Topic: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

This was fucking ridiculous, but we brought it home. What up.

Teague Chrystie

I have a tendency to fix your typos.

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Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

Hey, for lack of other Intermission topics, you guys could always discuss trailers and prospects of upcoming movies. smile

...

And hey, I am stoked for Neil DeGrasse Tyson in Cosmos.

Here's my NDT story:

I got to meet him at a book signing following an interactive Q&A astronomy lecture. Because I love astronomy and sf, I wore my Nostromo t-shirt.

This one:
http://www.cafepress.com/+long_sleeve_m … ,346252171

I kept telling myself that it wasn't a test, and that it wouldn't bother me if he didn't recognize the name, or get the reference, but what can I say? It was a test.

I got up to the signing table, and he said, "Wait a second. Is that the ship from Alien, or Aliens?" I said something to the effect of "I think I love you."

True story.

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Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

In the novel that City of Ember is based on, the city only has enough supplies to last 200 years, so that's when they set the box to open. They don't want people trying to get out and dying. It makes only slightly more sense.

"The Doctor is Submarining through our brains." --Teague

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Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

I think my favorite bit in EMBER, which I didn't mention here, is that they have this whole complicated plan written in plain English on unlaminated paper, and bits of it get lost or damaged or whatever, and then at last when they make it out of the city, there's a box of matches, and they have instructions in pictograms. Like the Builders thought the ride down the river would render everyone illiterate somehow.

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Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

That movie also really suffers from Terminator 3 syndrome. I feel like that entire movie is a first act, and I want to see the story of them exploring the surface instead.

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Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

bullet3 wrote:

That movie also really suffers from Terminator 3 syndrome. I feel like that entire movie is a first act, and I want to see the story of them exploring the surface instead.

At which point the director says, "If you had gone to see the film, they would have let me adapt the sequel!" I think that that's an example where it's legitimate to claim, "I had to because that's what's in the book!"

"The Doctor is Submarining through our brains." --Teague

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Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

I disagree, and I personally really dislike the trend of making movies that "just lead up to the really good part" so we can have a great sequel someday maybe. There's no reason you can't use the story as a jumping off point and just make something more cinematic and interesting, or just find a different book to adapt. This is one reason I really like James Cameron, he always delivers the epic climax instead of hinting at it for future sequels. If anyone else made Avatar, it would end just before the big battle, with a big "to be continued style ending", but he'll go and make a 3 hour movie and give the audience what it wants to see (don't get me wrong, I think it's his weakest film, but it at least tells a complete story).

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Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

bullet3 wrote:

I disagree, and I personally really dislike the trend of making movies that "just lead up to the really good part" so we can have a great sequel someday maybe. There's no reason you can't use the story as a jumping off point and just make something more cinematic and interesting, or just find a different book to adapt.

Or you could find a different movie to watch smile

In most of the cases with these adaptations, the first book held up well enough on its own to justify the sequels, so theoretically a movie just based on it should work. Sure, the later books might have most of the fun stuff, but you have to leave something for the rest of the franchise. That said... it's not uncommon for an adaptation to combine two or more books of a series. I was very amused to see how the Horatio Hornblower movie, scripted by the author of the books, managed to combine the first three novels into one film.

I write stories! With words!
http://www.asstr.org/~Invid_Fan/

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Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

I'm just saying, based purely off the movie, it feels like a giant prologue to a much more interesting sequel. Its not like Fellowship of the Ring, which has an interesting story in its own right while also setting lots of future things in motion. This is a case where I think it would have benefited from combining two books into one, which would also help keep our minds off all the plausibility issues with the story. Obviously this doesn't make sense for every series out there, but I think it makes sense here.

And regarding Terra Nova.......jesus don't get me started on that piece of crap. Talk about having protagonists you want to see eaten as soon as possible.

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Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

Master and Commander sort of did what Bullet3 is suggesting but ended up having the opposite problem. They combined (IIRC) book 3 with book 6 because, hey, that's where the good naval battles are.

But the reason those battles are so great in the books is because we've watched our heroes work their way up from a crappy ship to one that can really be effective. Better would have been to collapse books 1, 2, and 3 and get our heroes introduced to each other, have them serve on a crappy ship at first and struggle with an enemy, and then capture the good ship Surprise and plunge into the third act for vengeance on that enemy.

