How to Watch "War of the Worlds"

I recently saw Steven Spielberg's new film War of the Worlds. Overall, it was excellent. The visuals were incredible, without a hint that any of the elements were computer generated, though logically many of them had to have been. And I like how tension was maintained by having absolutely no background music during a lot of the more intense scenes. Heck, I can't remember now if there was any background music at all. All in all, it was everything that I had originally hoped Independence Day would be when I first heard of it. (Read my review to find out how bad I thought that film was.)

However, I'd heard that the very end of War of the Worlds is exceptionally lousy, and completely ruins everything that came before. In a War of the Worlds thread on a message board that I read, people were suggesting that one should walk out of the theater before the end. They said that one should walk out during the scene where a crowd of people are walking past a "Welcome to Boston" sign.

My girlfriend saw the movie before I did, but I told her about this piece of advice before she did. She didn't follow it, and thus unfortunately had to endure the ending. But she told me afterwards that, while the ending was awful, walking out at the aforementioned moment would have been too soon. The really bad part isn't until a few minutes after that.

So when she and I went to see it together, we walked out right after the scene where the military shoots down an alien tripod, and the door of the tripod opens, and an alien falls partway out and dies. So I haven't seen what happens after that.

And because of this (or so I hear, anyway), I can truly say that Spielberg's War of the Worlds is an excellent film.

ID4 Re-review

Way back in the late 90's, my website included a blog-like page called "Rants and Raves", after which this blog is named. Because that page predated blog software (as well as the term "blog" itself), I had to maintain it by hand. Eventually it seemed not worth the effort, as I didn't have a lot to say, and older entries just got more stale as time went on. So I scrapped the page.

One entry was a review of the 1996 movie Independence Day. I'm reposting that review here for two reasons. The first is for posterity, so I have a page to refer people to when they ask why I think Independence Day is one of the worst big-budget Hollywood films ever made. The second is so that I can link to this page in my next blog entry.

P.S. Thanks to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for allowing me to recover the old Rants and Raves page, which I had deleted from my hard drive a long time ago.

Independence Day

Before I saw the movie Independence Day, I had heard a little bit about it from my brother, who had seen it. Based on that, I expected it to be a fairly bad movie. When I actually saw it, I found that it greatly exceeded my expectations. Independence Day was a horrible film. The reasons? A shallow plot, and even shallower characters. And have you ever heard the term "suspension of disbelief"? Apparently, the makers of this film haven't.

The plot had no depth to it whatsoever. Synopsis: aliens arrive on Earth; aliens blow up a bunch of major cities; aliens then hang around in their spaceships, waiting until the humans figure out how to defeat them. It would have been more interesting to have seen the aliens actually invade Earth, taking over the cities, enslaving humans, and generally carrying out some sort of plan. Maybe I'm just longing for a remake of War of the Worlds. But then, one would think that a big-budget high-tech-effects movie in the '90s could live up to the standard for alien invasion films set by War of the Worlds so many years ago. But I guess that movie is from a bygone era when plot was more important than flashy explosions.

The characters were just as shallow as the plot. First of all, you have Will Smith playing the part of... Will Smith. Ok, so this time he's in the Air Force, but you can't watch him for more than 5 minutes before wondering if he's been keeping in touch with Uncle Phil in Bel Air. Somehow, I doubt that his character's part was written before anyone knew that Will Smith was going to be cast. But besides the fact that Will Smith is playing Will Smith, a part he's reviving in the upcoming film Men in Black, none of the characters were interesting enough to care about. Most of the characters were cardboard cutouts of overused stereotypes. Jeff Goldblum played John Q. Academic, a less engaging version of Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park. And Brent Spiner played John Q. Enthusiastic Scientist. At least he wasn't wearing silver paint. It seems that a half-hearted attempt was made to give some of the characters a chance at meaningful interaction, but it never quite went anywhere. For example, Will's girlfriend, a stripper, had a nice chat with the First Lady about her career choice. Lots of potential for meaningful discourse, perhaps even conflict, but nothing ever came of it. It's probably for the best, though, for it probably would have been out of place in an alien invasion film.

