Hacker Cinema
Oblivion
2013 · Film · 124 min
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
ActionScience FictionAdventureMystery
Jack Harper is one of the last few drone repairmen stationed on Earth. Part of a massive operation to extract vital resources after decades of war with a terrifying threat known as the Scavs, Jack’s mission is nearly complete. His existence is brought crashing down when he rescues a beautiful stranger from a downed spacecraft. Her arrival triggers a chain of events that forces him to question everything he knows and puts the fate of humanity in his hands.
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34 comments on Hacker News
I think this is way too optimistic. I suspect these things will be only available to the already-quite-wealthy. While the poor (i.e., not billionaires) are left to rot and starve without jobs, property, or livelihoods. Then, when the poors (i.e. us) become too much of a headache, these things will be deployed to murder the poors (i.e. me).
I am imagining a world somewhere between the movie Elysium and Oblivion.
So..what you are saying is that the movie Oblivion is a documentary.
The Oblivion soundtrack is amazing! Love it. I’ve listened to it so many times. I haven’t seen the movie yet. I should do that.
There was. I think it was titled "Moonfall", or maybe "Another Earth". There is also "Oblivion" in which the Moon was partially destroyed. There are probably other ones, too, but I think "Moonfall" is the one to which you are referring. I might just give it a watch in a bit!
But yeah, it would not be a good thing, according to the movie at least.
Special effects when done right make the movie a lot more watchable. There is a decade-old movie (besides many others), Oblivion, which I can re-watch repeatedly. The effects there seem to have been done with the right purpose and meaning. Of course, there are a lot more but this is the one I remember from my recent re-watch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblivion_(2013_film)
Well for the money I would hope they at least come close to the drones from the movie Oblivion [1]. Even better if they can communicate out of band using the same sounds for psychological effect. Those drones could work together as a team. I hope that is the AI they are going for.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEby9OkePpg [video][3 min 33 sec]
I haven't seen these mentioned yet: Galaxy Quest, The Fifth Element, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Oblivion, Tron: Legacy, Mission to Mars, Pacific Rim, Bicentennial Man, Alita: Battle Angel (some of these may be PG-13)
Treasure Planet and Titan A.E. are also good animated movies, although Treasure Planet is more science-fantasy.
I'd also second Back to the Future, Contact, Interstellar, Gattaca, October Sky
It's usually a big plot twist at least half-way through the film, right? I feel bad even mentioning the most mainstream example I'm aware of (Oblivion with Tom Cruise, IMDb 7.0 where 6.0 is where watchable starts for me at least for sci-fi) because being able to experience it unaware is most of the fun!
This was envisioned in several movies but my favorite example was Oblivion [1]. The tech must state their name and tech number clone number but I can imagine where this could go horribly wrong if one can't speak for some reason. Curious if drone AI developers will factor in potential failure scenarios rather than being reactive and just review logs to see why their drone took out a friendly.
Some day humans will not be in the loop because people will do what people can do.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX4d4CvdZLA
I remember some anecdotes including how they couldn't stop NPCs from randomly going from town to town and steal or buy everything in every shop so there was never anything left for the player. I believe this was mentioned in the making of documentary which came with the collector's edition of Oblivion.
My "instant-flow" choices are Stellaris Soundtrack (Paradox Interactive) and Oblivion Soundtrack (by M83, Tom Cruise movie from 2013)
I'm a subscriber on Digitally Imported. It's know as DM.fm [1] nowadays but it's Digitally Imported to me since I started listening it in early 2000's :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DI.FM
Personally I think that the movie Oblivion had one of the best UIs of all time. Every element placed there was animated with such a detail to transporting meaning, and wasn't there just for the show effect as most other Sci-Fi UIs. [1] I wish this UI was reality.
While I think Star Trek transported the idea of using touch screens everywhere, I don't think their UIs are practical, as all of them were static (except for the tablets, which only displayed texts).
