*****Spoiler alert*****
geonuc wrote:I'll agree with pumpkin's final point. If bad science is something you can't endure in a movie/TV show, then your choices are pretty limited.
Its not so much that I can't suspend belief its when they go internally inconsistent.
E.g. They get the physics pretty much right at the start but then they abandon the physics that they defined at the start in order to either increase the drama or provide special effects.
That peaked when that bad physics was being used to kill off a major character and it bugs me because all the while I'm sitting there thinking, pull the damed cord, you're in zero G and not moving relative to one another. A light tug is all it takes. Instead they dragged the scene on and on trying to hype up the drama which just left me longer and longer to dwell about the stupidity of it. Now had they wanted to fix it and make it believable, make the station rotate with them attached. The graphics would hardly cost a thing and they would have kept internal consistency and not even had to change the plot any.
Then there was the crying scene where her tears left her eyes and just floated towards the camera. Ok, I get its for 3D fun but it was really distracting and unbelievable. If they wanted 3D fun, I say spin the station and have stuff come off it towards the camera. Again, internal consistency and realism without much effort and without causing people like me to wonder who on Earth missed the opportunities to get things right with little or no effort at all yet they spend considerable effort in making things wrong.
E.g. the debris flying around the world in 90 minutes. Ok, first its not 90 min but I can suspend belief in a little math errors. The visible debris just ruined it for me. I understand the need for visuals but its like presenting a war movie where projectiles travel as fast as paper planes. I don't get it, apart from a few movies that did that well (the Matrix for example) everyone knows that bullets travel so fast they can't be seen. Space debris that can orbit the planet in 90 minutes make the speed of bullets seem slow. I managed to ignore the fact that you wouldn't see them coming even if their speed was so slow. See I'm not that fussy.
Then the re-entry scene. Head butts the wall.
I've skipped a whole load of others but it got to the stage they were making more mistakes than anything else.
But the part that gets me the most, is that they spent a shit load of time and money on getting the space craft right and that's according to real life astronauts. By that they refer to the buttons being the right buttons to push, the levers to be the right levers to move etc.
So they went out of their way to recreate something accurately where only a few people would notice, then totally screwed it up where a large majority are forced to notice. Even my MIL had to complain about the death scene and she knows little about physics, but, because they presented the physics at the start she expected something that didn't happen but should have.
I am guessing that the tech guys recreated the craft as much as they could because they love that shit. The graphics guys did as much as they could and it showed because between those two the movie was five stars.
The director however has the final say in how its presented and that's where the ball was dropped and for me it was made of crystal and shattered. For others that ball was rubber and it just bounced back and they played bounce with it through the movie. All I got was lots of crystal balls breaking regularly.
Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2013 2:38 am
