Moontrap Review

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The Romulan Republic
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Re: Moontrap Review

Post by The Romulan Republic »

Oh yeah.

It would be great if they made this early civilization African (or Middle Eastern, which as I recall is where the first known civilizations appeared). Would certainly be more original, in any case.

Plus it means that Chekov's love interest in the film would become an interracial relationship, and I tend to support interracial relationships in media, for the sake of undermining/ticking off the white nationalists. :D
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Re: Moontrap Review

Post by The Romulan Republic »

Agreed.

It would be interesting, and more original, and more historically plausible, if the ancient civilization were African (or Middle Eastern, since that's where the first major civilizations historically seem to have originated).

Which would also turn the film's romance plot into an interracial relationship, and nothing more directly counters (and terrifies) white nationalists than interracial relationships. :D
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Re: Moontrap Review

Post by TGLS »

The Romulan Republic wrote:Agreed.

It would be interesting, and more original, and more historically plausible, if the ancient civilization were African (or Middle Eastern, since that's where the first major civilizations historically seem to have originated).

Which would also turn the film's romance plot into an interracial relationship, and nothing more directly counters (and terrifies) white nationalists than interracial relationships. :D
Did you mean to edit or something?
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Re: Moontrap Review

Post by J!! »

well, who says they'd have to be homo-sapiens sapiens? why not homo-sapiens neanderthalensis?
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Re: Moontrap Review

Post by The Romulan Republic »

TGLS wrote:
The Romulan Republic wrote:Agreed.

It would be interesting, and more original, and more historically plausible, if the ancient civilization were African (or Middle Eastern, since that's where the first major civilizations historically seem to have originated).

Which would also turn the film's romance plot into an interracial relationship, and nothing more directly counters (and terrifies) white nationalists than interracial relationships. :D
Did you mean to edit or something?
No.

I think what happened is that I tried to post once, and lost my internet connection. When I came back, I didn't see my post (since it had gone over onto the next page), and erroneously assumed that the post had not gone through, so rewrote it.

Just an improbable fluke. My apologies.
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Re: Moontrap Review

Post by Madner Kami »

Fuzzy Necromancer wrote:Also, just...I find it dubious that this super-advanced pre-historic civilization would be white, when most of the human population were still pretty concentrated in Africa way back when.
That depends on what you consider "human population". In the broader sense, there are plenty of non-brown people around for a lot of the time. For example, there's quite a stretch of time, where there were more H.Neanderthalensis around, than H.Sapiens.

As for ancient civilizations that flew into the heavens. Just no. It's an interesting thought and thought-play, but it's just not possible. The lack of infrastructure and broader governmental organization makes it impossible and if such things existed, we would have had found proof by now. There may be the odd "advanced" civilization around here or there, not yet known and burried on the ocean floor or underneath tons of dirt, but nothing that is more advanced than a stone-age city-state that did farming way before everyone else did. Any sort of higher metallurgy and technology leaves behind some quite obvious traces, both in terms of items, obvious infrastructure or human settlements. You see, technology is not what most games make you think it is. There's, to a degree, a certain linearity in techological development. You simply can not invent a spaceflight-capable rocket, before you figured out how to make certain unnatural metals. Without steel, you are not going to be able to build facilities that can fabricate aluminium for example. Without being able to refine iron, you are not going to create steel. You are not going to mine iron without having at least bronze tools already (though sub-saharan Africa needs to be closer inspected in that regard, as they somehow managed to skip the bronze-age and worked iron by 3k BCE somehow) and so on and on. All this would leave obvious traces in the ground and all this can not be faciilitated by a simple city-state. There need to be trade-lanes to get access to rare materials. Tin for example, to create bronze, doesn't exactly lay around everywhere. There's a reason the big bronze-age civlizations all sprouted up in the eastern mediterrenean. Mycene, Egypt, the Minoans and the Hittites, had access to tin. Everyone else in the mediterranean did not.
J!! wrote:well, who says they'd have to be homo-sapiens sapiens? why not homo-sapiens neanderthalensis?
Same as above. We would just know, we would see that they could do that. It would be impossible to overlook.
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Re: Moontrap Review

Post by Fuzzy Necromancer »

J!! wrote:well, who says they'd have to be homo-sapiens sapiens? why not homo-sapiens neanderthalensis?
That would require reworking the core mythology though, since the big deal was that the body they found was genuine 100% human. Still, another branch of hominids in space does sound cool.
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Re: Moontrap Review

Post by The Romulan Republic »

The big problem with a "serious" remake, surely, is the absurdity of the alien's plan.

So... they've been here for tens of thousands of years, and they just sit on the Moon waiting for us to come so they can scavenge parts off of us? What the hell happened that crippled them so badly that they could not reach Earth after crossing interstellar space?

One thought I had is that whatshername they find on the Moon was actually sent up their to sabotage them, and did so successfully, but her ship was crippled/destroyed so she couldn't get home and put herself into stasis. Which lets her do something more than be the damsel in distress/token female/love interest, even if its only via backstory.

Also, maybe the stone age space travellers and the aliens had a full nuclear exchange, which crippled both sides- thus explaining why the aliens are stuck on the Moon/in orbit, and why the ancient space travellers' civilization disappeared.
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Re: Moontrap Review

Post by Fuzzy Necromancer »

Well, my thought was we didn't know for sure that the robots WERE alien in origin. There seemed to be at least some possibility that the stone-age astronauts made the robots, which turned against them. Maybe they were first built as part of a lunar terraforming project?
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Re: Moontrap Review

Post by Fuzzy Necromancer »

Another thought, given the whole Trap title, maybe the robots were intended as something like the scientific knowledge probe in Bablyon 5? Something set up just at the periphery of inhabited worlds designed to take the native life forms out of competition if they got enough of a grip to establish regular space travel with their nearest world?
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