- Oh please, don't let it suck.
- To see the reaction, you'd think that Marlon Perkins shot them with a tranquilizer gun and then Jim wrestled their groggy hobo asses to the ground and locked the 4G Mobile Hot Spots around their necks. Instead of it being, you know, a paying temp job.
- What gun for robot cheetah?
For robot cheetah: super soaker.
ReplyDeleteI agree about Enders Game, I hope it doesn't suck. It's been a LONG time since I read that one. Gonna go get the book!
ReplyDeleteYou can't REALLY help the homeless! There is grant money on the line here! What? Are you daft?
Cheetah robot is creapy. It looks like it's legs are on the wrong way! I usually like robots, but that one makes my tummy feel yucky.
s
For shame... how could we even think to require some form of service, before turning over our ill gotten gains. It is dastardly, dastardly I say.
ReplyDeleteAnd before the Nanny state made casual employment impossible, a hobo could buy a day in a flophouse by pushing a broom for a couple hours ... and become NOT-homeless.
ReplyDeleteIt's good to see that the tech folks have found a way past the regs and crap to be able to pay hobos to push digital brooms again.
I really hope they don't ruin ender. Like really really. Changing Anderson to a girl is a mark against them already, but in the end if they don't rewrite it too badly it's all going to come down to whether or not those kids can act.
ReplyDeleteIt's Hollywood. Of course they'll &^(&* it up...
ReplyDeleteTake a good hard look at that cheetah's legs.
ReplyDeleteThe running bit - that's easy; an accelerometer or two and a gyroscope is all it needs for stability. But an animal's foreleg is a very complex structure.
The designers completely got around it by making it much simpler, yet able to perform its primary function of high-speed mobility.
My colleague at work and I were talking just the other day about the "Big Dog" from DARPA. Heretofore, most robot designs merely mimicked the functions of animals - this is the first time to my knowledge that someone has gone and improved on a design found in nature.
The running is nothing - those legs are BIG.
gvi
It'll suck. Sorry.
ReplyDeleteChanging the gender of an officer is minor. Just because they screwed up Starship Troopers (extraneous shower scene excepted) doesn't mean that this has to suck, too.
ReplyDeleteThe kids are just flat-out TOO OLD. Valentine's actress is about 16. Ender's actor is almost 15. That Bean kid is about 13.
Look, I know that it's hard to find good actors that are single-digits, but couldn't you at least try, Hollywood? You're blowing it.
Oh, and for robot cheetah bristling with lots of HP hydraulic hoses? Modified choke auto shotgun with highbrass heavy turkey loads.
ReplyDeleteEnder: My first thought when I heard it was getting the film treatment was "I hope they film Ender's Shadow at the same time..."
ReplyDeleteCheetah: Bola. And the first time I saw it I was thinking it was running backward as the 'legs' looked much like the curved spring-like appendages some amputees use for running.
I too thought it was running backwards.
ReplyDeleteTam, I think a standard 12 gauge pump gun stoked with # 4 or larger buckshot and an improved or modified choke should do the trick. BANG, Thud, spark, spark, sizzle, smoke!
ReplyDeleteTam:
ReplyDelete1) Too late. They made it suck when the turned Anderson from a lieutenant whose goal was to test Ender to failure into a touchy-feely mother surrogate psychiatrist who will spend the film telling Ender that he's a Special Little Snowflake, and that It's Alright to Feeel Different.
And the obvious failure to cast Gunny Ermey as Mazer Rackham...
2) Anything I wanted to say, others have said better already.
3) I'm thinking a pulsed laser cannon in the 40 mega-watt range...
Unlike Heinlein, Orson Scott Card is still alive. I assume he wouldn't tolerate the giant crap they took on Starship Troopers.
ReplyDeletePerkins always made Jim do the dangerous stuff. Chicken.
ReplyDeleteWhile Jim wrestles that alligator, let's talk about insurance.
ReplyDeleteJim doesn't have any.
He's what we call a "bad risk"...
I expect an Ender's Game film to be every bit as faithful to the source material as Starship Troopers or The Sum of All Fears.
I never thought of R. Lee Ermey as Mazer ... that'd be great.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I'd love to see it run on a non-treadmill surface. As a solution to the foreleg problem it's interesting, but aside from being terribly complicated the reach-flex-grip-launch pattern a pawed running animal has gives it a great deal more stability and maneuverability. Hooved animals can run much more efficiently and longer, but they slip more easily and much more catastrophically.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it depends on what they have in mind for the robot. If the answer is proof of concept/"because it's cool", then brava to them.
