Is there an echo in here? I wonder how many stories have used this device:
Any reader of The Hobbit remembers this. In their quest for the Arkenstone, the dwarves and one hobbit make use of the prediction that on Durin’s Day, the last light of the setting sun will shine directly upon a keyhole enabling entry to a secret passage into the mountain.
In The Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones makes use of ancient instructions to find the location of the Well of Souls, where the Ark is kept hidden. The light of the rising sun, passing through the headpiece of the properly positioned Staff of Ra, shines directly onto the location of the Well of Souls in the fabled Map Room.
In the 1959 movie Journey to the Center of the Earth (which I started watching while feeling under the weather today), the location of the passage leading into the Earth is revealed when the sun shines through an opening in a nearby peak, directly onto the mouth of the passage. (In the Verne original, I believe, the mechanism is similar, but less cinematic.)
Reuse of plot devices is a time-honored tradition among storytellers, of course. How many other stories have used this device? If you can think of examples, list them here in the comments!
My son-in-law Connor recently commented that he was done with Marvel movies. They were just getting too awful. I should have followed his example. I recently watched Thor: Love and Thunder. What a terrible mess of a movie. The writing sucked, the acting sucked, and the story sucked. The best part of it was the screeching goats, and that was only because they were slightly less annoying than the rest of the characters. What a waste of great talent. I used to like the Thor movies. What the hell happened?
I should have taken the hint after watching Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. OMG, what a terrible mess of a movie. Way to ruin every character in two hours and six minutes, which in context seemed like a very long time indeed. Even Rachel McAdams, whom I happen to have a thing for in better movies, couldn’t come through this without looking like a total mistake. Which in fact is a kind summary of the film.
Between the two, that’s just over four hours of my life I can’t get back. I think maybe I’m done with Marvel movies, too. I need to learn to just turn them off when it’s clear they aren’t going to get better. Which, come to think of it, is what I should have done with Obi-Wan Kenobi, too.
We watched the new Wonder Woman on HBOMax last night, and it was a lot of fun, an excellent Boxing Day movie. It didn’t reach the level of greatness of the first film, but it was still quite entertaining—especially if you’re weary of the dark, brooding tone of recent D.C. movies (and for that matter, Marvel, as well). Granted, the script is a little uneven, especially in the first third, but Gal Gadot still has the magic, and great chemistry with Chris Pine. Kristen Wiig is fun, as well. I finished the movie with a smile, if not the stars in my eyes that I left the theater with after the first one. The Easter egg has a nice twist. And because there’s a scene at the end at Christmastime, this can now go on the list of Christmas movies!
It all started with Allysen looking at the shelf space my movie collection was taking up. Collecting movies and, to a lesser extent, TV shows, has been a hobby of mine for over twenty years now—especially since we got a Panasonic DVD Recorder back around the turn of the century. (That was motivated in part by the space taken up by the VHS tapes I was recording off cable; we knew DVDs were far more compact.) So now I have all these big binders full of DVDs I’ve burned, and that’s not counting all the commercial DVDs in their plastic cases.
“I know it’s your hobby and you love it, but can’t you put all those movies on a big hard drive or something? Then we could put books on those shelves,” intoned Allysen thoughtfully and a little beseechingly.
“Not that simple,” responded I instantly and a touch defensively. “How would I then play the movies on our TV?”
“Oh,” mused Allysen, frowning in pensive thought. “I never thought of that.” And she went off with a flip of her hair to do whatever women do.
(Actually she gave a heartfelt sigh and said, “Never mind,” and went off to ponder some other intractable household problem.)
Notwithstanding the obvious decline of my writing skills during the pandemic, I couldn’t let the idea, once broached, go without at least a little research. And soon I discovered Plex, the free media-server software that lets you do just what Allysen said: Put all your movies on a hard drive, and play them on your TV, using your home wifi and Roku or Firestick or whatever you stream with. You can even put them on a home server, and then you don’t even have to have your computer turned on to watch your movies.
Fast forward: We now own a little black box called a Synology server, and in the black box are two big, honking 12TB hard drives, one serving as a backup to the other. I’ve been gradually, over the past couple of months, using the free Handbrake app to rip all my DVDs into mp4 files, and saving them to the server. I’m maybe a third of the way through the DVD collection at this point, and those binders are going one by one down to a spare filing cabinet in the basement.
How did it take me so long to discover Plex? It’s amazing. It helps you organize everything, and pulls in poster art, descriptions, and similar data for each movie. It even cross-references the leading actors in your collection. You can stream your media on your TV, your phone, tablet, laptop—even when you’re away from home. And you can share it with your friends, and host “watch together” movie nights, with your friends streaming simultaneously off your server! That last we haven’t put to the test yet, but we hope to, real soon now. Oh, it can also do the same with your music collection and photos.
