Author Topic: Review: Lady in the Water  (Read 3301 times)

The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers

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Re: Review: Lady in the Water
« Reply #15 on: July 24, 2006, 09:45:35 AM »
Problems with your argument:

There are laws that they do agree upon. And the science in Signs was, at best, absurd. Though I love the film.

With the Big Bang, we don't *know* what the matter was like even nanoseconds before this proposed explosion. It could be that the instant this "infinite mass" was formed it blew up: forming the mass itself causing the explosion. Nothing before the big bang is *measurable*. This by no stretch of the imagination means that before the Big Bang there was *nothing*.

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Re: Review: Lady in the Water
« Reply #16 on: July 24, 2006, 10:48:41 AM »
Why do we even have those formatting functions available?
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Re: Review: Lady in the Water
« Reply #17 on: July 24, 2006, 10:49:58 AM »
Yes, but we don't know if the Big Bang ever really happened.

IMO, the science in Signs was a stretch. As in the ideas it proposed are rather distant from current scientific beliefs.
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Re: Review: Lady in the Water
« Reply #18 on: July 24, 2006, 11:05:30 AM »
no, we don't. But the basis on which FMJ tries to make it appear absurd is flawed at the least.

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Re: Review: Lady in the Water
« Reply #19 on: July 24, 2006, 02:14:20 PM »
The thing with Signs is that's it's a character movie.  He had these great characters and then threw them into a scary situation that only turned silly in the last 10 minutes of the movie (though I admit I loved seeing River Phoenix smashing the alien with a baseball bat).  So it's like M just threw together a ok, all be-it hokey, plot for his characters to act in.

As for the science, who cares?  How often is any Sci-fi movie actually accurate?  And you can't complain about anything in this movie if you like any star wars movie, Star Trek, aliens, superman, spiderman, ect.
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Patrick_Gibbs

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Re: Review: Lady in the Water
« Reply #20 on: July 27, 2006, 02:19:19 AM »
Quote
The thing with Signs is that's it's a character movie.  He had these great characters and then threw them into a scary situation that only turned silly in the last 10 minutes of the movie (though I admit I loved seeing River Phoenix smashing the alien with a baseball bat).  So it's like M just threw together a ok, all be-it hokey, plot for his characters to act in.

As for the science, who cares?  How often is any Sci-fi movie actually accurate?  And you can't complain about anything in this movie if you like any star wars movie, Star Trek, aliens, superman, spiderman, ect.


Spriggan - I agree with you on much of this - it was indeed a good character movie, and it was only the last ten minutes that realy got silly (what with all of the bits with the water glasses, "Swing away," etc, I somehow expected the EXTRA BACON on Mel's Cheesburger to figure into the alien's demise).

The point oabout the science is avalid one, but this movie was setting itself up to be taken more seriously than STAR WARS or SUPERMAN - "Signs" was supposed to feel as if it took place in the real world, and it didn't. Still, I like the film a lot. The fact is, it's one of Gibson's best performances.

One last note: RIVER Phoenix was suffering from a serious bout with death at the time "Signs" was filmed, and to my knowledge has not yet recovered. It was his brother JOAQUIN who beat the terrible visual effect to death with the bat.
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Re: Review: Lady in the Water
« Reply #21 on: July 28, 2006, 03:31:29 AM »
Quote

With the Big Bang, we don't *know* what the matter was like even nanoseconds before this proposed explosion. It could be that the instant this "infinite mass" was formed it blew up: forming the mass itself causing the explosion. Nothing before the big bang is *measurable*. This by no stretch of the imagination means that before the Big Bang there was *nothing*.


The physics of the big bang say that all space and time were in one spot while the piece of mass was floating around. Which means, 1. Space did not exist. 2. Time did not exist.

The "ball" if you will never came together because all time and space were together. The big bang happened everywhere, becuse everywhere was all in one spot. IThere was never a time before it, since time was all in one spot.

You can't measure anything before, because it didn't exist according to the most commonly accepted version of the theory. It's not something that came together, it is something that happened.

So, where did it come from, what was it doing? The physics answer is that we cannot comprehend it.

According to all observations, all parts of the universe are moving away from each other at an equal pace, and all parts, when moved backwards, come from each other.

My whole point is that physics do nothing more than tell us what we have observed. Just because you have not observed something does not mean it cannot exist.

Scientists argue all the time because they observe the same things diferent ways.

Don't get me wrong, the movie Signs is absurd.

Again, all I am saying is that all science is based on observation and that sometimes our observations our wrong, or contridict themselves.

A better example would be that our laws of thermodynamics both prove and disprove the idea of cold fusion or zero point energy.

It's all where you observe it. We don't know the absolute truth of the matter.
« Last Edit: July 28, 2006, 03:33:36 AM by FirstMateJack »
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Re: Review: Lady in the Water
« Reply #22 on: July 28, 2006, 09:32:39 AM »
no. the theory of the big bang does not state that time and space did not exist. All it states is that all matter blew up at that particular time. Since anything before that is not measureable, scientists say nothing about what it was like an instant before hand. I have never read or heard a believer in the big bang state that there was only ever this hyper dense mass of matter that nothing pre-existed. I believe that's an interpretation put on it by those who want to disprove it. They *do* say that we have no way of knowing what happened before -- though I believe many adherants believe that the universe expands then contracts, resulting in a series of big bangs. But not knowing what was before is a distant cry from saying that there was nothing else.

My belief is that your misunderstanding comes from the frequent statement that the big bang describes the universe back to an "age" of 1/100 of a second. The idea, however, is not that everything popped into existence 1/100 of a second before what we predict, but that we don't know what/where things were 1/100 of a second before that instant, though we're fairly confident (if we believe in the theory) that there was *something* 1/100 of a second prior.

You may want to read this article about misconcpetions of the Big Bang in Scientific American. While it doesn't directly address this concern you have, some of the explanations there invalidate the set up you create for this problem (noteably that the theory never states that every piece of matter in existence was all in one space the size of a grapefruit).

As for "universal disagreement," listing some of the debates that scientists are still working out is hardly a demonstration that no, or even most, of the accepted scientific principles are in serious question -- especially when those examples are about the frontiers of scientific discovery. Naturally, I would expect that every princple has someone to disagree with it. But just because there's an idiot in a coal mine in West Virginia who didn't get past first grade in school who thinks a princple is wrong doesn't mean we can't have confidence in that principle.