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Post by themotile on Mar 4, 2005 16:43:43 GMT
It did have parachuting cows though...
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Post by flynnsixtysix on Mar 4, 2005 16:58:45 GMT
agreed MarkG - if this is the future of hollywood then it's grim - plastic sterile wooden - you could almost see the screen, the middleground with the actors and then some hand rail in the foreground
- long live anime..
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Post by VES on Mar 4, 2005 17:52:37 GMT
Ironically enough, Frank Miller's "Sin City" will also use a similar treatment to that of "Sky Captain". Hopefully it will be executed in a more convincing manner.
Now, as for a serious specualation on Hines' Martians, since my first post was more smart-arsed;
I expect a modest effort at the least regarding the actual creatures themselves. Most likely puppeteering. As for the Thunderchild scenes, who knows?
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Post by flynnsixtysix on Mar 4, 2005 17:58:13 GMT
I see no reason why one of the puppeteers can not put on a wetsuit and a snorkel and operate a tripod and thunderchild hand-puppet battle scene in the local seattle swimming pool...
left hand tripod - right hand thunderchild - bit of punch and judy scrapping then simply pull the thunderchild puppet slowly under the water...just cut in some cgi battle fx and composite some orange blobs - voila!!
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Post by themotile on Mar 4, 2005 18:01:51 GMT
So the martians in the cast messages were nothing to do with this version?
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Post by Refugee on Mar 4, 2005 19:37:04 GMT
I just hope they don't jump on the bio-tech band waggon like so many sci-fi's. Farscape's Moya I loved, to an extent I like the new cylon base ships and raiders but the martian machines should be shiny, metalic and machiny.
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Post by dudalb on Mar 4, 2005 19:49:55 GMT
" just hope they don't jump on the bio-tech band waggon : I don' t think they have the money to jump on a bio tech band waggon or any other kind. This a low,low, budget film. There are some kinds of film you can do well on a 12 million dollars..which is very small by today's standards. A film as dependent on SFX as WOTW is is not one of them. I am not a SFX is everything kind of guy, but that is not just enough to do the Wells novel justice.
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Post by Lensman on Mar 5, 2005 2:26:33 GMT
I just hope they don't jump on the bio-tech band waggon like so many sci-fi's. Farscape's Moya I loved, to an extent I like the new cylon base ships and raiders but the martian machines should be shiny, metalic and machiny. "Its motion was so swift, complex, and perfect that at first I did not see it as a machine, in spite of its metallic glitter." "At first, I say, the handling-machine did not impress me as a machine, but as a crab-like creature with a glittering integument..." "...it is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musulature of the discs in an elastic sheath... In this way the curious parallelism to animal motions, which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder, was attained. Such quasi-muscles abounded in the crab-like handling machine..." --H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds, Book two, Chapter 2. Metallic, yes. And apparently not actually bio-tech. But bio- like tech, yes.
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Post by themotile on Mar 5, 2005 10:00:45 GMT
But they were machines none the less, Wells makes that quite clear. I think what refugee means is that it would be tacky if the machines had guts like the new cylon raiders, even the new base stars had guts for walls, that wasnt Wells vision, they were glittering contraptions of amazing complexity, not cyborgs.
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Post by quaderni on Mar 5, 2005 20:17:26 GMT
[...] they were glittering contraptions of amazing complexity, not cyborgs. I'll take exception on this point. Most Wells scholars who are interested in science and technology think that Wells's Martians should be seen as cyborgs. Wells's language is deliberately ambiguous on this point; some of his descriptions and metaphors suggest that the line between life and machine was pretty slippery. Keep in mind that Martian technology takes the organism as the organising principle of their mechanics. Again, the Narrator wants to convince his audience that the FMs and HMs are indeed machines. For this reason, we should conclude that Wells wants us to think there was a 'debate' about this point. One minor point: Wells's narrator is deliberately unreliable. There's a long tradition in Western literature in which writers use 'narrator(s)' - through memoirs, letters, journals, etc. - to create verisimilitude. This had started in the 18th century with the rise of the epistolary novel (think Richardson's _Clarissa_). By the late Victorian period, however, many authors used this convention not to achieve verisimilutude, but actually to probe the limits of reality and representation. Wells's 'Narrator' does exactly this. As readers, we're not supposed to trust (entirely) either his account or his descriptions. A similar thing happens in _The Time Machine_, where things are complicated by a _double frame_ -- an unreliable narrator (the Time Traveller) and _another_ unreliable narrator who relates the Time Traveller's unreliable narration (Filby)! (Exact same thing happens in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- the unreliable ship captain tells the unreliable Victor Frankenstein's story.) But to return to the point: given the descriptions in Wells's _The War_, I'd say we should read the Martians as quasi-cyborgs.
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Post by themotile on Mar 5, 2005 21:39:41 GMT
The narrator does describe the workings of the martian machines in that they used metal disks in a sheath as a kind of muscle, but that is an imitation of life not actual engineered flesh that would deserve the title cyborg.
