In fact, a huge chunk of the "science" in science fiction is nothing of the sort -- the equivalent of someone in a hat with stars and moons on it waving a wand around. But there's a reason for that. These semi-magical bits of technology serve absolutely vital narrative roles. Without them, some huge chunk of our best science fiction would implode like a star made entirely of suck. Here then, for your tongue-clucking pleasure, are some of the most impossible science fiction technologies around, along with a detailed explanation of precisely how much we don't care.
5 Sci Fi Movies Cracked Tongue
An ill-advised sci-fi comedy in which aliens land on Earth at Halloween and are mistaken for trick-or-treaters by the inhabitants of a small town. The special effects and designs, which pay loving homage to 50s B-movies, are the main reason to watch Spaced Invaders. The flailing attempts at humour, meanwhile, are something of an acquired taste.
John Carpenter served as a jobbing studio director for this expensive comedy vehicle starring Chevy Chase. An incident at a science facility renders Chase invisible, and he spends the rest of the movie variously avoiding the attention of the CIA (represented by Sam Neill) and romancing Daryl Hannah. The special effects were once groundbreaking, but the comedy often falls flat; Carpenter keeps the vehicle on track, but Memoirs Of An Invisible Man noticeably lacks the bite of his best movies.
Superhero movies are so popular these days that even characters in other film genres are getting superpowers now -- like that movie about the stripper who is also a wizard, Magic Mike. Apparently, Hollywood's top writers are using their prodigious imaginations to come up with the coolest, most desirable powers ... and then doing nothing with them. Seriously, most of these characters use their incredible abilities to do one or two neat things and then forget they have them, when it should have taken them like five seconds to realize that they could have been doing awesome stuff like ...
Why is Jafar only using his hypnotic powers on the sultan, though? According to the Disney Wiki, which we hold as the ultimate authority on both Disney movies and arcane magic, the ruby eyes in Jafar's staff caused "those who gazed into them become susceptible to Jafar's suggestions and will." Nothing indicates that the staff only works on the sultan, so why didn't Jafar simply hypnotize Jasmine into saying, "Hey, Dad, I want to marry Jafar," and be done with it?
We probably don't need to repeat the plot of Ella Enchanted for you, but we'll do it anyway, just in case you're hazy on the details. In the movie, Anne Hathaway has a curse that forces her to do anything she's told to do -- literally anything. When someone says "hold your tongue," she grabs her own tongue. When someone says "kick some butt," she instantly goes all Neo on some dudes and kicks their butts, despite not knowing anything about martial arts.
It's just that they don't have barbed tongues or knife-cocks; in fact, they pose no threat to us at all. They're just a bunch of benign bacteria that happen to be immune to all modern antibiotics. That would still be a terrifying scenario, if said bacteria liquefied your organs or reanimated your corpse to attack the ones you love or something. Sadly, they are utterly and boringly harmless ... but everything up to the whole "they don't actually kill anybody" bit is practically tailor-made for a The-Descent-meets-The-Strain horror mash-up.
But, I'm getting ahead of myself. At the start, Ponte City was a pretty decent place to live. However, from the late '80s into the early '90s, it became literally infested by crime. Gangs took over the entire building, turning the whole place into a high-rise Bartertown. Despite what '80s movies will tell you, the main concern of inner-city gangs is not cleaning up litter and dance-fighting to save the rec center. So, that lovely indoor core quickly filled with garbage and the occasional dumped body ... five entire stories worth.
Hollywood has been making movies about astronauts since before there were astronauts, so it's completely understandable that they had to bullshit around a little when it came to designing their getups. All the way back in 1951's The Day The Earth Stood Still, for instance, space helmets were skintight, face-hugging pain-hats, because those Lindy-hopping Jitterbuggers figured that other planets were like Russia: cold and terrifying.
Even though we know what they look like now, modern sci-fi movies are just as full of shit when it comes to helmets. The problem is, actors are supposed to be sexy and brooding so audiences will buy tickets for their terrible movies ... and if you put that sexy, brooding face inside a metal sleeve, nobody will see it. That's why all the helmets in current movies have lights in them. Not on them, because that's logical and actually a thing NASA does all the time -- these lights have to be inside the helmet, pointing directly at the actor's stupid, handsome face.
And so blue became the official color for Star Wars holograms, and for all sci-fi movies ripping off Star Wars (so, all sci-fi movies). They slowly expanded it over time from one person to an entire galaxy.
