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Science Fiction: Films & TV

ramonmercado said:
I saw Arrival again tonight, even better on a second viewing.
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Second viewing of Arrival for me too, today. Definitely holds up a second time and there's lots a second viewing brings into focus including the sound, and the topicality (how fear is transmitted). I hope Amy Adams gets an oscar for an amazing performance.

8/10 from me -- loses a couple of marks for a problem with the end, otherwise very good.
 

One thing missing: looking about to see where the narrator's voice is coming from.
 
Passengers: The Starship Avalon is en route to Homestead 2, a colony planet. It's 258 crew and 5,000 passengers are in hibernation as 30 years into the 120 year voyage an incident occurs which damages the ship. Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) is woken prematurely and only has an android waiter (Michael Sheen) for company. After a year Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence) awakens. Systems glitches and breakdowns occur ...

A wonderful Starship design with rotating arcs as well as rings, you see just what happens to a swimming pool when gravity is lost and the Avalon spectacularly slingshots around Arcturus. 8/10.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1355644/
 
A nice looking ship. It could almost work- except they haven't put enough fuel tankage for an interstellar flight. Big ship like that'd need big fuel tanks.
 
Sci-Fi Gets Science Right: 'Passengers' Nails the Physics

The new science fiction film "Passengers" takes viewers on a journey to the future, when glitzy interstellar starships can transport thousands of hibernating passengers to planets in neighboring star systems. While aspects of its story line may seem like pies in the sky to skeptics, creators of the futuristic space thriller certainly outdid its predecessors "Gravity" and "Interstellar" in the physics department.

"Passengers" is the story of two space travelers (played by Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence) on an interstellar spaceship who wake up from an induced state of hibernation, or stasis, 90 years ahead of schedule. Unable to put themselves back into hypersleep, the two must come to terms with the knowledge that they will die on the spaceship before ever reaching their destination.

While the story is set way ahead of the current time and features technology that either doesn't exist yet or seems entirely out of reach, the makers of "Passengers" clearly took their science seriously. ['Passengers': An Interstellar Space Film in Pictures]

An 'Interstellar' journey
Rather than speeding through wormholes — theoretical tunnels that provide shortcuts through space and time — to hop from planet to planet like the astronauts do in the 2014 film "Interstellar," the sleeping astronauts aboard the spaceship Avalon in "Passengers" are traveling at one-half the speed of light. They're on a 120-year journey to an Earth-like planet called Homestead II that's located in a neighboring star system. ...

http://www.space.com/35104-passengers-scifi-movie-nails-space-physics.html
 
Dear me - this film seems to want to correct some of the mistakes in films like Interstellar and Gravity, but it looks like it may have fallen into a few traps itself.

As I've mentioned, the ship doesn't seem to have any visible fuel reserves- but it is supposedly travelling at 0.5 c, so it would need a lot of fuel (and propellant) to slow down. The drive (whatever it is) seems to be 'on' all the time, meaning the ship would still be accelerating - this would affect the local perception of 'down' in the rotating segments, but if the acceleration is very small this might not be much of a problem. But even a small acceleration maintained over hundreds of years would require lots of fuel tankage.

Hmm; the clip showing 'gravity loss' in the swimming pool shows the drive shutting down- this (somehow) causes the rotation to stop, and throws the swimming pool into zero gravity*. Chaos ensues.

The sequence showing the water in zero gee is very nice, but suddenly stopping the rotation would cause the water to slosh sideways, rather than raising it up in a big blob. They seem to have assumed that the gravity would disappear as it turned off by a switch (like in Moonraker); this isn't quite what would happen, though it is a very impressive sequence, and most of it looks right.

*Why would shutting the drive down cause the rotation to cease? A rotating ship would continue to rotate unless the angular momentum were removed somehow- this could be achieved using roll thrusters, or by shunting the angular momentum into flywheels - but this would be a deliberate process, and if it happened quickly everything in the rotating section would be thrown violently sideways.

Dammit - now I want to see this film to check out everything they get wrong. And everything they get right, of course.
 
eburacum said:
Dear me - this film seems to want to correct some of the mistakes in films like Interstellar and Gravity, but it looks like it may have fallen into a few traps itself.

As I've mentioned, the ship doesn't seem to have any visible fuel reserves- but it is supposedly travelling at 0.5 c, so it would need a lot of fuel (and propellant) to slow down. The drive (whatever it is) seems to be 'on' all the time, meaning the ship would still be accelerating - this would affect the local perception of 'down' in the rotating segments, but if the acceleration is very small this might not be much of a problem. But even a small acceleration maintained over hundreds of years would require lots of fuel tankage.
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Maybe it's a Bussard ramjet or similar, or an ion engine that is more fuel-efficient than current models?
Or a matter-antimatter drive? You actually wouldn't need much fuel for that.
 
