what 28 Months Later might be like

28 Days Later was a modestly alright film the less you look into it, however its sequel 28 Weeks Later made in 2007 seemed to try and follow I Am Legend in ruining these types of movies.

However I have to say I'm excited about the remote prospect of there being a 28 Months Later, Danny Bole (director of the first one) has stated it's definitely a thing he wants to do and states he has ideas to set it in Russia.

Assuming this is continuing on from the outbreak we saw at the end of the second one (not directed or written by Boyle) in Paris I assume it's going to carry on from that and be set in Russian 28 months (over two years) after the initial infection that hit England at the very start of 28 Days Later (I know confusing isn't it.

Even though I have serious qualms about the RAGE virus I have thought through how exactly the story could be set in Russia with there being a threat to a certain amount of people.

Although the RAGE virus in the first movie virtually infected every man woman and child in Great Britain the infected did starve to death just a month afterwords (meaning at least a week since they killed everyone else) meaning that in this third movie that very small outbreak in Paris would have to spread infect everyone in Europe and then spread with a plausible threat to people in Russia.

And they have to stay alive.

Although a small outbreak of infected chimps of animal right activists resulted in the outbreak that wiped out all of England in 28 Days Later is it plausible to assume the same will happen to all of Europe and some part of Russia over a space of two years in the third one?

However it's not for me to start bitching about inaccuracies in a movie or how stupid the plot in a movie is before it even goes into production, but hopefully a reasonable explanation will be given if Boyle follows where 28 Weeks Later left off and opts to start on Russia.

As in more reasonable than the obvious one I've just written about.

the story of the Donau

Known as the 'slave ship' in Norway during World War II the Donau was a 9,000 ton transport ship used by the Kriegsmarine between Nazi Germany and World War II.

Although a transport ship when the war started, it was later requisitioned for war duty and outfitted with anti aircraft guns and depth charges.

It was used by the SS and the Gestapo operating in Norway to transport 540 Jews from their home where they would be then moved to Auschwitz in Poland, whilst on the Donua Jewish men and women were put in separate holds, there they were deprived of basic sanitary and treated badly at the hands of the soldiers.

When the Allies were getting the upper hand over the Germans the Donau was seen by the Norwegian resistance as a very dangerous threat to the RAF, so while it was docked in Oslo Harbor Roy Nilsen from Milorg and Max Manus (who had already sunk another vitally important German ship) from Kompani Linge planted ten limpet mines on the port side of the Donau in the maximally secured harbor getting away Scott-free.

The departure of the Donau from Oslo Harbor was delayed however meaning that the limpet mines detonated before the ship reached its destination (Drøbak).



The captain managed to beach her however where it lay until seven years after the war.

* Photos from the Norwegian movie Max Manus

** A picture of the real ship

4 stolen military weapons that could have been used to more precision

Several action movies have hi-tech or destructive military weapons ending up in the hands of the bad guys or the terrorists, here I list the most questionable use of such weapons.

4. A Dassault Mirage 2000



As seen in: Les Chevaliers Du Ciel

The back plot to the theft of three French Dassault Mirage 2000's in the French movie Les Chevaliers Du Ciel was a lot more credible in the movie than I actual thought, all the jets were armed since the pilots were on a cannon ball run across the Horn of Africa in competition for a sale to an Asian company against an American F-16.

The terrorists shot the tanker crew and have an armed force where the Mirages almost out of fuel are forced to land, now if my geography serves me correct the Horn of Africa (or east Africa, hostile territory as its referred to in the movie) consists of Somalia and Ethiopia near the Gulf of Aden.

And they are flying fully armed Mirages (testing their arms endurance), surely at least they have on Exocet between the lot of them, why not use them to attack French shipping instead of a tanker at Bastille Day in Paris?

Of course our pilots escape when one is forced to test fly for one of the terrorists (to show him how the radar works), he performs a low altitude sonic boom of course and uses an air to ground missile to destroy the other Mirage escaping with one leaving the terrorists with one.

Which they smuggle all the way back to the France under the cover of a UN plane.



If you have connections that can bring you a stolen fighter jet back from Africa to the country it was stolen from surely you could smuggle in a single shoulder ground to air missile that would easily take out that low flying tanker!

3. A big ass nuclear submarine



As seen in: The World Is Enough

The plot of the 1999 James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough is Bond sent to protect a wealthy oil typhoon Electra King who has ties with a terrorist who plans to increase petroleum prices by triggering a nuclear meltdown in the waters of Istanbul making the world depend more on her oil company.

