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bears1
26-May-12, 15:29

Deleted by bears1 on 02-Jul-12, 23:59.
chrisforbes21
26-May-12, 16:38

so you must have seen
2001: A Space Odyssey
riaannieman
01-Jun-12, 03:37

Me, I like..
Star wars fan. Have all of them on blueray, and watch them over and over. I never saw any Star trek movies, and barely know about the TV series. 2001, 2010, 2061 and 3001 are quite good books to read. I haven't seen the movie 2001. Isaac Asimov has written several good space stories. I don't watch a lot of movies, but I do love the old classics: Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, On Golden Pond, The deer hunter, Out of Africa, Passage to India, Bridge on the river Kwai, Gone with the wind (WHAT A MOVIE!), Casablanca, the old singalongs like Paint your wagon, Annie, get your gun, Carousel and so on. I also own Rebel without Cause, Giant, and East of Eden.... I think ol' Jimmy D would have been the best actor ever, if he didn't die in that accident. I also like the 007 movies, but I think Daniel Craig is the worst Bond ever.
chrisforbes21
16-Jun-12, 06:12

Isaac Asimov
Is a great writer I am reading foundations at the moment. Ironically one of the best movies I
liked recently was "predators" I thought the genre had run its course and nothing could surpass
the first Arnie film so I was pleasantly surprised by the originality of the latest one.
brigadecommander
16-Jun-12, 10:34

children of dune
is spectacular and has good acting ,fine music,great photography and follows frank herberts book
to the letter!!!! almost as good as 'avatar'
riaannieman
16-Jun-12, 10:44

Children of Dune
I read all the Dune books, even those written by Herbert's son, but I didn't know Children of Dune was made into a movie! I'm going to get hold of that!
brigadecommander
16-Jun-12, 10:55

YOU WILL LOVE IT!!!
Its the best..a very beautiful movie!!! it combines the two books 'dune messiah' with children of
dune;;;listen to this;www.youtube.com
riaannieman
16-Jun-12, 10:58

Children of Dune
Are you very interested in science fiction?
brigadecommander
16-Jun-12, 11:11

very
very interested.Without SC-FI imaginations die. When the first Hominid looked at birds and
wished he could fly sci-fi was born.
lupusdwb
16-Jun-12, 17:17

Star Gate
Anyone seen Star Gate? If you're interested in science fiction, it's a good one. Pyramids, space ships, Egyptian gods, Goa'uld. Followed by 10 years of a television series by the same name.
riaannieman
17-Jun-12, 00:16

Star Gate
Yes, it makes me nostalgic. With Richard Dean Anderson.
lupusdwb
17-Jun-12, 06:55

Star Gate
The original 1994 movie was Kurt Russell and James Spader. TV series, Anderson. What interested me was the movie's concept that planets were "seeded" by an advanced race who's space ships used pyramids as "docks". Then that they built "star gates", using a worm hole or black hole, where they could travel from planet to planet. These travelers, "gods", were named by the Egyptians - Ra, the sun god; Osiris, ruler of the underworld; Hathor, goddess of love & joy, associated with foreign places and mother of the pharoah. Anderson's production company took up the storyline in 1997 with the TV series. There were also several other movies when the TV series ended.

It's the age old question about where we come from, why the human race has the ability to reason and other species on earth cannot reason as well. The movie chose Egypt, an ancient society that has mystified many because of their ability to devise a written language, build pyramids and commerce with a system of mathematics. The ancient Egyptians were smarter, more able to advance than others and, as a group, still exist. Without the Egyptians, our race would be far behind where we are now.

They could have chosen the Mayan civilization for the movie as well but not enough knowledge about the Mayans until recently when we've begun to solve their written language. And they were basically wiped out by a war, although their DNA still exists in the Spanish/Mexican race.

There's lots of ideas in the original movie that could be questioned. But I love the fact that our minds continue to explore and say "what if?". And science is based on "what if".
brigadecommander
17-Jun-12, 07:25

the oldest civilization.....was
Mesopotamia (from the Ancient Greek: Μεσοποταμία: "[land] between rivers"; Arabic: بلاد الرافدين‎
(bilād al-rāfidayn); Syriac: ܒܝܬ ܢܗܪܝܢ (beth nahrain): "land of rivers") is a toponym for the area of
the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria,
southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.

Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and
the Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian empires. In the Iron Age, it was controlled by the Neo-
Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires. The indigenous Sumerians and Akkadians (including
Assyrians and Babylonians) dominated Mesopotamia from the beginning of written history (c.
3100 BC) to the fall of Babylon in 539 BC, when it was conquered by the Achaemenid Empire. It
fell to Alexander the Great in 332 BC and, after his death, it became part of the Greek Seleucid
Empire.
chrisforbes21
17-Jun-12, 08:52

ancients
The most famous of the Mesopotamians or what was the city state Babylon was Hammurabi circa
1750BC, widely credited for creating the code of laws. Later Nebuchadnezzar circa 1100BC was
an interesting figure as a later part of the Babylon dynasty. His later namesake Nebuchadnezzar
II circa 580BC was credited with building the hanging gardens.

