Who would win in a fight Batman versus Max Payne?
These questions Dave used to post as part of bigger review, but the fact is most of them came from arguments we would have on the whole who would win thing so I thought I would throw up my own.
This question seems pretty obvious to anyone who did not play Max Payne all the way through. Batman has taken down hundreds of gun toting thugs who look a lot like Max. However, as a fan of Max Payne I can say it wouldn’t be as clear cut as all that. Max, like Batman, is haunted by the deaths of his family. However, his deaths happened recently while he was an adult and included his child. This gives him a much more nothing to lose attitude that is almost a death wish. He, like Batman, has the ability to push through any level of pain and suffering to deliver more pain to his enemies. If you don’t believe me just replay the Baseball Bat chapter.
I do think Batman would triumph in this fight, but it wouldn’t be a easy or clean as most fights against normal civilians would be. Max has untested reserves and an unholy resourcefulness that might surprise the Bat. Plus he has bullet time.
This image I pulled from Dave’s Batman t shirt collection, another one where he has hundreds of shirts.
Jason
Men in Black 3 Review
If someone has a functioning neuralizer please use it to erase the last 103 minutes from my memory.
I quick survey of other reviewers has revealed that about 70% of them think this film is a rollicking roller coaster through the magical land of comedy and the other 30% regret all the dinosaurs who had to die in order to make the film this movie was shot on. I, unfortunately, am in the 30% for one major reason: this movie is freaking stupid.
It always amazes me when a movie with the budget of a small countries GNP ($350 million) to have the very best in very expensive actors and special effects can’t seem to find $50 to hire a decent story writer. Will Smith has done some stupid movies in his career (Independence Day, Wild, Wild West, I am Legend) but this one really breaks new ground. The stupidity oozes from every pore and orifice, causing other weeping sores and lesions to develop that also ooze stupidity. It’s like of some stupid scientists were doing stupid research into the fundamental nature of stupidity and working on the Unified Field Theory of Stupidity only to discover a new stupid element (Stupidium), which they injected into their brains before writing a movie script.
All that being said, I cannot say this movie was really bad per se. The humor was strong, the special effects both puppets and CGI were good, and a lot of the supporting actors did a decent job. However the catch phrase “stupidly entertaining” is one that I feel is bandied around too much these days. Is it that difficult or bad to be “intelligently entertaining”? I actually consider this trend towards stupid movie scripts to be less about the writers being stupid or incompetent (although that is a possibility) and more about the absolute contempt that Hollywood currently has for the intellectual ability of the American movie audience, and as a member of that audience I am (and most of you should be) a little incensed. They are clearly writing stories for eight year olds and foreign markets and leaving those of us with a couple brain cells to die on the vine. (the Brawndo image, incidentally, is from Idiocracy and I think appropriate given that the mental decline of the human race is only being accelerated by movies of this stripe. The image comes courtesy of the Funny T Shirt category)
The violence and sex was deeply embedded in the PG-13 trench, with a lot of aliens exploding into kid friendly piles of goo rather than traumatizing alien corpses. The guy they got to play young Agent K (Josh Brolin-the Goonies, Wall Street Money Never Sleeps, No Country for Old Men) was amazing. He obviously studied not only the character but the Tommy Lee Jones mannerisms and gestures. In fact, he was much more Agent K in my mind by the end of the movie than Tommy Lee Jones, who seemed kind of tired through most of this (and really had limited screen time). The villain Boris the Animal (think Bug from the first MIB mixed with Lobo) was entertaining and disgusting. However, a big part of the appeal of the first film (we won’t talk about MIB2 in this review) was the aliens and how they could easily appear anywhere. Any human or animal on the street could potentially be another cool, weird alien. In this film they more or less ignored that all together and actually kept the aliens to a minimum. Instead they had a lot of humans (Andy Warhol, for example, could have been a really funny alien but instead is an undercover MIB agent. By the way, as a fan of Andy Warhol who sees him as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century I was kind of put off by his portrayal here) and human looking aliens. There was the obligatory walk through the MIB lobby with a ton of them and the inevitable disgusting fight scene against a giant slobbery fish, but other than that even the aliens that were part of the story always looked mostly human. I feel dirty for saying this as I normally hate this sort of thing, but this movie really could have used a small alien comic relief sidekick.