Awh, her diabolic plans are so cute!

If you're going to cause a nuclear meltdown in oil rich waters why not just cause it in the Strait of Hormuz, if you could get the submarine there, hell she could call the same guys who smuggled that Mirage into Paris during the Bastille Day to do the job to getting it to the Persian Gulf, I'm sure a nuclear meltdown there would be more significant, enough to bring down a good 40% of the world economy within hours.

2. a nuclear warhead



As seen in: The Sum of All Fears

In the movie The Sum of All Fears based on the much better Tom Clancy book of the same name it is revealed that Israel lost a nuclear warhead attached to an A-4 Skyhawk in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War.

This ends up in the hands of a neo Nazi who wants to pit Russia and the United States in a war against each other, so detonates it in Baltimore during a baseball game, it was intended to kill the president of course so the chain of command would be confused and unorganized, then they'd obviously blame the Russians.

It's a stretch considered it wasn't a missile payload and the fact it was on the east coast of the US, (maybe a nuclear destruction of Anchorage and an immediate loss of communication at Elmendorf AFB would appear more realistic).

But there is no way that the Russians could be blamed, unlike the book (which was more realistic but was still a bit of a push) this was set in the 21st century at the start of the War on Terror (just post 9/11), surely the US are trigger happy but the bad guys these days are the guys hiding caves organizing mass terrorist attacks, that may even involve nuclear weapons.

1. the USS Missouri



As seen in: Under Siege

The plot of Under Siege focuses on Steven Seagal foiling a group of mercenaries who've hijacked the battleship Missouri

to get its nuclear armed Tomahawk missiles, their plan is to smuggle the cargo back to North Korea after firing some at Honolulu to cover their tracks.

Then what give the nuclear Tomahawk missiles at North Korea who recently threatened to nuke Hawaii.

Why not just do the Koreans job for them, use all the Tomahawk missiles to wipe out Honolulu and other US military bases on the island, scuttle the ship and escape in the submarine to wherever?

It would cripple the US Pacific Fleet and kill a shit load of Americans in their home state.

Of course a group of mercenaries led by an ex psychopathic CIA agent helped by a psychotically unstable Executive Officer obviously don't know as much about what they're trying to do as I do!

the bigger picture of 'Red Dawn'

The 1984 movie Red Dawn wastes little time in getting into the action, less than 10 minutes in Soviet paratroopers land in a football field in Colorado and once there begin to hit vital targets like Mr. Cheesedale a high school teacher and the high school and it's students in general.

Yes a small town in Colorado would was a major focus of Soviet airborne operations!

Later into the movie when the Wolverine resistance fighters (named after their local football team) rendezvous with a downed F-15 pilot whom tells them a lot of what has happened in the world.

Russian proxy forces from Cuba and Mexico (which had a revolution) with sabotage forces disabled American ICBM sites followed by the Cuban and Nicaraguan armies marching into the midlands, covered by a massive Soviet assault of commuter planes flying right over the Bering Strait towards Colorado.

We (the audience) must take it for granted that the US radar operators can't tell the difference between a flock of pigeons and a full scale aerial assault!

Europe are shown to stay out of the war (since they "never" help America with in it's wars), except England that is, Red China sides with the United States (go figure) which results in (hinted) mass nuclear strikes that killed 400 billion of them.



It's not solid but then again this is a movie and we (the audience) are supposed to see it from the point of view of the teen resistance fighters (the Wolverines).

But would a Soviet and Cuban force really put that much attention to a single town in Colorado, what strategic importance does that have?

I wouldn't mind but the huge force (which consisted of tanks obviously carried in their backpacks) nearly had their operation foiled by a single UH-1 Huey army helicopter which observed and fired on them all afternoon and for half of the night!



Not only that but communism is obviously such a malignant disease that it slowly just absorbs places and people, for example a re-education camp (built in a drive in theater) is built nearly instantly in that town, do the Soviets really dislike what was going on in Calumet, Colorado that much that they sacrifice so many resources only to be defeated by six teenage resistance fighters?

Who are freedom fighters and remain freedom fighters by having a defacto leader!

Director John Milius stated he was inspired by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 and the resistance put up by the Mujahideen (then known by the Reagan Administration as freedom fighters), his inspiration really shows in the movie.



That all being said I doubt any American at the time doubted how real a war like this could have been!

the Nazi's Death Star

During the Nazi reign in Germany from 1933 to 1945 some very hi tech weaponry (for the time) was created, the Nazi's one idea Nazi physicists began to work on was launching a giant mirror into orbit.

