There’s also a French appetizer platter, if you’re in the mood for something light…
Assignment Outer Space (1960), in which Antonio Margheriti and Ennio De Cocini assure us that despite current projections to the contrary, there will still be newspapers in 2116…
Battle of the Worlds (1961), in which it’s apparently somehow possible– indeed, downright normal!– to become a professional astronomer without knowing the first thing about calculus…
Cosmos: War of the Planets (1977), in which the planets are conspicuously not at war, although one of them does insist on blasting “Tocata and Fugue in D Minor” out its windows at all hours of the night…
Georges Melies Trick Films, 1899, in which Satan invades a convent, a dancing girl bursts into flames, and Georges starts to get serious about telling an actual story…
and…
2+5 Mission Hydra (1966), in which there are sexy space girls, crappy robots, Communist spies, and savage space yetis, yet the American distributors still felt the need to add a bunch of inappropriate stock footage from Gorath and Doomsday Machine.
#1 by Blake on January 9, 2011 - 4:22 pm
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One thing I liked about Cosmos: War of the Planets, was that I saw about three ideas that I’d see later in other, bigger Hollywood films. *Spoiler Alert* We have what appeared to be a robot putting its consciousness into a living being (reminding me of MATRIX: RELOADED), it getting blasted out the airlock (ALIEN), and a throwaway sequence, IIRC, of a couple making love via some computer program that didn’t allow any actual physical contact (which reminded me of DEMOLITION MAN).
#2 by Blake on January 9, 2011 - 5:42 pm
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And this is what I get for commenting immediately before reading the actual review: I look like a doofus.
#3 by Mr. Rational on January 9, 2011 - 10:04 pm
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I once showed Cosmos: War of the Planets at a bad movie contest in my group of friends. Guess who won first prize for the night? And it wasn’t even close. One of my friends, who never drank beer, was driven to consume several during the movie. Let’s just say the night was a resounding success for me…except for all the relationships I damaged in the process, but hey, in the service of winning…
#4 by supersonic on January 11, 2011 - 1:21 pm
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Hey Santo, you seem like maybe you’re the one person who could answer this question. I’m hoping to identify an Italian science fiction comedy from the sixties. It may have been in black and white.
An alien appears on Earth in the form of a human, but at first he’s immobile and doctors have a hard time even figuring out if he’s dead or not. Then he gets up and sets about learning all about how to be a human. He reads books at super speed, and in one scene sets a dozen books on a table and blows them with a fan, because by hand he can’t turn the pages fast enough. He gets a job in a factory and works three times as fast as anyone else, irking the other workers (social commentary alert). Then in the end he learns valuable lessons about life and love.
Any ideas as to the title, or director?
#5 by El Santo on January 11, 2011 - 3:42 pm
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I wouldn’t swear to this, because I’ve never actually seen it, but what you’re describing sounds a somewhat like Ugo Gregoretti’s Omicron (1963). That movie concerns an alien sent to Earth as an advance scout for an invasion commandeering a man’s body, It Came from Outer Space-style, and posing as him in order to get the inside scoop on humans. From what I’ve read, it was intended as a comedy, and involves vast amounts of heavy-handed satire about Italian socialism and labor unrest.
#6 by supersonic on January 11, 2011 - 7:46 pm
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That sounds like it’s the right one. Thanks.
#7 by Read MacGuirtose on January 12, 2011 - 12:17 am
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Hm… maybe the movie presented the debate badly — I haven’t seen it, so I can’t judge that — but I don’t think this is the obvious false dichotomy you make it out to be. Yes, of course observation and modeling — or, to put it in more common terms, experiment and theory — are both necessary parts of the scientific process, and contribute in different ways. But that isn’t to say that scientists can’t and don’t debate their relative merits. No experimentalist sees theory as completely superfluous, nor does any theorist think science can get by completely without observation and experiment, but there is a certain amount of tension between some camps of experimentalists and theorists as to which is doing more fundamental science, and which is really at the heart of the process. Yes, it may be something of a silly argument, but it’s an argument that actually does take place between some scientists in the real world, nonetheless.
Again, though, the movie’s presentation of the debate may have been (and probably was) severely wanting. Especially if, as you say, it implies that Benson is the only scientist there who has any understanding of calculus. That’s just silly.
#8 by Read MacGuirtose on January 12, 2011 - 12:35 am
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By the way, I should perhaps add, for clarification, that the terms “experimentalist” and “theorist” aren’t just terms I’m using here for convenience; these terms are commonly used in the scientific world as I’ve used them here. Some scientists are experimentalists — focusing on observation and, well, experiment — and others are theorists — focusing on theory. This is a commonplace distinction, and scientists will readily identify themselves and each other as either experimentalists or theorists. And some (though by no means all) experimentalists really do tend to look down on theorists, and vice versa.