[1] https://gmunk.com/OBLIVION-GFX
So, everyone is worried about a fleet of drones attacking. I've seen some interesting drone flight formations for Chinese celebrations at night which indicate to me that they could be controlled, perhaps, by AI, to search out and attack incoming hostile drones.
Imagine facing a fleet of the drones from, for example, the movie Oblivion.
Tidy my office/workspace.
Move all none work related stuff onto virtual desktop 2 or 3.
Put on film OST's that lack lyrics (The Equalizer, Oblivion, almost anything from Hans Zimmer).
Make fresh coffee.
I've used that routine for over a decade and it's become a habit, once I've done all that I'm ready to work.
The drones are used to carry and drop rat poison over the island, which is something a few steps behind of drones those equipped with laser gun to hunt and terminate rats just like the movie Oblivion (2013).
I wanted to show my GF Star Wars... but it wasn't on it. Same for James Bond, Die hard 4, Oblivion, MI1, etc. It's a shame, really. I would gladly pay 20$/month, but in this case, I want ALL available movies, not just some cherry-picked ones.
FWIW, for watching arbitrary "not on Netflix" movies, Youtube is actually a surprisingly good option. Their "pay to rent movie" service has a pretty deep catalog, and an awful lot of their choices seem to be in the $2.99 - $7.99 or so range. It's quite often I want to watch something that's not on Netflix and find it on YT for, say, $4.99. I don't mind paying that a couple of times a month, on top of what I pay Netflix.
Frankly, I find so much netflix-shows on netflix, but rarely good movies not produced by them.
I wanted to show my GF Star Wars... but it wasn't on it. Same for James Bond, Die hard 4, Oblivion, MI1, etc. It's a shame, really. I would gladly pay 20$/month, but in this case, I want ALL available movies, not just some cherry-picked ones.
12 Monkeys - Travelling back in time to try and track the outbreak of a virus that wipes out most of humanity.
The Abyss - Survival and discovery on a deep water mining platform.
Apollo 13 - Look at the rescue efforts of this historical NASA moon mission. (Does it count as sci-fi?)
The Dish - Also not quite sci-fi, but a comedy about Australia's involvement in the first moon landing.
Battle for Terra - Surprisingly good animated movie about invading aliens.
District 9 - Alien refugee camp in Johannesburg.
Gravity - Astronaut stranded in orbit, trying to get back to Earth.
The Martian - Survival and rescue of a lone astronaut stranded on Mars.
Moon - After a serious accident, a solitary worker on the Moon discovers a conspiracy.
Oblivion - A veteran assigned to extract Earth's remaining resources begins to question what he knows about his mission and himself.
Predator - The classic that launched the franchise.
Predestination - Faithful adaptation of Heinlein's short story, "All You Zombies."
The Prestige - Some minor sci-fi elements. At the end of the Nineteenth Century in London, two stage magicians engage in a battle to create the ultimate illusion whilst sacrificing everything they have to outwit the other.
Source Code - Using limited time-travel to try and get information to stop a second, larger terrorist attack.
WALL E - In the distant future, a small waste-collecting robot inadvertently embarks on a space journey that will ultimately decide the fate of mankind.
Books & movies can help you connect with your location or situation, they don't have to be a diversion.
When living in China I liked to watch dystopian sci-fi & anime based in large cities - Akira, Ghost in the shell, Oblivion, Dredd, The fifth element, total recall
Then grab some headphones and go for a wander around your megacity :)
PS this also works for other scenarios. Eg "Black cat white cat", or "Brother" if strapped for cash. "Fight club" if your job is getting you stressed.
I think lot of art is created by artists as a "cure" for their current worries. And their problems tend to be just like ours.