The mirror, which they planned to design from about one million tons of metallic sodium, would burn cities to the ground, boil reservoirs, crisp people like bacon, kinda like the Ion cannon from the game Command & Conquer: Generals.



This so-called “sun gun” would be part of a space station 5,100 miles above Earth. “They calculated that the use of a huge reflector could produce enough heat, if focused on certain area, could make an ocean boil or burn up a city.”

The space station would be manned by Nazi spacemen with magnetic boots to help overcome weightlessness and most likely be powered by the sun (go figure).



The mirror itself was 100-meter-wide and would have been fitted at a point on the space station.

There are many obvious reasons this didn't come through, the closest the Nazi's got in space development was the V-2 rocket, 20,000 died of exhaustion making the ones fired at London that killed around 7,000 people!

Most of the German scientists moved to the US to continue their rocketry research. In addition to their work with US missile defense systems, many of the men went to work for the fledgling space program in the 1950s.

From this they developed the Saturn V, the engine which carried the Apollo astronauts into orbit for the moon missions of 1969-1972.

That being said the development would have been possible over a couple of decades had the Nazi's not been fighting a losing World War II by 1942!

a true informal sequel to Jaws

Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. We was comin' back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We'd just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin' from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn't know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin', so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the shark come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin' and hollerin' and sometimes that shark he go away... but sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn't even seem to be livin'... until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'. The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin' and your hollerin' those sharks come in and... they rip you to pieces. You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don't know how many sharks, maybe a thousand. I do know how many men, they averaged six an hour. Thursday mornin', Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boatswain's mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he'd been bitten in half below the waist. At noon on the fifth day, a Lockheed Ventura swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Hooper here, anyway he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol' fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a life jacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

- Quint



The above monologue about the real life USS Indianapolis from the movie Jaws has several inaccuracies but tells the broad story.

What happened was the ship was delivering the A-bomb when it was struck by the Japanese submarine I-58.

As it was sinking it sent several distress calls, the Navy long claimed that they were never received because the ship was operating under a policy of radio silence. Declassified records show that three SOS messages were received separately, but none was acted upon because one commander was drunk, another had ordered his men not to disturb him and a third thought it was a Japanese prank.

The subsequent delay of the rescue mission led to the loss of hundreds of sailors. About 300 of the 1,196 men on board died in the attack. The rest of the crew, 880 men, floated in the water without lifeboats until the rescue was completed four days later. Many did not have life-jackets!

Jaws the novel by Peter Benchley was based loosely on the the 1916 Jersey Shore shark attacks.



So instead of having a retarded sequel trying to make the threat seem bigger (Jaws 2 a bigger female shark) why not base it on the story of the Indianapolis?

It would be much bigger and the threat would be A HELL OF A LOT MORE SHARKS and LOTS OF PEOPLE GETTING EATEN IN THE WATER, giving the audience more what they went to see in the original Jaws without it repeating the same basic story tiring the concept out!

imagine the firepower of the USS Nimitz in 1941

The question is put forward by the character played by Martin Sheen in the 1980 film The Final Countdown in which the super carrier USS Nimitz (CVN-68) is time warped back to December 6th 1941 just off the shores of Hawaii.

I enjoyed the movie for the scene in which two F-14's splash two Japanese A6M Zeroes and was eagerly awaiting the finale in which several squadrons of F-14 Tomcats and F-8 Crusaders were launched to counter the attacking strike force of Zeroes prepared to attack Pearl Harbor!



Of course at the last minute they are prepared to be time warped and abort their strike force leaving me wondering about what would have happened and how awesome it would have been!



I would assume that if they hadn't averted the strike they would've used the AIM-54 Phoenix armed F-14 Tomcats to take down at least 4 Zeroes each from long range and then close in and hunt down the remaining of them with smaller missiles and even the cannons.

Obviously the Japanese strike force of 1941 wouldn't stand a chance against a squadron of mighty AIM-54 armed F-14A Tomcats.


www.military.com

But could the USS Nimitz take on 1941 Japan on its own (with no support ships), remember it could have taken out the six aircraft carriers that attacked it with a single nuclear warhead dropped in the water;


Like this only dropped from a plane

Now the Nimitz (in this scenario) operating on its own would be on full alert (remember 1980 deck configuration);

A CAP of two F-14's at a time both armed with six AIM-54's while bombers escorted by other AIM-54 armed F-14's could carry out a series of nuclear esq Doolittle Raids against strategic targets (unlike the real life Doolittle raid) such as the Yokosuka naval base and other large air fields around Japan at all times of the day.

