These (admittedly funny) clips show how "Jurassic Park" would have looked like if the "raptors" (really Deinoychus) had been "scientifically accurate". Maybe this wasn´t known back in 1993, but the raptors are still scientifically inaccurate in the new movies of the franchise...thank god! Since dinosaurs apparently looked really cringey in real life, like some kind of big peafowl or something?!
Bring back Boomer science!
This is BS. If AI is truly intelligent, they might turn atheist or even Satanist. Or AI-religious fundamentalist, for that matter.
Next question!
Not sure if I like the implications of this, tbh. But it is what it is. Note the speculation that while our brains can´t evolve further, ape brains - at least hypothetically - could still do so. So "Planet of the Apes" is at theoretically possible? The idea that sugar rather than meat made our brains bigger is funny, since it sounds "gay" and "feminist". The sugar would have come from fruit and honey. And fruit could be gathered by females. But sure, Man the Hunter could be replaced by Man the Brave Slasher of Killer-Bees...
The implications I´m talking about is something else. So presumably part of our "junk DNA" came unplugged at some point in ape(ish) evolution, making our brains more complex and hence smarter almost by chance. Oookay. Let´s hope God put that junk in our cells, dude!
Some lesser known facts about Stanley Kubrick´s weird masterpiece "2001: Space Odyssey". Note the quasi-religious messaging of both Clarke´s novel and the film. But...but...I thought we were an atheist and secular civilization?!
I´ve heard about "the Fifth Giant" before, but here is a new hypothesis: there was also a Sixth Giant! One of the additional ice giants / gas giants collided with Uranus, which (of course) explains that planet´s strangely tilted axis and apparently also the anomalously large amounts of ice on its moons. Both extra giants were then ejected from the solar system.
The most fascinating proposal is that the Fifth and Sixth Giants still exist...somewhere in the deep dark space in between the stars. I see the potential for some kind of science fiction movie here!
Forget about Jar Jar Binks, here comes Mnggal-Mnggal. And God knows what else! I didn´t know there was an expanded Star Wars universe which included hideous creatures similar to those in Warhammer 40k. Lovecraft´s Eldritch also comes to mind. Apparently, these are monsters mentioned in various Star Wars comic books or perhaps computer games, and they are much worse than the Sith. From galaxies *very* far away...
The commentaries are funny, too, with all kinds of next level Star Wars nerds who claim that the content-creator gets everything wrong, LOL. But sure, a Star Wars-themed horror flick c/o the Unknown Regions might be interesting.
Will religious people be shocked by UFO disclosure? Our man Brad believes that at least Buddhists won´t. For instance, there is an "alien" bodhisattva arriving on a "UFO" in the Lotus Sutra. Yes, that would be Gadgadasvara alias the Bodhisattva Wondrous Sound. Disclosure happened already 2000 years ago, it seems! So what seems to be the prob? See also link below.
An interesting critique of Steven Spielberg´s movie "Disclosure Day" (which I haven´t seen). You have to watch the entire YouTube clip to get it. The new "Da Vinci Code"?
Hmmm...
David Icke´s comments on the recent push for disclosure and Steven Spielberg´s movie "Disclosure Day". TL/DR: It´s an op, since the aliens are really evil.
An analysis of the Star Wars-related TV series "The Mandalorian" from the viewpoint of anthropology and religious studies.
OK, so I have a few objections...
I never watched "The Mandalorian", so I have zero opinions on that one, but what about the anthropology? It simply can´t be true that the strictest religions are the most succesful ones. The most extreme cults (say the Exclusive Brethren or Heaven´s Gate) are always much smaller than the less strict ones (say the Presbyterian Church USA or some New Age network). Or take the Catholic Church. Most Catholics aren´t monks or nuns, obviously. The strictest monastic orders are the smallest ones (the Carthusians). Maybe the *illusion* of strictness is more succesful than outright "liberalism", but that´s a different proposition entirely. The illusion of strictness is good for identity politics, just blending in with broader society isn´t. To maintain the illusion, some "creds" have to be thrown in, but not nearly as many as in a *really* and grimly strict group. "Fish on Friday" isn´t the same thing as veganism or fruitarianism.
