Skip to main content

Battleship

Last night Charlotte and I took Jude (8) to see Battleship. Although Jude enjoyed it immensely, we thought it was rubbish! Hollywood are making the same alien invasion movies over and over again. The best thing about this film was that AC/DC featured twice in the sound track.

There are a few positive things I can say about it. There was a lot of Peter F. Hamilton style sci-fi with the suits the aliens wear and the ships they fly. The film was much better than the remake of War of the Worlds that it was clearly heavily influenced by. Rihanna’s character was really strong and very convincing. Liam Neeson was, as usual, excellent, but if I were him I would be disappointed and slightly embarrassed with the rest of the film. Robroy it wasn’t.

That’s where the positives end. There was cliche after cliche, the worst being two of the main characters coming to blows near the start of the film and then saving the world together and telling each other what an honour it was at the end. There was a clear Battlestar Galactica influence with the battleship that had been turned into a museum saving the day towards the end. There was even a fighter pilot with the callsign “Boomer”. All a bit obvious really. And the idea of old sailors sailing the battleship into battle at that end and getting an old steam ship started in no time at all was just too far fetched.

Save your money.

Comments

  1. Replies
    1. The call sign "Boomer" was also in reference to the fighter pilot was shown to be Australian. Boomer - short for Boomerang - would also be a quip at the Australian government for the lack of support for the movies original intended production site.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv

Bloodstock 2009

This year was one of the best Bloodstock s ever, which surprised me as the line up didn't look too strong. I haven't come away with a list of bands I want to buy all the albums of, but I did enjoy a lot of the performances. Insomnium[6] sound a lot like Swallow the Sun and Paradise Lost. They put on a very good show. I find a lot of old thrash bands quite boring, but Sodom[5] were quite good. They could have done with a second guitarist and the bass broke in the first song and it seemed to take ages to get it fixed. Saxon[8] gave us some some classic traditional heavy metal. Solid, as expected. The best bit was, following the guitarist standing on a monitor, Biff Bifford ripped off the sign saying "DO NOT STAND" and showed it to the audience. Once their sound was sorted, Arch Enemy[10] stole the show. They turned out not only to be the best band of the day, but of the festival, but then that's what you'd expect from Arch Enemy. Carcass[4] were very disappoin

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th