This being said we shouldn't forget the lessons we learned in history from ships such as the USS Bunker Hill since it would be hard to keep F-14's on constant rotation one being only able to hold off a guaranteed 12 interceptors, and remember Japan had at least 4,000 Zeroes alone at the time!



This is big, bigger than the colony and a 48 hour series of strikes against Japan couldn't ensure that they would not only just cripple their military and civilian infrastructure but would have had every second warship and warplane in the Imperial Japanese forces coming down on the one lone Nimitz!

That being said I would much rather have the "Old Salt" on my side.

* "Old Salt" is the nickname given to the USS Nimitz by its crew in case you're wondering what the hell I'm on about!

the future that was

Remember when you were a kid and you first saw Back To The Future II where they go to the year 2015 and there are flying cars, hoverboards, self tying shoe laces, hoverboards and hydrating pizzas, how everything looked so clean and Utopian, and how the future was about to look like such a brighter and happier place.

Well its been twenty years since that movie was made (1989), now its 2009 and there are still no flying cars and no plans to make them!

Apart from great advancements in computers (the internet was unheard in BTTF's version of the future), what can we expect from further beyond than 2015?

A horrible dull future



The future that the 2006 movie Children of Men gave us was truly amazing, the year 2027 and not a child born in 18 years, the United Kingdom is the only country to regain law and society (just), while the rest of the world has become lawless, people are slowly losing it, life is dull and urban environments are stretched to the max in filth, violence, crime and general ugliness, this may happen in the future from a depression that crashes the current financial system meaning that law and order will fall soon afterwards reducing mankind back to the survival of the fittest.

A corporate run future

Man I hate corporations trying to sell me horseshit products I don't need!

But what if these corporations got together and gained more power above the government, of if they got so powerful they were allowed do business like sovereign countries, the 2008 John Cusack movie War Inc. took such a scenario showing a corporation (Tamberlain, based on the read life Haliburton) invading a fictional Middle Eastern country of Turaqistan for its vast oil reserves.



They then opened up the war destroyed control for business for big business.

This might be a stretch but think of this, in theory "anybody can run for president of the United States!"

I wonder who McDonalds wants up there?
I wonder who Diet Coke wants up there?

A totalitarian future



A future very like George Orwells 1984 were a small totalitarian government controls EVERYTHING everyone does every second of their lives, when 1984 came out it was more of a fear of what the world would look like if the Soviet Union took over.

However in 2002 when the US government proposed putting out an implantable RFID chip several hundred people speculated further saying it was the first step towards the rise of a totalitarian government in America (see video below).



The idea is that these chips will contain the money (hence digital money), from the chips the government can deduct the taxes you owe etc. etc. so you literally become a serf to them, and if you protest what they're doing they'll turn off your chip, and there is nothing you can do, you can't buy food you won't be able to survive!

This scenario may be more plausible in the mere future than the next one;

A future robot uprising


Be afraid, be very afraid

Man makes robot, robot gains intelligence, robot rebels against man and enslaves it.

I'm not going to bring up Will Smith's I Robot simply because I hate that movie with every fiber of my body (Will Smith totally sold himself), many sci fi movies show a robot uprising to be, first because they were programmed to think and feel and second after they've wiped out most of their creators (see Battlestar Galactica) they will want to look and feel like their creators.



A future of space travel



Firefly and Alien pull this off the best in my mind, a future where we will have truckers in space, where we discover a series of plants and emigrate to them, a future where space travel is just as common as car travel is on Earth today (okay maybe that's a push, as common as air travel), this scenario is a push considering how we haven't managed to send a man to Mars yet and the fact that our natural resources are on their way to depletion.

And the fact we're still kill each other over ideals, religion and resources shows that we'll probably never get that far in the future anyway!

an analysis into how the RAGE virus spread

After watching re watching 28 Days Later awhile ago I was curious on just how fast the RAGE virus could spread and why it wasn't stopped.

Okay some background, the RAGE virus is basically follows the road of any zombie virus, it's an infection in the blood, when a host is bitten by an infected they turn into an unstoppable RAGE infected killing machine, the virus in the movie was introduced through chimps and some animal right activists breaking in to free the chimps from a research center, they ultimately end up with the chimps infecting them and a scientist, then as this virus spreads from a single clinic to infect 99.9% of Britain's population in 28 days.

This brings into question, those three infected manage to infect (lets say a village of about 300 people) and let it spread from there, did any farmers not have a shotgun, don't people not have any knives or anything to defend themselves?



