Ridley Scott's Forever War In 3D 296
bowman9991 writes "Ridley Scott's next science fiction film, his first since Blade Runner, will be a 3D adaptation of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, an action packed novel about the impact of the time dilation effect on soldiers returning from an interstellar war against the mysterious Tauran species. Scott recently decided to move to 3D after watching footage of James Cameron's yet to be released science fiction epic Avatar. The Forever War, Cameron's Avatar, and Scott's other upcoming science fiction project, Brave New World, will make the next five years a fantastic time to be a science fiction movie enthusiast."
Re:How gimmicky is this 3D stuff? (Score:5, Interesting)
*As far as gimmicks go, I'd love to see a dolly zoom in 3D.
Re:Forever War is fantastic (Score:5, Interesting)
The traditional way to describe it is:
- Starship Troopers is written for World War II Vets in the early stages of a Cold War world
- The Forever War is written for Vietnam Vets in the later stages of a Cold War world
William
(who would give a lot to see a Starship Troopers which was an accurate adaptation of the book as written by Heinlein)
Re:Forever War is fantastic (Score:5, Interesting)
I just keep thinking about how this was supposed to be a response to Heinlein's Starship Troopers (or vice versa?)
It was partly as a counter-point to Starship Troopers. I think it went too far in the other direction and got a little stupid. Being an actual combat vet myself, I can say that the training and doctrine portrayed in ST was a hell of a lot more realistic that TFW. TFW was more like a snide caricature of what anti-war people think military training and tactics are like. And topping it off, TFW bizarrely had only "genius IQ" types being conscripted, which is completely asinine. Geniuses don't make good soldiers... at all. Still, TFW was an interesting read once you got past the silly axe-grinding to the story.
Re:Forever War is fantastic (Score:2, Interesting)
This could be a great movie (Score:5, Interesting)
If you saw the movie Jarhead, it was all told from the perspective and point-of-view of a soldier -- you never saw the "big picture" of the war...there were no helicopter or crane shots, it was all shot from eye-level.
Forever War is told that same way, from one soldier's point of view...and it's clear that he has no idea what is going on in the war in general...although you also get the feeling that nobody else does, either. The way that the movie skips through time with each long near-lightspeed trip makes his adventure even harder for him to understand -- the whole world changes dramatically with each hop.
I think that unlike a lot of SF books, this one really could be made into a good movie, that would capture the richness of each of the episodes in imagery that takes Haldeman many many pages to describe. I just hope that they just let the audience be as confused and out-of-sorts as the narrator is.
Forever War seems to be one of those "writer's first books" [like Grisham's A Time for a Kill, Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Hofsteader's Godel Escher Bach] that was slaved over, re-editted, re-written, re-thought, and probably submitted to publishers a dozen times before it finally saw print, because it is as tight a book as I have read. There's nothing wasted, there's nothing overly described that is better left to the reader's imagination.
Great choice, Ridley.
Re:Forever War is fantastic (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Forever War is fantastic (Score:3, Interesting)
Sort of impossible. The book is so much more complex and wouldn't make a good movie adaption unless it would have been made for a very small audioence
2D glasses for 3D movies? (Score:5, Interesting)
>some of us don't have perfectly aligned eyes and the "3D" effect
>isn't cool to people like me it gives me a raging headache for hours
This gave me an idea (maybe I should patent it)... how about "2D glasses" for the 3D movies? Offer patrons a choice, either watch it in 2D, or in 3D.
How?
Really simple. Simply make SOME of the glasses with both eyes having identically-polarized lenses. That way, both eyes see the same image, and you just get one of the two simultaneously-shown frames.
So for anyone who hates having stuff pop out of the screen, or gets headaches from the frequent depth transitions, they can still enjoy the movie along with everyone else.
Re:Forever War is fantastic (Score:5, Interesting)
Heinlein pretty much posits that all wars are a matter of population growth and limited resources.
This is so weirdly Malthusian, particularly coming from a technological optimist like Heinlein, that I never bought into it. The Future History stories are a broad refutation of this premise.
Ask any economist and they'll tell you that wars are not only not inevitable, but there is no rational explanation for them at all, if by "rational" you mean "economically rational." There is a serious problem in economics called "the war puzzle" or "the war problem" that tries to figure out why the hell people ever go to war, because it is never economically rational for either side to do so, regardless of outcome.
Heinlein tries to pretty up various completely irrational ideas as to why people fight to make it seem inevitable, but the only one that made sense to me was at the individual level. The rest amounted to, "Eventually we will meet something that wants to fight us, and we'd better be ready"--the H&MP instructor says almost exactly that at some point. And we will meet something that wants to fight us because "that's the way the world is."