I remember the days when all the flash websites looked like this. With all the pixel fonts of 8 px height. http://www.2advanced.com/ Was one of my favorites! (I can't even see it now as the flash is blocked by Chrome)
I actually miss that style, good thing it still exists in movies. Oblivion had also very nice GUI's. But Gmunk has a lot of other great work!
http://www.gmunk.com/OBLIVION-GFX
I think in the PBS documentary or something like it on youtube, they found a pretty big cerebral bruise on Otzi.
It's possible someone hit him with a rock to finish him off, or he hit his head on a rock when he was reacting to being wounded.
It seems that he was used to covering long distances and routinely got into fights. Otzi is probably similar to a cave raider from Oblivion :)
There was this movie called 'Oblivion', one of the concepts suggested in the movie was- Interstellar travel being so hostile for biological life only real and practical way of ever encountering a life form would be in the form a machine/AI.
You don't need to travel in your biological bodies. You can upload your brains to the AI and then have the machine basically run forever. The machine becomes your universe, and it figures out how to best survive in the universe(Mine planets, asteroids, prepare better versions of it self etc etc)
Going to repeat a lot of what has been said so far:
- Minority Report (The TV show isn't bad either)
- Ex Machina
- District 9
- Elysium
- Oblivion
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- I am Legend
- Her
- The Martian
- The Matrix (Only 2 & 3 if you're super bored)
- Basically any of the Mad Max series
- Firefly (TV show, movies are OK)
- Dark Matter (TV show)
- Snow Piercer
- American Ultra
- Last Witch Hunter (more fantasy than SciFi)
- Riddick
- Dredd
- X Files (I mean, it's not NOT scifi...)
- Treasure Planet (Yes, the animated one)
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Gets a bad rap for being animated, but it has it's own language and everything)
- Serial Lain Experiments (anime)
- Watchmen
- The Dark Knight
- Inception
- The Prestige (technically SciFi)
I can go on for hours
I love the interfaces in the movie Oblivion: https://vimeo.com/64377100
I'm not Jessica (just a guy on HN), but I do want to add that my social radar increased a bit by doing Vipassana meditation (= body-scan meditation). Or perhaps I should say social intelligence, since I didn't look at the character of people, but I felt what people were feeling quite intensely.
Body-scan meditation allows for the insula in your brain to develop (more than normal). Note that the insula maps to the body in a visceral sense. In my experience, this results in that everything that you will see you will also feel. So that means when you see a facial expression, you will feel it as well in a quite intense fashion. The most interesting example was when my best friend went to the movie Oblivion the evening after a 10 day meditation retreat. He told me he felt like he was in it.
Caveat: you do need to meditate (aka 'feel your body') every day to keep up this level of 'social intelligence' (for lack of a better word).
If you'd want to know more about it, search for: Search Inside Yourself written by Chade-Meng Tan. He worked as a software engineer Google and writes from a software engineer's mind.
The UI designs are cool, however I noticed they misspelled Tempe Terra in some of the maps. I like these kind of videos and the UI designs in many movies are interesting. The ones in Oblivion were especially great. You can find it here: http://gmunk.com/OBLIVION-GFX.
I had to think about the movies Moon and Oblivion. Not everyone can do the job so the right people are cloned to keep the job going on and on.
> Programmers often get criticized for their fruit salad GUIs, but usually that's the result of having to present plenty of options and data.
Simplicity is only one kind of beauty. It's certainly possible to have a gorgeous interface that still presents a ton of options and data. You often see these in sci-fi movies, like Oblivion, and the aesthetic is in fact about hyper-complexity: http://www.josephychan.com/Oblivion
So does it mean most alien invasion movies are wrong when they try to suck water out the ocean for energy? Like in Oblivion? What they could have done is to stay inside the Earth forever (like in War of the Worlds at least) and extract water from there instead.
moon was a great movie. it was the movie oblivion could have been.
From paragraph one: "the hero dressed down by his mentor in the first 15 minutes (Star Trek Into Darkness, Battleship); ... the moment of hopelessness and disarray a half-hour before the movie ends (Olympus Has Fallen, Oblivion, 21 Jump Street, Fast & Furious 6)."
