They apparently hired a theoretical physicist to review all the cosmology in their series, yet when it came to earthly things the special effects (and story) was so bad I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief to engage in it.<\/p>\n
Probably the most noteworthy case in point was the dust storms. Pure cheap Hollywood special effects done by people who’ve never seen a real dust storm, or even a photograph of one. The dust was this light fluffy house-dust like stuff that looked and acted absolutely nothing like the soil dust that makes up real dust storms.<\/p>\n
The aftermath of the storms looked particularly unrealistic, like someone emptied a bunch of vacuum cleaner bags at quasi-random. The aftermath of actual severe dust storms looks much like sand dunes, as any one of a large number of photographs from the 1930s Dust Bowl attests. The ready availability of such photographs means the producers really had no excuse for such shoddy special effects.<\/p>\n
And what’s up with dust storms blowing up when everything is green outside? The actual Dust Bowl happened in a severe multi-year drought, when there was precious little green anything, and the fields were lying fallow instead of growing lush crops of tall corn stalks. Another epic fail.<\/p>\n
And then there’s this “blight” which breathes nitrogen and in doing so somehow consumes oxygen. Hello? Oxygen and nitrogen are two completely different elements. Any massive outbreak of a new, nitrogen-breating organism would increase<\/em> the relative concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere by consuming some of the nitrogen. So the movie flunks basic chemistry as well as basic meteorology.<\/p>\n How the producers could do such a terrible job on mundane aspects of science while obsessing over cutting-edge issues perplexed me for a while.<\/p>\n Then it hit me: it’s actually consistent with the whole strange premise of the movie, that it’s somehow going to be more easy and more practical to travel through a wormhole to the far reaches of the universe, and colonize some barren desert world (even the final scenes of that one last planet showed a pretty inhospitable place that made the Dust Bowl Earth look like a green Eden by comparison) than it would be to focus on fixing problems here at home.<\/p>\n It’s all about ignoring (neglecting, even) the mundane and chasing madly after the esoteric and distant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" They apparently hired a theoretical physicist to review all the cosmology in their series, yet when it came to earthly things the special effects (and story) was so bad I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief to engage in it. Probably the most noteworthy case in point was the dust storms. Pure cheap Hollywood […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1569\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}