Hacker Cinema
Flash Gordon
1980 · Film · 111 min
Directed by Mike Hodges
Science FictionAdventureActionFamily
A football player and his mates travel to the planet Mongo and find themselves fighting the tyranny of Ming the Merciless to save Earth.
6 positive1 mixed15 neutralfrom 22 commenters
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22 comments on Hacker News
> could be bladerunner, could be star trek, could be 1984. Could be terminator.
It's a profound moment for sure, but let's ask ourselves: could the creative works of early last century have predicted our world? Would people in the 1930s say "2030, it could be like Metropolis, could be like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, could be like Flash Gordon"? No.
The real future might be nothing like any of the sci-fi movies we're so used to representing potential AI-based futures.
One thing I've been trying to remind myself about is that humans have explored only a very narrow slice of possibilities within the known universe. AI's ability to crawl the search space is going to uncover way more slices, (which yes, could lead to various outcomes like the movies listed), but more likely to be some hybrid/blend of outcomes (or entirely new outcomes) that we haven't imagined yet at all.
"May you live in interesting times" and all that
Reminds me of the time I was sitting on a regional jet on the airport in Philly where planes were stacked up because a runway was under construction. Near sunset we'd finally reached the head of the line of many planes of all different sizes and I thought it looked like a scene out of a retro science-fiction movie say Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers and what a miracle it is to be alive in the 21st century -- then this redneck in the seat behind me says "I can't believe I paid $1000 for this!"
Turned out he was flying home to the finger lakes after doing a job pulling a literally astronomical length of fiber through a data center in the land of us-east-1 a little south of Washington, DC. Like all that optic fiber that they didn't lay to your house [1] is a data center and no doubt there is enough to use as a delay line memory.
[1] empowering Elon Musk to blot out the stars
Every single film you mentioned came out after Star Wars. The closest, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, came out only 6 months later, so hard to argue that its derivative. Even so, its inarguable that Star Wars was the first of its kind to reach the kind of mass appeal that it did.
Likewise (to the parent), references to D&D or Kurosawa are red herrings, because those were sort of niche at that point. Flash Gordon is/was debatably niche, but even then, Flash Gordon wasn't made into a movie until 1980 (after Lucas gave up on pursuing the rights, and instead made Star Wars).
I'm not here to defend Star Wars as great art, but I am here to say that its place in the cultural canon is 100% earned, and trying to dismiss it as cliche, formulaic, or derivative is to wildly misunderstand the cultural impact of its forebears, and anachronistically criticize it for its similarities to the things it inspired.
I'm not sure I understand why you find those lines particularly comedic. Campy? Most definitely. They also don't really work out of context, so I sat down and watched the actual scene and well... they're still not a particularly funny line, and I don't think the scene is meant to be funny. Are you suggesting that they're intentionally hamming it up? Honestly, I can't even tell if this point.
Wikipedia seems to support this theory as well:
"Lorenzo Semple Jr. wrote the script. He later recalled:
Dino wanted to make Flash Gordon humorous. At the time, I thought that was a possible way to go, but, in hindsight, I realize it was a terrible mistake. We kept fiddling around with the script, trying to decide whether to be funny or realistic. That was a catastrophic thing to do, with so much money involved... I never thought the character of Flash in the script was particularly good. But there was no pressure to make it any better. Dino had a vision of a comic-strip character treated in a comic style. That was silly, because Flash Gordon was never intended to be funny. The entire film got way out of control."
It seems like the kind of show that would fit well in mystery science theater though. This is likely just one of those things that is more of a time capsule, or a period piece, it's likely very difficult for people who grew up watching this type of show to be able to objectively have an opinion about it without nostalgia creeping in.
Personally, I can't fathom thinking the 1980s Flash Gordon was a good movie while the 1980s Dune movie was not.
I don't understand all the love for Dune. I read it, it was ok, and that was it. 3 underwhelming film adaptations is more than enough.
