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FEATURED THREADS for 12-15-22

 
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Bud Brewster
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Joined: 14 Dec 2013
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 15, 2022 12:26 pm    Post subject: FEATURED THREADS for 12-15-22 Reply with quote



If you're not a member of All Sci-Fi, registration is easy. Just use the registration password, which is —

gort



Attention members! If you've forgotten your password, just email me at brucecook1@yahoo.com.
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Here’s a recipe for science fiction that’s sure to please the most discerning pallet.

~ Start with a generous helping of government agents who work in secret to cover up the fact that we’ve got aliens among us.

~ Sprinkle in several highly trained “future soldiers” who battle giant alien bugs.

~ Simmer above a red hot asteroid hurtling towards the Earth. Season with a group of rowdy oil drillers who must become astronauts to save the planet.

This tasty dish can feed a family of four — or a large audience in a theater.

Eat hearty, my friends! Cool

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Men in Black (1997)




My goodness, who knew science fiction could be this funny?

Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones are the perfect buddy cops, but the bad guys they hunt down aren't really bad . . . and they're never really guys.

The wonderful thing about the three MIB movies is that even though they aren't all equally good, they're still all very enjoyable. Sequels always have to struggle to win the audience's approval, because the first one popped up out of nowhere and surprised everybody with something fresh and new, but a sequel is duty bound to do the same thing all over again, except it's gotta look different.

No easy trick.

The basic concept of these movies is brilliant. While humanity's great unwashed masses are staring up at the stars and wondering if they're alone in the universe, the guy standing next to them is pretending he's from Hoboken, NJ, when he's really from Arcturus.

If truth is really stranger than fiction, this movie is right — I couldn't handle the truth.
Shocked
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Starship Troopers (1997)



Rambo never had to deal with anything like this!

Starship Troopers certainly isn't intended to be a "hard science" sci-fi story, but it's a tour de force of special effects, and the action is irresistible.

So are the attractive stars — especially Denise Richards and Dina Meyer. Director Paul Verhoeven wanted everybody to be attractive because he grew up in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands and he wanted to make a statement about right-wing Fascist regimes.

To quote Verhoven:
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"If I tell the world that a right-wing, Fascist way of doing things doesn't work, no one will listen to me. So I'm going to make a perfect Fascist world: everyone is beautiful, everything is shiny, everything has big guns and fancy ships, but it's only good for killing f**king bugs!"
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Some folks disliked the movie because it differed so much from the Robert Heinlein novel it was supposedly based on. Little wonder in view of what Wikipedia says on that subject:
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Because the movie originated from an unrelated script, with names and superficial details from the novel being added retroactively, there are many differences between the original book and the film.
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Makes you wonder why Hollywood does things like that — claim a movie is based on a book and then tick off the fans by changing so much that the claim sounds like what politicians and lawyers are good at telling with straight faces.

On the DVD commentary Verhoeven admits he never finished reading the novel because after the first few chapters he got "bored and depressed."

But his movie certainly doesn't have that affect on audiences. It's a wild romp from start to finish, with rousing music, stellar special effects, meteoric action scenes, and a coed shower scene with all the pretty people which — according Wikipedia — the actors agreed to do only if Verhoeven directed it in the nude.

Which he did.

By the way, I felt like the poster looked a little cramped, so I did what I often do with these things — expand them a bit.

Here's the actually poster.






And here's my improved version. Very Happy



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Armageddon (1998)



This isn't exactly science fiction, it's more like science fiction, but it's still loads of fun, especially when you compare it to "Deep Impact" (which could have been called "Deep Coma" Rolling Eyes ).

But hey, if they'd done the TV series "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" with this much energy and imagination, it would have run for years and years!

The thing I liked the most about this movie was the way the approaching asteroid was depicted as having such a complex shape it was like a tangled forest made of stone and iron ore.



The thing I liked the least was the way the space shuttles zipped around like X-Wing fighters. That's fine for "Star Wars" (which Lucas has always defined as a space fantasy, not science fiction), but this popcorn adventure could have toned down the cosmic hot rodding without losing the audience's attention, I'm pretty sure.

But they stretched the "thrusters pushing down" idea to the wheeled vehicles, and that bit of nonsense had me slapping my forehead right there in the theater. Naturally it became necessary to turn them off at one point so Ben Affleck could live out his boyhood fantasy of driving like Beau Duke on an asteroid.

Crazy as the suit-thrusters-pushing-down idea sounds, however, it makes as much sense as the old "magnetic boots" from days of old. I never bought that wacky idea — and Stanley Kubrick's velcro slippers in "2001" were even worse! Can you imagine the noise those things would make while you were yanking your feet off the floor with every step just to keep from having a wonderful time floating around the cabin?

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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)
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