I’ve been using Netflix to catch up on movies I haven’t seen, some of which are crap, but as many of you may know, I love cinema and story telling, so I’ll even watch a crap movie, if for no other reason than to learn from where they went wrong.
Today I began watching “Deep Impact” which is a story about an extinction level event caused by comet impact … not the first time cinema has covered this topic, but definitely the worst I’ve seen. Even Armageddon with Bruce Willis beats it, because at least they avoided all the stupid religious themes.
First of all, naming the spaceship “the messiah” was just a really bad choice, talk about corny. But it immediately gets worse when instead of using a massive bunch of nuclear devices slightly offset from a direct line of trajectory, to simply force the comet off its path, they have to waste space and resources in their space ship, to bring extra crew, a landing vehicle, drilling devices and everything else needed for a mission that I just can’t see NASA ever thinking was a good idea … when instead you could just place every nuke you can get into a module that just gets dropped off on the surface of slightly out in front of the comet, not intending to blow it up, simply deflect it into the sun or something.
What would have been even more accurate and interesting, is if they’d gone out there to study the comet, estimate it’s mass, thus determine the kinetic energy of its mass and motion, and thus calculate the precise blast and timing required to force it into the sun.
… and besides all that, there are vastly better ideas they could have researched about how to deflect an NEO.
BUT OK … let’s get past the naming of the ship and the idiocy of the mission, and move on to where they’ve now decided to move 1,000,000 into an underground city … and what do we see as the buses turn up to the tunnels? 2 elephants, 2 ostriches, 2 flamingos etc. … again with the religious ideas.
Pleeeeeease don’t tell me there’s human beings stupid enough to think this shouldn’t have been laughed out of the script development room? How the fuck did anyone come to the decision to fund this shit?
You’re seriously proposing they have precise diets for countless species underground, when instead they could just take a whole bunch of frozen sperm and eggs? They did it with the plants (mentioning the seeds); but oh no, not with the animals, we have to limit the gene pool to just 2 creatures and appease our stupid religious audience that don’t know what a phenomenally bad idea that would be (and why it makes the whole Noah’s Ark story such a joke).
Open Empire Film Projects:
This is one of the many reasons why Open Empire is so desperately needed … because films like this as an attempt to wake people up to the seriousness of the issue, just don’t cut it. We need films that don’t dumb down every issue to the point of stupidity, catering to the lowest common denominator; instead we should raise people up through film, by proper research in the script and thus educating the audience.
Open Empire film projects would not make these kinds of mistakes, and they’d be better films … because the primary concern would be making the best film possible, with the greatest beneficial ecological and social consequences (including education of the audience), not just some dumb financial bottom line.
When we educate people poorly, and society is dumbed down, problems get worse … and there are some problems you don’t want to mess with, like NEO extinction level impact events.