Anyway, the story. A few spoilers incoming, so if you really feel you will lose something from the story by know ahead of time what will happen skip ahead, but take it from me you probably won’t. I have seen scripts chock full of plot holes, but never on this scale. It’s like the first few massive plot holes started breeding smaller plot holes, who also started breeding with each other resulting in a massive six generation clan of inbred gaping plot holes. Boris the Animal is some kind of alien sociopathic killer from a now extinct race of aliens (did I mention that they borrowed heavily from Lobo on this one?) who has a crawfish living in his palm and can shoot spikes at people. He escapes from a prison on the moon staffed by the stupidest humans in the universe with the help of a super hot girl (don’t worry, this is the one and only time you will see anything remotely attractive and female in the entirety of the film) and his personal mud bug. He gets back to Earth, steals a time machine, and goes back in time to kill K (Tommy Lee Jones). He appears to succeed and K disappears from the time line, except for some reason J (Will Smith) can remember him (this was the first truly massive plot hole. There were any number of small to medium “practice” plot holes (how is it no one questions a human girl with a big cake visiting an alien in a prison that no humans are even supposed to know about, why would any prison on the moon have a armory 10 feet from the prisoners complete with weapons capable of blowing a massive hole to the vacuum, how does Boris the Animal talk when standing outside on the moon’s surface with no atmosphere, etc.) but this was the first one (of several) that felt like I was having a brain aneurism). J’s constant craving of chocolate milk was recognized by O (anyone feel like they were pandering a little when they gave the only thing resembling a love interest the code letter O?) as a sign of temporal displacement (at this point the plot hole generator switched from a garden hose to a fire hose in the face. She even said that this had only happened once in history but they knew enough to know what chocolate milk means? In comparison to the others this one was golf ball sized, however). At that point the now not extinct race of Boris begins a full scale invasion. J has to go back in time by jumping off a building.
It could be said that the plot was relatively coherent up until this point. Time travel as a plot device is weak and confusing even in competent hands. When fed into the MIB grinder it gets spat out so fast and in so many directions the audience had better be wearing eye protection. How is it J gets shot by the alien spike thing, jumps off a giant gantry, and goes back in time ten seconds but is somehow not shot even though he remembers getting shot? Why when you travel back in time to 1969 you have to first visit the dinosaur times first? If the first time J travels back in time he goes to the same position he started in and effectively doubles himself, but the second time he jumps back into the exact same position he was in to start with and there is only one of him? The list goes on and on.
However, the time travel does do one good thing. It allows us to meet young K, who was really well done by Josh Broslin and my favorite character in the movie. K and J team up after some “who are you” hijinks and work to track down Boris and young Boris. They meet up with an alien who can see the future but do nothing to affect it, making him the most worthless expository sidekick in cinema history. They have to put up a shield in space and do so by attaching it to the moon landing rocket. Stuff gets blown up. Aliens do alien stuff. An ending is pulled from so far up the writers ass if he were the last person in a human centipede he would have actually pulled it from the person three bodies ahead of him.
The stars. There were a lot of really funny moments. Two stars. Young K was really well done. One star. Will Smith, in spite of his bad choices in movie scripts (and being the Fresh Prince of Bel Air) is entertaining. One star. Boris was a pretty cool villain. One star. Good special effects. One star. In spite of everything, I honestly can’t say it wasn’t fun or entertaining. Two stars. Total: eight stars.
The black holes. Really, really, really stupid story. Two black holes. I am running out of funny analogies for how massively huge plot holes can be in a movie, but the ones in this film could have eclipsed the sun. Two black holes. While I find him entertaining, there is only so much “Will Smith is the coolest guy in the world and everyone else is a dork on the screen” I can take. One black hole. The future telling alien was so hippy dippy I wanted to reach into the screen and slap him every time he opened his pie hole. One black hole. The ending was so dumb, contrived, and out of no where it could have been a supporting character Agent D (I actually heard they started filming this thing without a completed script and it make sense). One black hole. Total: seven black holes.
