p e n g u i n d e v i l

Well, well, well… Six years and here I am again. Okay, and then some. I actually started this post eight months ago and got one paragraph into it…

Anyway, back then, I went to a movie gathering with some friends and it got me to thinking about movies in a more social sense again…

Originally, I wanted to do a little blurb about Science Fiction movies. I ended up doing something and put it on my current blog, but, hey, may as well start this up again as, for the umpillionth time, thinking about it made me want to reopen this blog and see if I can keep it going. I always had fun with it. So let’s see if I can figure it out…

The movie that I saw socially was Gravity. Now, I’d seen it before, but all I could remember about it was that it was non-stop and rather stressful. The second time around? The same… Non-stop and stressful. It was nicely shot and quite exciting, but there were two things that I found super distracting… First, George Clooney’s attitude. So unbelievably casual and unprofessional. It was a bit hard to take him seriously as an astronaut when he kept carrying on like he was just in the midst of being a jerk in the playground. Secondly, the nearness of everything. Space is huge, orbits are set off from each other, different things are at much different altitudes, and those things that they hopped between (Hubble, ISS, and Chinese station), are no where near each other. Maybe just little things done in the name of making the movie work, but those kind of things gnaw at me and distract me from getting into it. However, it’s still pretty fun to watch, if you can stand the stress.

But, on to other movies. Since I can’t really sum up seven years of missed movies, I’ll mention what is probably the movie I’ve watched the most in those years… Interstellar.



This has turned out to be one of my all-time favorite movies. A dystopian future in which food is running out, things are wearing out, and people are just trying to survive on what’s left. Things like the space program and anything else considered frivolous have been tossed aside. However, a farmer, who happens to be a former test pilot from the old days when people wasted their time with stuff like that, is informed by his daughter that a ghost is talking to her. In this new era of dying crops and everything running out, everything is very dusty, which is unpleasant and unhealthy but very helpful for her ghost. It turns out that is becomes obvious that some kind of communication is coming to her…. And once they try to decipher it, everything changes…

The story of sending a ship through a wormhole to a different galaxy in the hopes of finding some place for humanity to survive. It is a great romp. A fun, yet very serious, realistic-feeling space adventure. With some romance, and betrayal and murder and really unique looking robots. But what really takes off is the science. The planets on the other side of the wormhole orbit a black hole, and the science and gravity and time effects of the black hole are covered in many fascinating ways, as it the black hole itself and the singularity and the meaning of time and space and, hold on, Gravity!