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The second movie that my group watched for the Film Project was Planet of the Apes. I had also seen this movie before but watching it again I noticed more things. The long drawn out scenes reminded me of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The apes also reminded me of this movie. In the movie, four astronauts are sent to 
a space mission that will last a few thousand years. On the voyage, one astronaut dies. When I saw this movie as a kid, the image of her laying there always scared me. The three remaining astronauts land on a planet that does not have much on it. They search all over for life. They soon find a group of primitive humans, although none of them can speak. Apes on horseback come and hunt the humans. One of the astronauts is killed and the other two are captured. In this parallel universe, the humans are the animals and the apes are human-like. Somehow, all of the apes speak English. Taylor is helped by a woman scientist, Zira. Taylor sees that the other astronaut had a lobotomy and he says his famous line "you damn dirt apes"! Zira and her fiance take Taylor and the woman he is with to 'the forbidden city' to try and find a way back home. Taylor finds that the world he is on is, in fact, Earth and he sees the Statue of Liberty and then the movie ends.
For our science fiction film project, the first movie that our group watched was I Am Legend. I saw this movie when it first came out in theaters a
nd I really liked it. When I watched it again recently I noticed more things then the last time I watched it. I thought that this movie was really scary because it is something that could happen at one point. With all of the news coverage on the new H1N1 vaccinations, I cant help but be reminded of I Am Legend. In the movie, the cure for cancer causes a new virus. The virus transforms people into zombie-vampire creatures called Darkseekers and becomes airborne. Robert Neville is the only man living in New York who is not infected because he is immune. Throughout the movie he looks for a cure by testing on lab rats and occasionally infected humans that he captures. He thought that he was the only person in the world who was not infected but a woman and boy come to him. The woman, Anna, tells him about a colony of people who are not infected. Robert does not believe her. Later, the infected people follow Anna, Robert, and Ethan back to the house. They attacked the house and Robert Neville realized at the last minute what the cure was. He gave the cure to Anna and sacrificed himself to save them. At the end of the movie, Anna and Ethan find the colonly and five them the cure, the immune blood.
I thought that Carl Sagan's movie Contact was good. This movie reminded me of X-Files because of the government trying to cover up what really happened in the end. The government tried to make Ellie Arroway seem crazy to cover up the fact that she may have actually visited aliens since there was 18 hours of video footage. The end of the movie als
o reminded me of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In both movies, there were lots of lights flashing and they both went through a worm hole. Also in both movies, I didn't really understand what was going on in the end. I did not understand why the aliens 'downloaded her memories' and showed her the illusion of her father and a beach. I liked that at the end of the movie, the audience is left to decide what they think actually happened. If I were to make this movie, I would choose different actors. I couldn't really take Matthew McConaughey seriously.
I really enjoyed the book that we read in class, Ender's Game. In the second half of the book, Ender was given his own army, Dragon Army. His army was undefeated and the school administrators kept changing the rules to make it harder for Ender, but he always found a way. Ender got in a fight with Bonzo and ended up killing him. We later found out that he also killed Stiltson. Not long after this, the military strategists make Ender go to Command School. Before he goes, he stays on earth for a while. While on earth, Graff makes Valentine go to talk to him. At Command School, Ender has to use a 'stimulator' for battle practice. When the stimulator was first introuduced, I thought that it was actually real. As I read furter I saw that I was correct. Ender killed all of 
the buggers and ended the war. I did not understand why he went into a coma-like state after this. He had killed all of the buggers, but he saved humanity. Peter's plan worked in the end, he had total world domination. Valentine left earth to help start a colony and she convinced Ender to go too. On the colony, Ender found the last bugger queen. This was important because he felt so bad about killing all of them. He heald in his hands the last hope for them. Ender knew that the buggers had changed so he spent the rest of his life trying to find somewhere that they can live in peace. While reading the first half of this book, I thought that it would be really fun to have fake warfare in the zero-gravity rooms. Although, I would not like to have lived like Ender.
I thought these were cool.
In class we read Ray Bradbury's short story, A Sound of Thunder. This story used the idea of the Butterfly Effect, which correlates to Ian Malcolm and the Chaos Theory in Jurassic Park. The Butterfly Effect is the idea of cause and effect. If a butterfly flaps its wings in one place, there could be a rainstorm in another. If a hunter goes to the past and touches anything, it
could completely change the future. In this case, Eckels is taken on a 'hunting safari' to the past which is carefully planned out by the hunting guides. They only kill animals that would have died so that they do not change the future. Eckels is warned of this but still goes off of the path. He is forced to go retreive the bullets from the dinosaur because they can also cause changes in the future. When they return to the future, everything is spelled differently and the facist candidate has won the presidential election. When Eckels went off of the path, he stepped on a butterfly which brings a literal sence to the Butterfly Effect in the story, since the butterfly could not flap its wings, certain events could not happen in the future. We also watched The Simpsons episode, Time and Punishment in class which is similar to the short story we read. Homer travels back in time and keeps touching things so every time he goes back to the future, there is a big change.
I found the X-Files movie we watched in class interesting. In the movie two FBI agents, Mulder and Scully, are trying to figure out what the government is trying to cover up. The beginning of the movie took place thousands of years ago when someone was killed in a cave in Texas by an alien. This happened again when a kid fell into the cave thousands of years later. The alien blood went beneath his skin and crawls up towards his head and his eyes turned black. This is an important element of science fiction that we have seen a lot. The most prominent work that we saw that used eyes as a symbol was 2001: A Space
Odyssey because it is both human and alien. In the movie Mulder found a bomb in a building in Texas after receiving a tip of a terrorist attack in the area. While he and Scully evacuate the building, another agent is supposed to disarm it but does not because the bomb was meant to cover up what the government did about the boy and a few firemen who experienced the same fate as the kid. Mulder and Scully have to go to a hearing because the government was trying to blame them for the death of the boy and firemen to cover up what really happened when they were not informed that there was anyone else in the building. Mulder and Scully investigate this and find that the people left in the building had died before the acual explosion. Soon after this, I thought the movie started to get interesting. They had found that the virus was being trasmitted through bees and Scully was infected. She was being heald in Antartica where there were many other people with the alien living and growing inside of them. Mulder and Scully got out of there and the entire 'alien ship' took off and left. The last part was interesting because Scully is skeptical throughout the movie and she is in such a weakened state that she cannot look up to see the space ship.
