Too Far Out

Conditions: Starting To Turn

Catching Hell

For some reason the idea of mining asteroids has come back up in the schedule of things Nasa is planning, with the announcement of a scheme that will use a robot to lasso an asteroid and bring it in to orbit around the moon, so that at some point astronauts can go up and check it out.

"It really is a clever concept. Go find your ideal candidate for an asteroid. Go get it robotically and bring it back," said Florida senator Bill Nelson as he unveiled the plans at a press conference.

Nelson, who is chairman of the Senate science and space subcommittee, said President Barack Obama would put $100m aside for the mission in next week's budget for 2014. [...]

Of course, such a scheme does sound a little like the plot of a Hollywood disaster movie, in which an errant space mission could lose control of the asteroid and accidentally send it hurtling towards Earth. Such thoughts are high on the agenda of many scientists who have recently seen a dramatic meteor burn through the skies above Russia with enough force to shatter windows and injure hundreds of people. But scientists insist this mission is foolproof, because the asteroid being captured and brought home will be small enough to burn up in the atmosphere if it does end up on a collision course with Earth.

- guardian.co.uk/science

Well what about it ending up on a collision course with some telecommunication sattelites? Or on a collision course with the space station? See, this is the problem with these egg heads. They’re quick to think up a catchy scheme and come up with a plan and a budget, and quick to dismiss any dangers, but where is the actual point of it all? Mining? Who gives a shit about mining? Don’t we have more important things to spend money on than stupid plans to lasso space rocks?



Film Review: G.I. Joe: Retaliation

There’s something not quite right with the sequel to the first G.I Joe movie. Something odd that upsets the balance from the fun, slightly goofy, full-on action movie the first one was to middling, overly-distracted, uncharismatic action-sequence-collection that is its sequel. Is it the lack of Channing Tatum, who’s in the intro sequence and then... is gone? The lack of basically all the other characters from the first film, with not one explanation as to where they all went? Well, no. As good as the cast was from the first film, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they and they alone could pull off a sequel. Plus the additions of The Rock and an able assist from Bruce Willis means that there is still some capablility in these characters. A lacking plot, perhaps? Well, given that both movies are about the Joes trying to stop Cobra from causing missiles to be fired off all around the world then essentially, no.

The issue I think is with the tone. In the sequel we veer sharply from action to dull bits of exposition, back again, and that's it. The actual characters aren’t given much of a chance to breathe or stretch. And the connective tissue between the characters that props up the story and ups the stakes are not really there. Remarkably, the lessons demonstrated quite capably from the first film have been ignored here. By allowing the characters to mix and evolve you actually end up with a much tighter and more engaging action film. Here the characters mostly just muddle along as best they can until the end where they just go get an arsenal from Bruce Willis (who apparently was the original Joe) in order to take on the Cobra forces. One of the key highlights of the first film was the feud between Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes, which was set out, developed and then carried to a furious and satisfying conclusion. The sequel literally resurrects it, which undermines what the first film did, and then disarms it, which effectively guts what the first film did.

Speaking of shallow, the first film featured a fraught action sequence where the Joes desperately fought to save Paris from destruction. The sequel features London being blown to slow-motion smithereens by a wildly-enjoyable Jonathan Pryce hamming it up as the not-President while the Joes don’t even lift a finger. It’s kind of disappointing to see that just as a demonstration of how evil the bad guys are. Sequels are a tricky business, and it seems to me we’ve seen a string of sequels now that have not delivered compared to the first films. There was a time when the sole purpose of creating a sequel was to out-do the first film, but I’m wondering if that attitude is gone now. Apparently the makers of Joe 2 decided to put the film on a shelf for a year, in order to convert it to 3D. I consider it a great pity they didn’t also use that time to make it better as well. If you’re not going to improve on the original then do something else. One and a half nuclear footballs out of five.



- Peace out