Paragraph 10: "Look at January’s Gangster Squad. After an opening image that sets up the conflict between Josh Brolin’s hard-charging cop, Sgt. John O’Mara, and the criminal forces of mob boss Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), O’Mara is called in to see his gruff police superior. “We got rules around here, smartass,” the chief growls. “Do yourself a favor. Learn ’em.” That’s Snyder’s second beat, theme stated. And it’s right at the seven-minute mark, almost exactly when it’s supposed to happen in a 110-minute movie....an all-is-lost moment—including a death—between the 75- and 80-minute mark..."
Did you guys read the article, or just skim it looking for a table of data? The examples are there, with the minutes. You actually have to read numbers written as words (gasp!).
> Recent films have started focusing more on the roller coster ride of the visuals, and will do any distortion of the story necessary to motivate a visceral impact on the audience. Good storytelling takes a second seat to putting the audience into the most intense situations possible.
I thought that all of the movies listed (Star Trek Into Darkness, Battleship, The Dark Knight, The Avengers, Skyfall, Star Trek Into Darkness, Olympus Has Fallen, Oblivion, 21 Jump Street, Fast & Furious 6) had awful plots, but for some of those movies the visual spectacle made them tolerable.
None of the movies listed (well, I haven't seen 21 Jump Street) obeyed the rules of physics, which is a huge turn-off for me because it breaks the suspense. The best suspenseful movies they tease you into thinking that you can predict what is going to happen next, as if they were a puzzle.
I'm not saying that I don't enjoy every movie that can't be taken literally; I just don't like movies that are logically inconsistent. Star Wars doesn't follow the rules of physics, but at least it does so consistently; you understand the capabilities of the technologies that they use and can reason about how the characters might use them. I find movies that violate the rules of physics inconsistently to be intolerable; if you don't know what behavior characters are capable of, you lose your sense of immersion because you can't relate to the characters, and can't predict what they are going to do at all.
That's just my opinion, though, and obviously enough people don't agree with me because those movies (listed in article) made lots of money.
I think Star Trek is a bad example, as it's seen as such a prime example of 'good' that it's hard for modern directors/producers to deviate too much from the original feel of the material (beyond modern cinematic tropes).
Prior to seeing Star Trek, I watched Oblivion, which seemed to me full of futurism -- it had a ship that had a novel (to modern cinema) ship design, 'drone' design, antagonist design. I think we live in a world that is quickly gaining the capability of creating our ideas, so those things that were fantastical in the 70s but trope today are not as easy to devine today.
I was just thinking the other day that I sincerely enjoy how Scifi is quickly becoming a mainstay of modern film, because it means more scifi films to invent some novel idea of the future. You really should not be basing your assumptions of modern cinema off of a remake.
You can do "anything" with microcontrollers. Here is a collection of some recent projects I've come across at HaD (my preferred source for these kinds of things) for inspiration:
http://hackaday.com/2013/04/15/florianh-shows-off-minimabl-the-next-generation-of-his-quadcopter-project/
http://hackaday.com/2013/04/24/acrobatic-tricopter-inspired-by-the-oblivion-movie-trailer/
http://hackaday.com/2013/04/15/glowing-easter-eggs-more-fun-than-a-dye-job/
http://hackaday.com/2013/04/20/mood-lampnotifier-uses-neat-modular-pcb-design/
http://hackaday.com/2013/04/19/asynchronous-fireflies-use-few-parts/
http://hackaday.com/2013/04/17/upgrade-a-toy-keyboards-tone-production/
http://hackaday.com/2013/04/23/otm-02-is-a-3d-printed-wristwatch/
http://hackaday.com/2013/04/24/this-gps-logger-is-so-small/
Some of them are just simple LED blinkers, others are more advanced such as UAVs. What are you interested in?
edit: just another link, great collection of projects done with Teensy, a development board bit like Arduino:
http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/projects.html