Finally, too much of the film was too unbelievable to be at all engaging. For example, we learn that in order to escape an explosion that's barrelling through a tunnel, one can merely exit through a convenient side door, which the explosion will simply pass by. But even if we ignore the minor incidents where the universe defies even a ten-year-old's understanding of the laws of physics, most of the major plot points were just as incredible, if not more so. For example, an alien spaceship has been held at Area 51 since the 50's, but because no one was able to power it up, no meaningful study of the technology was able to be made in all of that time. It wasn't until the alien mother ship showed up and activated the captured ship that humans were able to study it. So when John Q. Academic (Jeff Goldblum) decides to give the mother ship a virus, he only has a few days worth of research to go on. So we're expected to believe that within a few days, they were able to reverse-engineer the CPU of the ship to figure out the opcodes such that they could program it, write a working virus in the proper binary format to be executed on that CPU, figure out the networking protocols such that they could communicate with the ship, and modify the networking software on Jeff's Powerbook to speak that protocol. Either that, or the alien ships had PowerPCs running MacOS 7.5, and were able to recieve the virus via FTP over a TCP/IP connection. Either way, a team of top-notch scientists who were able to accomplish all of this couldn't think of anthing better to do than lower the alien ships' shields. I would have reprogrammed them to fly into the sun, myself. But here's the real kicker; once the shields are down, a ship can be easily destroyed by flying a fighter plane into the huge central city-destroying heat ray gun at the moment that it fires. Now, call me crazy, but this strikes me as the intergalactic equivalent of Bugs Bunny sticking his finger into Elmer Fudd's rifle so that it blows up in Elmer's face when he pulls the trigger. I cannot fathom how a 15 mile wide spaceship can be destroyed so easily, except to suggest that my earlier assessment was erroneous; perhaps the alien ships actually had Pentiums running Windows '95.

Cubic Rubonium II

Clearly, this is harder than I thought:

Cubic Rubonium

I bought a Rubik's 5x5x5 cube, and am in the middle of trying to solve it. I first figured out how to solve the normal 3x3x3 Rubik's cube just a few years ago, which is relatively late compared to how long the puzzle has been in existence. My older brother of course learned how to solve it back when he first got one, when it was new.

The traditional way to solve the standard cube is to solve the entire top side first, then the middle layer, then the bottom corners, then finally the bottom edges. Solving the top side ad-hoc is easy. However, I've never figured out how to solve the middle layer without disrupting the top layer, so I had to rely on moves from a book to do so. I know other people who have been able to solve the middle layer ad-hoc, only needing to rely on memorized moves to solve the bottom corners and edges. But it never seemed worth it to me to memorize so many sequences just to be able to claim to know how to solve the cube. I'd have preferred to solve the entire cube ad-hoc, or at least solve all but one small subset of pieces, and then rely on only one or two simple memorized sequences to solve those.

Then, one day, I gave a Square One to a coworker for his birthday. I got to play with it too, and after a while I figured out how to solve it. In doing so, I realized that I could take one part of that solution and apply it to a Rubik's Cube in order to solve its corner pieces. So I got hold of a Rubik's Cube and did just that. With a little experimentation, I then figured out how to move edge pieces around without disrupting the solved corners. Eventually, I found that I could solve the middle layer, and then the edges of the top layer, leaving only the edges on the bottom layer as the remaining unsolved pieces. I then looked up how to solve those remaining pieces, which required memorizing only two very simple sequences. Thus, I had achieved my goal of being able to solve the cube mostly ad-hoc.

The 5x5x5 cube of course has many more pieces to solve than the standard cube does. But I've managed to solve most of it at this point. The 8 pieces in the center of each side aren't too hard to solve, since each such piece is only part of one side. (I say 8 instead of 9 because, like the standard cube, the single center piece of each side is not a movable piece, but is merely the endcap for the axis around which the side rotates.) Thus, it is easy to swap center pieces between two particular sides without disrupting the center pieces of any of the other four sides.

Having solved the centers of all sides, I then solved all the corner pieces, and then finally all the middle edge pieces. Doing so is exactly the same as solving a standard Rubik's cube, by only rotating the outer sides. That's the point I'm at now; the result looks like this:



I believe I can figure out how to solve the remaining edge pieces by using the principles presented on the page "How to Solve Almost Any Rubik-like Puzzle". I've already successfully applied what I learned there to solve the Rubik's Ufo. The trick is to make sure not to make a mistake while performing a long sequence of moves. I've already had that happen, and thus mixed up part of what I had already solved, without being able to figure out how to fix it. So I had to re-solve the cube up to the same point. Part of the problem is probably the fact that I was watching TV at the same time that I was trying to solve the cube. Next time I'll be more careful; I'm pretty sure that I can solve this thing with a little more time and patience.