Though on further thought, the debate in the movie, as you describe it, doesn’t seem to really be between experiment and theory at all. What Benson is doing is mathematical modeling, which is a kind of virtual experiment; if mathematical modeling doesn’t fall fully into the realm of experiment (as opposed to theory), it’s at least on the borderline. (While scientists do categorize themselves as experimentalists or theorists, there can, after all, be some overlap.) Meanwhile, though, the other scientists are doing… what, exactly? Pure observation will only tell where the Outsider is now. To tell where it will be — and therefore, in particular, to tell whether or not it will hit the Earth — requires projection of its motion into the future. In other words, in order to make any predictions about the Outsider’s trajectory, the other scientists have to be using a mathematical model.
Which means the characters aren’t really arguing about observation versus modeling at all, even if the screenwriter thinks they are. They’re both using mathematical modeling. They’re just arguing about which mathematical model is correct. If the movie presents it as an argument about theory versus experiment, or observation versus modeling, then you have a point that the screenwriter doesn’t know much about science — not because that’s a false dichotomy that doesn’t exist in the scientific community (it does), but because the screenwriter doesn’t know what theory and experiment are.
There’s actually another possibility, but it’s even sillier. We can consider the possibility that the other scientists really aren’t using any sort of mathematical model, but are just guessing based on the fact that it looks like the Outsider is going to hit the Earth. That they’re just eyeballing it, and Benson is the only one who actually bothered to do any math to try to work it out for sure. If that’s the case, then Benson’s attitude toward his colleagues seems more excusable. Every other astronomer in the world is, apparently, a complete and utter idiot.
#9 by Read MacGuirtose on January 12, 2011 - 12:35 am
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In other news, I am way too longwinded.
#10 by Read MacGuirtose on January 12, 2011 - 12:44 am
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Okay, more concise version of the above tl;dr comments:
The problem isn’t that it doesn’t make sense to argue over the relative merits of observation vs. modeling. Some scientists really do argue over that. The problem is that it doesn’t make sense to argue over predictions of where the Outsider’s path is going to be based on observations versus predictions of where the Outsider’s path is going to be based on modeling. Observation, by definition, doesn’t predict the future, so any predictions of the Outsider’s path have to involve some modeling. The problem, therefore, is that the screenwriter apparently doesn’t know what observation is.
There. That’s… probably what I should have just written in the first place…
#11 by El Santo on January 12, 2011 - 8:15 am
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To clarify then: the problem with movie is that it isn’t shown as a debate about relative merits, which is of course a valid question. De Cocini treats it as an either-or proposition, with Benson constantly crabbing about those tiny-brained so-called scientists at the observatory with their childish need to look at things, whereas a Real Scientist like him (being tight with the Great God Calculus) can scribble a bunch of equations on a flower pot and know exactly what’s going on.
#12 by El Santo on January 12, 2011 - 8:21 am
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Oh– and to clarify further: Benson treats it as a matter of pride that he’s never actually seen the Outsider, nor apparently looked through a telescope himself since who knows when. In which case you really have to wonder where he’s getting the values for the variables in his equations. Like I said, De Cocini apparently has no idea how this stuff actually works.
#13 by Richard on January 12, 2011 - 6:55 pm
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Actually, maybe he does – but only by accident. These days, professional astronomers don’t actually *look through* telescopes. They all have cameras mounted on them, so the images can be immediately digitized. Maybe the “electronic” telescope at the observatory is one of these? It would certainly be prescient for a movie made in the early 1960s.
Also, speaking from experience (M.S. in Astronomy), you can easily get the values for your variables from the literature. There’s quite a large amount of published papers that are not much more than lists of observational data.
Personally, I picture Dr. Benson as an expert on orbital mechanics, who determined the orbit for the Outsider as a test for his new approach to solving the Three Body Problem. Or perhaps he is revising and updating the famous treatise “The Dynamics of an Asteroid” by James Moriarty. Now that the object has been found, confirming the accuracy of his method, he no longer has any real concern with it – until people challenge his calculations.
And by the way, if the Outsider is massive enough to produce detectable perturbations in Uranus and Neptune, what is it going to do when it approaches the Earth at less than half the distance of the Moon? Even a “near miss” at that distance will be catastrophic…
#14 by El Santo on January 12, 2011 - 10:51 pm
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“It would certainly be prescient for a movie made in the early 1960s.”
It would indeed, were it not for all those scenes of people looking through telescopes…