The 1981 BBC Series version was quite good for a program with a Doctor Who level special effects budget.
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Thanks for this. I remember that moment in the film, but my reaction to it was probably influenced by a real-life story I’d heard years before seeing it.
Basically, a woman from a country that had been through decades of unrest described how the women and children were forced to risk their lives by sneaking out for food at night. They hoped the cover of darkness would keep them from being shot, and it didn’t always work.
One year, there was a period of time for a few weeks when the firing would stop, so they got bolder in foraging for food. They couldn’t figure out what had changed, because appeals by the women for their children hadn’t worked before. Long after the weird cease-fire ended and she’d left the country, she told that story. Someone looked into the dates, and it turned out the combatants had stopped because one country was in contention for the World Cup.
That’s why I watched that scene in the movie with a lot of disbelief.
ETA spoiler tags
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Will check this out. I’m not sure if another read of the one below would be a bit much, given the events of 2020 so far…
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(Seanan McGuire as) Mira Grant’s Parasitology and Newsflesh series should have a place in any apocalypse novel chart.
Said by someone who would happily buy her grocery shopping list (me), it might not carry much weight but her twists on the classic “Zombie Apocalypse” theme are a pleasure to read.
Sal (MC in Parasitology) is still one of my favourite characters, I’ve just binge-read the three volumes - again.
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I’m still ticked off that Interstellar used such a lame plot device to necessitate humanity’s exodus from Earth. They establish at the beginning of the film that humanity’s problem is ecological—a disease of some kind is destroying crops across the planet and anything grown in the open is going to be vulnerable. Then the movie posits that the only way to save any significant portion of humanity is to relocate to self-sufficient, ecologically sealed space habitats, but they need to unlock the secret of antigravity to make that plausible.
One thing the movie never even attempts to answer is “If you can build self-sufficient ecologically sealed habitats for everyone to live in why does it even MATTER if they are in space instead of built on the surface or in underground caves or whatever?”
There are all kinds of plausible reasons humanity might need to abandon the Earth one day, but that’s just some shit writing.
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I enjoyed Earth Abides, but saying the protagonists are trying to “rebuild civilization” is giving 95% of them way too much credit. They at least manage to get a thriving band of hunter-gathers going, so maybe some century down the road…
One that’s not on list that’s also good is John Christopher’s No Blade of Grass, which is about a virus wiping out the world’s cereal crops. The protagonists have make some pretty grim decisions.
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this movie sucked. hard. illogical plot. illogical decisions made by the protagonists. nearly all the time. plotholes everywhere. pseudo-philosophical BS… still hate it.
just my opinion.
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Also, when is the NASA finally going to realize they can’t keep spending billions and billions of dollars to rescue Matt Damon? Stop getting stranded on hostile planets, asshole.
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As an engineer I also hated some of the technical details in that film:
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Hijacking control of a government drone and gently bring it to a soft landing with a laptop seems extremely far-fetched even if that was something you could plan for ahead of time. Honestly I would have preferred to see him patch the truck tire like he was planning to.
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They built a big giant space station at the NASA facility when they had no idea of the engineering, or even the fundamental physics, of how it would some day be put into orbit.
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They had intelligent robots that flew spacecraft using a joystick interface rather than USB, WiFi, or, I dunno, just programming the damn spaceship to be smart enough to fly itself.
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As a security measure against a rogue astronaut stealing a spaceship, the robot disabled the spaceship’s auto-docking feature. Disabling the ability for it to take off in the first place would have been too much trouble, I guess?
There’s so much more but it exhausts me just to think about it. I normally try to suspend my disbelief for sci-fi films but the producers made such a big deal about how they did extensive research and consulting to get the technical stuff right.
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Well, I can’t speak for the film versions but the book ‘The Day of the Triffids’ by John Wyndham was excellent and has aged surprisingly well.
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The one part of that movie I liked was the idea of an AI having adjustment settings for its personality, so if you wanted your robot assistant to be more fun or less talkative or whatever you could just tweak the preferences a little. Imagine if C-3PO had slider bar you could adjust to dial down the constant whining.
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flying into orbit to rendezvous with the spaceship with a chemical rocket, when said spaceship has multiple shuttles, which are capable to land and take off from planets with high gravity.
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Best answer!
I didn’t notice, but was he among the crowd of Asgardians who managed to make it onto the ginormous spaceship before the events of the Ragnarok prophecy blew Asgard up?
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I can’t speak for the film, but the account of A Sound Of Thunder is a ridiculous misrepresentation of the book. In which there were no baboon-dinosaurs (and if there were, there wouldn’t be a local gas-mart). The change was much more subtle and just amounted to replacing a democratic government with an authoritarian one.
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I really used to like the genre, it was practically my favorite. But it’s become so commonplace that it’s lost some of its shock value. If every other movie is post-apocalypse, then the whole idea that the world has ended is no big deal anymore, and I tend to care less about why it happened and what’s going to happen to the protagonists…
I’m also completely sick of zombies (apparently I’m the only one who is) and I never really liked zombies that much anyway, so they’re really cluttering up the post-apocalypse genre for me.
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Someone priced that very question out once, in detail. The amount spent rescuing Matt Damon by NASA and/or the military (he was also Private Ryan, after all) was astronomical.
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