While we were at it, we cut the cord from Xfinity, but perhaps that’s a story for another time.
What are you watching while you’re cooped up inside, practicing social distancing? Here at the Star Rigger Ranch, we decided to binge on movies about infectious disease outbreaks. What fun!
We started with Outbreak, which was entertaining if totally unconvincing. With Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, and Morgan Freeman, it at least had actors you like to watch. Plus, it had the Star Trek medical-miracle feature: the ability to synthesize a vaccine/cure within about an hour of discovering the secret. You go, Bones! (And I see The Atlantic just published an article about it. Great minds…)
Segue to The Andromeda Strain, which really had that 1960s SF movie vibe going, talky and lecturing. It was mildly entertaining, but reminded me why I’d never bothered to keep a recording of it. In the end, the people do nothing useful; the bug mutates and becomes benign. (Oops—sorry—spoiler alert!)
Next up was The Cassandra Crossing, which had this going for it: It’s a train movie, and I like train movies. Otherwise it’s ludicrous, being based on the idea that if you’ve got a train filled with people infected by a plague, the obvious thing to do is to send it over a failing trestle so that it will plunge with a spectacular crash into an uninhabited ravine. That’ll show those germs! (Dusts off hands.) Next problem?
Finally we come to Contagion, by far the most realistic of the lot. Also educational, terrifying, and depressing. Good if you want to learn how this coronavirus thing could go. Bad if you’re looking for diversion.
For diversionary purposes, Outbreak is the not-very-satisfying winner. But what movies have we forgotten?
I saw Ad Astra on Saturday. I was really looking forward to it—a movie touted as a thoughtful film, possibly the best for depicting space travel in a realistic way since 2001. In fact, it’s a beautifully filmed, wonderfully acted science fiction movie… that ultimately makes almost no sense at all. Far from being realistic (or plausible, the director’s preferred term), Ad Astra is a Swiss cheese of logical gaps and science absurdities.
SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS!
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Let me preface this by saying that Ad Astra has many strong points. It has great production values, and some of the world-building touches are nice. (Pillow and blanket on the shuttle to the Moon? That’ll be $125. Franchise fast food in the lunar city? That’ll probably happen. Pirates on the prowl between lunar outposts? Maybe.)
To its credit, the main thing this movie does right is the character building—specifically, Brad Pitt as an astronaut traveling to Neptune in search of his missing dad, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who is suspected of being responsible for deadly energy bursts coming Neptune. The effects of solitude, both self-imposed and externally imposed, on each of them? Spot on. Fantastic performances. For this, I came away with the feeling that the movie was well worth seeing. For me, it was a failure but an interesting failure. I’ll probably watch it again.
Unfortunately, too much in the story is just dumb. For example, the notion that:
A search for intelligent life in the universe is best conducted from Neptune—why, we’re never told, because what we actually need is large detectors and telescopes, not distant ones—and that a negative finding there means that’s it, we’re alone in the universe.
A Neptune-orbiting antimatter reactor gone wrong would release bursts of world-busting energy directly at the Earth, and that the energy would magically intensify as it approached Earth (energy and radiation tends to dissipate, not intensify, with distance).
If you have a world-critical need to get from Point A to Point B on the Moon, and you know the intervening territory is infested with pirates, the thing to do is travel by lightly armed, open rover instead of… I don’t know, flying in a shuttle?
If you vent a compartment to space, the organisms inside will explode and splat on the viewports (they wouldn’t).
You would send a radio signal to Neptune and sit listening for an answer (the round-trip signal time is around eight hours).
If you need to get right now to a rocket that’s a mile away on Mars, and there’s an underground lake between you and it, definitely go underwater and pull yourself hand-over-hand along a cable, which wouldn’t take long at all.
If you need to get inside a rocket that’s moments from liftoff, and you’re coming up from beneath, you can expect to find an airlock hatch right next to the engines—and anyway, what’s a little smoke and fire to a tough astronaut?
The flight crew on a deep-space mission would carry guns as side-arms, because you never know when you might want to fire bullets inside a pressurized spaceship. And they would definitely abandon their stations during a launch (including the pilot!) to subdue a stowaway who poses no immediate threat.
I know you can come up with more. Talk to me about that tower in the opening sequence. It looks cool, but what is it, and what’s it for, and what’s holding it up? And near the end, what about that jump away from the station and through the battering rings of Neptune, and coming out right where you parked your spaceship (which you could not see through the rings)? Stop me before I go on.