A grand total of one star. Meh. Better than MIB2 in my opinion. Worth seeing? Maybe. If you are a Will Smith fan or just have nothing to do at all on an evening it beats staring at a wall. Don’t see it just because you are a massive Tommy Lee Jones fan, as he is hardly in it (unless you like the idea of a great Tommy Lee Jones impersonator). Date movie? Sure, why not? Unless she is familiar with sci fi and the paradoxes of time travel most of this stuff won’t bother her. No hot girls to feel in competition with. All the guys keep their suits on so no losing a lot in comparison. Bathroom break? Most likely the entire scene with Andy Warhol. Once the joke that he is an MIB agent is made there isn’t much left but they keep beating it into the ground. You won’t miss much.
Thanks for reading. I will try to see something tomorrow afternoon. Probably Chernobyl Diaries. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. If you have comments about this movie or review feel free to post them here. If you have an off topic question or suggestion feel free to email me at [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
Another dumb movie question: Beauty and the Beast
Since I couldn’t find any Beauty and the Beast images, I pulled this one from the Incredibles from Dave’s movie t shirt collection. Pixar is owned by Disney, right?
Anyway, here is the thing that doesn’t make sense to me from Beauty and the Beast. When the teapot is transformed back into a human woman she looks and sounds like she is about 70, but her child the teacup is like 5. How old was she when she had them? I thought they were all supposed to be kind of frozen time or something.
For that matter, how exactly does a three candle candelabra get amorous? He has burning candles for hands! That implies something either really dangerous or really pornographic, or both. Am I the only one confused by this?
Jason
More dumb movie questions: Back to the Future
Time for me to do another dumb movie question, and this is one that has bugged me for a long time. If you recall from Back to the Future Dr. Brown got shot by Libyan terrorists for stealing about 500 pounds of plutonium. We go through the entire movie series and in the end find out that Dr. Brown read Marty’s note and invested in a bulletproof vest. All is good and happy.
Here’s the question: what happened to the van full of extremely well armed and pissed off terrorists that were chasing Marty in the time machine? Sure they ran into a photo booth, but it never looked like it was enough to take them all out. Shouldn’t Marty have gotten to the Doc just in time for their execution? For that matter, what happened to any other terrorists still associated with that first group? Do they really expect us to believe that they didn’t leave one guy back at the base with instructions to call Libya for more terrorists if they didn’t get back with the plutonium?
That’s pretty much it. The time machine blueprints I found in Dave’s movie tshirts. Not a lot of detail on that one.
Jason
How they could have made the movie Battleship not suck.
So I’m starting a new thing for nights when I don’t have anything else to write about and it’s my special “How they could have made (insert sucky movie title here) not suck”. If you are a regular reader you should know by now I have a massive ego and overinflated sense of my own intellect and therefore feel totally qualified to tell guys in Hollywood who have been doing this all their lives how to do their jobs.
All that being said, the movie Battleship had some major issues and could probably have used some help. One of the biggest and stupidest mistakes was the steps the movie took to actually get the U.S.S. Missouri at full steam and armed in about two hours. I spoke to a guy I know in the Coast Guard the other day and he said those big steam engine ships would take two days just to get the boilers hot enough to generate steam and when you think about the thermodynamics of heating a giant tank of water to the boiling point that kind of makes sense. Also, there is no way they keep 30 year old live rounds on a ship with tourists on board. Furthermore, the pretense they had for including the game of Battleship into the movie Battleship was flimsy at best. (Failboat image I found lurking in the cheap t shirt category)
I, in all my genius, have thought of a plot that would both solve these problems and overall make for a much better and believable movie. Here it is:
Aliens invade the Earth. They set up a floating base out in the Pacific. The aliens breathe chlorine, and start to xenoform the planet (the term terraform is when we attempt to change the environment of an alien planet to let us live. If aliens do it here it’s xenoforming) the planet by pulling chlorine from the salt water (NaCl, for those of us who missed high school chemistry) pumping it into the atmosphere. Our navy attempts to assault them only to find out the aliens employ a powerful electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generator that fries all electronics that approach them. No radar, computers, missiles, range finders or pocket calculators work anymore, and with the ships more or less dead in the water the aliens ships sink them at their leisure. Aircraft without electronics falls out of the sky, leaving us helpless to thwart their dastardly scheme.