I've pointed out several problems with 28 Days Later before but when our characters in that movie encounter the British soldiers who've secured a Victorian style mansion in the woods are armed with just their SA-85's seem to have no problem defending their area.




Yet at the start of the same movie it was stated that the main infection had sparked and rampaged throughout the countryside, and that the army blockades had been overrun, of course the mansion one we saw in the movie was overrun from an internal dispute and a chained infected being let loose, but surely the entire British Army could have at least protected London from this outbreak!

Now onto 28 Weeks Later, this was probably the biggest crap fest of a movie I have ever seen in my life, it could have been brilliant, even though it was action packed (towards the second half that is) it was the biggest disappointment of a sequel I have ever seen since Alien 3, it just reeked of bad writing.

The story focuses on 28 weeks after the initial infection had broken out (hence 28 Weeks Later) and shows the US Army securing London, District One (based on the Green Zone in Baghdad apparently) is set up to house civilians being imported into the city, the infection is dead until some woman who is immune to the virus is found, kisses her husband, he becomes infected and less than 10 minutes all hell breaks loose!

The extreme lengths that the writers go to to make this disaster happen is just unreal, apparently the woman who had been quarantined didn't warrant a guard or any kind of surveillance, this one lone infected manages to take down several armed American soldiers almost instantly!



Then when the Red Alert is actually issued every single civilian freaks out, you think a closely guarded military complex would at least give the civilians a drill in case you know, SOMETHING LIKE THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED, and putting over 200 civilians in one confined area is obviously the best thing!
Sure when was a containment room set up to actually contain something!?!

And just to make the situation worse the commanding officer actually orders that the whole city be plunged into darkness. How does this help the situation? It panics the survivors and makes it even harder to see whats going on. This makes less than no sense.

While the US Army snipers guarding District One are ordered (wait for it) not select the tenth of the people infected but shoot everybody!
As if the whole containment strategy couldn't get any stupider it did!



Why not just drop napalm around the areas were the infected (and those fleeing civilians are), on screen I counted about 10 infected running and getting burned, and then after it a bigger horde of about 60 running towards the underground.

So there you have it, the danger of the fictional RAGE virus even though the writers set it up (well in 28 Days anyway) is made to be ten times as dangerous than it could have possibly been!

'Battle Royale' was rather amusing

I have to say I was expecting to have the shit scared out of me or at least be grossed out when I watched the Japanese movie Battle Royale, just to give you some background is you never heard of this movie;

Battle Royale is about a nationalist socialist Japan, in which students on a "study trip" are gassed in their bus and bought to a remote island where they are forced to play a game, in which they are given a variety of weapons that they are to use to kill each other until only one student remains.

Their movements are restricted by metal collars, later identified as Model Guadalcanal No. 22, around their necks which contain tracking and listening devices; if any student should attempt to escape The Program, or enter declared "danger zones", a bomb will be detonated in the collar, killing the wearer. If no student dies in any 24 hour period, all collars will be detonated simultaneously!"



Now you're probably asking how the hell I found this amusing, its the way the movie starts, as if it's a fun sporting event, except it's on an island and they are all forced to kill each other, after that it got a bit stretched out and like a sports event, (and I hate sports) updating on screen how many students are left after a kill.

The weapon distribution scene is rather amusing, for instance the one student who gets a kick out of it (the guy who has fun) is armed with an Uzi while the good guys (well the guys who stick together and don't kill each other) and armed merely with a frying pan handle!
And another armed with a paper fan!

It was about halfway through the movie I begun to question the whole point to the game, I mean they are using these games to eliminate the weaklings in society, but doesn't that mean when they cut down the population doesn't that mean the main survivors in society would be a load of cold blooded mass murderers!

That being said I enjoyed Battle Royale, (especially the set up at the start), and I would recommend it, its a two hour experience different than any other movie I have ever seen!

how Back To The Future was nearly ruined!

Remember the lovable characters from Back To The Future?
Well the original script didn't take prisoners on ruining the future to be good movie.

Doc (known as the Professor) is a failed scientist living in an old abandoned theater where him and Marty pirate movies including Marty owning his own little porn tape empire in his school, Marty's family being losers is the same.

Instead of having a DeLorean as the time machine they have a fridge, think about that for a minute, instead of an awesome configured DeLorean they had a fridge!



Time travel in movies is seldom cool, but when you have a DeLorean as a time machine as in these movies it is cool!

And when Doc the Professor shows Marty his time machine Marty (in this version being the douchebag he is) states they should go into the mere future and get horse racing results!

