On Fri, 18 May 2018 20:40:19 -0700 (PDT), Johnny1A
<
johnny1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Friday, May 18, 2018 at 12:28:42 PM UTC-5, Jerry Brown wrote:
>> On Thu, 17 May 2018 19:30:17 -0700 (PDT), Johnny1A
<snip>
>> >
>> >My impression of the movie was that star flight was still relatively new, they've had it for a few decades, but no more. They've got FTL communications, too, but it's really clumsy and difficult to use, they have to dismantle part of their drive to construct the communicator, and it takes a lot of the energy from the ship's power plant to run it. It all looks like a relatively new tech.
>>
>> It's been a while, but I thought that the jury-rigging was necessary
>> because of the Id creature sabotaging the ship in its earlier, less
>> lethal, visit.
>
>No, not exactly.
>
>Captain Adams (Nielsen's character) was sent to Altair IV with his ship to see what had happened to a previous ship, the _Bellerophon_, that had gone out there ~20 years earlier and nothing had been heard since.
>
>It takes about a year to get from Sol to Altair in the movie.
>
>Captain Adams discovers some of the weirdness going on on A4, and decides that he needs to get clarifying orders from home. We're informed that they can send instantaneous (or close enough) messages, but to do so they have to build at FTL communicator, apparently it's too big and expensive and power-hungry to be standard equipment. To build it they'll have to take some components out of the ship's drive, and hook the whole thing up to the ship's power plant to run it.
>
>It's a few days work for the crew, a major project, but once they have it running Adams can get instructions from the home government. But the id-creature sabotages the effort because Morbius subconsciously doesn't want interference from home.
>
>The id-monster does sabotage the project, but even without interference they would still have had to dismantle part of the drive and go through all the trouble to build the device.
I rewatched it yesterday and, as well as confirming your correction
above, was pleased that it still stands up well against the non-stop
action which comprises the majority of today's SF films.
One question that occurred to me was why no-one seems to have
considered purchasing the rights to FP's United Planets setup (perhaps
with less Brylcreme) in order to make their own space
exploration/adventure series without the fear of Paramount coming
after them.
And I strongly suspect the Enterprise's registration number being the
time that the C57D arrives in the Altair system to be what tvtropes
terms a "shout-out".