Disasters, Apocalypses, and Social Media (2024)

CW: Child death, cute robot dog “death” (The robot dog’s probably backed up, but…)

I don’t normally review second parts in series when I didn’t see the first part, but this movie stands well enough alone…even if I never got a really great explanation of what the crisis was.

The movie works wonderfully as a climate change analogy. Denial, dueling solutions, and some very realistic reactions to “Yes, we really are all going to die.”

It is a visual spectacle…it’s a little long, but very watchable and the SFX are superb. Some of the best I’ve seen. It’s a beautiful movie.

The actors do a great job too.

You can probably sense the but coming.

This movie has the typical scientific rigor of your average disaster movie. That is to say, none at all. If you don’t care you’ll probably enjoy it more.

But being me, I’m going to list all the glaring science errors:

1. Terrorists blow up a space elevator mid point station. It falls straight down along the tether. I suppose this could be explained by the tether still being in place, but I still can’t believe it wouldn’t have fallen away from the tether. Great visual, but no.

2. Speaking of the space elevator, not much point having a space elevator if you’re still using on board engines on your craft that pull 9G. Not what space elevators are or are for.

3. The plan is for the Earth to spend 2,500 years traveling to Alpha Centauri. Nothing alive is going to survive that. No, not even in underground cities.

4. They halt the Earth’s rotation to make it easier to move. Okay, so…first of all, you would have to do this very gradually to keep things from flying off. They’d need more time than they had. There would be devastating earthquakes. The oceans would migrate to the poles. None of that, of course, happens in the movie. They also change the day to 60 hours for no reason.

5. They use engines to “exile” the moon so they don’t have to worry about it. The plan is to leave it behind. When these engines explode, this immediately causes a devastating tsunami on Earth. Not going to happen. The explosions also completely reverse the moon’s course and send it right back to crash into Earth. Like, no.

6. Lunar nuclear fusion. Lunar nuclear fusion. This is the one that really had me yelling at the screen. Something something nuclear bombs something something phased array something something. There is no force in the laws of physics that would allow the core of the moon to fuse, implode, and disintegrate. It would also be harder to dodge the resultant debris than just…dodge…the…moon.

7. Also on the moon. No matter how powerful your solar storm is, you can’t have auroras, even very slight ones, on the moon. It doesn’t have a magnetic field.

8. This movie also doesn’t know how the internet works. They shut down the internet (why) and have to reboot the “three root servers.” The internet is much, much more redundant than that.

Last note. Do Chinese soldiers salute petty officers? Does anyone know?

Now, the good thing is that a lot of these are…well…they aren’t forgetting inertia exists or giving comets tails in interstellar space. Unlike U.S. disaster movies, the incorrect science is mostly college level, not high school.

Watch this as a disaster movie and you’ll enjoy it. But if you can’t tolerate science errors…you might find yourself yelling at the screen. I should have watched it later in the day. With alcohol. Just saying.

Doctor Who 1.6 “Dot and Bubble”

Okay, I have to say this is the best episode so far…

The first impression is that this is another episode in which Doctor Who takes on excessive screen time. Lindy wears a social media bubble around her head at all times and can’t function in (or even properly see) the real world. This is how her society dysfunctions.

But it’s not, or not just that. Instead, it’s a scathing takedown of propaganda, radicalization, and white supremacy. This is an episode I suspect Davies has been wanting to do for a while.

It’s an episode that no previous Doctor could have done. Having a Black companion (such as Martha) face what he faces would have worked.

Seeing Fifteen face it…a Black actor absolutely not in any way tone policed, but showing all the anger the situation deserves…

“You’re in the same room?”

The true message is that if you live in a bubble you will echo the bubble…and it was dark and beautiful.

Possibly one of my Hugo noms for next year.

This movie is unfairly suffering from memories of Solo, I think. It’s not doing well in the box office and I think it’s because prequels starring franchise characters only seem to work as TV shows.

It’s also suffering from an unfair comparison with Fury Road that is only heightened by the use of footage from that movie in the end credits. Fury Road was insane. I have no idea how they didn’t kill multiple stunt people filming that movie.

Furiosa uses fewer practical effects and more CGI, which is a good thing for production costs and safety, but makes it look less like a Mad Max movie. The three bike chariot didn’t look functional to me, but I looked it up and yes, it was real. That they actually did. I’d like to see some good closeups of it to get a better understanding of how it worked. It certainly did look awesome.

It also suffers from a certain lack of agency on the part of the protagonist…in part because she’s a child for a good slice of the movie. It took me a good way into the movie to realize that what was missing from the film. Agency.