The time machine is a fridge hooked to a mini nuclear reactor, and after they test it on the Professors monkey government agents come in and shoot him and Marty gets into the time machine and is warped back into the year 1952.

He walks around like an idiot loudly exclaiming he hasn't been born yet, he eventually meets up with the younger Professor who tries to figure a way to get him back, Marty after being told not to wonders into town and tries to invent rock n' roll early to get his own career going (literally within hours of arriving in 1952).

He finally comes around, realizes he has to get his parents back together, that bit is nearly the same as in the movie except when Marty plays the rock song the police are called saying its a riot.



Marty gets his parents together and him and the Professor drive the fridge to the 1952 Nevada nuclear test, going close to it a series of events nearly ruin their plan but in the end Marty makes it within a certain distance of the blast before it is triggered.

It is the end that completely gets me, not only was the original version really silly it was close to retarded near the end, the Professor meets him and Marty finds 1982 is very different, everyone has flying cars, robots and get this, the Professor never even made a time machine.

Rock n' roll music doesn't exist after that one "riot" at a school dance which makes little to no sense!

Luckily this never came to be and the Back To The Future we all know and love took its place!

iPod Touch controlled RX-8

Pretty impressive when you think about it especially the fact its done through Wi Fi meaning you could technically start the car from any corner of the planet!

Kinda of reminds me of the BMW 750iL from the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies that was remote controlled through his Song Ericson mobile phone.



Although if it could in fact drive the car with the WiFi that means that a ten year old Bond gadget would look hopelessly lo-tech.

Back To The Future too!

When a great movie is made there is always the sequel, the sequel is never as good as the movie it is following but always tries to live up to to its former self, this sometimes leads to the movie giving the audience the same 'meal' they enjoyed out of the first one, hence Die Hard 2: Die Harder, but I'm not going to go into that stupid stupid movie but instead focus on Back To The Future: Part II.

Back To The Future on one hand was a solid story set out well from start to finish to make it a good movie, in Back To The Future II (well the second half anyway) they went a bit crazy trying to top the first film completely by going into the first movie again!



Yes anything is possible when you have a time machine!

What was the coolest bit in the first movie, the skateboard chase in which Biff tries to ram Marty in his '46 Ford before Marty jumps the whole car catches his skateboard and watches Biff careen into the back of a manure truck and get himself and his car buried in shit.

How do you top something like that?

Well how about have Biff chase Marty in his '46 Ford while Marty rides a hoverboard from the future at night through a tunnel when Biff nearly catches him again only to have Marty be saved by catching a bit of rope attached to a flying DeLorean.



Then have Biff crash into another manure truck and get covered in shit again.

Another memorable scene from the first movie is Marty playing John B. Goode in the dance scene, but to add to the excitement of a song why not have his future self save his past self playing on stage by climbing over him and dropping sandbags on their heads.

It sounded crazy enough to work.

And finally the lightning scene from the first film, well have that repeated again by having the flying DeLorean being struck by lightning.

Then repeat the other scene from the first movie again to double the adrenaline rush!

So in this case does the sequel better the original?

It's your decision.

why James Bond should have died with the Cold War

Ever watch Dr No and think "wow this is really old and completely out of context in today's world" well its true in one sense but the truth is that the 1960's were when spies were cool and that's when James Bond was at his best.

Remember From Russia With Love which followed in 1963?
The whole move was basically Bond just going around kicking commie ass, and Goldfinger, well if you haven't seen it there is something seriously wrong with you.

The Connery era which started the same year as the Cuban Missile Crisis were truly the best and made in the most relevant time, counting out George Lazenby Roger Moore was to follow, and I'm sorry but everybody knows that during this time Bond was an absolutely twat, but the stories were relevant for the time, for instance the 1983 film Octopussy concerned the detonation of a nuclear bomb on a West German air base, and in the end Bond crashes the circus there by dressing as a clown.



Moore made Bond look like an idiot, and a pervert at the same time considering most of the women in his era where young enough to be his grand daughters!

Timothy Dalton took the role as Bond in a more serious approach, The Living Daylights made in 1987 was a good movie, however it has dated quickly considering that at one stage Bond joined the Mujahideen (today's Taliban is a dissident of them) to fight Soviets forces.

In 1989 License To Kill dealt with the bad guy a major drugs dealer in South America, the movie was very good but didn't gross that much money, the producer of the Bond movies since 1962 (Albert R. Broccoli) died shortly later, the Berlin Wall had come down and the Cold War had ended, the series went into a hiatus.