When I attended the Launchpad Astronomy Workshop for writers, we screened the movie Armageddon, so that we could deconstruct the science mistakes afterward. I believe that Ad Astra may be a good candidate for that role. But I will say this: They got the far side of the Moon right, and didn’t call it the dark side of the Moon, even though it happened to be in darkness due to the Moon’s being at its full phase.
I have no wish to disparage a sincere effort by a filmmaker new to science fiction. But it appears to me that writer-director James Gray had a vision, but not the depth of understanding of his subject matter to pull it off. Or maybe he understood it, but misjudged where it was reasonable to take liberties. I acknowledge that this probably puts me in the minority of reviewers, many of whom seem to love the movie. God bless ’em.
But if you are an aspiring science fiction writer, study this movie critically. Appreciate the character-building, which is genuinely rewarding. And then learn the difference between cool looking and plausible.
For extra credit, go back and do the same exercise with Sunshine.
A week ago, we had a movie night/book launch party at my home, and we watched First Man, the excellent biopic about Neil Armstrong, which of course culminated (SPOILER ALERT!) with the successful first landing on the moon.
A few days after that, I watched First Men in the Moon on Turner Classic Movies, an oldie based on the H.G. Wells novel (how closely, I do not know). In this film, the first explorers traveled to the moon in 1899, and the story was rather different. The plot revolved around our hapless explorers finding a race of large, bug-eyed creatures called Selenites living in the moon, in a complex of caverns beneath the lunar surface.
Now I’ve just finished watching the recent Nova episode: Back to the Moon, about how and why we might—after 50 years!—return to the moon to stay. Most of the information was familiar, but something new I learned is that apparent sinkholes have recently been discovered on the moon—holes in the surface, possibly connected to subsurface tunnels and maybe even caverns! The upshot: One location real lunar settlers might pick to build their shelters is in existing tunnels and caverns beneath the lunar surface—just like the Selenites!
I’ve always been fascinated by submarines and all things underwater. Lately I’ve been reading a book called The Ice Diaries, by William R. Anderson & Don Keith. Anderson was captain of the world’s first nuclear submarine, Nautilus, when it completed the first trans-arctic voyage from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic, straight across the North Pole under the polar ice cap. That was in the summer of 1958. Captain Anderson tells a fascinating story of the work—and the setbacks—that went into this super top-secret mission. They sailed by special order of President Eisenhower, at a time when America was still reeling from the Soviet Union’s firsts in space and badly wanted a first of its own. (For you young’uns, this was during the Cold War, and these things mattered.)
Much of the passage was tricky to execute, because of the boat’s being sandwiched between shallow bottoms and down-plunging ridges and keels of overhead ice. Both posed a hazard to the boat, which was vulnerable to damage, especially to her periscopes and sail. It had not been built with this mission in mind, and her first forays under the ice cap had resulted in bent periscopes and a bashed-in sail. Little was known about these waters, inertial navigation was difficult close to magnetic north, and instrumentation for scanning overhead obstacles was still in its infancy. It was an impressive achievement! Here, from the book, is Nautilus returning to visit New York City.
That got me thinking about an old movie called Ice Station Zebra, from 1968, with Rock Hudson as skipper of a nuclear sub called upon to go under the polar ice. (In this case, they were to deliver some important people carrying guns to an outpost far up in the arctic.) Turns out I have a copy (I collect movies, probably more than I should), and I started watching it to see how the fictional sub sized up against the real one. The answer, to my surprise, is it sized up pretty well!
The sub in the movie looks a lot like the Nautilus, actually. (That’s a snapshot from the movie, above.) The scenes in the control room felt more realistic to me than I expected—not that I would know—and some of the instruments they showed for scanning the ice looked just like what Captain Anderson described in his book, including a monitor showing TV images from the sail. I’m going to guess that these exterior underwater shots of the sub showed it closer to dangerous ice than the real people would have liked to go, but hey, it’s a movie. As a film, it’s just so-so, but as a depiction of what that voyage might have looked like, I give it a thumbs-up!
I should ask my niece’s husband Steve about it sometime. He’s a real-life sub captain. I wonder if he ever went under the ice.
By the way, you can go aboard the real Nautilus at the Submarine Museum in Groton, CT. I’ve been; it’s very cool.
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A week ago, we had a movie night/book launch party at my home, and we watched First Man, the excellent biopic about Neil Armstrong, which of course culminated (SPOILER ALERT!) with the successful first landing on the moon.
