in that strong Martian breeze.
Oh there's more. I'm only doing this to extract some value from my wasted late night. In the end the alien cried. I know why. The entire thing, the script, the acting, the soundtrack, the direction were off-kilter. Worst still, and the cardinal crime of Mars capers, it was dull, dull, dull.
