Comment

Comment by Jenniffer on February 22, 2010 at 8:05am

There do seem to be a rash of late of "sci-fi" movies that really turn out to be anti-scirntist, pro-spiritualist garbage and it makes me insane. "Nine" is a good example. That was such a disappointment to me. And Avatar... It's amazing how much technology went into making this anti-technology film! But science fiction films aren't really made for science fiction fans anymore, and the general public is disturbingly mistrustful of science these days.

Comment by Gliktch on February 21, 2010 at 9:35pm

John, there are many other reasons to hate Knowing besides its pathetically flawed anti-science messages... As others have pointed out, Cage should really stick to what he's good at (Face-Off was a prime example), and stop making a fool of himself in movies that don't suit him. The only saving grace is that he's a very expensive fool, so the blame really lies with the casting/producers; I can't fault him for picking up whatever hefty pay-packet gets thrown his way ;)

Dan, I was just considering starting a new group for Horror/Dark Fantasy fans, centered around Brian Lumley, Stephen King, et al - do you think there'd be enough activity to warrant it? :)

Comment by Dan DuPree on February 11, 2010 at 9:26pm

Stephen brought up Harlan Elison..best short science fiction ever..except for Triptree but the movie rendition of a boy and his dog was not a bad job.


and I want to throw a query out.. this may need its own thread, but Stephen King's Dark Tower series meet the standard for sci-fi sorry harlan or is it Fantasy? If you haven't read it it is a unique work in literature and I generally don't think of SK as literature. The series was written over a 30+ yr period and goes full circle.

Comment by Seamonster on February 11, 2010 at 2:51am

Face Off anyone?

Comment by Aaron Sikes on February 9, 2010 at 1:48pm

Nick Cage movies used to be worth watching, then he started saving the world and making God happy, or pretending to have emotional depth.

Comment by Jo Jerome on February 9, 2010 at 1:36pm

Glen; Don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel about Nick Cage movies.

Comment by Seamonster on February 7, 2010 at 9:08pm

I'm with Glen. Screw Nick Cage. After seeing The Wickerman remake I had to scrub my brain with a toilet brush and I still feel dirty four years later.

Comment by Wonderist on February 7, 2010 at 11:08am

Minor spoilers, re: Pandorum, and Legion.
JBH and Glen, I'm with you. You may also want to be aware that Dennis Quaid, who I used to sorta like as an actor, has recently shown himself to be on a kind of anti-science, anti-atheist crusade, portraying two parodies of atheism. First, in Pandorum, he plays a Nietzsche-wannabe megalomaniacal atheist who proclaims, paraphrasing, "God is dead, I'm god now." In Legion (playing now), which is entirely a Christian propaganda movie, he plays such a shallow atheist -- the kind of atheist that Christians love to pity -- that, even after witnessing possessed humans crawling on the ceiling, meeting an angel, and shooting dozens of possessed humans himself, he proclaims stupidly, "I don't even believe in God!" I can forgive his latter role in Legion, but the whole anti-science, anti-atheist theme in a sci-fi movie like Pandorum made me want to puke. Point being, Quaid seems clearly to favour portraying parodies of atheists in anti-atheist films; seems like some sort of personal mission of his.

Comment by Susan Stanko on February 7, 2010 at 9:05am

I didn't see "Ghost Rider" but, I was tempted to.

Comment by John B Hodges on February 7, 2010 at 6:48am

Comment on "Knowing", a film starring Nicholas Cage.

WARNNG- SPOILERS BELOW, after the break and scroll-down.

(JBH) A brief comment on a current movie, "Knowing" starring Nicholas Cage. I have long known that many movies carry ideological messages. I am a science-fiction fan, and one particular type of movie that really annoys me is the "science-fiction" movie that is anti-science, thinly disguised religious propaganda.