Pierce Brosnans first movie Goldeneye seemed to try and make up a credible threat, spies in the 90's weren't cool, that's final, and they even had Bond level half of Saint Petersburg with a tank, which was kinda cruel when you think about it.



The bad guys base consisted of a satellite receiver for a Goldeneye satellite hidden in an artificial lake!

Tomorrow Never Dies was about a media typhoon who uses a stealth boat to 'make the news', by forcing the west and the Peoples Republic of China closer to war by using stealth to use a sea drill to sink British ships, there's one big hole there, how did the cooperation manage to buy a stealth boat, and further how did nobody know about it?



The World Is Not Enough had a modest enough plot, Die Another Day however shows another media typhoon who buys a large laser like satellite to create an artificial sun, he promises to do nothing bad with it, apart from melting his ice palace to kill two people, yeah two people for Christ sake instead of just shooting them!!!



He then uses it to start destroying the 38th Parallel kills Bond and gets away with it, (just kidding, good won at the end of the day).

Casino Royale however has started to reboot the series into something that was (in 2006) a lot more promising for today's world, showing Bond not as a super hero spy, but a good one who makes mistakes, and has weaknesses and feels pain.

Quantum of Solace however is the worst Bond movie ever to come out, there I said it, the movie can't seen to identify itself or who Bond is, is he Jason Bourne in the Bourne Supremacy or is he James Bond?

What the series will bring next I don't know, but I doubt it will be of the quality of Casino Royale, or anything before 1989!

what Top Gun 2 will boil down to

Top Gun



Back in 1986 Jerry Bruckheimer made a movie called Top Gun, which followed a Navy pilot Maverick who penetrates deep into the Top Gun Naval Academy in San Diego where the top 1% of the countries fighter pilots train to be even better, to see who the best was, this is slightly inaccurate since in real life the pilots would kill each other for it but it helps the story so we'll let that by.

The movie features real close ups of F-14's flying (which Bruckheimer points out more than once in the audio commentary), the movie features nearly as many shower scenes and as if that wasn't bad enough they even strip down get greased up and play volleyball to the tune of Loverboys "Playing With the Boys", Bruckheimer explained he wasn't gay in the douchiest of ways however:

Click here to listen (484k mp3)


The movie boils down to Mavericks wingman Goose being killed, him showing his girly boy emotions and then eventually returning to the Indian Ocean 24 hours to battle Soviet MiG-28's (there is no such thing as a MiG-28 the aircraft shown were F-5's) over the Indian Ocean, which shows them using F-14 Tomcats doing close up engagements rather then slaughter the enemy off with AIM-54 missiles, but then again I'll let that also slip for dramatic purposes since the movie was good for the time (even though the end did look very like Star Wars).

Les Chevaliers Du Ciel



In 2005 a French movie titled Les Chevaliers Du Ciell (translated to Knights of the Sky) was made featuring French Dassault Mirage 2000's instead of F-14 Tomcats, no gay context, no Kelly McGuillus, Chris Corner instead of Kenny Loggins and instead of the Russians as the "bad guys" we have terrorists, yes terrorists in a movie about fighter-jets.

Instead of Kenny Loggins and Berlin the movie has Chris Corner and Thirteen Sense (with songs that actually aren't that bad), but instead of the Soviets or the Russians or the Chinese being the bad guys its terrorists, terrorists who manage to force them to land several of their Mirage 2000's somewhere in the Horn of Africa for their plan to use them to disrupt the Bastille Day in Paris, the movie is a little anti climatic since after the showdown in the actual desert the good guys manage to escape and leave the terrorists with one of their Mirages which they then down over Paris bringing the movie to an end.

It sounds silly but it actually works perfectly for the movie (apart from the last ten minutes which as I said were anti climatic) but it worked.

Now for Top Gun 2.

Top Gun 2

With the US Navy destroying all their F-14 Tomcats back in 2006 (to prevent Iran getting parts for their F-14A fleet) it looks like the F-14 isn't going to be in the next Top Gun, however judging by its debut in Iron Man I'm putting money on the F-22 Raptor starring in this movie, Paul Walker and Vin Diesel as the movies main characters and DJ Tiesto producing the theme for the movie.

It will then revolve around some terrorists in some Middle Eastern country that are planning to do something or other and ends with Diesel prompting Walker who is only like 'new at this', Walker overcoming his fear some terrorists killed after trying to do something and then close with a rap song.

I'm not saying it'll be that predictable but that's what I'm sure it'll boil down to!