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Post by quaderni on Mar 5, 2005 23:05:09 GMT
The narrator does describe the workings of the martian machines in that they used metal disks in a sheath as a kind of muscle, but that is an imitation of life not actual engineered flesh that would deserve the title cyborg. Not to sound cranky, but consider the following. 1) The term 'cyborg' was invented in 1960 by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline. To quote from one study, the word meant a 'human-machine hybrid that could survive in an extraterrestrial environment....The cyborg's abilities extend beyond human limitations by mechanical, electronic or chemical means' (Marie O'Mahony, Cyborg: The Man-Machine_, Thams & Hudson, 2002, p. 11). 2) Donna Harraway (the most important cyborg thinker) defines cyborg as: 'a hybrid creature, composed of organism and machine ... [they function as] communications systems, texts, and self-acting, ergonomically designed apparatuses' - they are 'creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted' (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Routledge, 1991, p. 1). 3) Or again: 'The cyborg image can be read in two ways: as a coupling between a human being and an electronic or mechanical apparatus, or as the identity of organisms embedded in a cybernetic information system' (Anne Balsamo, _Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women_, Duke Univ. Press, 1999), p. 11. 4) Or yet again: The cyborg is 'the melding of the organic and the machinic, or the engineering of a union between separate organic systems' (Chirs Hables Gray, ed., The Cyborg Handbook, Routledge, 1995), p. 2. In a cheerful tone, I'd recommend a careful re-reading of Book II, ch. 2-3, esp. the comments that invovle, '[The Martians] have become practically mere brains wearing different bodies according to their needs' (Oxford edn, p. 249).
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Post by themotile on Mar 5, 2005 23:11:02 GMT
So what your saying is that the machines are not cyborgs until the martian pilot hops in and takes control, so by that logic a car, helicopter or anything else that needs a human component is a cyborg. My ford escort cabriolet is a cyborg. Cool.
So without the martians the machines are just mechanical contraptions with out organic working parts.
I have read the book many many times.
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Post by quaderni on Mar 5, 2005 23:16:51 GMT
So what your saying is that the machines are not cyborgs until the martian pilot hops in and takes control, so by that logic a car, helicopter or anything else that needs a human component is a cyborg. My ford escort cabriolet is a cyborg. Cool. I have read the book many many times. Sorry Motile, my tone wasn't intentionally curt. I'd suggest, though, that Wells sees the Martian interaction with machinery as somehow crucial - and a part of their own process of evolution through natural (or now controlled?) evolution. We drive our cars and may think of them (figuratively) as extensions of our bodies; but for the Martians, these things are quite literal - the machines are part of their organic apparatus. Many passages in the book suggest that the Martian machinery is almost alive, although the Narrator takes pains to emphasise that it is not. One of the most striking passages is when the the FM gets hit by a shell in the hood: not only does Wells refer to the moment as 'decapitation', but that 'ruddy-brown' liquid is shooting out of it, just like in an actual human decapitation. Of course, these are levels of metaphor - but they're metaphors, I'd wager, deliberately inserted to make us think about the Martian hybrid between life and machine.
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Post by McTodd on Mar 5, 2005 23:24:14 GMT
That's as maybe, but I agree with Motile that the Martians are not cyborgs, though they may be considered a halfway house towards being cyborgs.
One common aspect to the definitions you quote are that cyborgs are human-machine hybrids. And in conventional usage in science fiction, cyborgs are always creatures (human or otherwise) with parts of their bodies replaced by machinery, a la the Borg in Star Trek; the Cybermen in Doctor Who (who have gradually replaced all their limbs and organs with mechanical devices); and the Six Million Dollar Man.
The Martians have not actually replaced any parts of their bodies, they drive their vehicles and can dismount and drive another machine whenever they please. This is not something one can imagine a 'classic' cyborg doing.
And although they are pretty helpless when not in their machines, they can still exist independently of them (and in any case much of that helplessness comes from their being on a strange planet with much stronger gravity and thicker air than they're accustomed to; at home they probably skip and gambol through the Martian red-weed fields like little baa lambs).
Maybe they can be considered quasi-cyborgs, but they are no more true cyborgs than we are when we drive a car or fly a fighter jet. And Wells's Narrator makes the distinction clear when he asks how would a man in a steam locomotive seem to an intelligent rabbit (and had cars been in much use then, I'm sure he'd have used the car in his analogy).
In any case, even if you do consider them to be cyborgs (and frankly I think it comes down to semantic hair-splitting) that's still no excuse for the machines to be depicted in an explicitly organic way - H R Giger, for all his undoubted genius and generally positive influence, has cast a long shadow over science fiction design. The Fighting and Handling Machines are machines and are better depicted as such, in my opinion.
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Post by quaderni on Mar 5, 2005 23:35:03 GMT
In my view, I'd let the textual evidence speak for itself. But I suppose this discussion should be moved to the novel board.
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Post by McTodd on Mar 5, 2005 23:41:09 GMT
The textual evidence does speak for itself, and they are not cyborgs.
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Post by themotile on Mar 5, 2005 23:42:49 GMT
Although I agree with Mctodd completely the text is open to your own interpretation, if you read the book and see semi organic fighting machines in your head and that gives you pleasure then that cool man, after all thats the point of reading the book, pleasure. I wouldnt have read the book 33 times over 20 years if it didnt please me.
Although I will add this, I think you may be reading too much into Wells novel, he wasnt omnipotent and every word didnt have an underlying meaning, I believe the machines were machines, tools for the martians if you will, and the martians were simply martians with a vast technical knowhow.
As McTodd says our own gravity made them seem physicaly weak but Wells states that on mars they could move around on those tentacles quite well, even in the weakened state that poor bloke who fell into the pitt didnt stand a chance.
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Post by themotile on Mar 5, 2005 23:47:09 GMT
I suppose this discussion should be moved to the novel board. Not realy, this thread is about Hines martians, the question was will they have a biotech property and so we find our selves here. The answer quite frankly would be no as the budget wouldnt have allowed it but if Hines had the means I suspect they would have been sadomasochistic cyborg lesbians in leather.
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Post by quaderni on Mar 5, 2005 23:51:47 GMT
The answer quite frankly would be no as the budget wouldnt have allowed it but if Hines had the means I suspect they would have been sadomasochistic cyborg lesbians in leather. Now you're talking!
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