Cage's movie is hardly the first of this type. Some fairly recent examples are the remake of "Solaris" featuring George Clooney, and "Signs" featuring Mel Gibson. But there have been examples going back decades. "Flatliners" is a milder example. I have found a few "science-fiction" books of this type also.

In "Knowing" Cage plays a professional Astrophysicist at MIT who has recently lost his wife in an auto accident of some type, evidently traumatic; he is depressed at the absence of purpose or meaning in the Universe, where tragedies happen randomly. In a classroom lecture he makes the dichotomy between a "deterministic" worldview where everything happens for a reason, and a "random, accidental" worldview, implying that the scientific worldview is the latter, that "shit happens for no reason."

He has a son in Elementary school, and fifty years ago this school buried a Time Capsule with drawings from each child in a big class showing what they think the future will be like. One child, a very sad little girl, instead of doing a drawing, fills her page with numbers. Fifty years later (present day) the Time capsule is retrieved, and the drawings passed out to the children of the present-day class; Cage's son gets the page of numbers.

Cage's character notices a few numbers that coincidentally give the date of 09/11/2001 and the death toll of that event, he looks further and finds more dates and death tolls that match other disasters, airplane crashes, floods, bombings, etc; later he finds that each date also has some numbers alongside that give the latitude and longitude of the event. The numbers on the page are a perfect record of newsworthy disasters of the last fifty years, and at the end there are three more sets with dates yet to come.

So much you can see from the Previews and ads for the movie. SPOILERS BEGIN HERE. Scroll down for more.

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The last set of numbers on the page turn out to be a prediction of Armageddon, the end of the world. It is dressed up in somewhat naturalistic terms; the Sun gives out a super-flare that delivers such fire to the Earth's surface that nothing living could survive. Some number of human children are saved by friendly aliens who take them to another nice Earthlike planet, where there is a big grassy field and a huge golden tree.

The aliens (Humanlike, white hair, no beards) have been visiting Earth for a long time; the Prophet Ezekiel got a visit from them, and wrote of their spaceship, "a wheel in a wheel, way in the middle of the air." The Biblical prophets interpreted them as Angels. The aliens are telepathic, and only a few humans can hear them, mostly children (including Cage's son). They sound like voices whispering inside your head.

In the process of getting from the beginning of the movie to the end, the message, theme, and plot of the movie is: listening to voices whispering inside your head is a more reliable source of knowledge than Science. (Imagine the word "science" said in a contemptuous and derisive tone of voice.) Our professional Astrophysicist starts out believing in the "scientific worldview", that there is no purpose or meaning in the Universe, and in the course of the story is converted to the Deterministic worldview, that everything happens for a reason, and the way to know what's really going on is to listen to Prophets, in particular from the Bible.

(Just today I heard on the radio a country/bluegrass song "If you see them flying saucers, you better pray to God, it may be a sign of Judgement Day.")

It must be frustrating to religious folk that in real life, prophecies are not nearly as reliable as the page of numbers in this movie. In real life, prophecies are more like "There will be turmoil in the Middle East; there may be sand involved." By contrast, astronomers can predict eclipses to the minute, thousands of years in advance.

In real life, if you hear voices whispering inside your head, it's a good bet you are suffering from schizophrenia and need medication.

I'm also a bit surprised at the theology that Cage's movie is pushing. One of the classic problems of theology is the "Problem of Evil": if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent, why do bad things happen to good people? One classic reply is "because humans and lesser Supernatural beings have Free Will, and they do bad things to each other; floods and frosts and earthquakes and cancer are all the results of freewill actions by humans and evil spirits. So you should blame everybody EXCEPT God." If you are going to argue for Determinism, to the degree that train wrecks can be predicted in complete detail fifty years in advance, and that this is all part of God's Plan, then you have to explain why God seems so cruel and capricious. "Hey, here we have a Barbie Doll; lets tear her legs off, just for fun."

So, overall, I would not recommend this movie for science-fiction fans. Or anyone else, for that matter.

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