However, changing the entire atmosphere of a planet is a long process, leaving us weeks before the levels of chlorine get dangerous. How, then, to assault the aliens without our electronics? How about the dozens of ships in the mothball fleet? Most of them would take weeks if not months to retrofit with strickly analog controls, but a few older ships still have analog in place. First and foremost, the noble and mighty U.S.S. Missouri. Within a few short weeks of massive retrofit the ship with a number of analog equipped support ships steams to battle the alien menace.
Once they close with the aliens they discover that a byproduct of the xenoforming process seems to be a visibility obscuring fog that leaves the more or less steaming around blind. However, the aliens are in the same boat (haw!) and the battle is reduced to shooting blindly and hoping for a hit, or perhaps firing off flares in hopes of gaining a target.
You get the idea. This strikes me as being a much better story and just cutting some chains and running off. Movies like this just show how lazy and unimaginative Hollywood really is.
Thanks for reading. I think I am going to have fun with these. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. If you have ideas on how else this movie could have been improve by all means post them here. Off topic comments or suggestions for other movies that could be improved email to [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
No mercy for Anakin Skywalker
So I was thinking about Star Wars Revenge of the Sith. It was probably the best of the three recent ones, although that doesn’t really say much. However, something about the ending has always bugged me.
Here’s the thing. Anakin Skywalker gets horrible burned and dismembered by Obi Wan, the man who raised and trained him from age eight. Now either Obi Wan was feeling bad about the ending to which Anakin had found and was taken by emotions for the young man he raised from a child, or he felt that Anakin had been to far corrupted by the Dark Side and was beyond redemption. If the former then he probably would have sought medical help for young Anakin in hopes of saving his life. If the latter he probably would have given Anakin the coup de grace in order to end his suffering.
What I sincerely doubt he would have done was leave Anakin to twitch off an die a horrible, agonizing death. Sure, he got picked up by the Emperor but Obi Wan had no way of knowing that was going to happen. If I ever lose three limbs and suffer burns over 90% of my remaining body for God’s sake put a bullet in me. I guess Lucas has never heard of a mercy kill.
Of course the Who’s Your Daddy picture comes from Dave’s Star Wars t shirt collection. Hilarious.
Jason
A questions about the most recent Star Trek movie.
I’m not the fanatic Dave is, but when I saw the recent reboot for Star Trek a big question popped into my head. Here it is:
If the Romulans could go back in time to destroy Earth and Vulcan as revenge for their own planet being destroyed, why not just to to Romulus and warn them of the impending doom headed their way? While there they could have given the Romulans their ship, giving the Romulan Empire a technology edge that probably would have let them conquer the Federation. Then, by the time the super nova hit Romulus they could all be living on Earth. It’s not like they were worried about destroying the time line.
Dave says time travel is a hard plot device to use competanly, and I’m starting to see what he means. I still enjoyed the movie, but this is kind of dumb. This image I got from Dave’s Star Trek t-shirt collection. He has a ton.
Jason
What to Expect When You’re Expecting Movie Review
Expect a lot of pain.
I actually want to thank the producers of this film because it has helped answer a question that has bugged me for years: what would it be like to be water boarded for 110 minutes? I might have gleaned something else on the prospect of kids and parenthood in my life, but in spite of this films best effort to convince me otherwise I think I still want to one day have a wife and kids (or some kind of android synthetic or VR equivalent, both of which seem more likely based on my current dating success rate).
Assemblage scripts are garbage designed to crowbar as much star appeal into a movie with minimum effort as possible. While this film was slightly more tolerable than New Years Eve in both story and acting effort, it still had that convoluted multiple character/story thing that results in the audience never really connecting to or caring about any of the characters. They all blur into a mundane paste of faces normally occupied by supporting characters. Each substory in turn is grossly undeveloped and comprised entirely of every pregnancy cliche in the history of the universe.
That being said, the director of this one (Kirk Jones-Nanny McPhee, Waking Ned Divine, Everybody’s Fine) at least made some effort to throw in some character development that had a little potential, but they were universally premature and undeveloped (haw!). The entire film suffers from the curse of Trying to do Too Much. There is a reason most good movies have a protagonist in one form or another, and one main story line with a few sub plots. Following the lives of five different couples is like trying to follow the lives of five of your friends, and we all know how hard that gets. I don’t go to the movies to work harder than I do in my real life.
