I love that about older films, the pacing tends to open itself to more emotional investment if you’re in the right mood it can be such a refreshing change.
I agree, getting invested in the pacing and the environmental telling can have huge benefits. But I wont lie, I found myself reaching for my phone a few times, room for improvement
Look okay so I have the basic theory behind the film alright?
Eventually the crew of the Enterprise realizes that every planet with intelligent life they’ve ever visited has some kind of bean.
Every star system.
Every galaxy.
Background:
Long before the dawn of humanity (and every other civilization in the known universe), billions of seeding ships full of a variety of gene-modified ruggedized advanced beans were sent out through the cosmos.
Who sent the beans? The last civilization of a distant supercluster, who had known several millennia of intergalactic stability and connection (over thousands of galaxies, countless people). But in the last few centuries they had suffered a horrible war with something invading from the deep black. A majority of the galaxies were wiped out within the first few decades, but a distant arm of the supercluster fortified hard and held out. They desperately hoped to overcome it, but they had only succeeding in slowing it.
Witnessing so much annihilation, many knew this was the end of life here. There were attempts to salvage life, many generation ships were sent out but they always prematurely lost connection.
…
But they sent beans.
GOOD beans.
They established life in corners of the universe where life would have otherwise been impossible! They grew in the most fucked up conditions, there were beanstalks in methane oceans and spreading around supervolcanoes.
There were beans on Earth, before there were single-celled organisms. They established the foundation for life.
We’re not here by divine decree.
We’re here, because the aliens sent beans.
(Potential addition/twist: Fungus. Rarely found beyond Earth, almost always seen as a poisonous pest, humans being uniquely similar to fungi becomes an important plot point. Recently there has been a horrble fungal pest on Earth ruining beans in particular, but also attacking many other plants at an increasing and alarming rate. Human and animal fungal infections have gotten far more aggressive. Eventually; Mushroom zombies.)
(Spolier alert: The enemy from the deep black was fungal in nature. It feeds on worlds and builds mycelium networks through fibrils stretching through cold space off anything it can. Solid planets, asteroids, gas giants. Touching them, growing on them, eventually slowing them through a weak but persistent and increasing resistance. Growing like mold, but ever larger, always reaching for the network it moves through. (Only thing it can’t touch are stars, but it can feed from them.) After consuming everything it can reach, it sends out spores and slowly dies as it has sapped all energy from its hosts.)
I like how his reaction to a “crisis of conscience” is to continue to lie to the person, fraudulently take home all this super valuable technology, and then somehow use this bit of immoral bullshit to actually make something decent. It’s like a microcosm of his whole character/career.
After his first game venture failed, Peter Molyneux started a baked bean export business. Commodore International mistakenly offered him ten free Amiga systems . . . .
A couple of months ago there was a period in which there were plenty of posts about beans. The posts and the comments built up the idea that the Lemmy identity was tied to beans. I guess that died down a bit.
Your indignation at someone calling out the beanery of your post is somehow even funnier than the serendipitous inclusion of beans in the post. All around A+, bravo.
I think it's real, just not the way its presented. I think he likely went to Amiga, talked his company up on how important they are in vague ways, and then jumped on whatever they said to promise that "yes, we can do that." That's his MO.
You should’ve seen the articles in gaming magazines about him and his games. B&W and Fable mostly. Always these grandiose claims of whatever new tech was being built in then they’d release and be, well, none of that. Innovative sometimes, sure, but nowhere near what was promised. He was treated like a god and always got massive articles to build up hype. I wish I still had my old Maximum PC collection.
I feel lucky that I played fable games as a kid and never heard of this dude so I just saw the games for what they were, no inkling of any broken promises to taint what were actually good games
The first game was incredible, but I thought the series went the way of the original Jurassic Park trilogy, where each subsequent release in the franchise was worse than the one before.
Fable suffered from the same issues as The Elder Scrolls, with the methodic removal of RPG elements and a general “dumbing down” of game mechanics with each iteration. The 3rd Fable game doesn’t even have an inventory.
I found Fable 2 to be the best of the three. Gameplay systems were the most fun, character options the best, etc. The first one frankly had the major issue of gender locked character. Female protagonist should absolutely have been an option in that game.
molyneux is one of the weirdest names in game development. that boy makes lots of promises about how epic his new game is, and it always feels like the mcdonald’s happy meal toy version of whatever big thing he claimed it was.
Black&White 1/2 are the biggest examples of this. was proclaimed as some huge advancement of ai in games, and it was just “if you pet this giant cow every time it either eats its own poop or throws poop at your villagers, it will eat and throw its poop like crazy, desperate for more validation from you. meanwhile you keep using your giant literal hand of god to pick individual people up and throw them into the ocean because you’re god in this game” and then two hours in you’re bored and stop playing.
I played the hell out of Populous and Populous II back in the day… Including a fair bit of multiplayer too - running a link cable between Amigas in our flat.
I wonder if I’d enjoy an upscaled port today as much as I did then.
Wish they finished the game because it was pretty fun.
Were we playing the same game?? When I played it in 2013 it was a tedious, RSI-inducing cow-clicker with lootboxes and “premium” gems, and according to Steam I played for less than an hour before abandoning it.
This gives me similar vibes to the film “Go”. Came out around the same time and had that girl from Dawson’s Creek in it. Well worth a watch. They don’t make film like them any more.
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