The film implies the existence of the human soul, as that seems to be pretty much all that Alex Murphy has left as he begins a new life as a robocop.
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Last time, Spooner’s investigation into Dr. Lanning’s apparent suicide led him to Sonny, the robot who claimed it could dream. It turns out that Sonny’s dream isn’t a dream at all, but an image programmed by Dr. Lanning. It was meant to lead Spooner to a storage area where all the older robots were being kept. Once Spooner finds the exact spot where he was supposed to be standing in Sonny’s dream, he plays the hologram Dr. Lanning recorded before he died. The hologram program is simple. The doctor recorded certain responses that are triggered by the right questions. Spooner begins talking to the hologram until it tells him what he needs to know. Dr. Lanning’s hologram says there’s going Read More ›
In the end, I wanted Jakub and Lenka to restore their relationship. So, if you have a couple hours, give Spaceman a try. You just might find that gem.
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Adam Sandler gives a marvelous performance at a key point, but the script doesn’t give a specific moment that tells the audience what changed his mind.
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Netflix recently released a film called Spaceman, starring Adam Sandler. It’s… interesting. The first time I watched it, I hated it. The second time I watched it, I hated it less. I can appreciate what the movie was trying to do, and Adam Sandler puts on a fine performance… most of the time. But there were just too many plot holes and too much meaningless rhetoric for me to really enjoy the story. The movie is based on a 2017 novel, Spaceman of Bohemia by Czech author Jaroslav Kalfař. It begins with a Czech astronaut flying toward a mysterious, purple anomaly called the Chopra Cloud. The Cloud had appeared in the sky a few years previously, with no known reason. Read More ›
Last Saturday, we talked about how the writers did an excellent job setting up Feyd-Rautha as a worthy adversary for Paul. However, their decision to make Chani a skeptical antagonist—opposing the man she supposedly loves—has already created numerous problems for the story, and those problems continue to stack up. By the time we reach the conclusion of the film, I don’t know how the writers expect to create a Part Three that will be in any way, shape, or form consistent with the source material. In Part Two, Paul and the Fremen finally launch their final assault on the emperor. As in previous retellings of the story, Paul uses his father’s stash of atomic weapons to blow a hole in Read More ›
The portrayal of Chani in Part Two is, however, much harder to understand. If she doesn’t believe in the Bene Gesserit religion, why is she there on Arrakis?
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Invisibility is one of those interesting concepts that started out as imagination: What if I were invisible? Or— in the hands of a storyteller — what if my character were invisible? Tolkien famously made it a power granted by the Ring in The Lord of the Rings. The concept is used in science fiction too, for example, in the form of the cloaking device: However, as science fiction writer Douglas Adams (1952–2001) noted satirically in Life, the Universe, and Everything, in everyday life, “The Somebody Else’s Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what’s more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural disposition not Read More ›
Overall, Paul’s reluctance, in this version, to be the Fremen’s leader enables him to earn their respect over time while doing more ordinary tasks.
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For example, if the Bene Gesserits are the true power behind the throne, why do they need a Kwisatz Haderach to cement their power?
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The rainstorm Lynch introduces at the end, implies, refreshingly, that there was more going on in Dune than just the plans of men.
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Last time we talked about the opening of Dune 1984. The Hollywood Strike has delayed the sequel to the current remake till March but the classic is worth revisiting in the meantime, both for its successes and failures. The 1984 writer, David Lynch, made various changes to the story that gave the viewer a clearer understanding of what was going on than Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 novel did. After the first two scenes, which help establish the situation in the world of Dune, the Reverend Mother flies to Caladan to test Paul Atreides with the painful Gom Jabbar. I’ve agreed with his choices so far. His opening showed the viewer why the Reverend Mother chose to visit Paul when she Read More ›
The decades-old film retelling relied on some risky techniques but they turned out better than we might have expected, given the scope of the plot.
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Alien Resurrection might help you forget Alien 3, and that alone makes it worth watching.
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No one can pull ideals from a system of numbers. How could a robot decide what is objectively moral when all its decisions are based on a set of probabilities?
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Let’s not count the humans out too soon. The real question is, are we doing anything that is unique, that could not just be replaced by a machine?
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Olson makes large assumptions as he develops his argument. But the literary licence granted to science fiction is not available to real-universe physics.
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If the multiverse plot device eliminates the finality of events or choices (“it happened only in X universe”), we won’t care so much about the characters.
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Last time, Teddy had just finished saving Dolores from the Man in Black, who turned out to be William all along. He takes her to the coast because that was where he promised to take her when they were performing their pre-programmed loop. However, the coast is apparently not very far because as Dolores dies in his arms, Teddy starts reciting a campy monologue, and then shuts down while the board applauds the speech. Even when they’re trying to escape their loop, the robots still, somehow, find themselves trapped in yet another one of Dr. Ford’s narratives. Dr. Ford appears, addresses the crowd, then orders for Teddy to be cleaned up, and for Dolores to be taken to a nearby Read More ›
I’ll start out with the most irrelevant plot first because almost no screen time is devoted to it, and it amounts to nothing in the end anyway. Hale successfully convinces the Board to fire Ford, not that he really cares. But Hale has been convinced this entire time that Ford is going to delete the park’s data out of spite. So, after Theresa is killed, she enlists Sizemore, a jaded writer who works for the park, to smuggle the data out through one of the decommissioned robots. This plan doesn’t work; however, because all the robots wake up by the end of the episode, and the data is lost in the vengeful horde. So, it’s a plot point that goes Read More ›