This is far less rational, on a purely empirical basis, than Haldeman's admittedly thin "why can't we all just get along" schtick: flat-out to-the-death conflict is extremely rare in nature, and even in human history until fairly recently. Limited warfare was the norm until the late 1700's: the past 200 years of total war are the anomaly, and Heinlein's view took that anomaly to be the norm, the model for all conflict between intelligent or quasi-intelligent beings (see Daniel Bell's "The First Total War" for a good introduction to changing beliefs about war in the time of Napoleon.)
Re:How gimmicky is this 3D stuff? (examples) (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's some simple GIF "wiggle-grams" that illustrate the parallax effect:
http://www.well.com/user/jimg/stereo/stereo_list.html [well.com]
The "stone gate" is my favorite. (Click the thumbnail for bigger size.) Warning: some "artful" nudity.
Re:Forever War is fantastic (Score:3, Interesting)
I have to say that I just didn't like Starship Troopers. It was so far to the right politically that I felt it was unamerican. Maybe it was the difference in time but I am not what most people call a liberal. I come from my uncle served in WWII, my father was in the 82 Airborne. I have a lot of respect for the people that serve but Starship Troopers just creeped me out. Both the book and the movie.
However I think you are under estimating the importance of why people fight. The answer "unit cohesion" really is an important answer. It is really why people do fight most of the time. There is often no deeper answer than to save your buddy or yourself.
Re:What Forever War is about - bit of a spoiler he (Score:3, Interesting)
What I remember was that the war started thru combination of misunderstanding, accident, and indeed some government agenda... but that the war continued simply because the Taurons simply could not communicate with a species of individuals. Only when humans evolved into a homgenous species "Man" could they talk with us and thus end the war.
Re:Forever War is fantastic (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, the asinine military "training" was the most cringeworthy part of the novel. You draft the best and the brightest from Earth, spend untold billions to equip them, then hold live fire exercises deliberately intended to kill off many of them and demoralize the survivors, just to toughen the troops up? That's not to say that some military commanders don't do stupid things that get their soldiers killed, but it generally happens on the battlefield, not during boot camp!
However, IMHO an even bigger issue in the novel is how the government decides to handle population control - by encouraging people to be homosexual, i.e. as if it was a conscious choice that could be made. I can just imagine how that plot point could play into anti-gay sentiment if the movie becomes popular, i.e. "See? Children can be recruited into the gay lifestyle - The Forever War shows it happening!" I doubt that the "humanity turns gay" subplot will make it to the final script.
The most interesting aspect of the novel is definitely the "man out of time" theme, as Mandella realizes he has nothing in common with the future Earth he keeps returning to, and re-enlists because the military is the only thing left that he can make sense of. Unfortunately, I'm guessing that Hollywood will screw TFW up just about as badly as it screwed up Starship Troopers. You'll have lots of exploding spaceships and dead aliens, but not much else.
Re:How gimmicky is this 3D stuff? (Score:3, Interesting)
New 3D effects concerns (Score:4, Interesting)
Some voicing their concerns about 3D ruining their enjoyment by giving viewers headaches or disorienting them with fading transitions, wipes and other common 2D movie tools need to understand that there are already techniques in place to remedy these problems.
First off, the new polarization techniques don't use the older, vertical/horizontal polarized light filters. Instead, clockwise/counterclockwise spiral polarization is used, resulting in less image bleed-over into each eye. Second, directors have the ability to lessen the perceived depth of a frame, making it seem not as if you are viewing reality, but more a bas relief sculpture. This helps during transitions or fast motion to keep people from getting headaches or experiencing vertigo. The recent film Monsters vs. Aliens used these variable depth shots quite a bit. I've had problems in the past myself with watching polarized 3D films, but have no problems watching any of the new 3D tech.
I'd say a much bigger concern is going to be how films done in 3D transition to DVD/bluray. If directors start shooting their films differently in order to take advantage of 3D imagery, how much intention will be lost when the film is converted to 2D? Imagine a director tweaks the depth of everything in a shot to lie in the far background, then pulls one particular item forward to emphasize its importance in the shot. Everything else considered equal, that information will be lost in the 2D version. It's a comparable problem to taking a color film and turning it into black and white. If "the girl with the red umbrella" suddenly becomes just some other person amidst a sea of other gray umbrellas, the meaning of the shot is lost.
Some newer TV's have 120hz refresh rates (or better) to allow for 60fps stereoscopic imaging when using shutter glasses, but that is hardware which is going to have a hard time making it into living rooms.
Re:How gimmicky is this 3D stuff? (examples) (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Forever War is fantastic (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree. I loved the book, but it's more like a long lecture (like most of Heinlein's books ;-) ) than something I would want to watch in a movie theater.
