Hacker Cinema
War of the Worlds
2005 · Film · 117 min
Directed by Steven Spielberg
AdventureThrillerScience Fiction
Ray Ferrier is a divorced dockworker and less-than-perfect father. Soon after his ex-wife and her new husband drop off his teenage son and young daughter for a rare weekend visit, a strange and powerful lightning storm touches down.
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22 comments on Hacker News
I see this author has "12 honorary degrees and is an Officer of the Order of Canada". And CBC is Canada's government-funded national public broadcaster.
But it's hard to take them seriously on any particular details given that their article, up for 8+ months (!), mis-describes H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds as a story of the Earth "invaded by benevolent Martians". [emphasis mine]
It's a seminal work of scifi, which popularized the "alien invasion" genre and term "Martians' (both for literal creatures from Mars and also a metonym for any alien visitors/invaders). It's been adapted to film many times. And the Martians in it - with their disintegrating heat-rays & death-clouds, consuming human blood – are far from 'benevolent'.
The Book of Eli War of the Worlds 2012 Day of the Triffids (TV series) The Bodysnatchers Waterworld The Postman Contagion
This is why there’s ideas like the Bussard ramjet, which may not work but try to work around this problem by using in situ mass-energy.
Now I have read that it may be possible to use a powerful magnetic field to assist with slowing down by braking against the interstellar medium, which helps.
The Avatar films have (in spite of very derivative plots) fairly realistic (at least physics wise) interstellar ships. They accelerate using beamed laser propulsion from the Sun and use antimatter rockets to decelerate, then repeat this in reverse to come home. One assumes they somehow recharge at their destination but this is not shown. Too bad all that cool tech is in service to humans who decided to be the bad guys from War of the Worlds.
Still traveling that close to c brings up tons of other problems. Collision with a micrometeorite would be like an atomic explosion, and blue shifting of incident and cosmic background radiation would blast you in the head with x-rays and gamma rays. Those problems would demand more mass for active or passive shielding, and you’re already mass constrained.
All things considered it’s way more practical to go slower — which could still be insanely fast e.g. 0.25c — and figure out how to cryosleep or become an AI that can just turn yourself off for the trip. Cryosleep for humans is a brutally hard biomedical problem but way easier than trying to approach the speed of light. There are other multicellular animals that can do it, albeit much simpler ones, so it’s probably possible.
0.25c allowing for acceleration and deceleration gets you to Centauri in around 25 years and to further star systems with promising exoplanets in hundreds of years.
Then there’s generation ships, but that’s the kind of thing Mormons would do. :)
> back in 2005 when movies were still far from the rock bottom current era of spandex, sequels, and remakes!
Really? If anything, I’d say the frequency of remakes and sequels is going down from how I remember things back then.
The top movies in 2005 were Star Wars 3, a Harry Potter Sequel, a War of the Worlds remake, Charlie and the Chocolate factory remake. We also got spandex remakes of Batman Begins and Fantastic Four. Hardly some golden era of original storytelling
So many great sci fi novels, and so many bad movie versions.
Heck, nobody even seems to be able to film a decent "War of the Worlds" that is like the book.
The film "War of the Worlds(2005)" has effects going down to 20 Hz; to play it you will need an ATMOS AV receiver that has an LFE port to feed the signal to an amp that has LFE input. Not all amps which have an LFE input can cleanly output 20 Hz, let alone anything lower, so you would need to check the specs.
I wouldn't be surprised to discover that the original "Iron Man" movie reproduced effects at that level, but I know the "War of the Worlds" film does.
I know this is a bit adjacent, but I always come across this sort of movie when I encounter another small genre of films, which is the documentary-style sci-fi. Following in the vein of Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds’ “News report” these are sci-fi presented as non-fiction. The one I witnessed in real-time was Without Warning but have since discovered Alternative 3 and Special Bulletin It’s a fascinating genre as television used to be much more trusted, like radio before it, and the internet has I think gone through the same transformation. And it’s fascinating that each of these productions thought “No way people will think it’s real…”
Anyway, kind of fun to watch (kind of)
[0] Without Warning https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6J4pfT2qLb4
[1] Alternative 3 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7YHrCAQ1Dlg
[2] Special Bulletin https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cDZQsVNZ3SE
I hear the sound effect of the tripods from the most recent film version of War of the Worlds when looking at these photos.
I have to agree on that - it seems like forcing a show/movie to a user even if that does not align with their mood or historic picks. I am not interested at all in shows like Inventing Anna or Tinder Swindler or Selling Sunset but I have to still cope with them showing that moving banner ad like that covering so much real estate.
What I would like to see is, semantic search where I could elaborate the shows/movies I'd like to search for: "A classic movie starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg" and Netflix shows me "War of the Worlds" in search results.
Like with many things in my lifetime I think perfection was achieved in this area at least a couple of decades ago. As the article states, nobody actually cared whether a DVD had Dolby or DTS on it. There was this perception that DTS must have been higher quality, so you'd imagine it was (and often the DTS version sounded louder due to calibration issues).
Our relentless insistence on progression has led to gimmicks like Dolby Atmos. It really doesn't add much of value to anything. It's just a new logo to put on cheap plastic soundbars that will be in landfills in a decade.
