Rick's b.log - entry 2012/12/12

Birthday card

Thanks Ewen! ☺

The world will end... maybe...

At the end of this week, my birthday.

The following week (more or less), Jesus' birthday. Or for those who are not of Christian persuasion, an excuse to eat a lot of chocolate (wait - what - we need an excuse!?). Then the week after, the Mayan calendar suffers an overflow condition and the world ends.
Just like that.

I guess it's going to be a busy month. I gotta prepare for the big end. Get in some drinks, some of those little wooden parasol things and straws, lots of SD cards for photos. Of course, it's a bit fail to take photos of the end of the world, but if the SD card survives and floats through space for several eternities before being found by explorers, they can decode the images and say "wow, weren't these funny looking creatures?" while looking at pictures of us.

Fax

Zombies

Now, as a movie critic I can say the CERN setting is rather a gimmick, some of the acting is iffy, the special effects are comical, the entire beginning looks overexposed, and the majority of the story isn't particularly original (people trapped in a confined place, zombies, oh-crap - it reminded me a fair bit of Chernobyl Diaries). However, even though we're on familiar ground, this movie had something that is so hard to do and so easy to get wrong. It had atmosphere. You could feel the danger lurking in the shadows.
Now understand that the entire film, some hour and a quarter, was put together with a budget of a couple of thousand quid (if IMDb is to be believed). Then it turns into something really incredible. This is like the student film to rival all others. A complete accomplished film with reasonably good editing, remarkably few continuity errors, soundtrack, everything... and all better than a disturbing number of low budget films. I could name a dozen (but I'll spare the guilty) all of which had bigger budgets, all of which sucked harder. Well, let me point to "Snakes On A Train" (no, Train, not Plane, this isn't the Samuel L. Jackson one) which was people stuck in a confined space with snakes. Probably a budget a hundred times larger (if not more) and frankly it sucks a hundred times harder.
I mean, if this is what these guys can come up with on a £2K budget and some time and effort - damn, throw a real budget at them. Let's see how they roll when their imaginations aren't held back too much by budget. Oh, and let's see more of Zoë Hatherell, if this was her first production, she was good.

But... will we see more from Luke Thompson? He's a boffin, his website (of sorts) says stuff like "The Large Hadron electron Collider is a new project to utilise the LHC in a novel way. Given the huge energies and luminosities available, it is proposed to collide one LHC beam with a relatively low-energy electron beam, to yield TeV-scale e-p and e-A collisions." (I think a translation for lay people might be along the lines of "zap! zap! zap! bang! whoo-hoo!" - any physicists care to translate that into plain English? comments form below)
Anyway, I think Luke has bigger fish to fry than making movies. I hope, however, he gets time and inclination to do some more. It would be so lovely to have a sci-fi film with a solid science grounding, instead of the usual handwaved nonsense - "Polar Storm", I'm looking at you. Stop sniggering at the back "MegaCyclone" (or should that be "Space Twister"?), I'm looking at you too - in fact most SyFy original movies have such a poor grasp of really basic science that my jaw hits the floor, bounces, and holes the ceiling.

Anyway - it's a selection of HD downloads/torrents but you can also pull it from YouTube if a 19GiB 1080p release is a little too heavy for your mobile phone. ☺
Go on, you know you wanna...

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Rob, 14th December 2012, 19:33

Many Happy Returns.  (Mine soon too!)  Off to check out the zombie film ... we like zombies here ..

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