Then, if that was successful, you could collapse books 4, 5 and 6 and get thru the espionage adventures, the romantic entanglements that strain the main characters' friendship, and, resolving that, get them back to sea for a rollicking battle in act 3 that's tied back to the espionage.

Warning: I'm probably rewriting this post as you read it.

Zarban's House of Commentaries

Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

Unfortunately, unlike Master and Commander (as far as I know), Ember was based on an enormously popular young adult novel. The contract for the studio included an option for an adaptation of the sequel book. They had to do Ember first.

"The Doctor is Submarining through our brains." --Teague

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Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

On listening to this one, I was amused to hear myself say Terra Nova was a bad concept, and then later say there's no such thing as a bad concept.   lol 

My intended point was that "People go back in time and live with dinosaurs" may sound like a fully-realized concept, but in actual practice it's not as much of a slam-dunk as it seems.  As evidenced by the Terra Nova episodes thus far - every one has had to contrive some reason for the characters to leave the safety of their walled, sonic-cannon protected community, just to give them an excuse to bump into a dinosaur in the first place.  To put it perspective, if Terra Nova was a show about a family that went to live on the Serengeti, they'd have to be pretty stupid and/or unlucky to get chased by lions every goddam week.     

But to be fair, the core Terra Nova concept might have worked, just with a different approach.   For example, nobody at Terra Nova wanted to go hang out with dinosaurs, the time-whatsis just happens to dump them into the Cretaceous.   So naturally, the first thing they did was build a big wall to keep dinosaurs out of their tomato gardens.   But the show could have started earlier in Terra Nova's history, before the wall was even up.  You could get at least a few episodes of hot dino-action outa that. 

And it sure would be nice if the colonists had a reason to HAVE to interact with the dinos every week.  Hell, at least Jurassic Park had that - the main characters were paleontologists.  So even though they knew it was dangerous, they WANTED to go poke the dinosaurs.  From what I've seen, Terra Nova doesn't have dino experts on staff at all - presumably all those slots were taken up by teenage guitar-strumming Twilight stand-ins.

Anyway, I retract the statement "Terra Nova was a bad concept", and hereby replace it with "Terra Nova is a terrible execution of a concept, and your mom's a whore."

Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

Trey wrote:

On listening to this one, I was amused to hear myself say Terra Nova was a bad concept, and then later say there's no such thing as a bad concept.   lol 

My intended point was that "People go back in time and live with dinosaurs" may sound like a fully-realized concept, but in actual practice it's not as much of a slam-dunk as it seems.  As evidenced by the Terra Nova episodes thus far - every one has had to contrive some reason for the characters to leave the safety of their walled, sonic-cannon protected community, just to give them an excuse to bump into a dinosaur in the first place.  To put it perspective, if Terra Nova was a show about a family that went to live on the Serengeti, they'd have to be pretty stupid and/or unlucky to get chased by lions every goddam week.     

But to be fair, the core Terra Nova concept might have worked, just with a different approach.   For example, nobody at Terra Nova wanted to go hang out with dinosaurs, the time-whatsis just happens to dump them into the Cretaceous.   So naturally, the first thing they did was build a big wall to keep dinosaurs out of their tomato gardens.   But the show could have started earlier in Terra Nova's history, before the wall was even up.  You could get at least a few episodes of hot dino-action outa that. 

And it sure would be nice if the colonists had a reason to HAVE to interact with the dinos every week.  Hell, at least Jurassic Park had that - the main characters were paleontologists.  So even though they knew it was dangerous, they WANTED to go poke the dinosaurs.  From what I've seen, Terra Nova doesn't have dino experts on staff at all - presumably all those slots were taken up by teenage guitar-strumming Twilight stand-ins.

Anyway, I retract the statement "Terra Nova was a bad concept", and hereby replace it with "Terra Nova is a terrible execution of a concept, and your mom's a whore."