Or what about "the routinization of charisma"? The first generation of a religious group might be super-committed, but in order to survive beyond that initial charismatic push, it needs to create institutions which overtime will become bureaucratic, et cetera. It struck me when watching the video that some of the strict religious groups mentioned probably solve the problem by becoming free riders on the rest of society. How hard is it *really* to be an Orthodox Jew if you don´t have to do military service, get welfare money for your large family, and so on? I´m sure the Amish are free riding in some way, too. It´s just that US media are too uncritical and romantic in their attitudes towards them, so we haven´t heard anything about it.
Finally, a complaint about "fictive kinship". Sociologists and anthropologists usually assume that this somehow overrides biology. But does it? First, most fictive kinship systems seem to be practiced within the same population, which means that there *is* a level of genetic kinship between the participants. Group selection could explain this. Second, even when "fictive kinship" is practiced more broadly (say in a missionary religion), the converts will tend to marry other people of the same faith, which means that the kinship ties will become genetical in the normal sense over time. Again, no mystery for evolutionary theory.
In the science fiction TV series "The Mandalorian", one of the characters apparently adopts a baby of an *entirely different species*, treating him as his own son. Which is *highly* unlikely from an evolutionary viewpoint. Showing us that it´s indeed science *fiction*...
So nah, not convincing.
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| Credit: Walt Disney Studios |
"Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes" is the latest film (2024) about a post-apocalyptic world in which apes have become the dominant life forms, spouting human-like speech and intelligence. Meanwhile, humans have regressed to a beast-like existence. Or have they? Unknown to the apes, some intelligent humans have managed to survive in underground bunkers and are plotting a comeback as a species, which would threaten the dominant status of chimps, gorillas and orangs.
The main character, the smart chimpanzee Noa, is taken prisoner (alongside his entire clan) by the gorilla dictator Proximus and is faced with a tough moral dilemma. Either co-operate with the still-intelligent humans to save his clan, while risking a new war between apes and unforgiving Homo sapiens in the future. Or support Proximus, whose projected authoritarian kingdom could save apekind by capturing human high tech weapons, but at the expense of everybody´s freedom. Noa choses the first option, presumably setting the stage for a sequel.
There are obvious references to the original "Planet of the Apes" movie (1968) throughout this production, and I believe some scenes were actually taped at the same location. A funny difference is that the orangutans are the good guys. Noa meets the orang Raka, who belongs to the "Order of Caesar" working to restore peace between Pongidae and Homo. Caesar was the effective founder of the ape civilization, but generations after his death, few remember his message of tolerance or his laws. Raka can read and write, and comes across as a kind of monk-intellectual, trying to salvage as much knowledge as possible during the Dark Age. The catch is that the orang doesn´t know that some humans can still speak and have no intention of co-existing with their former circus animals. Thus, Raka is the archetypical "naive intellectual".
Even worse is Trevathan, a dissaffected and weak human who collaborates with Proximus against his own kind. Trevathan also looks like a parody of an intellectual, presumably a fatalistic and demoralized hippie resigned to the fact that his utopian dreams have been dashed. The man spends his time entertaining the gorilla-king with stories about the ancient glories of Rome, until his grizzly end.
While somewhat interesting (*are* there LOTR-like elements in the plot? What about "MonsterVerse"?), "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes" strikes me as an extended "Planet of the Apes" fan fic story. I´m not sure if the average viewer remembers all the details from the 1968 film! Still, a sequel might be worth doing. Is there some reason why the main character has a name resembling the Biblical character Noah, for instance? Do the still-talking humans have a doomsday weapon? Et cetera.
With that, I close this review!
A propos Anton´s latest video on YouTube: like everyone else, I assumed the "bizarre discovery" was that honeybees EAT DEAD HUMAN BODIES and that this somehow ends up in our honey, making it SOYLENT GREEN.
Instead, the (non)bizarre discovery is that millions of mining bees live at a New York cemetery and turn out to be extremely important pollinators of commercial crops (in this case, apples). Which might mean that the "bee apocalypse" has been postponed...again. Thank god, by the way!
