Skip to main content

Battleship

By
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. Phil Nash14 April 2012 at 14:25

    You sunk my battleship

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonymous1 October 2012 at 13:08

      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

By
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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
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...
22 comments
Read more

RESTful Behaviour Guide

By
I’ve used a lot of existing Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs and have created several of my own. I see a lot of inconsistency, not just between REST APIs but often within a single REST API. I think most developers understand, at a high level, what a REST API is for and how it should work, but lack a detailed understanding. I think the first thing they forget to consider is that REST APIs allow you to identify and manipulate resources on the web. Here I want to look briefly at what a REST API is and offer some advice on how to structure one, how it should behave and what should be considered when building it. I know this isn’t emacs vs vi, but it can be quite contentious. So, as  Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean said, this “...is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.” Resources & Identifiers In their book, Rest in Practice - Hypermedia and Systems Architecture (‎ISBN: 978-0596805821), Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson describe resour...
1 comment
Read more