Thank you for ripping on Terra Nova. I have no intentions to ever watch the show but the trailers alone  made me roll my eyes. It's such a blatant attempt at throwing together separate successful franchises. While a hybrid of Avatar, Jurassic Park and LOST could work, it sure as shit ain't gonna happen on a television budget. South Park decided to take a jab at the show a few weeks back. This is from Stan's new found perspective where everything in pop culture appears as literal shit to him:

Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

Back even before Lost started, I thought that it would be great to have a TV show about people having to create a new society out of nothing. It could be on an island, a different (Earthlike) planet, or whatever—the time-travel idea is terrific. It would be this great adventure/drama that mixes the danger of technophilic humans trying to survive in a wilderness with the drama of people forming a political and economic system.

But Terra Nova is very orderly and controlled, so they start off with pretty much everything they need. But the real problem is that it's just badly written. Even with a ready-made society, it could still be like Spartacus, but it's not.

They could still do a good Star Trek series based on that idea. A sizable starship's crew has to abandon ship and starts an impromptu colony on a planet with weird and dangerous animals. It could even be a group of actual colonists who suffer an accident with some of their equipment, cutting them off from the rest of the Federation.

Warning: I'm probably rewriting this post as you read it.

Zarban's House of Commentaries

Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

That's what Lost started out as, just a bunch of people figuring out how to live together on an island. Then people at the network decided it needed more monsters and spooky shit, so they brought in JJ Abrams to mystery box up the place.

Because just watching human beings doing things is too boring. You need smoke monsters and dinosaurs.

Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

Eh, you're timeline is a bit off.

They liked the spec script, which was people on an island.  They brought in JJ Abrams, THEN he decided to dd spooky shit.  He introduced a couple things without knowing any of the backstory.  He was just thinking purely from a perspective of what would be cool for a pilot.  He brought in Damon Lindelof and they brainstormed the backstory together.  Then he promptly dropped it in Lindelof's lap, who then brought in Carlton Cuse to be his creative partner.

Eddie Doty

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Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

I have always wanted to see new Star Trek shows that were set in the universe but weren't about a Federation crew having a new adventure each episode. Follow a merchant crew. Follow a colony. Deep Space Nine was an excellent idea, but that show had a really slow start before it finally got good, and then it only stayed good for a season or so before it kinda fell apart again, probably because they were hemorrhaging viewers due to the previous couple of seasons being sorta "meh" and they felt like they needed to start blowing shit up. Or something.

I really liked the idea of Voyager. They get thrown out into some completely alien section of the galaxy where nothing at all is recognizable and predictable. You could have done pretty much anything at all with that show, inventing new races and new worlds and letting the writers some up with all kinds of crazy and exciting things. And then they fucked it all up and turned it into Little Ship Fights The Borg: The TV Show. Fuck the borg. The borg would have been great if TNG had forgotten about them after that one Q episode. They are possibly the worst thing to ever happen to star trek.

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Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

Lots of aliens/monsters would have been better left only seen once. The more you bring them back, the more the writers feel they have to expand on them, and the less effective they become. Doctor Who is full of this kind of thing, both original and next gen. The Angels, in the episode "Blink", are fucking awesome. However, it only takes one more story with them (written by the same author) to already have them talking and with a personality. and ignoring the rules already set up. I'd be willing to bet we see some allied with the Doctor at some point...

I write stories! With words!
http://www.asstr.org/~Invid_Fan/

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Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

Is it weird that everytime I think of the 22nd century, I think of Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd centurysmile

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51EZAR72RAL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

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Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

Brian Finifter wrote:

Because just watching human beings doing things is too boring. You need smoke monsters and dinosaurs.

In retrospect, I wish there were dinosaurs on the Lost island. Would have made more sense than a lot of what did happen big_smile

Last edited by Jimmy B (2011-10-30 13:36:06)

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Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

Squiggly_P wrote:

And then they fucked it all up and turned it into Little Ship Fights The Borg: The TV Show. Fuck the borg.

Actually, if you go back and watch the show again, there are WAY fewer Borg episodes than you think there were. Voyager really was, for the LARGE majority, exactly the show you described earlier.

Posted from my iPad
http://trek.fm

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Re: Intermission 007 - Anything But The Shark

The Borg, Q, and the holodeck = 90% of Star Trek suck

Warning: I'm probably rewriting this post as you read it.

Zarban's House of Commentaries