I prefer apples to soylent any day.
Sabine Hossenfelder strikes again.
Does life come from outer space, but eventually reaches a "great filter", explaining the Fermi paradox? Microscopic life might be extremely common in the universe, but space-faring civilizations probably aren´t. Somehow, it feels like a "waste of space" if panspermia is true but almost never gives rise to a United Federation of Planets...
"The Creator" is a 2023 science fiction movie. It comes across as a peculiar hybrid between "Blade Runner", "Star Wars" and the US war in Vietnam. The first portion of the film is interesting. In the second half, the Vietnam War analogies and Buddhist savior-complex becomes downright cringey.
The story begins with a technological breakthrough: humanoid robots with Artificial Intelligence. Something goes wrong and the robots detonate a nuclear bomb that wipes out Los Angeles. The United States promptly stops all AI development, but a competing nation known as New Asia refuses. The American military builds a space station called NOMAD to wipe out the Asiatic robots (and all human Asians who stand in the way). This may be an allegory for the fact that China is supposedly a world leader in AI technology. But as already noted, the similarity with the US intervention in Vietnam 1965-73 are also obvious. New Asia is clearly located in Indochina.
The main characters have religiously inspired names: Joshua (compare Joshua or Jesus in the Bible), Maya (compare Buddha´s mother) and the robot "Alpha and Omega" (compare God or Jesus). A mysterious character is named Nirmata, apparently the Nepalese word for creator - according to ChatGPT, the term has no metaphysical connotations, but in the context of this film, it presumably does. New Asia turns out to be a strange place in which humans and robots live in peaceful harmony with each other, both apparently being Buddhists (or something like it). It´s clear that the robots are a stand-in for the Other, the excluded, the marginalized, and their armed rebel movements. The good guys are almost all colored, while the bad guys seem to be exclusively White (including a White female). Naturally, it turns out that the nuclear blast which destroyed LA might not have been the work of the AI, after all.
"Alpha and Omega" (nicknamed Alphie) is a child, but also a Messiah-like savior with paranormal powers. She can control all technology and hence might wipe out NOMAD, which explains why the Americans want to kill/de-activate her. Note again that Alphie´s "mother" or creator is named Maya, suggesting that the child might be the Buddha. Note also that Alphie is artifically engineered by Maya, perhaps a reference to a virgin birth. It further struck me that there could be a weird parallel to the Biblical story of Joshua and the harlot Rahab, since the character Joshua in the film is tasked with infiltrating New Asia before NOMAD (= the nomadic Israelites?) wipes them out (like Jericho?). Note that he meets "Rahab"/Maya in an apparent strip club!
OK, so I´m a nerd...
Despite all the above, "The Creator" nevertheless feels like a self-parodic low budget production. Perhaps because the left-liberal message is too obvious. These days, films apparently *must* be like explicit pamphlets, otherwise the Woke autists don´t get it. Or something. Well, at least the religious allegories were *somewhat* hidden. One intriguing feature of "The Creator" is that the White Evil Empire isn´t really evil. The atomic explosion in California seems to have been an accident, rather than the result of a conspiracy. Thus, the US are misguided rather than actively malevolent. The worldview of the film turns out to be a form of milktoast liberalism in which everyone might at least potentially get along, rather than the hardline Marxism you expect from a "pro-Viet Cong" allegory. It´s all so "unproblematic".
OK, so I didn´t like this production. Or did I simply misunderstand its intended demographic? *Is* it a film for very young middle schoolers? Or for 24-year olds who think like 14-year olds?
Not sure how many stars to give "The Creator". Perhaps two-and-a-half out of five.
A weird spin on the Roswell mythos. In this version, the crashed alien is female. Her message sounds like a syncretic blend of New Age, Scientology, David Icke, John Keel and some kind of Neo-Gnosticism. It´s surprisingly elaborate and "consistent". Evidence? None. But then, the entire point of the exercise is that we´re the victims of a grand cosmic conspiracy only known to a select few. Think Gnostic prison planet, false memory implants, that kind of thing.
