By viewer request, I take a whack at the 1994 movie Stargate. I talk about wormholes, linguistics, how to find your place in the universe and why I hate ancient aliens.
Michael Siegel
Michael Siegel is an astronomer living in Pennsylvania. He blogs at his own site, and has written a novel.
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on A Note from EmThank you Mike :)
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The last time I saw this movie was in the mid-90’s and the only thing I remember about it was James Spader explaining “I had to learn the vowels!”
Which, yeah, was really good. If you think about the differences between an East Coast and Southern accent, 90% of the non-vocabulary differences seem to be in the length and shape of the vowels. Maybe some weird ‘R’ stuff (future linguistics student “Why did President Kennedy keep talking about ‘Cuber’?”).
I also liked your point about the 100-fold bomb. I was talking with Fish the other day about a question I saw on the twitters that asked “you’ve got one warhead to get through… where do you want it to go off?”
Most folks answered with some variant of “my least favorite city” but a handful said stuff like “the fault” or “the caldera” and that gave me a restless night or two. Fish explained something like “I’ve heard that but I think it’d be like throwing a baseball at an elephant. I’m not saying it wouldn’t hurt but… you’re not going to do anything interesting.”
So a 100-fold bomb would be a pain in the side but not a lot more.
Would totally mess up a spaceship, though.Report
Consider the stereotype of the STEM teaching assistant that speaks English with such a strong accent that many students find them unintelligible. Much/most of the difference is vowel substitution and rhythm. Occasionally things with consonants — the v/w thing for Russian, l/r for Japanese — but mostly vowels. In college it usually took less than a couple hours of listening to pick up a particular vowel/rhythm combination, and after that I had little trouble.Report
I still have trouble with the Canadian “about”.
I got a *LOT* closer when I realized that it’s a lot closer to “eh-bout” (I already knew that it wasn’t “ah-boot”).
But, still, those are vowels that we don’t seem to have down here.Report
People underestimate rhythm and pace. When I was teaching in Texas for a couple of years while I was in grad school, I had to learn a new slower pace. When I moved from Texas to New Jersey I had to relearn my former pace, because people were trying to complete my sentences for me.Report
I have yet to watch the video, but I remember watching the movie the first time on an airplane in the ’90s after it came out, which meant a tiny little fuzzy LCD screen that did not to the FX and set design justice.
That is, IMO, at lest 75% of what’s good about the movie.
But I watched it again after falling in love with the SG-1 show, and while I think it has real problems with pacing and Kurt Russell’s Col. Jack O’Neil is basically carved from balsa wood, James Spader is a lot of fun and once the action picks up in the final act the setup pays off pretty well.
The show remains a favorite even if it went on a few seasons too long.Report
I liked that the show introduced the DHD (Dial Home Device), and that part of every mission was to get the DHD up and running and figure out how to dial home.
I also liked the Iris, so you could stop an invasion.Report
I generally liked that the show took an absolutely clownshoes premise–“Did Ancient Astronauts Carve the Venus of Willendorf?”–and then took itself just seriously enough to actually build some genuinely good science fiction on top of it while mostly being lighthearted space opera adventure.
It’s one of those shows that was so relentlessly adequate on pretty much all fronts that it turned out to be really good.Report
Re: language – one funny bit from the show is that they keep this conceit in the pilot, but in the first ‘real’ episode, Daniel starts speaking the Ancient Distant Egyptian (or maybe it was the ‘gods’ language) but then the new alien character they meet looks at him funny and replies in English. (which was the show going ‘ok, yeah, we get it, don’t write letters)
(one other feature of the pilot is that it was created for premium cable (showtime I think) so has some ‘premium cable’ content that of course would not be a feature of the series.)Report
It was legit tentacle porn IIRC.
Man I really want to get back on Twitter so I can bust out the, “Did you know Stargate SG-1 was originally hentai?” troll.
Quitting cigarettes was easier than this shit.Report
Also, if you set off a nuke bomb in Cheyenne Mountain, that could very well be a civilization destroying event. (though they weren’t in Cheyenne Mountain until the show, maybe?)Report