Anyway, the story is of a bevy of insanely hot girls getting knocked up by their lame husbands, boyfriends, or one night stands. Cameron Diaz (Something About Mary, Gangs of New York, the Green Hornet) is a reality TV celebrity who gets knocked up by her dance show partner (Matthew Morrison-Glee, Dan in Real Life, Music and Lyrics) and has to balance pregnancy with her celebrity life. Jennifer Lopez (Gigli, Monster-in-Law, the Cell (very underrated movie IMO)) was looking super hot as the infertile unemployed photographer trying to adopt an Ethiopian orphan with her husband (Rodrigo Santoro-I Love you Phillip Morris, 300, Rio). Elizabeth Banks (the Hunger Games, the 40 Year Old Virgin, the Next Three Days) plays a baby store owner who desperately wants to have a baby with her wimpy husband Gary (Ben Falcone-Bridesmaids, Smiley Face, Garfield: a Tail of Two Kitties) who has series daddy issues with his race car father (Dennis Quaid-Vantage Point, the Day After Tomorrow, Frequency). His dad is also going to have twins with his perfect wife Skyler (Brooklyn Decker-Battleship, Just Go With It). Meanwhile, young food truck owners Marco (Chase Crawford-Covenant, Gossip Girl, Twelve) and Rosie (Up in the Air, Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, 50/50) get knocked up after a one night stand.
Really, that’s pretty much all you need about the story. The rest of the film plays out like a Chinese restaurant menu that only serves pregnancy cliches. One from column A, two from column B, etc. The closest thing to actual hardship is from Rosie and Marco, and the rest of them seem to be living in an idyllic world where discomfort and hardship are at worst temporary situations. There’s also a “dudes” group of daddies who punctuate the rest of the lame stories with some of the most emasculating testicle destroying dialog since Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Seriously, these guys are exactly the whipped boobs every guy fears turning into when presented with the prospect of marriage and kids. I don’t know what the director was thinking about shoving them into this thing, or how much they had to pay Chris Rock to agree to participate.
Anyway, the stars. A hotter bunch of women you will not find in this universe. One star. As much as I would like to just dump all over this film in all ways, there were a few cliche driven laughs. One star. I will award a star for this movie a star for sticking to it’s PG-13 guns and not showing any graphic birthing scenes. 
There are some things that cannot be unseen. One star. One of the food trucks specialized in bacon. One star for deliciousness (Bacon image courtesy of the Funny T Shirt category). Total: four stars.
The black holes. Five different intertwined stories, none of which I could give a damn about. One black hole. Most of the stories were undeveloped, trite, and uninteresting. One black hole. This script fell out of the cliche tree and hit every branch. One black hole. Predictable as hell. One black hole. Pacing really dragged on at points. One black hole. Kids are cute, but parents generally suck. One black hole. Somehow they cast two guys who look like they went to the same high school together as father and son. Also, for the most part I hated all the male characters. One black hole. The “dudes” group insulted both my intelligence and machismo. Two black holes. Total: nine black holes.
Grand total of five black holes. Not great. Worth seeing? Not if you respect your testosterone. Date movie? In one sense yes, in that she will probably love it and be thinking about what could be. On the other hand, if you are not into having kids this may start her down a path that could have unexpected results. If you don’t want to have kids and she suggests it I’d say run screaming into the night. Bathroom break? This is another film that has the sideways benefit having no moments be critical to the story. You can cut out at any point and be fine. However, if you feel like you want to retain the desire to continue urinating standing up you will miss as much of the “dudes” group scenes as possible.
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed reading this more than I did watching it, although honestly that wouldn’t take much. Nothing on deck for tomorrow or the next day. I’ll see what I can do for Friday but am going to Kublacon and might not be able to see much. Also on the 6th I am going to Italy for 11 days so I will not be reviewing anything for a while. Jason might still post some stuff. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. If you have a comment about this movie or review feel free to post it here. Off topic questions or suggestions can be emailed to [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
A question about Star Trek 3 the Search for Spock
So I have been posting odd movie questions lately and wanted to ask this one because I know it will bug the hell out of Dave. He is a screaming Star Trek fan. Here it is:
If Genesis caused the germ cells on the Spocks coffin to hyper evolved into giant mutant worms in a few hours, why would it cause the highly radioactive cells of Spocks body to simply create a new Spock? Shouldn’t his body have either evolved into a billion other weird little creatures? Or hyper evolve into a super advanced Vulcan? Or since he was all radioactive and the DNA probably all messed up into Spock with like eight arms (Octospock)?