If we were to vote on the next Heinlein book to make into a movie, I would vote for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Though they would probably have to severely shorten the first half of it (the lecture half) for the movie adaptation.
Re:Forever War is fantastic (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Forever War is fantastic (Score:3, Interesting)
NOOOOOOO! (Score:3, Interesting)
How can you take the misery and apathy of Mandella, and the serious, prolonged waste of life and turn it into effectively a 3D cartoon?
Get the damn budget and immortalise the story, or leave it until someone else can do it.
Re:Forever War is fantastic (Score:3, Interesting)
Heinlein pretty much posits that all wars are a matter of population growth and limited resources.
This is so weirdly Malthusian, particularly coming from a technological optimist like Heinlein, that I never bought into it.
Heinlein tries to pretty up various completely irrational ideas as to why people fight to make it seem inevitable, but the only one that made sense to me was at the individual level. The rest amounted to, "Eventually we will meet something that wants to fight us, and we'd better be ready"--the H&MP instructor says almost exactly that at some point. And we will meet something that wants to fight us because "that's the way the world is."
A point often lost on people is that memes share the same Malthusian crunch as biological creatures. In fact, memes may face a stronger crunch. Technological advances may keep us feeding larger populations, for a while anyway... but nothing will create sufficient brains for the memes to populate without "meme wars".
Some memes engage in "limited warfare", accept their losses gracefully, and fade off the scene. Some drive their hosts to fight to the death and try to convert as many others as possible. Guess which type of meme tends to survive longer in the human population?
If this sounds academic to you, open a history book. "Why don't we all just get along" sounds great in theory, and is certainly the purely rational-economic point of view. But when asked to convert to Islam, or get baptized, or pay taxes to a government overseas, or some other "meme only" change that has little or no physical effect on you... People are most emphatically not pure rational-economic machines. People have culture (memes) and a little thing such as forbidding/allowing/forcing girls to wear a veil to school causes them to react "irrationally".
And this doesn't even go into the fact that, when all is said and done, Maltus was right on the money. Advancing technology aside, if the human race continues to grow exponentially, very quickly (in a millenium or two) you reach absurdities. Asimov calculated that if we double the number of people every 30-40 years, the total mass of humans will equal the total time of the universe - before the year 7000. Even if we double the number of people every 100 years instead of 30, it takes an alarmingly short time for people to eat the whole of the earth (molten core and all).
At some point, the number of deaths must balance the number of births. Sure, rich countries are getting close to that point, but the western world as a rule is not there yet, and its doubtful it ever will be. You also have a problem with the poor-but-developing countries who have access to modern medicine and are making babies like crazy. If people are willing to react violently to the amount and placement of fabric on school girls, you can imagine how they'll react when not/having babies comes into play. You'll be fighting the Catholics and the Muslims at the same time. And that's just for starters.
Finally, in the 10,000 years of documented history of this planet, there hasn't been a single one AFAIK when there wasn't some war going on somewhere. This seems a pretty strong indication that war isn't going anywhere. The meme "why don't we all just get along" just isn't working that well, and saying that it will some day take over the world takes a whole lot more justification than "Maltus was wrong because of the last 400 years". First, we had plenty of the most nasty imaginable wars in the last 400 years, and second, they were extremely atypical.
Heinlein was a technological optimist but he was no fool either. If anything, his explanation for the war seems much more realistic than Haldeman's. In Heinlein's universe, humans and "bugs" and other races could live on the same planets, and assuming such planets are in very finite supply, you have all the makings of a nasty war. Also, Heinlein makes some philosophical points there about why people
Re:How gimmicky is this 3D stuff? (examples) (Score:3, Interesting)
Modern 3d doesn't use red/blue glasses. I've always stayed away from 3d because of how lame red/blue glasses are.
The latest 3d uses circular polarization, so no issues with color, like red/blue, and no issues with orientation (i.e. effect breaks if you're not sitting perfectly still and facing the screen "just so") like parallel/horizontal polarization. Honestly, it's really cool, I had no issues with convergence, and stuff really did look like it was 3D. The glasses were sturdy plastic, pretty high quality for theater 3d glasses. I didn't feel like a complete tard wearing them, hehe.
In Monsters vs Aliens the vast majority of the 3d effect was used to make it look like you were looking out into a rectangular hole in the wall onto the 3d scene, though they did have a couple "pop out" effects. One in particular was a paddle-ball toy, that was kinda funny, and unexpected.
I popped my glasses on and off a few times, and the difference was incredible. Obviously with the glasses off things were a little blurred and odd, but they were just so incredibly flat, it was stunning. It was easilly the best 3d I've ever seen, and I can't wait for more.
For sure I'm worried about how good live-action will be, but the animation was just stunning, so I'm sure live will be decent at least.