WesIsaLeo2 wrote:
However, once again we have a movie based around "found footage." Good Grief, is this gimmick running on tread-less tires or what? The film proceeds at a pace of a potboiler action film, vs. a thoughtful sci-fi one.
How else should the crew's activities have been presented? By a high-quality conventional movie camera, or a shoulder-mounted steady cam right up in people's faces, like a regular movie?
For me, capturing the crew's activities with handheld and wall-mounted cameras made the movie look just like something from Apollo, Shuttle, or International Space Station missions. It's what we are used to seeing from space, so it seemed that much more realistic.
There's something wrong when we dismiss sci-fi that is realistic because we want something that isn't, and then we blame that sci-fi for it.
The soundtrack overwhelms too often. The action that is shown is too confusing. Much of the dialogue is mumbled, incoherant. If there was no subtitling option, I'd have missed much of what was said.
You may have watched a poor quality recording. I had little problem with mine.
Of course it was no secret that something unexpected and bad was going to happen to this expedition, to the crew. But did the film have to go down that same old "and then there were ____" road of killing off characters?
The supposedly found footage is edited together and shown to us in a way that makes the events as clear to us as possible. It is possible that characters might have been killed off nearly simultaneously, but in order to clarify events, they are shown to us in sequence.
You complain that the sound wasn't clear enough, but then you turn around and complain that they simplistically presented the characters' demises one by one for purposes of clarity?
And the denouement...oh, brother. A ton of money spent to send people into far reaches of space to show/prove existance of life, other than on Earth? Puh-leez, anyone w/ half a mind could've told you that for free. I'm thinking our own galaxy is huge enough to have life (as we would recognize it) somewhere in it.
The problem there is that what someone with half a mind might tell us isn't really worth much.
And what you think might be the case isn't science. It's just speculation. Rather, we need to know what the data actually demonstrate.
I'm thinking the discovery of it wouldn't change a damned thing for most people's lives here. "Oh they found life, that's nice. Honey, get the kids ready for school."
Fortunately, science isn't completely restricted by the likes of the idiotic, self-absorbed, nearsighted masses. Science is able to do some good work despite them.
I do wonder which is the greater tragedy here though: that all of this crew and its ship were lost, or that so many people wouldn't give a damn either way?
And what kind of life did they discover? Just the obligatory "micro-organisms" and an angry glowing-blue octopus, happily living in a water-like substance that just happens to be liquid at near absolute-zero temperatures. That was some anti-freeze that "life" lived in.
Near absolute zero? Hardly. Freezing or near-freezing, perhaps.
There are sea creatures that live near the North and South Poles on Earth, as well as in the deepest oceanic trenches. They do indeed have antifreeze proteins in their bodies which enable them to avoid freezing to death. So...what's your point about this Europan cephalopod being able to do so?
Also, do not forget the numerous times that we were told in the movie about underwater geothermal activity. There are currents of much warmer water down there beneath the ice in this movie. Pay attention!
The over-riding feeling I got from this, especially watching the end, was "oh, those poor, brave, intrepid explorers...oh, well let's analyze the data they lost their lives for, better them than us, right guys?"
It's only an hour-and-a-half-long movie. Of course it's going to move from one element to the next.
And yes, the management said its piece about both the sacrifices of the crew and their collected data. Both were worth discussing.
But the data was the most important part. That's why the crew made their sacrifices: to collect it. The pilot lady Rosa deliberately drowned herself in the end to get the best shot she could of the creature for the people back home.
It's an alien concept for many. But there are people who put the mission first, and who do not balk at others who do so, as well. Who needs glowing cephalopods when such dedicated human beings are already so foreign, so strange, so exotic to so many of the viewing public, I guess?
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