While we are on the subject, it is shown that Spock’s new body was growing up from a child, which really implies that at some point it was a baby. What, exactly, did that baby eat or drink? If it grew up so fast it must have been eating like 10 times it’s body weight every day. Grass? Since there were no animals on the planet that would imply no need for the plants to evolved into something edible. I didn’t see a lot of water around there too. Even if he did find edible grass and rocks to suck on wouldn’t he have suffered from massive malnourishment?
I love this question. The image I found in Dave’s Star Trek collection. He has like a million Star Trek t-shirts.
Jason
Battleship Movie Review
F-Zero. You sank my movie script!
This is another one of those movies that I, as reviewer, find so annoying in that it doesn’t fail completely. There are elements of this film that are seaworthy, but rather than sinking to a massive gaping hole in the hull it goes down to a million billion small holes comprised of flat acting, lame story, over reliance on CGI, mediocre casting, and disconnection from reality issues.
Of course all these issues pale to insignificance compared to the major problem with this film: the whole premise is based on THE WORST SOURCE MATERIAL IN CINEMA HISTORY! Battleship? Really? The game I used to cheat at against my sister with the pegs and plastic ships? I might have bought a navel battle against aliens but this is just dumb. I consider it a bad sign when Hasbro starts this movie out with a dramatic Hasbro intro cut scene similar in tone (if not seriousness) to the Marvel and DC intros from their respective movies.
By the way, here are some of the other Hasbro projects that are in production or under consideration: Candy Land starring Adam Sandler (oh God!), Ouiji (actually Universal paid $5 million to get out of the embarrassment of being associated with this project. Good move IMO), Stretch Armstrong, another GI Joe, and worst of all another Tranformers. By the way, check out this trailer for the upcoming Chutes and Ladders movie. Epic.
Speaking of Transformers, you will definitely feel like you are being beaten with the Michel Bey stick while watching this film. Massive slow motion explosions, grey CGI robotic aliens, flat acting, one dimensional characters, dopey worthless sub plots, and a super hot blond girl as out of place in this movie as Al Pacino in a really horrible Sandler film (oh, wait. That happened). The typical Bey pattern is followed in the aliens being unstoppable killing machines at the beginning of the movie and dying to wet farts by the end.
The thing that bugged me the most about this film was how completely disconnected from the realities of the military, navel warfare, ship maintenance, and actual science it really is. So instead of my usual pattern I am going to give a very succinct plot summary followed by the things that bugged me the most. Here we go:
Taylor Kitsch (John Carter, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Friday Night Lights) plays Alex Hopper, a waste of humanity who joins the Navy to be with his brother after stealing a chicken burrito for a super hot girl (Brooklyn Decker-Just Go With It, Exposure: Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2011, Spike TV VGA Game Awards). Apparently being a lazy unmotivated impulsive smart mouth who is hated by your commanding officer (Liam Neeson-The Grey, Phantom Menace, Taken) for dating his daughter (the burrito girl) is no inhibitor to your navel career as he managed to rise to the rank of Lieutenant in six years. He and his brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgård-Generation Kill, True Blood, Melencholia) are participating in navel maneuvers off Hawaii when aliens follow a signal sent out by NASA and start attacking. They seem to have a very specialized threat assessment process and are cool with an enemy ship nearby as long as it is not actually shooting at them. Explosive navel hijinks ensues. A semi-clever (there’s a fine line between clever and stupid) plot device is found to reference the actual game it was based on. Rihanna (the Hangover, Just Go With It, 21) apparently has every job on the ship including gunner, Marine, soccer player, and possibly ships cook. All forms of military decorum and chain of command are disregarded. The fate of the planet manages to boil down to a fist fight between an amputee and an alien wearing advanced power armor.
Let’s talk about the many, many breaks from reality that this movie suffers from. 
