Posted on 10/07/2015 9:25:26 AM PDT by Citizen Zed
You have to love an article that begins with a quote from Karl Marx.
I thought Jeremy Renner was taking over the Bourne movies
A quick anecdote about Damon. When Team America came out Damon was said to think his rendering was funny. Sean Penn on the other hand was angry (isn't he always) and threatened to sue.
LOL inadvertently hell, who wouldn't leave Damon behind.
That’s about right. I will see it this weekend.
I like even bad space movies....so I am sure this will be fine. Ha ha.
I hope the book was a whole lot more scientific.
The movie treated putting manure on potatoes and mixing hydrogen and oxygen as “HUGE SCIENCE!!!”
The hexadecimal communication did impress me.
It is huge science. He didn’t just put poo on potatoes and add water. He made a self sustaining sealed environment greenhouse that included its own rain in small enough amounts to not rot the potatoes and not choke out the plants with methane from the poo and avoid all the other imbalance problems, in an extremely hostile environment, with scrounged equipment, some of which was specifically selected to not let him do what he was trying to do.
...in the book?
In the movie he did “just put poo on potatoes and add water”.
Didn’t even calculate thermal balance for just one example.
Not a bad movie IMO but “science” was hardly the star.
In the movie. I think you weren’t paying attention in that part. Even if they didn’t show every single calculation (because, let’s face, doing math on a computer is not exactly cinematic) it was huge science. I think science was the star as much as it can be. Science isn’t terribly photogenic, but as big a part of the movie as you really could get without turning the movie into a loose collection of youtube lectures.
I think it would be hard for someone who’d read the book to not fill in what the movie left out, or just remotely hinted at. So there may be our disagreement. I certainly have a lot I bring from the original novel to a film adaptation. Sometimes that increases my enjoyment, sometimes my frustration.
I haven’t read the book. I just don’t expect, or want, a movie to run me through every calculation, that would be boring. He rattled off a list of things he was going to have to get right, that’s where the big science was, and when it involved physical stuff they showed it (including him screwing up the water calculation the first time). One of the rules of story telling via TV or movies is “show don’t tell”, if they’d have had him run through every little calculation that would have been a lot of telling with basically no showing. So they glossed over everything they couldn’t show in some way other than a bunch of characters on a screen. But there was still plenty of science they showed.
Ha! Well that knocks the legs from under me.
I’ll have to check back to see what others think.
“screwing up the water calculation”
Yes - his first attempt at burning hydrogen (to produce water) resulted in a (small-ish) explosion; he then remarked that the reason for the explosion was that he’d forgotten to include the amount of oxygen in his exhaled breath.
Not being a scientist myself, I’d qualify that sort of thinking as “big science”...
And in cinematic terms that’s “showing” you that he did a whole lot of calculations to get his farm working. And he’d messed up at least one, which gives dramatic tension to the success of the whole enterprise.
I spend way too much time reading about how story telling works, so I see a lot of the “strings”. One of the ways I judge if a movie is good is if I see the strings DURING or only when considering it after. If I see them during it means they’re not using them subtly, or the just don’t have a compelling enough story to distract me from the craft. I didn’t see any of the strings during The Martian.
I love the Bourne series.
For example, blowing up the greenhouse, flying through the air 100 feet, putting a hole in his glass helmet, gasping for air, finding duct tape in the debris, using the duct tape in -150 degrees with dust particles flying around, being able to dispense duct tape wearing gloves into several pieces applied one at a time, in an attempt to keep the pressure in his suit 100 times that of the pressure outside his suit. Science Schmience.
Oh please that was an action scene. We all know action scenes defy science in every frame. Meanwhile the movie had over an hour of ACTUAL SCIENCE scenes that actually got the science mostly pretty right.
ping
How is this propaganda? I haven’t heard anything like that. Certainly not about the novel.
I’ve always wondered if they speed up the camera during Damon’s fight scenes. He seems to move awfully fast for anybody who isn’t a legitimate martial artist.
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