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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2654 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 14, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The mere suggestion that Deckard is a replicant pisses me off honestly because it reeks of "midwit twist" and directly plays against the very theme of the movie and of the book it's based on. The point is Deckard is an asshole. He's a shitty person, and the replicants show more genuine emotion, more humanity than Deckard does. The whole keeping animals thing, the Voigt-Kampf test, it's performative, it's technical, it's irrelevant. Which is a great point, a poignant message, and is completely fucking ruined if Deckard is a replicant himself. Ridley Scott is an infuriating director to enjoy the works of. He seems to be an accidental genius, but as soon as he's self aware of having made something significant, he just fucks with it until it's ruined. Remember Prometheus?

Carpenter deserves respect, here's a director who's smart enough to resist the lure of fucking with something good. No matter how much midwits (and dumbers) cared about "but wha happen to Michael?" at the end of Halloween, Carpenter was smart enough to know that it's not important and if you really need to know then another director can make that stupid schlock for you.

I think Scott's reputation as one of the all-time greats is almost wholly unearned. Alien is a masterpiece and Blade Runner is brilliant, but aside from those two, can you name a third film he directed which rises above the level of "pretty good"?

Black Rain? It was okay. Gladiator? Haven't seen it in full since I was a child, remember thinking it was pretty good. Ditto Black Hawk Down. Matchstick Men was elevated by a predictably great Nicolas Cage performance, but was ultimately a pretty shallow and predictable conman movie. The Martian was a lot funnier than I expected it to be, but I watched it for a second time a few months ago and found that I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the first.

Obviously there are stacks of other films in his filmography I haven't seen, but of those I have, none are even approaching the standard set by Alien.

Isn't The Martian's rewatchability something of a victim of it being so plot-heavy? Watney's a good enough character to keep us invested, and the setting is realistic enough to delight space fans while feeling novel to non-space-fans, but the great fun of the story is the series of suspenseful "how's he going to get out of this shit?" and "how much more shit is his hack for the last shit going to get him into?" questions. Once you know all the answers you lose that suspense, and the tiny bit of extra dramatic irony doesn't make up for that.

Still one of my favorite movies and books of all time, but it is what it is.

I also liked the book better than the movie [edit: not sure how I wrote the opposite originally], but that wasn't flawed directing; it's hard to turn a long novel into a short movie and retain as much quality as they did.

Before seeing it, I was expecting a rather gritty survival movie, sort of like The Revenant IN SPACE! When I finally got round to watching it, what surprised me about it was its lightness of tone and comedic elements. In principle that's the sort of thing that should survive a first watch, but on the second watch I was disappointed that I didn't find it nearly as funny as the first time round. A lot of the quippy dialogue sounded positively MCU-tier to my ears.

on the second watch I was disappointed that I didn't find it nearly as funny as the first time round. A lot of the quippy dialogue sounded positively MCU-tier to my ears.

This is just Andy Weir's style of writing and if the movie captured that (I have not watched the movie) it succeeded surprisingly well at adapting the book, I guess.

I have DNF'd all of Weir's books because of that. His prose and dialogue is just grating; the constant ironic quipping and attempts at relatable humour in impressively dire and panic-inducing situations feel very out of place. One of the most horrendous examples of millennial ahh writing in existence. I find it honestly surprising that he isn't actually within their age range because he shares that same pathological inability to take anything seriously that is so typical of that whole cohort.

constant ironic quipping and attempts at relatable humour in impressively dire and panic-inducing situations feel very out of place

I get it and I do understand that my professional life's stakes are far lower than an inaugural interplanetary astronaut.

But this is also my coping mechanism during disaster so it's not quite as grating as it may be for some.

I also think this style of humor works better in the story's context than it usually does elsewhere. As a modern (near future) astronaut, Watney should realistically be a massive nerd who handles stressful situations really really well. And as the book explains, he was chosen for the mission explicitly because he has an easy-going personality that will help morale and won't cause conflict with his crewmembers after over a year of close confinement, which seems like something NASA would plausibly do.

An astronaut in a movie not about the early days of space flight should generally be a little dorky.

attempts at relatable humour in impressively dire and panic-inducing situations

I think it's not the direness of the situation that doesn't fit. When a situation is utterly dire, with nothing to be done to escape the worst of it, gallows humor (see the Real Life tab) often kicks in. Later when a dire situation is over, for better or worse, the people who worked on the situation are also often prone to humor: consider the facetious "towing bill" Grumman sent to Rockwell after Apollo 13 for an example of "better", or Giuliani's SNL appearance after 9/11 for "worse". A situation which merely may become dire isn't an exception either; the disastrous explosion on Apollo 13 wasn't the first "bang" the astronauts heard, because Haise thought it was funny that he could futz with the cabin repress valve and his cabin mates would feel "our hearts jump in our mouth".

I think it's the precise timing of the humor where modern writers fail. Loads of people joke about dire situations when they're fine afterward, joke when they've merely survived afterward, and even joke when they're doomed not to survive and there's nothing to be done, but I'm having a hard time finding good examples of people being jokers in the very middle of dire situations in real-life, at the points when every second counts and the outcome is still up in the air ... and yet that's exactly when too many e.g. MCU writers think it's the perfect time to balance out the tension with a quip.

Georges Cadoudal, a Catholic Royalist guerrilla fighter during the French Revolution, was arrested and sentenced to death in 1804 after a failed assassination attempt on Napoléon. On the guillotine, as he was reciting the "Hail Mary", he stopped at "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now". As the priest who assisted him encouraged to finish the prayer, he answered: "Why? Isn't now "the hour of our death"?"

My sides. Programmer humour over a century before the invention of the computer.

The Duellists and Hannibal are worth your time.

YMMV, but you should see Legend for Tim Curry.

Kingdom of Heaven is excellent.

One of my favorite non-horror movies, probably in my top 5.

Assuming we're talking about the extended editiion that came out on DVD, i agree. Maybe not in my top 5 but easily competing for a spot in my top 10 alongside Alien, Gladiator, and Blade Runner.

Alien probably makes my top 5, and I would argue that when one director has 4 movies in the running for your top 10 favorite movies its disingenuous to claim that he doesn't know what he's doing even if you think that Napoleon and Promethius were both bad movies and that everyone involved in thier production should feel bad.

Yes, I was thinking about the extended version too. The movie itself is pretty ahistorical if you’re read up on the history around that time period. The first time I watched it it took a little adjusting to suspend my disbelief for the sake of enjoyment, but eventually I overcame it.

At the expense of getting lynched by most people on TM I must confess I’ve never watched Blade Runner. Not even a YouTube clip of it, :(. I’m a geek myself who’s skipped out on his religious duties and I do intend on watching it at some point. Alien is one of those movies I love but it’s a cinematic hill I will die on and insist that it’s properly thought of as a science fiction movie and not a horror film (which is what it really is). Event Horizon is a proper horror film set in a sci-fi context.

Blade Runner exists in a weird space where on one hand it's visuals are stunning and it features one of the greatest villains/villain arcs in all of cinema but on the other hand it's pacing and plot are kind of a mess which is why there are half-a-dozen different cuts of it floating around.

On the Gripping hand while Alien, Gladiator, and Villeneuve's sequel are all better "movies" than the original Blade Runner I still think that Blade Runner is worth watching if only to appreciate Rutger Hauer's performance and to see what everyone else in the cyberpunk dystopia genre has been cribbing off of for the last 40 years.

Blade Runner is worth watching if only because of what a long shadow it casts on the science fiction genre. The sequel is also excellent, and for my money better than either of the Dunes Villeneuve later helmed.

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