Re: Jump the Shark (is now) Nuke the Fridge

curmudgeon wrote:
Early in the new "Indiana Jones" sequel our creaky, 65-year old hero
stumbles onto a nuclear test site, and the warning siren is blaring.
Panicked, surrounded by Potemkin houses, he folds himself inside the
lead-lined cavity of a refrigerator.
Kaboom; the blast sends Indy hurtling across the New Mexico desert, a
mushroom cloud rising behind him.

Haven't seen INDY4, but very slightly in their defense, it was probably
a very low yield device.


He lands and logic be dammed, tumbles out unscathed.

I have no idea how far Indy travelled, or how hard the hits looked, but
physics is not the strong suit of TV/Movie Makers, even when a science
consultant is employed to keep things making sense. e.g. In CRUSADE
"Racing the Night" when Galen in his ship scoops Gideon off of the
speeder (flying motorcycle). Gideon goes from full speed of the speeder
say due East, toward a wall of a building, to the speed of Galen's ship
(faster than the speeder) due West and somewhat downward too, all in a
fraction of a second. G-forces anyone? Then, there's the mechanics of
getting Gideon off of the bike and into the ship. It's a scene that
would have been best avoided.

There's another scene in the same episode that had the Excalibur being
pulled down to a planet by an enhanced gravity field, and even though
resisting with full engine power, the Excalibur is losing altitude and
will enter the atmosphere in 15 minutes. So, they fire the main guns at
the source of the beam. Trouble is, using the main guns robs the
engines of all power to resist the field. All they have left is life
support and artificial gravity. When they shunt power to the main
guns, the ship should noticeably accelerate (lurch) toward the planet
unless the field reduces its power correspondingly. The ship doesn't
lurch and nobody mentioned that the field power reduced.

I cringe a bit when those scenes roll by. Likely, I'd do the same thing
with that scene from Indy4.


TV/Movie Maker physics is often Wyle. E. Coyote physics. In CRUSADE's
case, JPL either dropped the ball, or these scenes weren't shown to
them. JMS needed somebody on staff, there all the time, who had a clue
about basic physics. However, he either didn't, or they were asleep.



The franchise though, will never recover.

The franchise is over, anyway. Harrison's too old to do any more. He
was probably too old to do this one (Indy4). Stallone was too old (Man,
what the hell happened to him?!) to do another Rambo. Clint Eastwood's
probably the only one that can pull off a good sequel (Dirty Harry "Gran
Turismo").

--
Mac Breck (KoshN)
-------------------------------
"The Dresden Files" (2007)
Harry Dresden: [re. Bianca] What is it about bad girls? They lie,
cheat, won't suck your blood even when you beg them to, and for some
reason, no matter how badly they treat us, we still can't walk away.



.

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