Antimatter drives have their own problems - the worst being a horrendous emisson of gamma rays, which would sterilise everything on board. The best design for an antimatter ship involves putting the drive a very long way away from the habitable section, surrounded by heat radiators (no drive can be 100% efficient, so there is always lost of waste heat). Ion drives have fantastically low thrust, and still need both fuel and propellant.

A Bussard drive makes sense- but mostly as a brake- the acceleration is lower than the drag, so you can use it to slow down. Perhaps this ship has a hidden Bussard magbrake system- in which case I'm very intrigued.
 
If it worked at all, the EM Drive wouldn't emit a blue glow at the rear, as far as I can tell. If the 'resonant cavity' got very hot it might exhibit a general glow all over, but that's a speculation too far for me.
 
Most of the reviews of Passengers I've seen say it's fairly dull and a waste of two fun stars. I'm still curious to see for myself, though.
 
GNC said:
Most of the reviews of Passengers I've seen say it's fairly dull and a waste of two fun stars. I'm still curious to see for myself, though.
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Its definitely worth seeing, a few flaws but I give it 8/10.
 
'kin ell ! ... the new Alien - Covenant film looks a bit good

 
The Ars Technica science fiction bucket list—42 movies every geek must see
...and nine bonus stinkers from which you should run away screaming.
ARS STAFF - 11/3/2016, 12:00 PM


Here at Ars, we're always making lists (just like Liam Neeson). Lists of science fiction movies are a common item for discussion on the Ars staff Slack channel—particularly short lists of the best science fiction movies ever made. But "best" is an impossible word to quantify in any broadly applicable way—one person's "best ever" might be another person's worst, especially in a genre of movies as rich and varied as science fiction.

While the Ars staff has some bitter disagreements on which movies are better than others, it's undeniable that some science fiction movies are mandatory viewing for the modern geek. To that end, rather than try to pull together another tired "top ten sci-fi movies" listicle, we've instead polled the Ars staff to try to come up with a definitive "science fiction bucket list"—that is, a list of sci-fi movies that you should absolutely see at least once before you die. They aren't necessarily the "best" movies by any specific set of criteria, but every film on this list is outstanding in some particular way. Some are groundbreaking in their stories or subject matter, some are controversial, and some contain a character or plot twist that became an archetype, referenced in and reused by countless other films. Some films on the list, like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, are pure cinematic poetry; others, like Pacific Rim, are pure popcorn fun. And, as a bonus, we even included a bonus list of a few absolutely terrible stinkers at the very bottom. ...


http://arstechnica.com/the-multiver...on-bucket-list-42-movies-every-geek-must-see/

I don't agree that Zardoz is a stinker, Connery is woefully miscast but the film has some good ideas.
 
Great to see Galaxy Quest and Computer Chess get some love, two fantastic sci-fi films.

But the worst list is seriously off in many places. Zardoz is incredibly boring and Battlefield Earth is fatuous propaganda, but Re-Animator is a terrific comedy horror, Bad Taste is a remarkable achievement on next to no money, Barbarella is a visually perfect comic strip (but looked down on by the "serious" fans with no sense of humour), Brain Damage is one of Frank Henenlotter's best and I even think Robot Jox has its merits. It's all an opinion, I suppose.
 
Brain Damage is one of Frank Henenlotter's best
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I think I saw that a long time ago - is that the one with the drugs allegory creature that looks like a singing knob?
 
Which now reminds me of this one, which didn't make the list:


I remember James Whale showing that clip on his TV show. The following week he said lots of people had written in to complain, so here it is again. :rofl:
 
OneWingedBird said:
I think I saw that a long time ago - is that the one with the drugs allegory creature that looks like a singing knob?
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That's the one! Cosmic ending, too. Sadly the TV horror host who provided the voice of the parasite died this year (at a ripe old age, though).
 
The Expanse just began it's second series.
 
I'm just back from seeing Arrival: intelligent sci-fi (well, more or less: there are one or two plot holes and last time I looked, Messrs. Sapir & Whorf had been largely rebutted, but, you know...), some clever timey-wimey stuff, and last but not least, the world is saved by a translator :glee:
 
Just watched "Ex Machina", liked it a lot, it looked amazing, it explored some interesting ideas about AI and self-awareness of such, even if the ending was a little weak and if I'm frank, I "called it" about half an hour from the end (but then I'm constantly amazed at the assumptions folk make about how an artificial consciousness will behave).
 
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