Minority Report started this trend, and it looked rad as hell, but the reason it didn't look dumb was that Tom Cruise didn't have a whole bunch of shit going on behind his big transparent screen. Now that other movies are doing it, we're seeing this in the middle of busy command centers and such, rendering the always-super-tiny text even more impossible to read. And it's more than monitors. Tony Stark even had a transparent cellphone in Captain America: A Better Avengers Movie Than The Last Avengers Movie.
Zoroastrianism used to be one of the biggest religions in the world, but their idea of heaven had a slight twist on it: To get there, you'd have to cross a bridge. Sometimes rickety, sometimes wide and sturdy, and if you fell off, you'd go to the House of Lies for eternity. Fun! Not terrifying at all! This month, join Jack, Dan, and Michael, along with comedians Casey Jane Ellison and Ramin Nazer, as they discuss their favorite afterlife scenarios from movies, sci-fi, and lesser-known religions. Get your tickets here, and we'll see you on the other side of the bridge!
In 2005, Japanese millionaire Takashi Hashiyama, president of the Maspro Denkoh Corporation, decided to sell his $20 million art collection, and two auction companies, Christie's International and Sotheby's, fought to handle the lucrative contract. Takashi, an eccentric (aren't all millionaires?) whose collection included rare paintings from Cezanne, Picasso, and Van Gogh, couldn't decide which company to go with, so he decided to settle the matter in an ancient and time-honored tradition. In the Western tongue, we believe it is known as rock-paper-scissors.
Which Sci-Fi Trope Would You Bring To The Real World, And Why? Every summer, we're treated to the same buffet of three or four science fiction movies with the same basic conceits. There's man vs. aliens, man vs. robots, man vs. army of clones, and man vs. complicated time travel rules. With virtual reality and self-driving cars fast approaching, it's time to consider what type of sci-fi movie we want to be living in for the rest of our lives. Co-hosts Jack O'Brien and Adam Tod Brown are joined by Cracked's Tom Reimann and Josh Sargent and comedians David Huntsberger, Adam Newman, and Caitlin Gill to figure out which sci-fi trope would be the best to make a reality. Get your tickets to this live podcast here!
Giger made several conceptual paintings of the adult alien before settling on the final version. He sculpted the creature's body using plasticine, incorporating pieces such as vertebrae from snakes and cooling tubes from a Rolls-Royce.[13][22] The creature's head was manufactured separately by Carlo Rambaldi, who had worked on the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.[70] Rambaldi followed Giger's designs closely, making some modifications to incorporate the moving parts that would animate the jaw and inner mouth.[22] A system of hinges and cables was used to operate the creature's rigid tongue, which protruded from its mouth and featured a second mouth at its tip with its own set of movable teeth.[22] The final head had about 900 moving parts and points of articulation.[22] Part of a human skull was used as the "face", and was hidden under the smooth, translucent cover of the head.[13] Rambaldi's original alien jaw is now on display in the Smithsonian Institution,[51] while in April 2007, the original alien suit was sold at auction.[71] Copious amounts of K-Y Jelly were used to simulate saliva and to give the alien an overall slimy appearance.[22][62] The creature's vocalizations were provided by Percy Edwards, a voice artist famous for providing bird sounds for British television throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the whale sounds for Orca: Killer Whale (1977).[55][72]
Alien's roots in earlier works of fiction have been analyzed and acknowledged extensively by critics. The film has been said to have much in common with B movies such as The Thing from Another World (1951),[47][127] Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954),[128] It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958),[33][73] Night of the Blood Beast (1958),[129] and Queen of Blood (1966),[130]as well as its fellow 1970s horror films Jaws (1975) and Halloween (1978).[47] Literary connections have also been suggested: Philip French of the Guardian has perceived thematic parallels with Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939).[127] Many critics have also suggested that the film derives in part from A. E. van Vogt's The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950), particularly its stories "The Black Destroyer", in which a cat-like alien infiltrates the ship and hunts the crew; and "Discord in Scarlet", in which an alien implants parasitic eggs inside crew members which then hatch and eat their way out.[131] O'Bannon denies that this was a source of his inspiration for Alien's story.[28] Van Vogt in fact initiated a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox over the similarities, but Fox settled out of court.[132] 2ff7e9595c
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