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GoMangoMan's Replies
I think while the script was good enough, and hit a lot of themes that it needed to hit, and was enjoyable enough to me, it was maybe also a bit jumbled, trying to hit all those points and not run out of time, and then still missed hitting some of the themes as much as it should have.
some things that are lacking if I think about it:
- the importance of spice: what spice is, what it does, where it comes from, why it's so important (maybe this was in part 1? but IIRC that really should have been expanded on in part 2. where were the navigators?)
- Paul saying how he can see the future after the water of life is good, but I would have liked it to be more significant than it was. he just kind of casually says he can see clearer now, and can find the "narrow path". ok mentioning that is good, but it should be more than just that. he can literally see fourth/fifth dimensionally: a landscape of possibilities, with so many options leading toward holy war and only a few or even one avoiding it. and the fight with Feyd being a nexus point, causing time blindness to him as well as all other spice users because of the importance and uncertainty of that moment.
- Jessica knowing beforehand about inheriting memories; I thought that she only learned this in the process. and then, the actual effects of this are only mentioned casually without really going into the details of what it means.
some of these it seems like it's enough for a reader of the books to have the concepts triggered in their memory, but I don't know how well the ideas are actually conveyed to those who are new to the story.
as in any industry it happens when the people who make the money decisions are too far removed from the end product, and so they make terrible decisions.
basically this. I don't think it's possible for the story to make sense, but it's fun to explore the ideas anyway.
in the book it's even more than that. (spoilers for the book).
<spoiler>in the epilogue he suddenly becomes an advocate _against_ tobacco and is the one who writes the book "thank you for smoking". in fact the whole MOD squad recant saying (at least publically) "we now recognize the wickedness of our former ways".</spoiler>
the storyline reason was so that the redhead reporter could see him transition and know that he was The Mask
exactly
same here. I expected a childrens' "horror" movie and got basically that. it was maybe a little bit slow paced would be my only negative, and maybe it wasn't fantastic or anything but it was good enough for a kids movie. my nephews definitely liked it.
I loved the space exploration theme (reminded me of the movie Explorers) but it was kind of forgotten almost immediately after she got there, and instead of being on the moon she was in strange alien rainbow city instead.
the story felt like it barely made any sense, and most of the characters felt a bit cliched (only exception maybe Chang'e); the moral theme was good though, although maybe it was borrowing quite a bit from Inside Out, where (spoilers for that I guess) <spoiler>the goal of the main character is misguided, where getting what you impulsively want is not the correct solution, but accepting your own feelings of sadness and loss is what you need to do.</spoiler>
[quote]1. I think this point was raised before, but wouldn't the "normal" consciousness notice missing time when the Thing takes over? There is nothing in the movie indicating that scenario...[/quote]
it's possible they can both run concurrently. as long as there are thing neuron cells that are still also functioning like human neuron cells, then the human consciousness can still be running. the thing consciousness must work differently, some kind of cellularly-distributed consciousness, because even a small amount of fluid seems to have some awareness, and nervous tissue is not central to the thing's ability to think; any tissue seems to be.
for a slightly different theory, it's also possible that instead there is an alien "human" consciousness that is controlled by the relatively less intelligent distributed thing consciousness. as a dog, it gets to have a dog mind to make use of, but as a human, it gets to have a human mind. but when reduced to mere tissues, it functions only at a base level of survival instinct.
(some combination of these is also possible. maybe the second occurs at a later stage.)
actually the characters in the movie look like the poster quite a few times; they wear some kind of headgear flashlight. so the poster is just one of the workers... except the point is, is it a human or something else?
in Blair's rant he says that it doesn't want to be a dog since it's a relatively useless body shape and would stand no chance of getting out of there as a dog, whereas a human shape is way more useful
<b>1. Does a Thing know that it is a Thing and not the dog/person/whatever anymore?</b>
yes, but note that that isn't necessarily mutually exclusive with the person still temporarily "existing". the thing is emulating human cellular structure, it's just human cellular structure plus something more. so as long as the imitation holds, it's possible that the original person is still functioning normally to some degree. Basically there can be two consciousnesses running at the same time, but unfortunately for the human part, the thing part has a lot more control at the cellular level. (I don't know this for sure, it's just a possibility.)
<b>2. Single cell "infection" theory - yay or nay?</b>
in the computer example that was shown, the infiltrating cells were around the same size as normal cells. this means it's likely that your immune system could protect you from smaller infections. this would also be why no one was infected by carrying the carcass from the Norwegian base, and it takes a massive attack like what happened to Bennings to assimilate someone.
I think it's difficult or impossible to say. I don't think it has the same kind of consciousness that we do. It's a multi-cellular organism, but its consciousness is spread out over its entirety, not just limited to our kind of nervous tissues. How this works exactly would be hard to say. For example, where is this information stored? It would have to be able to transfer information/memories as a part of the assimilation process. This information has to be stored somewhere, even while at the cellular level it remains a close enough match to a human's cellular structure that it appears and behaves like a human.
It's basically a new tier of multi-cellular life, having the ability of not just cellular imitation, but also shape-shifting, and distributed consciousness.
(One of the things I really like about the movie is how this is not really that far-fetched. That is actually in some ways a pretty plausible alien concept (maybe minus the fact that it would maybe not likely be compatible with just any biology). Multi-cellular life is already kind of "weird" how we're this collection of tiny organisms working together forming a whole, a whole that attains consciousness when the individual organisms themselves are not.)
I didn't ask you to prove anything, I asked you a rhetorical question. if you don't get it, you don't get it, but it's not exactly hard to get.
do you mean when you hear "earn this" you don't think for a second how that can be applied to any civilian? what did we do to deserve them dying for us? nothing. we should bear the burden of owing that unpayable debt every day. that's like the whole message of the movie.
it's symbolically directed at me and you (fairly obviously, it's not that subtle). we who benefitted from countless who died like that for us, who would probably not trade their lives for ours if given the choice plainly.
IMO Ryan is us the viewer (not a genius level observation or anything, it's quite on the nose). It's not saying that war is stupid, it's trying to make sure you the viewer understand what was given to you and what the price for it was. "Earn this".
From the point of view of the soldiers who died, do you think they consider you (us) personally worth having given their life saving? Heck no.
there were some resident pretend-theist trolls here for at least 10+ years (amazingly long time), but they seem to have dried up 6 years ago now (I supposed when imdb boards were closed?).
I don't know who they really are (KiBL and Navarros in particular) or why they would spend such a large chunk of their life posting the most obvious transparent BS here, but they were instrumental in my deconversion.
it's symbolic. "earn this" falls on us the viewer, who have had countless people die for our freedom.
I think it does have slightly more than just "a burnt out paramedic for a few shifts". he's not just burnt out, he's haunted by the people he failed to save, and feels like he can't save anyone anymore. he's struggling to save someone and keeps failing to. there are a couple of people that he kind of saves near the end, but he doesn't feel it. eventually, he realizes who he can save: Mary's dad. finally, he saves someone, and finally he can heal and help Mary to heal.