Saturday, August 04, 2007

The CORE, bitches!

With apologies to Chapelle.

Today, via Oliver Willis, (mine was based on the giant French one, this is in Mexico):


and ...

Japanese Journey to Center of the Earth
(oh we tell you it's just a drill. I signed an NDA ...)

Aaron's invention in the movie was based on both this and a project a friend of mine worked on for his graduate degree:

New Radar Can See Through Walls

My point is not validation, as petty as I can occasionally be. My point is that science is cool, and will provide all the fantastic ingredients we desire for our wee scifi adventures.

Brings back memories of arguments at the studio. When I came on the project, they were rather proud of the ideas they'd come up with ...

Studio: The vessel that digs to the center of the earth --
John: Yes?
Studio: Has a diamond windshield.
John: ...
Studio: DIAMOND WINDSHIELD!
John: You realize, this vessel digs. It is constantly digging.
Studio: Yes!
John: Then what will you see through this windshield?
Studio: Not following.
John: You know when you're driving through very heavy rain, and you can barely see?
Studio: Yes.
John: Now imagine that rain is magma and rock.
Studio: ... oh.

The fact that I managed to keep the dinosaurs out of the movie (I am not shitting you) was a bloody miracle in itself. This is generally why the science in sci fi movie sucks, by the way. It's not that we writers have no faith in the audience being able to understand the science -- it's getting the science past executives who a.) are science illiterate and b.) believe that if they don't understand it, the rube audience won't.

(That's not because they're elitist, by the way. They're narcissistic. That distinction is, if not important, at least relevant)

In retrospect, it is -- with the exception of one or two particularly awful bits of plotting from the studio (Project DESTINI) -- exactly what Jon Amiel and I set out to make. An old school 1960's science hero movie.

Also in retrospect, we probably should have told Paramount that's what we were making, as they were rather expecting Armageddon. Whoops.

Now as to that "wiring a computer to a shortwave radio" crap in Transformers, don't look at me.

63 comments:

Chris said...

I just saw Transformers today (opening day here in Japan) and don't worry - the technical flimflammery got lost in the awesomeness. Y'all made me a 12-year-old boy again for a few hours, and for that I can forgive you anything....

EditorJDC said...

You're like Arthur C. Clarke, but without the boy thing.

JDC

Shan said...

They should have just found an old telegraph machine among the old stuff in the dam, rather than even having the "hacker" character(s).

marcosgsoriano said...

Didn't someone once say that science fiction in film is like 30 years behind where it is in literature. I guess that means we have 30 years to wait for a feature version of Accelerando, and by then the singularity may have already passed...I know you're a Stross fan John so I thought you might be interested in watching my Stross inspired short film Singularity, which was in competition at the 2007 Science Fiction Short Film Festival in Seattle. http://www.pixultronik.com/singularity.mov

Anonymous said...

Heh. As I write this, I am curenly watching The Core on F/X. Spooooky.

Anonymous said...

If you're reading this and you haven't yet read Accelerando:

GO READ IT NOW!

It's beyond me why anyone who is a SF fan would not have read it yet.

A comparison would be someone in the present day using a chamber pot on a daily basis. It's barbaric.

Imagine all previous SF from Verne to Vinge ground up in a food processor with some cayenne and vinegar, then injected into your brain via the Ludovico Technique.

John, what's you take on Sunshine? And why do movie execs insist on nuking the most important parts of our solar system? Namely, the earth, moon and sun. Why don't we pick on Neptune for once?

Unknown said...

Neptune is where our secret liberal media base is.

And yes, the "what, nukes AGAIN?" discussion has been had multiple times in those stucco walls ...

Anonymous said...

My fave thing about TRANSFORMERS? The deliberately over-arch language. That kind of pompous verbosity is sadly lacking in kids' films today. Not since the hallowed CONAN stories by the original R. E. Howard (I ignore the followers-on) and 1960s Marvel comics have I heard such florid dialogue, and I absolutely LOVED it.

More big robots, more "Get behind me, Sam! I will protect you!" stuff. I, too, regressed by 20 years this week, and shamelessly enjoyed it. Many thanks.

I also enjoyed THE CORE. I can overlook discrepancies in return for one of the most original SF concepts on screen in years.

Anonymous said...

You know, I actually rationalized that bit about wiring the computer to a shortwave in my own head. After all, ham radio operators DO use computers to transmit their morse code these days, or did a while back.

