Science Fiction Films discussion

Cite some examples of Science Fiction that really seemed far-fetched....like, "how did they ever conceive of that?" - in a good way, or in a bad way. It could be an idea that drives a book or film, or it could be a small detail that seemed ridiculous.

Ridiculous: Ignoring physical realities
- Space ships that fly around in space as if they had air. They have wings & know how to use them, even in vacuum. Star Wars is fun, but the suspension of belief is almost unbearable.
- So many of the action scenes in movies now do the same thing; Bruce Willis sliding down a roadway without road rash (Diehard 4) or Ultraviolet where she can balance in the oddest ways.

Cool: The idea behind Minority Report, the idea that crime will be stopped before it happens by precogs. Far-fetched, but an awesome idea.

Not so far out there: The depersonalization in so many SF films. THX, 1984, Metropolis & more.

i like your minority report citation. i also liked the idea, but imagine actually making that work (even philip k dick saw the problems, and included some of them in his text).

and yes, your diehard comment....are these modern uber-heroes immune to scarring?

Point on the problems with Minority Report.
There was a short story (I forget by who or when) about a future world where violent crimes had been pretty much gotten rid of because the cops could look into the past. They could watch a murder take place & always got the guy. In a love triangle, a guy sets himself up with a murder weapon, a scalpel, & angers the other guy until he hits him with a whip or something. This gives him cause to slash with the scalpel, killing him, leaving the girl for him.

They sit down to dinner in a restaurant & she's lukewarm to his advances. He tells her how he was smart enough to actually murder the other guy. She infuriates & belittles him, so he kills her by crushing her head with a pitcher in public.

There is no perfect way of defending against crime, but the SF writers have sure found some doozies.

I remember the old TV series the "Time Tunnel"

the two main characters enter a time machine that isnt quite ready; consequently they go back and forth through time, landing at key moments in history.

They never seemed to land at an ordinary day, they always landed as the Trojan horse is entering Troy, the day the Alamo is overrun, or the day the walls of Jericho fell.

in all those history making moments.........everyone spoke clear American English and they understood each other without any problems.

Haha! That is far-fetched Manuel. You'd think they'd at least have accents. ;)

I remember 'Time Tunnel'! That was a fun show - when I was about 8 or 10. I doubt I could stand it now.

One of my favorite movies is "Fantastic Voyage"
from the 1960's.

Despite the impossible physics and the incredible amount of energy required to shrink a human crew and vehicle small enough to maneuver inside a human body.....

My biggest pet peeve about this movie is the incredible amount of beauty and color inside the body of the government official on the operating table. It didnt occur to me until years later that it would probably be very dark inside our bodies........where was all that color and lighting coming from????

i loved that film as a kid! i got so excited when i knew it was going to be on tv.

still very enjoyable to watch, despite my pet peeves

i saw it for sale the other day in one of the two-for-one specials....i forget what other film it was paired with, but i almost bought it out of nostalgia.

here is another one from my childhood.

In the 1961 movie "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea"
the Van Allen radiation belt catches fire and causes temperatures on Earth to start climbing, producing massive ecological damage....as ridiculous as that premise is.......I was always bothered by those scenes of the "Seaview" (submarine)while she is traveling under the Arctic Ice caps. As the ice caps start to melt, we see the submerged submarine getting pelted with huge chunks of sinking ice.

Physics was never my strong point, but even as a child, I knew water was more dense than ice, there is absolutely NO WAY for ice to sink!!!!

Tell that to the guy in script development who is screaming, "if we don't have sinking ice boulders, we don't have a movie!"

:)

It was really a stupid scene.
The submarine is bombarded with chunks of perfectly formed sheet ice that has apparently melted from the ice caps.

The crew in the submarine are looking out that huge "viewing" window and seeing the ice fall.......which reminds me....where is all that light coming from, that enables them to have such great visibility???

Uhhhhh, reflecting off the ice?
;)

Manuel wrote: "in all those history making moments.........everyone spoke clear American English and they understood each other without any problems...."

That's because the TARDIS projects a field that translates everyone's language into...oops, sorry, wrong far-fetched, time-travel concept ;-)

And as for shrinking people down to germ size, in The Micronauts the author sort of gets around that problem in a not-quite-as-far-fetched way: Miniature bodies are cloned from the originals and, in a process the author wisely leaves largely to the reader's imagination, the personalities are transferred.

I never questioned the "physics" necessary to shrink the crew to perform surgery at the micro level.

I always questioned the light source that illuminated the beautiful universe inside the human body of "Fantastic Voyage"

Thats the point of this thread!

Haven't you heard of the light within?
:)

Ive heard of the Internal flame........
oh wait......!!!!
I meant the Eternal flame..........

Never mind

In my world there is....
:)

Just my 'magination.....

I mentioned this in the Water World thread.

Gills on Kevin Costner.

I have two problems with Kevin Costner's gills.
Its been ONLY 500 years since the polar ice caps have melted and flooded the entire planet with water.

Yes, evolution will continue to change human beings from the familiar form we recognize today, but 500 years is not very long in biological time.

The other problem I have is; why would human mammals evolve gills? There are other land mammals who have returned to the sea, but they continued to be mammals. Dolphins and whales were once land animals, but they evolved a blow hole to continue breathing oxygen.

my problems with kevin costner have nothing to do with gills...
:)

This thread reminds me of the following Neil deGrasse Tyson quote: I'm ok with Avatar's 10ft tall 3-fingered blue people. But if vortex could float mountains, why did water roll off their sides?

interesting topic pg ... how the chick in planet terror pulled the trigger on her gun leg has always bothered me ... but i don't think that is science fiction ...

it's an apt question, nonetheless!