Fun Flic

It's an okay film.

I love the creativity. The ship is something someone could make--or imagine making--whereas the invented ships in current sci-fi movies couldn't even be built by billionaires, governments...

I read somewhere that the topics Jules Verne wrote on were those that people all over the world were imagining and writing letters about to their newspapers and each other, reading serialized novels about, etc. For example, a hollow Earth, or what might be down under the depths of the oceans, or on the moon, or Mars, etc.... Thinking about what life was like just 100 years ago--and most of it was pretty awful, with the exception of fantasies and real life advances can be a shock... People born in 1900 lived to an average of 46.3 years for white men, 33 years for black men, 34 years for black women and 48.3 years for white women. Out of every 100,000 live births, 600 mothers died in 1900--a number that decreased by 90% in the next 97 years--Margaret Sanger pioneered work in family planning and contraception (although police closed her first clinic), and serious advances were made in areas of cleanliness, sewage and trash disposal and clean fresh drinking water--changing the world. In 1900, 1 in every five children died by the age of 5. This would be totally unacceptable today. Heartbreaking--but with family size at an average of 7 children before 1900, every family had lost at least one of their youngest children--in some cities, 30% of infants were lost in their first year of life.

Yet, in spite of this sad outlook at the turn of the century, life for everyone was about to change in HUGE ways. Besides the improvements in health and longevity, and soon to come in working conditions, pay, and education, advances would bring social mobility and the time and opportunities for entrepreneurs and inventors to bring people luxuries and tools to ease their lives in so many ways--refrigerators that did not need ice, stoves that ran on gas or electricity instead of needing wood, washing machines and vacuums to reduce the time required for these chores from one day per week per chore to one day per week period.

At the end of the 19th century, oil lighting had changed life in cities as both homes and streets were lit--enabling social life to continue past sunset (in other words, past work hours!)--then telephones brought a connection unthought-of before--and soon, electricity would change life again in even larger ways. Streets had been paved in response to demands from bicyclists, and within 10 years, autos would take over these streets--within 20 years, many--if not most--families would own one. Families could leave the congested inner cities to give their children a healthier life in the suburbs and adults could choose the best jobs, not the closest. Airplanes were about to take to the skies, connecting the coasts and the continents. Outlooks were expanding in big ways.

So while people now were being given the time to think and dream for the first time in social memory, their perspectives and visions were growing and expanding in large ways as well....they were thinking of the planet, the world, in ways that only the elite wealthy and educated or self-educated had ever done, and few of them... Imaginations soared as people had time and could think about new concepts of travel, communication, and entertainment--sports, hobbies, soon radio and movies. And it's these first new ideas I find the most fascinating. I love the first sci-fi, and the first movies...they are the most fun. The most accessible. This movie is a great example of that. An awakening much as the original Star Trek was. The first Batman and Superman serials.