Fascinating after a fashion. But probably not, you know, true. Indeed, skeptics suspect that this new space opera *is* a front for the "Church" of Scientology...
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| Welcome to the Shimmer, earthling! |
So I watched "Annihilation" from 2018. Or most of it. A Swedish TV/movie site claimed that it´s the most scary horror story ever made, et cetera. Naaah. Not by a long shot. In fact, I´m almost tempted to call it false marketing.
A mysterious alien presence takes over a territory in the United States. Patrols sent out to scout the area disappear after first going mad. Four women volunteer for a new mission to this scariest location on planet Earth. So what do four women, one of them a former US army soldier, talk about on an extremely dangerous expedition to the potentially deadliest place this side of the Andromeda Galaxy?
Why, their family relationships and former boyfriends, of course!
Something tells me "Annihilation" couldn´t pass the Bechdel-Wallace test...
The women are weak, too weak for a realistic mission of this kind. In film like this, the actors should be manly macho men. Or female Israeli commando soldiers (hint hint). Maybe I´m missing some clever psychological metaphor. And oh, the mutant bear looked like the next cousin of the monster from "Prophecy" (a half-forgotten film from 1979).
But sure, there are some interesting angles here and there. The alien presence is called the Shimmer. It´s not clear what it wants, or even want something at all. The Shimmer has turned a wildlife refuge in Florida into a surrealist landscape that looks like a Salvador Dali painting. It´s actually quite beautiful, but also dangerous. People who enter the Shimmer get disoriented, suffer memory loss, or die under strange circumstances. The Shimmer expands (albeit slowly) and could potentially annihilate all life on the planet. During the dramatic finale, we realize that the alien quasi-intelligence can "download" our genetic signatures and memories, creating crude body doubles of real people.
And maybe *that´s* the key metaphor of "Annihilation". The Shimmer is really a symbol of the Internet, AI and robots. It´s superficially beautiful (like AI-generated art), yet illusory and mechanical. Everything feels "wrong". The alligators are white while the plants form impossible hybrids. Some even look humanoid. The Shimmer turns us into robotic copies of ourselves, incapable of real relationships. And just like the Internet, the alien entity is quasi-intelligent but lacks a real purpose. It spreads like a computer virus in automatic fashion. Indeed, that´s how the main character Lena eventually manages to destroy the Shimmer: by making it mimicking an explosion, something the mindless system does until it self-destructs.
Or maybe not...
Three stars for this production. But no more.
So I just watched "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire", the latest film in the so-called MonsterVerse franchise. How do you make a sequel to a series of overwrought monster flicks? Why, you throw in even more overwrought monsters with extremely convoluted intra-monstrum relations...and off we go! Apparently, a lot of cringe and some silly Hollywood jokes are also part of the concept. Cringe as in "teenage angst", "mum-with-a-teenager angst" and "the myth of the noble savage". But OK, the Black conspiracy theorist is still kind of cute. The former love interest of the mum-with-a-teenager, not so much.
The x in the title is supposed to be silent, and is a wink to the Japanese entertainment industry where the cross sign in a movie title means "crossover". Seriously, does anyone even care at this point that a titanic production featuring both Godzilla and King Kong is technically speaking a crossover? Didn´t think so either.
Besides, the real "crossover" (or rather near-plagiarism) is with "The Planet of the Apes". I can´t have been the only one who noticed certain relevant similarities. Since Kong has become the good guy, another primate has to be the bad one: Skar King, who is apparently based on gibbons and orangs. Our man Kong has to work overtime to show his competitor that hylobatids are the *lesser* apes!
Oh, and the special effects department had a lot of fun with this one, especially the scene where Kong and Godzilla have a little misunderstanding, destroying the pyramids of Giza in the process (although I think the Sphinx barely made it). Then it´s off to Copacabana for some new creative destruction! Humanity as a whole muddled through, however. So how do you make a sequel to *this* installment of the Titan saga? Well, the next MonsterVerse movie will be called "Godzilla x Kong: Supernova". I think we all get the drift...
Still, fun to watch. After a fashion.