First of all, my good friend science (I Atom Science image courtesy of the Vintage T Shirt category). One of the alien ships crashes onto the planet (by the way, they have the technology to travel across light years to find a signal from earth but don’t have enough radar technology to avoid a satellite in orbit around the planet) and scientists determine that it is made of an element not found on Earth. I guess the writers (and everyone else associated with this film) was sick the day they did science in the 8th grade, so I will explain it to them. You see, a periodic table of elements lists each one by a number. That number is the number of protons (and neutrons) in said element. Therefore, if you have an atom with 46 protons in it you inevitably have Palladium regardless of what planet you are on. As the number increases the elements become increasingly heavy and unstable, making most of them only occur in lab experiments for a few moments. Furthermore, the Earth scientists were somehow able to figure this out in about five minutes in this movie.
Next, let’s talk about battleship maintenance and mothball museum ships. This movie seemed to think all you need to do is cut some chains and a ship that had not even fired up it’s engine in ten years would be sea worthy. Also that a ship that had been a museum for decades would have both fuel and live ammunition on board, or that a battleship could even operate with a crew of about 20.
It is laughable that anyone would think that a ship the size of the U.S.S. Missouri (45,000 tons) would come to a screeching halt when moving at flank speed and a single anchor is dropped, causing the ship to whip around it’s anchor point. At best the anchor should have torn up a bunch of sea bed, but the inertia generated is amazing.
As for military protocol, there is no way the commander of a ship would be running around with an assault rifle hunting for aliens when he has seamen who could do it for him. This was just dumb.
The list goes on and on. It’s almost like they purposefully said how dumb can we make this movie before the American public finally vomits it back out (based on box office receipts they blew past the limit on this one). Stuff like an interplanetary signal being visible in space, aliens who can only see stuff that is actually dangerous, senior officers brawling like barroom drunkards, and so on just hurt the whole thing. You see, science fiction movies start off with a serious break from reality, which essentially means in order to be taken seriously you have to try to remain true to reality as you possibly can. That’s why movies like Aliens or TV shows like Stargate SG1 work; they are dealing with unreality but they keep everything remotely human as real as possible.
Anyway, the stars. If you don’t care about reality or are just really, really, really ignorant and possibly dumb the movie can be fun. One star. I do like big navel ships. One star. Alien invasion films. One star. I’m going to award a star to this film for having the best excuse for alien invasion as of late in the form of none at all. Stealing all our water, power, or brains is just dumb. It’s OK for aliens to just be imperialistic jerks. Some of the action was kind of fun. One star. Total: five stars.
The black holes. Dumb, dumb, dumb premise. Two black holes. Insulting my intelligence by disregarding a ton of fairly basic science and military protocol. Three black holes. Must every alien invader have a weakness? One black hole. A bonus black hole for getting a floating museum and steaming it out to fight with about two hours of work (also I would like to note that they talk about the shells being 1,ooo pounds as they try to manhandle one down a long corridor. In fact they weighed 2,700 pounds. Also, it was established that the Missouri was the last Battleship decommissioned. Where the hell did they find 16 inch shells? Do we even make them any more?). One black hole. Aliens who are ultimate bad asses at the beginning turning into paper dolls by the end. One black hole. The fact that advanced aliens with interplanetary ships apparently are cool using trebuchet-like targeting systems on their ships. They don’t believe in any kind of guidance? One black hole. Crow barring in the game pegs into this movie. One black hole. Sub plots that made me wish movies had never been invented. One black hole. Having the fate of the planet come down to a fist fight. One black hole. Flat acting and one dimensional characters. One black hole. Total: thirteen black holes.
A grand total of eight black holes. Pretty miserable. Worth seeing? Maybe, if all you want is Transformers style action and a lot of explosions. It certainly is brainless fun, so if you can shut you brain down (or are just brainless to start) you might enjoy it. Date movie? Hell no. Not only will she not be interested but all the stupidity surrounding this movie will infect her perception of you. Bathroom break? I can honestly say that there is not a critical moment in this film that missing would cause you to lose something from the experience. Most of the most worthless footage seems to be in the first 30 minutes, but any of the scenes involving the girl, the handicapped vet, and the wimpy scientist are an excellent chance for you to use the restroom, check your email, smoke a cigarette, and possible leave the theater entirely to go home and take a little nap. God knows I wanted to.
Thanks for reading. What to Expect When You Are Expecting is later today, and believe me I am dreading it. I hope you all appreciated the sacrifices I make to keep you entertained. Follow me on Twiiter @Nerdkungfu. Post any comments on this movie here. If you have any questions or suggestions on other topics feel free to email me at [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
