Monday, June 22, 2009

Knowing - Too Stupid to Save

I saw that Nicholas Cage movie Knowing last night. It was OK. Not fabulous but ok. It's not as good as Alex Proyas' other movies (The Crow, Dark City, I, Robot) but enjoyable enough I suppose. Anyway, it brought up a few things that bother me. The sad part of the message of the movie is that we need benevolent aliens to save our retarded asses from extinction. Why is this sad? BECAUSE WE'VE HAD THE FUCKING TECHNOLOGY TO SAVE OURSELVES FOR THE LAST 40 FUCKING YEARS!!! Yeah, we are a space-faring species. Or we would be if we weren't busy spending billions of dollars on stupid wars and squabbling over limited resources. In space there is literally, unlimited resources. If instead of these oil companies spending billions of dollars on increasingly complex and expensive ways to get a limited, polluting and inefficient resource on our planet, they could have spent billions on a space infrastructure and get ALL THE FUEL AND ENERGY WE WILL EVER NEED from the planets and moons in our solar system. We could have established colonies on the Moon back in the 1970's. However, the U.S. government thought the money would be put to better use fighting a pointless war in Vietnam and more nukes in the 80's. There were designs on the drawing boards to build self-sustaining massive space habitats. Instead we got Skylab and the International Space Station. Both utterly useless bits of junk floating around with no real purpose. We COULD have been on Mars by now. But instead, we sent a couple of RC cars. If we had colonies on Mars, in the Asteroid Belt and in orbit around Saturn, We could just be like "thanks for the offer weird aliens that like to stalk children but we can handle this ourselves, bye."

Speaking of the aliens, if I was them and took a look at our species I'd be like, "wait a second - why aren't these idiots doing anything to save themselves? They have the technology to do it. Sure, their spaceships aren't as awesome as ours but they work. Why should we save them if they make zero effort to save themselves? They are too stupid to bother with."

So yeah, that's the message of the movie, we are too stupid to save ourselves, despite having the ability to. I guess it's not too far off from the message of my song cycle The Fall of Man but, idk, I guess it's just a bit too depressing when seeing it from another viewpoint. Actually no, what really bothers me about the film's position is "we are fucked and only an outside force (God, angles, aliens) can save us. Which I think is bullshit. We CAN save ourselves, we are just too caught up in our petty bullshit to see the big picture. The Fall of Man is a WARNING. Knowing's position is one of acquiescence, which is just lame.

1 comment:

  1. I agree with what you post. The reason about the energy issues is because of money - pure and simple. We and most likely we already have; abundant source of different and new energy is again money. The powers to be that are invested in the carbon based fuel energy would lose all their money and power - control over you and I.
    As for us having space ships; not good enough; we would have to have star travel to get away from that solar super flare. The only way would be a massive "generation" ship(s).. Powered by a "new" Energy source.
    The aliens; what really made this movie stupid is it inferr's that Humanity is an experiment of these aliens and they decided that the only one's who can hear their message gets saved; the children; meaning what? Innocence??
    The messages showing all those deasters indicated these aliens have the ability to travel in time - no free will.
    They have the ability to either stop of divert this super flare; but decided humankind is too screwed up to be saved except for the "Children"
    In the ending the bunnies imply another "Noah" type event; two by two. Implying the earth went through this before - the great flood caused by God - "Aliens"? As for the tree as implied "Tree of Life"; most likely taking from the Bible the "tree of knowledge" - so here we go again.
    Another ending of the movie might have gone like this: over the same period of time Humankind became aware they are not alone in this universe and we are being watched. Allot of the wars on this planet is due to religeon - look what is going on now. Wars are also caused by the need of resources by one country and taking it from another. The "Banks" profiting from "Wars" in lending money to the countries fighting to buy weapons and lending money to companies to manufacturer weapons and more on and on and on.
    How about the ending where a nuclear war breaks out; the weapons are stopped in mid detonation; reversed - hey we are talking about alien super beings here and humankind sees the nations responsible for that "spanked" by these aliens. Meaning the leaders of those countries are held to pay for what they did. The final message would be from the aliens - we are watching you; you are our children - GROW UP.... There is a wonderous world out here for you to see..
    But again this is a movie and the suggested ending makes about the same sense as the movie's original; but it would have a better message.

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