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RE: Last movie you watched, and your critique of it
June 6, 2014 at 5:47 am
Olympus Has Fallen: decent action flick, mostly because it minimizes the scenes where Gerard Butler tries to convince us that he can play a normal guy, and gives us a lot more of Butler channeling his inner-Leonidas, which he does so well. It being an action flick, the plot isn't terribly meaningful, but there is one gaping hole that leaves me shaking my head. And even though it IS an action film, I'll spoiler this part so as not to give away a presumably important plot point:
The President and several of his cabinet are taken hostage by terrorists. Three of the hostages (including the President) have the codes to a system that will allow the terrorists to detonate America's nuclear arsenal in it's silos. Yes, I know, that's idiotic on several levels, but stay with me here. The terrorists demand the codes from the other two, with threats to kill them. The two hostages insist that they'll take the codes with them to the grave, but the President (who of course is a dedicated and loving person who lost his devoted wife in a tragic accident) commands them to turn over the codes, promising that when it's his turn, he'll die before giving it up. Both of the hostages obey and turn over their codes.
Later in the movie, we see a terrorist entering the third and final code without any preamble. The President shows no signs of any particular duress. Which means that he handed over the crucial final code without any real effort on the part of the terrorists! If Butler's character doesn't kill the terrorists and enter the override code with just seconds to spare, the USA would have been turned into a nuclear wasteland. The movie never reconciles the fact that the President apparently intended to provide the terrorists with the means to literally wipe out the USA. That's insane, even for an over-the-top action movie.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
