Movie Reviews 2.0
- Thread starter Dresden
- Start date
This thread demonstrates why nerds can't have nice things.
DuckThor Evil
Legend
Yeah it's pretty funny that in the Terminator movies, the robots actually have a skill to miss
Babel-17
Veteran
Well, I think it more a matter of the the Viet Nam analogy making the anachronism of soldiers in the future using 20th century tech less significant, but it wasn't done on purpose.
Cameron, where he had the money, painted as geeky and high tech a future as possible, imo.
The armored vehicle, the looie running things remotely by camera, and those remote heavy machine guns, showed Cameron making the military look impressive with their toys.
Imo he just didn't have the bucks to dress the soldiers up too much.
Cameron, where he had the money, painted as geeky and high tech a future as possible, imo.
The armored vehicle, the looie running things remotely by camera, and those remote heavy machine guns, showed Cameron making the military look impressive with their toys.
Imo he just didn't have the bucks to dress the soldiers up too much.
Billy Idol
Legend
Saw Oblivion. Good. Ending could have been better.
In the words of Graham or maybe it was Alstrong, "One word: Armageddon!"
The sentry guns had night vision optics. (Well the directors cut featured em anyway.)
The brief for the mission was a routine check-in on a colony which might have encountered *one* alien lifeform - certainly the marines and the powers that be in the film didn't emphasize Ripley's concerns. It was expected the colony simply had some broken communications gear and just needed repairs. So they went in with light weaponry more as a flag waving operation.
In this case it being the caseless M41A pulse rifle and some smart guns. Note they also only brought one dropship and APC down too. The director's cut has a whole long diatribe from Hudson about the fancy weaponry that they have available to them including plasma weapons. Most of it was left either on the Sulacco or destroyed when the APC got totalled.
Also the film also mentions that the helmets they were wearing had infrared visor capabilities - there is a line in the movie about how the aliens aren't showing up in it.
Finally a caseless project weapon would offer quite a few advantages - it doesn't require batteries to operate. Being caseless has only an ammo infeed in terms of moving parts. (No case ejection required.) So would likely be much more rugged and resistant to dirt. I can see several good arguments for maintaining them as your initial combat arm instead of the fancier stuff.
Aliens is quite clearly a vietnam allegory on a certain level, and should be seen from that perspective. Maybe people today are less reluctant to see that, but the movie is a quarter century old by now; vietnam was still a pretty fresh memory back then. Even if we ignore that, I don't really "get" the criticism about the marines' weapons though. Convential firearms are simple beasts and quite effective really. They can be easily produced with simple machinery, ammunition can be easily produced. As Banksie notes, the rifles the marines carry use caseless ammo, so they're going to be pretty dirt-proof overall. This is the future, so we'll pretend they have solved any currently outstanding issues with the caseless ammo itself.
You don't need fancy lasers or phased plasma rifle or any stuff like that, and in a theater of war often you don't want to. A theoretical handheld laser would be much more complicated to build, certainly much more fragile. Muck on the lens would screw up the lens when you fire the gun and so on (and muck being so prevalent outside of research labs that you really can't ignore that as a factor.) What happens when the air is dusty or foggy? Bullets just penetrate through that shit, a laser wouldn't necessarily. Also you wouldn't want to blind yourself or anyone else of your own troops when firing it, you'd need to wear goggles which creates more issues.
That in a "real" future situation robot soldiers would be deployed, as someone proposed, makes for a terrible movie. No drama whatsoever, no plot, no nothing. Seriously: WTF?!
You don't need fancy lasers or phased plasma rifle or any stuff like that, and in a theater of war often you don't want to. A theoretical handheld laser would be much more complicated to build, certainly much more fragile. Muck on the lens would screw up the lens when you fire the gun and so on (and muck being so prevalent outside of research labs that you really can't ignore that as a factor.) What happens when the air is dusty or foggy? Bullets just penetrate through that shit, a laser wouldn't necessarily. Also you wouldn't want to blind yourself or anyone else of your own troops when firing it, you'd need to wear goggles which creates more issues.
That in a "real" future situation robot soldiers would be deployed, as someone proposed, makes for a terrible movie. No drama whatsoever, no plot, no nothing. Seriously: WTF?!
Armageddon: the movie you can't just shoot holes through its plot, you can drop entire texas-sized meteors through it...
Worst big-budget action movie ever made, I think. It's just....terrible. Awful. So much wrong in two hours has never before been made, and never since either I'd prefer to think.
You could be right there, but that's just one aspect of Armageddon's badness. There's the terrible casting choices (we forgive you for appearing in this movie, Michael Duncan, RIP), the truly epically bad dialogue, the entire comically ridiculous premise of sending oil drillers into space to begin with, and so on.
Near Dark?
Projectile weapons in pressurised environments, whether on board a ship or in a different atmosphere on a planet might not really be the best idea. Something with less penetration/more localised damage might be the better choice.
That said, the Star Trek 'phasers'/'disruptors' etc etc are really pretty rubbish weapons in other respects. A projectile weapon such as a machine gun can fire dozens of bullets in the time your phaser has one little zap. OK, admittedly, you can't use a machine gun to heat a rock to stay warm or set the phaser's power pack to explode and clear a way out of a cave/prison cell/whatever. Similarly, projectile weapons probably wouldn't have the Star Wars blaster ability of either opening doors (by shooting the lock) or sealing doors (by shooting the lock).
I suppose the choice between a machine gun or phaser/blaster really depends on whether you want a straightforward weapon or a swiss-army gun.
For what it's worth, I think Aliens is an excellent film with few dodgy plot points (other than the fact that everyone and I mean everyone on the spaceship buggers off down onto the planet surface!), especially in comparison to some of the more modern movies around.
The limited Colonial Marine technology/weaponry is perhaps to some extent just a factor of the technological movie-making limitations of the time it was filmed. I have to say that Cameron didn't exactly cover himself with glory in Prometheus when he had a much freer creative hand due to CGI and the like. I know which of the two movies I'd rather watch.
"I hate it when they ain't been shaved."
I saw the new Evil Dead.
Pretty good, in a disgusting kind of way. Wouldn't call it scary, and the second half just gets silly - like most horror movies do.
But i found it very entertaining.
Pretty good, in a disgusting kind of way. Wouldn't call it scary, and the second half just gets silly - like most horror movies do.
But i found it very entertaining.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
It's a remake, not a re-release. Apparently Romero likes it.
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