There is accounts that the cities of Byblos and Sidon have been inhabited since 4000-6000BC.
The water erosion on the Sphinx suggests it was built before 2750BC with some experts saying it
could be have been built before the great ancient flood in about 8000BC. If that was the case
we would need to tear up conventional theories. The problem is it is hard to date such stone
objects. Back to topic I would love to see a Hollywood style epic of the ancient civilisation who
built the sphinx and what happened, not sure there is a movie one this is there?
riaannieman
17-Jun-12, 08:58

Evolution
Do you guys believe in evolution? Just look at what happened to this conversation....
chrisforbes21
17-Jun-12, 09:03

evolution
I am a believer in both nature and nurture. For me its a 50/50 split. Nurture the nature and you
get evolution.
lupusdwb
17-Jun-12, 09:08

Sphinx (1981)
Actually there is a movie about the Sphinx but not about how it was built. Agree, the dry arid land wherein the Sphinx lies prohibits the normal dating of objects. Tough to know when it was built.
lupusdwb
17-Jun-12, 09:34

Documentary: Mystery of the Sphinx
Just found a documentary on the Sphinx, narrated by Charlton Heston. It's available on Amazon. And of course there's lots of books.
brigadecommander
17-Jun-12, 10:20

1955 there was a big one
that showed how they moved them huge rocks over the
landscape.en.wikipedia.org
chrisforbes21
18-Jun-12, 14:10

I had heard of this movie
But forgot it existed, I've added it to my Amazon list, not sure the tools we knew they had in
ancient days would have built the pyramids though. Even some of our biggest cranes today
could not shift the weight could slave power alone do it?
shamash
21-Jun-12, 17:58

the best of the best of the best of the "space movies"
is the Soviet film SOLARIS.

It's the best sociobiology flick: where if a man can solve a mystery of outer space,
then he can solve a mystery in his inner space. That's my take on the motion picture

Here is part of Roger Ebert's review for the Chigago Sun Times:

<<"I saw Tarkovsky's 1972 film "Solaris" at the Chicago Film Festival. It was my first
experience of him, and at first I balked. It was long and slow and the dialogue seemed
deliberately dry.

But then the overall shape of the film floated into view, there were images of
startling beauty,

then developments that questioned the fundamental being of the characters
themselves, and finally an ending that teasingly suggested that everything in the film needed
to be seen in a new light. There was so much to think about afterwards, and so much that
remained in my memory. With other Tarkovsky films--"Andrei Rublev," "Nostalgia," "The
Sacrifice"--I had the same experience.

"Solaris" is routinely called Tarkovsky's reply to Kubrick's "2001," and indeed Tarkovsky could
have seen the Kubrick film at the 1969 Moscow Film Festival, but the film is based on a 1961
novel by the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. Both films involve human space
journeys and encounters with a transforming alien intelligence, which creates places ("2001")
or people ("Solaris") from clues apparently obtained by reading minds. But Kubrick's film is
outward, charting man's next step in the universe, while Tarkovsky's is inward, asking about
the nature and reality of the human personality.

"Solaris" begins with a long conversation between the psychologist Kelvin (Donatas Banionis)
and the cosmonaut Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky), at the country home of Kelvin's father.
This home will be seen again at the end of a film in a transformed context. Burton tells him
about a Soviet space station circling the planet Solaris, and of deaths and mysteries on board.
Eventually Kelvin arrives at the station (his journey is not shown) and finds one crew member
dead and two more deeply disturbed by events on the station. The planet, we learn, is entirely
covered by a sea, and when X-ray probes were used to investigate it, the planet apparently
replied with probes of its own, entering the minds of the cosmonauts and making some of their
memories real. Within a day, Kelvin is presented with one of the Guests that the planet can
create: A duplicate of his late wife Khari (Natalya Bondarchuk), exact in every detail, but
lacking her memories.

This Guest is not simply a physical manifestation, however. She has intelligence, self-
consciousness, memory, and lack of memories. She does not know that the original Khari
committed suicide. She questions Kelvin, wants to know more about herself, eventually grows
despondent when she realizes she cannot be who she appears to be. To some extent her
being is limited by how much Kelvin knows about her, since Solaris cannot know more than
Kelvin does; this theme is made clearer in Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney's 2002
remake of the film.

When we love someone, who do we love?

That person, or our idea of that person? Some years before virtual reality became a byword,
Tarkovsky was exploring its implications. Although other persons no doubt exist in independent
physical space, our entire relationship with them exists in our minds. When we touch them, it
is not the touch we experience, but our consciousness of the touch. To some extent, then,
the second Khari is as "real" as the first, although different.

The relationship between Kelvin and the new Khari plays out against the nature of reality on
the space station. He glimpses other Guests. He views a taped message from the dead
cosmonaut, filled with information and warning. Khari, it develops, cannot be killed, although
that is tried, because she can simply be replaced. Physical pain is meaningless to her, as we
see when she attempts to rip through a steel bulkhead door because she does not know how
to open it. Gentle feelings are accessible to her, as seen in a scene that everybody agrees is
the magic center of "Solaris," when the space station enters a stage of zero gravity and
Kelvin, Khari and lighted candles float in the air.

The last sequence of the film, which I will not reveal, invites us to reconsider the opening
sequence, and to toy with the notion that there may be more Guests in the film than we first
thought. It is a crucial fact that this final shot is seen by us, the viewers, and not by those on
the space station. "The arc of discovery is on the part of the audience, not the characters.,"
writes the critic N. Medlicott. That they may be trapped within a box of consciousness that
deceives them about reality is only appropriate, since the film argues that we all are.">>

mistee
21-Jun-12, 18:22

Contact
My all time favorite space movie is Contact with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. I love this movie. I also love all the Star Wars and Star Treks as well as Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks and Gary Sinise.



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