Special effects don't make a movie anymore. What matters is plot (and music). For example, "Colossus the Forbin Project" is very good. Some other very good scifi movies:
. Invaders from Mars
. Flash Gordon (1980)
. Terminator
. Star Wars IV
. Alien
I've had that same thought. How far away are we from true "video on demand"
- Show me the second season of Firefly, set after the events of Serenity - Remake Flash Gordon in the style of John Carpenter, with Roddy Piper as Flash - Create a 6 part mini-series, a modern day retelling of Seven Samurai, in 2050 Tokyo underworld, with Hiroyuki Sanada and Ken Watanabe - I'm too busy to read this obscure book from project gutenberg, make a movie of it for me - Here's a one-pager I wrote, give me a trailer for it with Keanu Reeves as the main star
I think that them going with directors they are happy with is precisely the problem. Amazon has cranked out a lot of mediocre tv shows that don’t have any significant greatness. What’s strange about these directors is that they haven’t directed anything I thought was good at all.
The writers have uncredited writing credits on Flash Gordon and Star Trek Beyond [0]. I like those but it’s just strange that that’s all they have. Like that’s it. Not even a complete screenplay.
I’d love to read the story of how they assembled this team that is free of PR.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/filmosearch?role=nm4260438&job_type=writer
But I enjoy Dynasty Warriors / Wuxia / Dragonball Z!! (Or 300 if you prefer American)
Heck, I enjoy watching Yu-gi-oh with my nieces. It turns out that full fantasy fights with completely different sets of rules is certainly a genre. Sure, its a cartoon, but the entire point is that the fights progress by a completely different set of rules on purpose.
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> There's fake made with human actors, and there's "f--k it, just cut and paste 1000 zombies or robots in the next scene and make the heroes cut through them like butter" fake.
You mean like Star Wars stormtroopers? In something like 3 movies, they only ever land ~2 or 3-shots off on the main characters (R2D2 and Leia in the 3rd film IIRC).
I think about some older movies I've enjoyed: Star Trek, Flash Gordon, etc. etc. Plenty of "1000-to-1 odds" going on and yet I still enjoyed the film. Or Indiana Jones. The 1000-to-1 odds thing is basically an ancient trope: found in old epics / stories, and even movies from decades ago.
Looks to be a different source from the OP, but let's go down the chart for 1980 past the top ten:
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/1980/
Kramer vs. Kramer (book)
Ordinary People (book)
Popeye (comic)
The Shining (book)
Cheech and Chong's Next Movie (sequel)
Caddyshack (original - franchise starter)
Friday the 13th (original - franchise starter)
Brubaker (book)
The Jazz Singer (remake)
Flash Gordon (sequel/remake)
Bronco Billy (original)
Raging Bull (book - biopic)
Maybe you should go back a few decades until you can find a time when the top 20 were mostly originals. Would have to be before the Star Wars/Jaws blockbuster era, probably.
Assuming we avoid extinction, computer UIs will probably be symbiotic by then. THE_THING_WE_ARE_TALKING_ABOUT will still be prominent, but only conceptually.
Busy glass blinkies - holo or not - will look about as convincing as the Flash Gordon cockpit does today.
A long time ago there was a Russian movie called Solaris directed by Tarkovsky. It featured a bizarre library-in-a-space-station which completely subverted the usual SF tropes.
I'd expect more of that in the distant future. If you're going to have space travel, you might as well be comfortable, cultured, and brain-interfaced.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/434034482834578070/
Yes, but it's not technically correct to call Martian seismic tremors "earthquakes".
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080745/goofs
Flash Gordon (1980) Goofs
At the very beginning of the film, Ming and his henchman are discussing "an obscure body in the SK system", which the inhabitants refer to as the planet "Earth", pronounced as if the word is completely foreign to them. However, at that moment, Ming activates a button on his console labeled "Earth Quake".
http://bobcanada92.blogspot.com/2020/10/flash-gordon-logic.html
I recently watched Flash Gordon for the first time since the 1980s, and Max Von Sydow's performance was a definite highlight.
Casting a `proper' actor as the villain in a silly movie is always a great idea. (See, for example, Basil Rathbone in The Court Jester.)
If I just saw a picture of it at random, I would guess it to be a cheesy prop from an old Flash Gordon movie.