When you watch movies from the early days of Dolby Digital in the 80s you can tell that progress has been made since then. But watch a movie from the early 2000s and it will sound just like one today. In fact, they often sound better. Examples are Lord of the Rings, Spider-man 2 and War of the Worlds.
Why can't we just be happy?
There's a pretty well-done War of the Worlds-style film where a local conflict escalates in to nuclear war at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHLU0Uej1WA
The smaller independent theaters near me tend to do more of this sort of thing. The one near me is doing an entire month of a Samurai movies. Also Month Python and the Holy Grail, and War of the Worlds (2005). All their first run movies tend to be independent ones.
Not saying that chains shouldn't rerun old movies, just saying those types of theaters do exist. It's the only way I can truely get a movie theater experience for things made before I was born.
As far as I can tell, The Disney versions can be trademarked, but other different versions of Mickey could be produced by other people.
The best example I could think of from the top of my head was the original 'Three Stooges' films of the 40s and 50s differing from the 70s Hanna-Barbera "Three Stooges" cartoons.
Another example would be the various film versions of "The War of the Worlds" and then the Musical version from the 70s. All different, but all using the same scenario.
Along those lines, it's low-key fascinating for me to see unintentional 9/11 imagery in pre-9/11 movies. Look at something like True Lies, which treats a terrorist attack and a plane destroying a building as lighthearted action movie fare.
You never see that kind of imagery treated so flippantly after 9/11. 2000s movies with 9/11 analogues (War of the Worlds, Munich, Cloverfield, etc.) deal with it mostly indirectly and always as deep-set trauma.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_entertainment_affected_by_the_September_11_attacks
There's a documentary I saw that explains that the hubbub around Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast was just to cover up the arrival of Red Lectroids.
A thought: Drawing is a great way to explore the worlds of your imagination, but you’re limited to your own imagination.
To expand the scope of the world you can create, you really do need to visit the worlds imagined up by others. Be it in books, video games, TV, movies, or radio (try listening to “War of the Worlds” sometime with an era-appropriate mentality, it’s kinda crazy).
Not an audiophile or amateur by any stretch but this sounds familiar/similar to tripod sounds in the War of the Worlds (2005 edition). That sound has stuck with me. Great visuals in that movie... that train!!
Tripod sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzY099ihULs
>This sounds a lot like out of a movie.
imagine yourself in 1917 as a German soldier in trenches with 500 of this
http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/12_01/tankDM0212_468x345.jpg
coming toward your positions in formation (http://forums.canadiancontent.net/history/69756-how-worlds-first-tanks-wwi.html) - it wasn't like movie, it were Martians straight out of the "War of the Worlds".
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.
> the majority of the USA prefers to have the electric eye of Sauron to watch over them, because the alternative -- more freedom that might lead to more terror attacks -- is too scary for them to accept.
As a guy who has never set foot in the States I found it strange when I first heard Dakota Fanning asking Tom Cruise "Is that the terrorists?" in Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" (when an airplane falls over the house they're in), I was asking to myself "why does the Americans' first instinct in case of unknown danger focus on terrorists?".
And talking about "the eye of Sauron", there is of course this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kytDzjuBGJI , which still gives me the chills. An under-estimated movie, IMHO.
The gulf between homage and derivative work is quite wide. Consider a few examples of famous derivative works: Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, Alice in Wonderland, Apocalypse Now, Muppet Christmas Carol. Right now there are no less than 3 different ongoing adaptations of Sherlock Holmes (the movie series, the BBC series, and CBS's Elementary series).
These are works that would be patently illegal if the source material were not in the public domain. This isn't just about "remix culture", it's about being able to adapt and interpret what's out there, fully and without restriction. Clearly there is value to allowing such artistic freedom once a work has grown sufficiently old. However, today that age has grown quite impractically long. A movie such as War of the Worlds (a 110+ year old book) can be made without seeking a licensing agreement, but movies such as The Hobbit (a 75 year old book), King Kong (79 years), The Chronicles of Narnia (62 years), Casino Royale (59 years), or The Dark Knight Rises (73 years) still require licensing.
And the sad part is that even in the next 20 years when, say, the Superman IP will be pushing 100 years old and Mickey Mouse even older it seems likely that such things will still require licensing.
The fact that the current IP laws have not utterly destroyed creativity or the productivity of creative industries is not a ringing endorsement. The fact is that they are stifling and they have been responsible for creating an industry which is too heavily controlled by a small group.
hey hackers, matthew pointed me here and I thought I'd share some stats (more about the Flash version than the iPhone version but yea)
Days spent making Canabalt: 5 (long ones) Hits on my server: ~2 million Hits on other major portals: ~2 million Estimated hits on crappy portals: ~4 million+? Hits on my server from twitter: 50k+ Best Referrer: Stumbleupon Money from donations: ~$500 iPhone sales: can't say but good enough! Top App Store Ranking: 37 Bandwidth Bills: $1000+ Top legit score I've ever seen: ~30km My top score: ~8km Resolution: 480px x 160px Initial Piracy Rate: 12% Current Piracy Rate: 25%
Inspirations: Half Life 2, District 9, Banlieue 13, Another World/Flashback/Prince of Persia, War of the Worlds (book, not movie)
Trivia: I never finished drawing the space ship that flies by since it is barely on-screen for more than a few minutes. Sadly, multiple screenshots have captured it in all its under-realized sloppiness.