Or like Vietnamese ground troops fighting against F4 Phantom IIs.
(Y’know that goop they use to hold wiring harnesses in place? It was used in the wiring harnesses of F4s. Many of which were grounded because it turned out there was a microbe in Vietnam that just loved the stuff.)
I agree it was pulling out deus ex microbia (hah!), but extending the metaphor for 19th century British Imperialism, I think it was a fair use since Wells wasn’t just trying to condemn imperialism, but also to warn Britain that their own shortsightedness would be their undoing. I don’t think Wells did it to give a happy ending. Many of his published works ended in varying degrees of disaster for the protagonists, so I don’t see him feeling the need to Disney-fy (if you’ll forgive the anachronism) War of the Worlds.
To me, the important distinction between Scientology and all the other religions is that most religions are up front about their supernatural beliefs. You don’t have to be a Level-22 Catholic or put tens of thousands of dollars in the collection plate before they tell you the part about Jesus dying for your sins.
I can’t remember where I read it, but there’s some work of fiction, or maybe it was just some futurist speculating, that an airborne microbe with a taste for rubber could bring the world, and every military, to its knees.
Point taken. Aren’t there mystic sects of Christianity though that only give you your decoder rings after some rite or vows or something?
Oh, wouldn’t YOU like to know… 
I agree though, that secrecy is maybe the only distinction in kind for cults versus religions. That said, the Pythagoreans (mathematicians) would meet that definition of a cult, as would many of the ancient Greek schools of philosophy, Buddhist monastic orders, and probably others. Though in the case of groups like the Platoists, they used secrecy like a paywall, since teaching their philosophy was their bread and butter.
The audience for the book was also familiar with the experience of Africa, where European explorers, traders, and colonial officials dropped like flies from malaria, dengue fever, and a variety of other tropical diseases.
Back in the original run of Omni, they published a short by Asimov called “Found” (I think), in which an astronaut sent to repair a satellite finds that its electronics has been riddled with tiny holes, courtesy of some microscopic silicon-based life form. The end of civilisation presumably ensues.
Dakota Fanning was just fucking insufferable.
All she did was scream and cry. And when she wasn’t doing that she was whining. I go to an action/adventure movie with sci-fi themes, I expect that there might be a collicky baby in the auditorium. But not on screen for minutes on end.
Mystery cults were, at one time, all the rage.
That was literally the movie I had in mind as I typed that. I had a friend who took an anthropology class that looked at depictions of anthropology and archaeology in film, and Prometheus was featured as “How NOT to Do Archaeology.”
This is turning into me ranting about tropes more than particular movies, but I’m also thinking of Hollywood’s treatment of acids. Javier Bardem’s character in the James Bond movie Spectre supposedly lost his jaw to corrosive hydrogen cyanide. I lost my suspension of disbelief. HCN is a weak fairly weak acid and the quantities and concentration necessary to dissolve half your face would definitely kill you through toxic action. I wrote briefly about “salt acid” in The Mummy which melts some hapless Egyptian laborers who open a tomb.
I don’t know that much about computers, but I’ll let the numerous Boingers with a background in computer security and programming explain how much computer-related bullshit there was in that movie.
It’s not that acid can’t be scary, it’s just that Hollywood often manages to find the least scary circumstances to apply them.
Oftentimes, when I think of bad science in sci-fi, it’s not that the science is wrong. I’m willing to accept that in a lot cases where there’s a miracle material or drug. I can accept that Tony Stark has a magnificent fusion reactor in his chest or that Captain America uses a vibranium shield that absorbs kinetic energy like a sink. Fine. It’s really when it’s applied inconsistently. Don’t tell me that Captain America’s shield absorbs kinetic energy from bullets and then have someone push him back with a flying kick to the shield. That makes no sense, that means that momentum does transfer through vibranium and Black Panther’s suit doesn’t keep bullets from actually hurting him.
One of the worst offenders for consequential mechanics being ignored was Superman Returns. He lets a bunch of crooks try to machine gun him to death in a populated area, sending ricocheted bullets everywhere. Superman is supposed to care about collateral damage. Then there’s the classic Superman stupidity you get in every movie where he catches people who’ve fallen sixty stories who should have turned to mush in his invincible arms. It’s not the ground that kills you, it’s the abrupt landing. There’s also the way that Superman should just pass through the various humongous objects he tries to stop using brute strength. James Kakalios addresses all of these issues and more in The Physics of Superheroes.
Picking up a bad film in particular? The Day the Earth Stood Still. Not the original, which was not a secretly brilliant work of philosophy, but was pretty good. The Keanu remake was mostly annoying and synthetically preachy. There’s a line in the movie that SETI head Seth Shostak (who consulted for the film) commented on: The scientists are watching an object head towards earth and one of them says something like “Dr. Smith, the anomaly is moving towards us at a rate of 257 meters per second.” Shostak remarked that scientists don’t talk that way, the guy would have more likely said, “Bob, there’s something headed towards us and it’s pretty fast.” What kind of scientist heads immediately towards the site where an asteroid is about to strike? I really didn’t like what they did with that movie, though I did like Gort, Gort was cool.
Wizard of Oz was completely unrealistic. Monkey can’t fly, witches don’t melt, and ruby slippers don’t transport you anywhere.
That’s basically the ending to every Crichton novel. Nothing ever changes; there is always something at the end that resets the world like at the end of a sit-com episode. There’s always something that is about to revolutionize the world (cloning, time travel, nanobots, etc.) and it goes haywire so the heroes have to destroy it without the rest of the world knowing.
I think the answers all lie with the guy that wrote the book. Crichton is maybe OK at telling a story, but the science is as shit as Dan Brown’s religious scholarship. Bad at doing the science thing, and with a safety last attitude. I avoid Jurassic Park movies because I know the source material is going to be total crap and I won’t be able to suspend disbelief.
[edit] Wait…did you make it through the entirety of Outbreak? If so, you dear sir, have much greater patience than I. Not even Sutherland could save that POS.
Maybe we should also start a best scifi movie thread? They will all contain Sam Rockwell and be comedies, though. 
(And, no, I’m not counting Iron Man 2 in this list.)
See, I was willing to go with it. That they’re not on the Mars in our universe but a similar version of Mars that has such dust storms. I was willing to live in their version of the universe where they developed incredibly strong glass to have floor to ceiling windows and built spaceships that had enough room to have a goddamed conference table in them.
And then they put the lander for Ares IV on the ground a year before the crew was supposed to arrive. So the NASA plan is to set themselves up for similar disasters on every future Ares mission even before they arrive? Get all the astronauts in orbit and watch a dust storm knock over their return vehicle from space? How much does it cost to fix the problem with three more legs?
I’ve heard from medical students that the one show that continually got medicine right was Scrubs, so you’re probably right on with your assumptions about Sam Rockwell comedies…
I’ve worn a pair in Manhattan, and oh! the places I went!