Well, Marlon Perkins was old at that time, or he played the old guy in Wild Kingdom, like Lorne Green played an old dad in Bonanza. As for gainful entry-level employement for heretofore unemployables, to the Leftists all entry level employment is too degrading and demeaning to permit it; way more degrading and demeaning than sitting around on the public dole for 40 years, in turn getting drunk, high, and knocked up.
ReplyDeleteMutual of Omaha is people you can count on when the log-in's tough...
ReplyDeleteI will be interesting to see Ender's Game done in Starship Troopers style. Or socially corrected as the Forrest Gump movie was. The books were every bit as good, just a different story.
ReplyDeleteI still want to see the social critique of functionally unproductive "muliply handicapped" individuals, "The Ship Who Sang".
And "Dragonsong", too.
And maybe Pierce's "Beka Cooper: Terrier". Or "Wild Mage". Or "Protector of the Small".
Or even, for pity's sake, Roald Dahl's "Marguerite, Go Wash Ypur Feet (The Board of Health's Across the Street)".
Or "On Basilisk Station", from Weber. Or Drake's "With the Lightnings".
It took so long to get around to Ender's Game, I guess I am worried about the "gump" treatment in store.
I fear that "Ender's Game" will suck. My level of cynicism has reached such heights that the best I can do is hope that it won't suck as bad as "Starship Troopers".
ReplyDeleteA couple of things leaped out at me (bearing in mind that it's been a few years since I last read the book):
1. The kids are too old. I can live with that, I suppose, but still...
2. Other than Petra, I don't many if any females at the Battle School. I think that the assumption (made somewhat explicit when Graf explained why Valentine was an unsuitable candidate), is that females tend to lack the killer instinct that males have. And if they DO make Maj. Anderson into some touchy-feely surrogate Mommy figure... The whole point of the Battle School was to create the ultimate commander: tough and ruthless but with sufficient empathy to lead his forces, NOT molly-coddle the kids and tell them how special they are;
"You is kind, you is smart, you is important"...
3. Why bother to "introduce" us to the actors who portray Ender's parents or Dap? They were relatively minor characters. Ditto Stilson: his "role" was to f*ck with the wrong six year-old and pay the ultimate price;
4. Dap (Nonso Anonzie) is introduced as an imposing drill sergeant meant to be both intimidating and encouraging to the young Launchies. As I recall, Dap was described as a young man, more babysitter to the launchies than sergeant. Indeed, I don't recall Card really describing many of the adults in the Battle School aside from Graf and a couple of others at all: the book is primarily about the children, not the adults. To the extent that there was drill, it was conducted by the kids' "army" commanders;
But perhaps I'm being too picky. Perhaps I should restrain my comments to echoing Tam:
Oh please, don't let it suck.
My first thought when I read the bum-borne router thing a few days ago; "How long before they slap that thing on a pawn counter looking to swap it for the price of a jug of Thunderbird?"
ReplyDeleteI wonder how they're going to go about rewriting the "Demosthenes and Locke" aspect, since blogging has notably failed to result in global domination for everyone else who's tried it. That's about as far as my curiosity goes, though, since I didn't even care enough to read past the first book.
ReplyDeleteAlso, robot cheetahs: because there's no way this could turn into a SyFy original movie.
Agreed on the first point. So far the casting looks good at least.
ReplyDeleteMy older brother gave me his copy of Ender's Game when I was a kid. I hated reading before that.
ReplyDeleteI bought a copy for my little brother when I came home on leave. He passed that on to the youngest.
I'll be picking it up for my son in a few years.
If this movie sucks, it might break me just a bit.
The Ender's Game movie makes me sad just thinking about it.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting that hollywood is trying more and more "young adult" books these days.
For Robot Cheetah...
ReplyDeleteDa da da dunt!
Da da da dunt!
Da da da da da da dunt!
Spud Gun Spuuud Gunnnn!
Heinlein was dead. And Clancy has always had more than a little bit of just-leave-the-cash-on-the-dresser in him. Card, on the other hand, is still very much alive, and conscious of artistic integrity.
ReplyDeleteIt might suck anyway. It's already been languishing in options-development hell for years and years while six or seven whole crops of possible casts have aged out of plausibility.
But I for one am hoping it doesn't.