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The short film someone made is pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg
by fridder 6mo ago
The short film someone made is pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg
- eloisant 6mo agoThe short film makes no sense, as the 2 people talking are meat themselves.
- the_af 6mo agoPlus for the story to make sense, they have to be seeing Earth from scans/sensors, and one of them must in fact not be familiar with Earth at all, having disbelief in what the other is saying. But if they are both there, in a diner, they cannot be as skeptical. I get the constraints of short indie films, I love them regardless, but in this particular case it completely misses the mark.
- stdbrouw 6mo agoYou just have to go along with the idea that skin provides no indication of meatiness and that the two aliens are Ford Prefect types, then the short film lands just fine.
- the_af 6mo agoI guess. It's still hard to mesh with the idea they don't believe these humans flap their meat at each other, or that they do not communicate exclusively via radio signals. It doesn't match my idea that these are two energy/mechanical beings discussing a faraway planet from their spaceship or whatever, talking theory without actually seeing the beings they are discussing.
- ceejayoz 6mo agoYou've never encountered, say, a baffling code bug that couldn't possibly be caused by X, spent a day on it, and found out it turns out to be caused by X?
- the_af 6mo agoOh yes. But never dressed up as X! :D More seriously, what you describe is partly the short story. The short film adaptation doesn't quite work for me, for the reasons I explained in other comments.
- jvuygbbkuurx 6mo agoIt was funny when they talked about meat sounds using meat sounds.
- AlwaysRock 6mo ago"probed them all the way through. They're completely meat." The two talking, and other races, are machines that cover themselves however they like. These two are machines with artificial skins. That is normal. Fully meat beings are not. At least that is how I always read this story.
- axus 6mo agoMachines with artificial skins? I'll have to re-read the story, I thought the "meat" was matter and the aliens were made of energy.
- outworlder 6mo agoNo, it's literal meat that they have issues with. Machines are fine, hydrogen clusters are fine.
- bigbuppo 6mo agoThey only look like meat to blend in. It's the only way to figure out if they're made out of meat.
- the_af 6mo agoIn the story, the very idea of permanently meat-based beings appals them, and in fact one of them doesn't entirely believe it. So why would they look like meat to "blend in", a priori, if one of them doesn't even fathom the idea? "Blend in" with what? One of them doesn't believe what it's dealing with! Like a sibling comment mentions, they talk about "meat sounds"... using meat sounds! Why would they find it surprising if that's how they are communicating in the short film? They are not depicted as communicating via telepathy or whatever. (Yes, I understand the limitations of low budget shorts. But it doesn't mean it has to work...)
- bigbuppo 6mo agoWell, if you think you can do a better job, make it happen. Make the film you want to see.
- the_af 6mo agoWhy? Surely one can criticize a movie, book, videogame, etc, without being required to create a better one in turn. I didn't hate it, and I always appreciate the charm of low budget productions. I'm just saying this particular adaptation doesn't work for me, and trying to explain why. One low budget feature-length film about aliens I quite liked (though it obviously has a higher budget, and of course its own set of flaws; and to be clear I'm not arguing both productions are in the same ballpark!) is "The Vast of Night" [1]. I quite liked the actors and the directorial choices. --- [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6803046/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6803046/
- ceejayoz 6mo ago> So why would they look like meat to "blend in", a priori, if one of them doesn't even fathom the idea? I'd imagine British spies in WWII sometimes wore swastikas to blend in? They infiltrating to investigate. It needn't be an endorsement of the practice.
- TazeTSchnitzel 6mo agoYou're interpreting it overly literally. Cinema can be as abstract as theatre or the written word.
- ceejayoz 6mo agoYou should probably go watch the Terminator movies.
- otikik 6mo agoI interpreted this in two different ways: * This is a virtual environment and the "meat actors" are depicting avatars of virtual/not-meat entities inhabiting that world. That's why there's inconsistencies with real life, for example the red guy's clothes. This was what I thought when I first saw this short. * This was really an exchange of concepts and data in a language not really suitable for humans to understand. So what you are seeing is not what actually took place, but a translation. Some machine took the abstract data interchange and translated it to what it thought would be more appropriate for a meat head to understand, including setting it up in an environment that would make sense to a human. But it made some mistakes (the clothes, the weird behavior of some characters). This could have predicted AI Video slop, in a way.
- gcanyon 6mo agoThey only look like they're made of meat. And they only look like they're made of meat to you because you know you're made of meat, and they look like you. To them, they're just disguised as "what the creatures on this planet look like," which is obviously (to them) not meat, because they've never seen meat beings. To them, we are obviously not-meat, although how we appear is compatible with being meat. But silicone dyed the correct shade can look like meat. Stone painted the right color can look like meat. And if you say that silicone and stone don't look like meat even when prepared to copy it, bear in mind that we are made of meat and very good at distinguishing it. Different races favor different attributes for distinguishing one person from another, hence why "they all look alike" is somewhat true for pretty much any "them" you care to name. Rocky from Project Hail Mary almost certainly thinks all humans look alike.
- amiga386 6mo agoI like that the bearded one can't help cracking up when he says "the ones you probed": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg&t=285s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg&t=285s
- dreamcompiler 6mo agoI'm a big fan of Tom Noonan (the character in red). He unfortunately passed away a few weeks ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Noonan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Noonan
- antisol 6mo agoOh No! Sad news! I missed hearing about it at the time. I'm also a big fan. He's awesome in a bunch of things, but my favourite is Cain in Robocop 2. Such a great performance. "Jesus had days like this. Hounded and attacked like a criminal. But like him, I don't blame you. They program you, and you do it" "Frank. The Benzedrine's got my teeth wiggling. Cut it... Scopalomine, five mills per"
- aidenn0 6mo agoHow does one get Tom Noonan to play in a film-school movie?
- StumpChunkman 6mo agoAgreed! I love the saxophone riff for the opening/closing song. Also, funny to see Ben Bailey outside of a taxi cab.
- joezydeco 6mo agoIt's a good visualization but they skipped the punchline, which was the entire purpose of the story.
- hn_throwaway_99 6mo agoYeah, I found this was definitely a case of "the book was much better than the movie", especially odd since most of the dialog was word-for-word, yet they skipped over the small parts that gave the story its lesson and relatability. Like the whole "officially or unofficially" part is one of my favorite parts of the original story, as it makes it seem like these intergalactic beings have to deal with the same concerns as Bob in corporate HR. I think it highlights why the original text was uniquely brilliant and why it makes it reliably makes it to the top of HN every year or so.
- joezydeco 6mo agoWell said, thank you.
- ubermonkey 6mo agoThat's Tom Noonan (who recently passed away) and Ben Bailey; one of the kids in the other booth we see briefly is played by Gbenga Akinnagbe in his first film role, who rose to greater prominence as Chris Partlow on The Wire.
- nilram 6mo agoAlthough there's other's that are a little more true to Bisson's dialog, that's my favorite for the actors, and especially the background music.