The real Shughart and Gordon

Back in 1993 during a raid in Mogadishu (Somalia) the second Black Hawk to be shot down Super Six Four came under attack from an angry mob of Somalians, some of the crew members had survived and had armed up preparing to take defensive positions, two Delta snipers Shughart and Gordon (also known as D-boys) were dropped in to defend the crash site.

With no backup coming (and the fact they were outnumbered by dozens of skinnies) and only with their own guns and not much extra ammo they went right into the middle of the battle!

But coming under bitter attack they eventually ran out of ammo and ended up dead like the rest of the crew (except the pilot Durant), the story has been confused over the years and I'm going to try and illustrate what exactly happened over those 15 minutes after the Durant had been shot down!

I will use screen shots from the 2001 film (directed by Ridley Scott) and extracts from the 1999 book by Mark Bowden to show my point.

Text from the novel about the post crash of Super Six Four:

He picked up his weapon, an MP5K, a little German 9mm sub machine gun. The pilots called them SP's or Skinny-poppers.

Durant realized that with his leg and back broken he would be unable to pull himself out of the chopper. He pushed the piece of tin roof away from him and revolved to defend his position through the broken windshield. Durant remembers seeing Frank sitting in the doorway opposite, about to push himself out, it was the last time he saw him.

That's when Shughart and Gordon showed up.
He didn't know either of the Delta operators well, but he recognized their faces. Seeing them gave him an enormous sense of relief. It was over. He figured they were part of of a rescue team. His next thought had been to get the radio up and operating, but now, with his rescuers already on the ground there was no need. Shughart and Gordon were calm. There was gunfire, mostly from the choppers overhead. The D-body reached in and lifted Durant out of the craft gently, one lifting his legs and the other grabbing his torso, as if they had all the time in the world, and set him down on his side by a tree. He was not in great pain. With the airframe and a wall joined behind him, and a wall to his left that ran all the way back behind the tail of the chopper, Durant was in a perfect position to cover the whole right side of the aircraft.



That's when in the book from Durants point of view (since he was the only real survivor) the mob got a lot bigger and hundreds of skinnies begun to move to the position of the crashed helicopter.

Mike Durant still thought things were under control. His leg was broken but it didn't hurt. He was lying on his back, propped against a supply kit by a small tree, using his weapon to keep back the occasional Skinnie who posked his head through the clearing. There was just about a fifteen-foot space between the wall to his left and the tail of the chopper. Durant admired the way the Delta guy had positioned him.

He could hear firing over on the other side of the helicopter. He knew Ray Frank, his copilot, was hurt but alive. And there were the two D-boys and his crew chief, Tommy Field. He wondered if Tommy was okay. He figured there were at least four men on the other side of the bird and probably more from the rescue team. It was only a matter of time before the vehicles showed up to take them out.
Then he heard one of the operators - it was Gary Gordon - cry out that he was hit. Just a quick shout anger and pain. He didn't hear the voice again.

The other one - Randy Shughart - came back to Durant's side of the bird
"Are there any weapons onboard?" he asked. There were. The crew chiefs carried M-16s. Durant told him where they were kept, and Shughart stepped into the craft and rummaged around and returned with both. He handed Durant Gordon's weapon, a CAR-15 loaded and ready to fire. "What's the support frequency on the survival radio?" Shughart asked. It was then, for the first time that it dawned on Durant that they were stranded. The pilot felt a twist of alarm in his gut. If Shughart was asking how to set up communications, it mean he and the other guy had come in on their own. They were the rescue team. And Gordon had just been shot!



The book states that Durant heard Shughart cry out among the roars of the mob that raided the crashed helicopter, Durant was nearly killed but later simply taken captive and was lucky to be released three days later, even though it was assumed in the novel that Gordon died first it is not exactly fact since even Durant himself isn't sure who died first.

Many believe it was Shughart but if it was him Gordon would have given Durant his M-21 a very distinctive weapon instead of the CAR-15, is it also stated that Gordon would never give up his CAR-15 if he was still able to fight.

In Durants own book A Company of Heroes Durant says he only heard Gordon say "damn it I'm hit," and not long later Shughart coming around and giving him a CAR-15.

In 2001 during the invasion of Afghanistan a GPS tracker was discovered with the name G Gordon written on it, it was for a long time believed that it was Gordon's one he had used in Somalia and had been somehow smuggled to Somalia but it was later turned out that it wasn't in fact Gordon's GPS but was from another helicopter pilot lost earlier in Operation Anaconda.