We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Battle: Los Angeles I am not going to tell you much about it: only that it is one of the best SF movies I have seen in a long while and perhaps the best combat movie I have ever seen. The soldiers acted like soldiers. They were competently led by people who were very human and proud to be US Marines.
Go see it, and then tell all your friends about it.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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The second such post offering high praise. I’m going to make time now.
Meh. It looks like a rip-off of Neil Blomkamp’s Halo shorts.
Source Code and Sucker Punch are more my kind of thing.
I think the best way to say this is that despite being a poor SF movie (alien invasion premise is paper thin), it’s a pretty darn good war movie.
Two things:
Shaky cam must die!
And this, gleaned from a negative review I disagreed with on every other point: Script writers, if your character says the line, “But that doesn’t matter now,” back up, and do the last page or two over.
Oh, come on. All alien invasion scenarios are paper thin. It’s just a plot around which to spin a good yarn… I think Jerry Pournelle (or Robert Heinlein) said “Never let the facts get in the way of a good yarn.”
If the real thing ever happened, we’d probably not even know it was happening. Actually we might not ever know. It would be a normal day one minute… and we’d suddenly be dead the next. The likely hood of an alien species being within 10,000 years of our technology level is rather slim. And the ones on the negative side of us aren’t going to show up on our door step.
Nonetheless, there have been some good ones in SF: Footfall; World War and Forge of God are great tales.
This movie differs from most in that it takes a microcosmic view of the invasion. You are with the grunts and no one tells you much about what is going on. You get a few wild ass guesses on TV, but all you know is something nasty is attacking your home and killing your people.
I also like it that aliens technology is not magically immune to explosives and bits fall off of things when you hit them with a .50 cal.
Wasn’t it Nixon?;-P
I think it looks fantastic and can’t wait to see it, liberal film reviewers are panning it and some seem embarassed to admit they like it.
I’ve never liked the Aliens magical immunity to missiles, bombs and bullets in SF movies as it means that the only way they can be defeated is through some similar magic event for the humans. Bacteria, Red Dust, Computer Virus etc.
If the opposition in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan etc only had bows and arrows and swords they would still have mangaed to kill one or two of the Occupiers.
Best combat movie ever though, better than Blackhawk Down?
Regarding the plausibility of Humans defeating Aliens who have the technology to get here, Christopher Anvil’s “Pandora’s Planet” makes the invading aliens quite stupid on average, with an occasional supergenius with an IQ of 150 or so. They had developed their advanced technology slowly, over a very long time, and did not prosper in competition with much brighter humans.
Smart but unfriendly aliens would just wipe us out from orbit, I suspect.
I will probably see the movie nevertheless 🙂
Perry de Havilland: “Smart but unfriendly aliens would just wipe us out from orbit, I suspect.”
On the other hand, if they want a functioning biosphere fairly close to our own, any such series of events sufficient to wipe us out would probably make quite a mess.
On the gripping hand, carefully controlled destruction of our cities, say anything over a hundred thousand people, would very severely cripple us. Controlling the farm roads would do for most of the rest us, leaving only die-hard vermin.
That would be particularly effective if you weren’t planning to make the place your own.
Incidentally, I may have to see this again, and pay attention to the backgrounds. I noticed one scene where the Marines wound an alien — and its comrades pull it to safety. They are not soulless automatons; they care about each other.
Aliens are by definition… alien. If there were such a thing as an invasion, all bets are off as to what form that would take. The ability to get here, from 500 light years away, is irrelevant if the aliens lack in other areas, such as providing a garrison in an area that has already been conquered. Or maybe they just want us to give them tulip bulbs and they will be on their way.
I am not very receptive to alien omniscience, however. Nothing I have seen (not even recent natural catastrophes) suggest that physics as we understand it, does not apply. Bullets, bombs, or Windows 95 will stop any force in the Universe.
I just saw ‘Limitless’. Now that is a good movie! I can recommend it to all.
1. I suspect any alien civilisation arriving would:
a) wait until we are utterly dependent on electronics then EMP our asses. We could not wage war above Taliban levels if GPS were taken out, for example.
b) Likely to end up hostile, even if they arrived neutral-benign (witness our own history)
2. Even HG Wells had Fighting Machines vulnerable to ordinance, resulting in a change in tactics to chemical warfare.
3. The story sounds like Cloverfield: The Grunt’s View.
4. Why invade? “invent” new stuff, suck out all the wealth and own it fair and square while remaining under the radar.
5. Why Earth? Surely there are countless earth-like planets that are without hostiles (i.e. us).
6. I suspect our threat would not be from organised invasion but
a) crash landing of stricken craft, hijacked prison ship, as in an “unscheduled event”
b) when we venture out to the stars,, we will be slapped down in a “No Warp Zone” imposed by the United Systems.
