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Reviews
For All Mankind (2019)
First 2 seasons were great. Then it plummeted
The first two seasons were fantastic. Believable, great stories, great acting, well cast, great characters, great writing. Loved it.
And then season 3 came and it was like it's like the original writers had been replaced by the folks that wrote all the disaster films of the 70s. It seemed like there were multiple disasters in every episode.
The very first episode of season 3 with the space hotel? Who designed and built that thing? Beavis and Butthead? The whole premise was just beyond stupid and really set the tone for the rest of the series.
The Dev and Helios thing was completely unbelievable. There are reasons you've never seen a large company run as a Democracy: Because it wouldn't work.
The Danny Stevens story lines were just ridiculous and went a long way to ruining the show. I don't blame the Casey Johnson. That was all on the writers. It was like they just ran out of good ideas and would go with anything to turn it into an action/disaster show.
The Jimmy Stevens story line was even more ridiculous.
I gave season 4 a shot, but when the first episode started off like the first episode of season 3, I was done.
Moonfall (2022)
The moon fell through a bunch of plot holes.
I love Halle Berry and the trailers for this looked compelling. But within minutes it was clear that this movie was just going to be horribly written. Look, I'm willing to suspend belief, but I shouldn't have to suspend belief because the writers couldn't bother to do their research.
NEVER would the Space Shuttle launch on a mission with only 3 astronauts in a situation where 2 of them were going to spacewalk at the same time. Yeah, it messes up part of the story, but I can't suspend the belief that, only in the most dire of emergencies, would only 1 astronaut be left aboard the shuttle.
The whole thing with the moon's gravity and stuff. Just ridiculous. And I guess being a nerd (like a LOT of the people who are going to go see this movie), I also know that we know TONS about the moon, including its surface an interior and NASA covered it up? Did China, the ESA, Japan, Israel and India also cover up what they would have obviously discovered in their own trips to the moon?
Cue the outcast conspiracy theorist who knew all along. Cue the string of impossibly ridiculous coincidences and close calls. I thought it was funny how the shuttle survived, undamaged, hitting two massive rocks in space, but then a smaller on ripped the tail right off.
The story and overall idea are great. The acting was pretty good. But the writers and directors couldn't be bothered to hire a single space nerd to tell them about the dozens of moronic things they're doing in their movie that nerds won't suspend belief on.
You'd think studios would learn by now. Want to make a movie that's going to attract nerds? Hire some nerd advisers or suffer the consequences. Like a 5.2 IMDb rating and.
The Phenomenon (2020)
Recently converted skeptic
I've been a science guy all my life. A little over 20 years ago I worked the Drake equation with numbers that seemed pretty reasonable to me and came up with N a bit less than 1, meaning that the odds were, we were alone in our galaxy and that other life probably exists in other galaxies, but we're alone here.
I caught the David Fravor episode of Joe Rogan Experience and that really kinda did it for me.
The thing about this documentary is that the vast majority of the witnesses are sober, serious, credible people. Generals, naval aviators, presidents, senators, defense department officials, missile launch officers, etc. These are not easily excitable whack jobs.
What is abundantly clear is that they are out there. They are also, for the most part, not interfering. Here's my theory on it: They made a huge display of force and a "hey, here we are" back in the early 50s. Then Roswell happened, and the government started trying to suppress discussion of it to the point where it became fringe, "whack-job" seeming territory. The "visitors" probably decided that we're not ready for them and backed off.
Here's the thing: I think as a species, we're desperately in need of help. I think we're on the fast track to extinction. According to a 2010 Nature article, since 1950, 40% of the phytoplankton in oceans has disappeared due to ocean heating and acidification. Phytoplankton accounts for half of our oxygen supply and it's quickly disappearing. The other half of our oxygen supply is rapidly being burned to the ground and we have an addiction to oil that's making all this worse. And this isn't our only problem. We have lots of them. Nuclear waste, biological weapons (and the capability now for anyone with a few tens of thousands of dollars, to build custom viruses. How long until an psycho biologist wipes us out?). We're doing a lot of things wrong and I think most of us feel overwhelmed by the problems and I think as a species, we're overwhelmed and don't know how to fix these things.
We should ask them for help. They're clearly not here to hurt us. Maybe they're just waiting for us to ask the question. I think the UN should send a signal out, doesn't matter where. Just broadcast. They'll get it. If they're inclined to help they will. If they don't, we're no worse off.
But if nothing else, maybe us asking for help will also be us admitting we have a problem and that may be a big help too.