This sudden change of heart always reminds me of Ming the Merciless' wedding vows in the film Flash Gordon:
Priest: Do you, Ming the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe take this Earthling, Dale Arden to be your Empress of the hour?
Ming: (pause) of the hour, Yes.
Priest: Do you promise to use her as you will?
Ming: (pause, then very slyly) Certainly!
Priest: Not to blast her into space?
Ming: (silence)
Priest: ....Until such time as you get the whim....?
Ming: I do.
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I think people are blind to the creeping generally. They need way more time before they gain any trust from this space, especially after the Linux is Cancer comments, Halloween documents, general decline in privacy and general decline in ability to accept feedback (hey Scott Hanselman, where's our fix for SCVMM gone? - nothing back from MSFT for 16 days on github AGAIN)
As a big fan of Jodorowsky (L'Incal is one my favourite graphic novels ever), I think we could also unequivocally say that whatever he had made would not have been very faithful to the book. It's quite possible that Dune fans would have been even less happy with Jodorowsky's film than Lynch's.
We also have to remember that this was before Star Wars and Alien. Most scifi at the time was, with some honourable exceptions (2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, The Andromeda Strain, Solaris), pretty silly, childish, often campy stuff: The Black Hole, Buck Rogers, Moonraker. Pulp origins aside, Star Wars introduces a level of violence, maturity and realism to the genre that stood out at the time, and closer to that of contemporary adult 1970s productions like Apocalypse Now, Easy Rider and so on.
For all the considerable talent involved in the Dune adaptation, it's quite possible — and this eases the pain over the loss of the project a bit — that it would have been closer in tone to something like Zardoz or Flash Gordon, i.e. a big, colourful, but ultimately also a bit silly extravaganza. Even O'Bannon's Alien script was also pretty pulpy and silly until Ridley Scott, David Giler and Walter Hill hammered it into shape.
There may be niche applications, but people spending their days in Oculus Rift headsets is not likely to happen. (Even in SF, that only showed up in the 1980 Flash Gordon movie.)
Real Genius. Charly (which is an adaptation of 'Flowers for Algernon'). I.Q. (with Walter Matthau as Einstein), Young Einstein (Yahoo Serious splits the beer atom). Buckaroo Banzai.
Pretty much every film with a mad scientist. Frankenstein was a science genius. So was Dr. Zarkov in Flash Gordon.
I'm the same way - for me, "Bladerunner", "Barbarella" and "Flash Gordon" are on auto-repeat as my background noise for serious coding sessions. For some reason these 3 movies just work so well in that sense ..
/off-topic
Directly in front of me from the 1970s is a 3x5' Spock ASCII art poster - here's a pic of one - http://sturgeon.css.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/ASCII/Spock.jpg
I got a wide column terminal printer in storage, one day I may get it going and print out some others.
Other than that some old movie reproduction posters (Forbidden Planet, Flash Gordon), a few abacuses, some old posters of events I had put on, and other classic computing ephemera.
You're forgetting that Star Wars was itself a tribute to other shows and movies, Flash Gordon etc. Lots of them had vertical scrolling text explaining what story you were being dropped into, but Star Wars had good film stock so you could read it even as it receded into the distance. (Edit for clarity: This was done on purpose just to show off.) Most of those shows had tiny "ships" floating around on strings, so Star Wars had a giant star destroyer fill the screen. And so on.
As a former college football player, I could not agree more with this comment. Years later, when the pain is shooting through your back, the only "flame" is the one you feel burning through your nervous system. It's a brutal sport and I'm more than happy to only be watching these days. For the benefit of my children, I will do everything I can to discourage them from playing too.
It's one thing to be a spectator by choice, but when you're forced into the role, it's a completely different story.
P.S. That said, thank you for reminding us of the question, "who wants to live forever" - it is perhaps the single most epic line from the 1980 film Flash Gordon.
I don't think you know Freddy Mercury or Queen all that well. Considering they provided the score for two films (Flash Gordon, Highlander) and allowed their music on scores of commercials (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zr5lZWx9X0 ) yeah, he'd/they'd shill.