And with a computer that had a very simple serial interface card in it, it would be very simple to make that take the place of the old telegraph key. Of course, it's likely that that particular hacker actually knew Morse code and could transmit and receive it. Hey the guy's a major cryptologist, of COURSE he knows Morse...

Hmm, it might have been more fun to have the computer get blasted in the fight with the little Decepticon, and make him do the Morse by hand. They guys a major cryptologist, of COURSE he knows Morse...

Unknown said...

Didn't someone once say that science fiction in film is like 30 years behind where it is in literature

Well, that wasn't always so. FORBIN, and ANDROMEDA STRAIN, etc. I think we're just in a weird place now with the economics.

Unknown said...

Hey John, I feel like my knowledge of science is less than adequate and I'm tired of being ignorant. How can I fix this? I'm not looking to try and go back to school or anything, but I do love to learn. Any books or what have you that you can recommend?

marcosgsoriano said...

Bill Bryson's A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING covers a lot of ground and is darn entertaining and fairly up to date, written by someone like yourself who knew little but wanted to find out as much as he could. Asimov wrote a bunch of book that aren't current but cover the fundamentals well. And Steven Hawking's A Brief History of Time (the book and doc) and The Universe in a Nutshell are good but not for the novice.

Noumenon said...

What the heck, Anonymous. You talk up Accelerando and don't give a link where people can try it for free before they buy it?

John (Mr. Kung Fu Monkey), can you say this stuff without getting blacklisted? Besides calling your old bosses narcissistic, you're really painting a picture of yourself as somebody who cares more about writing your vision of a movie than about writing a movie that people will like. Maybe you've proved yourself enough, I dunno.

Anonymous said...

In regard to TRANSFORMERS, my girlfriend (who's just finished her third year of her Masters in Physics, and is currently trying to find out why OLEDs work better in magnetic fields) got kind of annoyed that the Australian woman (did anyone else think that Tom Lenk would have a bigger part?) mispronounced... something beginning with F that I can't remember. It's in the same scene she mentions DNA based computers.

(Also, can the Decepticons not just buy the fucking glasses? They can hack a military encription, but they can't fake a Paypal account? [/pedantic])

Unrelated to the science, I liked how the general Michael Bay-ness of it actually worked in the film's favour. His approach to emotional subtlety made the arrival of Optimus Prime seem slightly more significant than the resurrection of Christ. Which it is.

James Henry said...

Ah, but did you do the 'perfect day'/Lou Reed reference?

Or was I reading far too much into that?

Unknown said...

John (Mr. Kung Fu Monkey), can you say this stuff without getting blacklisted?

Christ, I hope so.

Besides calling your old bosses narcissistic,

You know, nicely enough, all those people I'm referencing were eventually fired. So, you know, it works out.

Also, it's not like I'm talking about every executive I've ever met -- I've gone on record several times saying the Dreamworks and Fox execs I worked with are extremely smart.

you're really painting a picture of yourself as somebody who cares more about writing your vision of a movie than about writing a movie that people will like.

Not at all.The whole point of writing a movie to your vision is that you think your vision is what people will like. The version of MAGE I wrote was both what I thought was the right movie, and what I though other people would dig. I didn't just fight crappy notes for two years because my words are so goddam precious, but because I thought those changes would make a movie nobody liked.

Unknown said...

I should clarify that. I thought nobody would like the movie, because if we did the notes then it would not be good. And people, in theory, do not like movies that are not good.

All you have is your own individual idea of what will make a good movie. You write what you would like, and hope that's what other people will like.

The trick is that often people in charge of making movies do not, in fact, like the type of movies they are making. So their input is often spectacularly wrong-headed. It is one thing when Akiva Goldsman, secret geek and Oscar winner, tell em he thinks I should change something in a spy movie. It is quite another when an executive who does not like spy movies, has not paid to see a spy movie in ten years, tells me I should change things.

This is not to say I don't have a rep for being ... testy.

James Moran said...

I'm still trying to figure out where the dinosaurs would have come into things. Presumably living at the centre of the Earth, in some Lost Word-style scenario? With diamond skin, obviously, so they don't melt? Please tell me, it's driving me crazy. I have to know how the execs justified that one.

James Henry said...

Holding the dinosaurs back for the sequel, maybe?

Anonymous said...

You know, if you chose to write an old-school homage to 1960's sci-fi films that happened to have a lost world of dinosaurs living in a hollow world at the earth's core, I'd line up to watch it. Possibly even weeks in advance.