Thanks Dale; I saw some movie posters in NYC and thought it looked good. I am going to see it with my wife, who, wonderfully, is an even bigger SF geek than me.
I am sure reading the likes of Pournelle and Niven is good preparation for this. For me, Lucifer’s Hammer remains their greatest combo.
David Weber’s book, Out of the Dark, sets up the whole “Alien Tech” question pretty well. Despite a rather cheesy ending.
First off, the invaders send probes to monitor us, circa about the 14th century. They weren’t expecting a rapid rise in technology and, by the time they get here in the 21st century, we’re more than ready for them.
Second, related to that, Earth is in a rather isolated section of space. The other races were in more “populated” areas and made first contact earlier in thier development. As a result, much of the science ends up getting invented by other people and shared around. Earthlings, however, had to build everything from scratch and we’re more innovative as a result.
Finally, all of the other known species fall into either “Herd” or “Predator” categories, both of which have very strong hierarchal structures. Inside those structures, if a person shows up who demonstrates that he’s more powerful, you’re supposed to roll over and acknowledge that he’s the boss.
When the aliens (A predator species, by the way) show up, they destroy some of our cities and expect us to surrender. Instead, we keep fighting and killing them, and it’s a constant mystery to them that we don’t quit.
‘The likely hood of an alien species being within 10,000 years of our technology level is rather slim.’
This is the crux of whit I think is the silliness of things like SETI, the plaque place on Pioneer ( which is difficult to decode EVEN when you know
the meaning !!! ) etc.
The technological window you have to hit is just too narrow for any reasonable belief in success.
Think about it, it there were a billion people on Mars living as we did just 300 years ago ( a VERY short time span ) there would be no way to communicate with them other than going there!!
With our technology today, if there were a planet orbiting Alph Centauri ( just over 4 light years away – right next door !! ) known to be populated with beings similar to ourselves, at a technology level close to our own, and LISTENING …….
Hello ?
EIGHT YEARS later
Yes, what is it ??
This is going to be a L O N G conversation.
If we are visited by aliens, we probably are going to be viewed as a curiosity more than anything else ( and may well have been viewed that way already !!! )
I agree. This is the best military/war movie I have seen, probably ever. Absolutely loved it. It showed the Marines as normal guys just doing their jobs, not as some idiotic Hollywood stereotype.
Great movie.
Damn Marine publicity office never stops working…
Not much different in that regard from the original Night of the Living Dead.
That’s why some reviewers have been panning it. It doesn’t fit The Narrative.
I get the bit about liberal reviewers hating it because it doesn’t fit with ‘the narrative’.
I’m not down with that narrative and I’m politically inclined to agree with the message of this film, but I’ve got to say that I thought it sucked. It was like being subjected to a big screen version of one of those Play Station combat games that my teenage son and his friends are addicted to. I saw it just over a week ago and I’ve already forgotten what happens at the end.
Director Jonathan Liebesman said of the alien invaders: “They look at us like we look at ants.”
If they had the technology to get here and stage an invasion our entire civilization would as an ants nest against a middle-aged house wife or a bored little boy. It would be as tricky as boiling a kettle and pouring it in.
Director Jonathan Liebesman said of the alien invaders: “They look at us like we look at ants.”
If they had the technology to get here and stage an invasion our entire civilization would as an ants nest against a middle-aged house wife or a bored little boy. It would be as tricky as boiling a kettle and pouring it in.
The fact is, if another race is by some miracle less than two centuries more advanced than us (i.e. they have not gone through a technological singularity to the point where they’d lose any interest in such materialist goals) and still retain primitive animalistic drives for conquest, they would be far more successful to infiltrate our culture in disguise and take over the leadership class in order to secretly dominate us and get us to do all the work for them.
i.e. There is no proof that they haven’t already invaded us and control things already.
“i.e. There is no proof that they haven’t already invaded us and control things already.”
It’s difficult to prove a negative. But if you want evidence in the affirmative, I offer you Barack Obama. Alien or cyborg?
Incidentally, two centuries is hardly enough for a species to shed its “primitive animalistic drives for conquest.” Humans have made huge technological strides in the since 1811; have we lost such a drive? Why would you expect another species to do so? Two millennia might not be enough time.
I still wouldn’t put my hand in a fire-ant mound. Or even around a few of the buggers.
Why wouldn’t the aliens just come to our system and take any asteroid they like for resources, and dare us to do anything about it?
Of course, an alien society might be more interested in abstract knowledge, such as a University studying the tribes/nations of the weird earthlings, and capturing a few for their zoos, or so they can restock the planet if we wipe ourselves out.