It wouldn't be the same movie as "The Core", but it sure could be awesome.

Anonymous said...

There's something in every movie that detracts from its realism. After seeing a flick, you can spend a lot of time ruminating over the finer points of what's feasible and what's not (e.g., shouldn't all the vehicles allowed to park around the dish arrays in the movie Contact have been diesels to prevent spark plug radio emissions?) But at some point, you have to let it go and enjoy the film.

Everyone's had a moment when their background (military, engineering, medicine, you name it) came rushing to the fore and screamed, "Oh, that's just some crap right there." When one hits me, I pause a beat, and wait for some piece of dialogue which I imagine should follow with an explanation for the pill I'm being asked to swallow. When none comes, I file it away, thinking maybe it's on the cutting room floor. If I file away too many of these and I'm not being entertained in the meantime, the movie just loses all appeal.

For Transformers, the only "pill" I remember was a badly done little factoid about the Beagle probe. Must have been a rollicking ride, though, because that's the only detractor I could remember afterward. Jeeze, there's usually a dozen "Aw c'mon!!" moments in a Michael Bay movie! For The Core, there was absolutely nothing wrong. Perfect score. Oh, I'm sure someone could find something. But you couldn't convince me there was anything out of place... because I was thoroughly and 100 percent entertained.

Anonymous said...

@Anonymous: Being a computer scientist, and moreover specializing in network security, I wince every time I hear somebody on-screen say "firewall" or anything to do with encryption, because there's pretty much no chance that whatever follows will be anything like technically accurate.

And yet I still have a soft spot for Hackers...

Anonymous said...

Ah, that must have been YOU I found myself respecting in The Core. :-)

Are you the one who put the line about Sailor Moon porn in there?

Anonymous said...

Regarding the geode pic:
Wow...talk about fact and fiction colliding...

That said, I enjoyed THE CORE. I do not apologize for that and I still think that it's better than ARMAGEDDON (but I did like TRANSFORMERS, so I guess Bay's redeemed himself).

THE CORE actually got a lot of the science _right_ (thanks to you, John!) in regards to the makeup of the mantle/outer/inner core. Granted, the one "get" was the unobtanium, but at the very least there was a sensible explanation of the science involved in the film.

Diamond windows? What the hell? To be honest, though, the producers were probably thinking of the film version of AT THE EARTH'S CORE (which ain't a bad film either--I mean, c'mon, it's got Doug McClure, Peter Cushing and the gorgeous Caroline Munro).

One more thing, John...what did you think of the "controversy" surrounding THE CORE in regards to the shuttle crash landing in the beginning? Granted, I'm assuming that this was always in the script, but despite this, it seemed that some critics wanted to blast the movie to bits because of the destruction of Columbia (which happened _after_ the film was finished but _before_ it was released).

I wonder what they'll think about the shuttle crash that's prominently featured in THE INVASION....

Anonymous said...

wtf?

>>>exactly what Jon Amiel and I set out to make

Jon Amiel. Bloody THE SINGING DETECTIVE Jon Amiel.

And you drop it in so nonchalantly.

Why aren't other jaws on the floor here?

What's next?

"As I said to Diana Rigg after our not of hot sex fifteen years ago..."

You would, wouldn't you?

Anonymous said...

Oh those damn typos creep in to ruin all my good lines (OK, so I think they're good lines!)...

not = night

back there

(Although it could be a typo for KNOT!)

Jay said...

something beginning with F that I can't remember. It's in the same scene she mentions DNA based computers.

Fourier transformations?

Anonymous said...

There was some good science in The Core, but also some bad. I remember Aaron's character mentioning that sound loses frequency entering denser rock. It's forgivable for a student to phrase it that way, but not an instructor. There was the silliness about solar microwaves being heretofore deflected by Earth's magnetic field. The idea of amping a nuclear bomb's power by slapping some fuel rods onto it is stinky. The scenes toward the end where everyone is getting pinned down by the heavy bombs or dragging the fuel rods around just make you sad if you recall where the ship is in relation to Earth's mass (these things must have been REALLY heavy at sea level). I guess telling me that soft suits can "take the pressure" is fine when I think they're inside a protective geode, but I still have trouble with it. But, you know what got me the most? Had nothing to do with physics. It was Project DESTINI being spelled out for us in dialog and then mispelled in about 15 subsequent shots of computer screens. That and the hacker's mispelling "its" with an apostrophe. I've got severe spelling issues!!

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