Not an OR (I'm not interested in observing raindrops) but an MR (movie report). The movie is The Fountain, for which you've all
probably seen
the trailer. The astro relevance is that the gorgeous golden misty environment featured in the trailers is supposed to be the
inside of M42. I knew
I was going to be doing an MR when, early in the movie, you saw a starry sky with Orion recognizable and prominent, and M42 shown as
a golden
blob. It turns out that M42 is (in the movie) an important symbol of death and rebirth in the Mayan culture, and this ties in with
the plot, which I won't go into,
except to say that it's important that the nebula is the site of a dying star whose explosion triggers rebirth. Now, here's the
question: We all know that this is
not an accurate description of what the Orion Nebula is, and that this description is more apt for a PN or SNR. So, should the
moviemakers have picked a different object or
identified the Orion Nebula correctly as a site of star formation? If the latter, I'm not sure they could have told the intended
story. For the former, they
really needed an easy naked-eye object, and there is no such thing among PNs and SNRs. As for the color, everybody who uses a
modest-size scope
knows that the nebula is really green, while everyone who images it in color knows it's red :-) so what's with the golden color in
the movie? I suspect that they
intentionally made it non-nebular to get away from the comfortable, easy associations with Hubble images and make the viewer see it
afresh. Similarly, they
didn't make its shape anything like that of the real thing, though what they did has a beauty all its own.
Anyway, the movie is well worth seeing. The visuals are absolutely spectacular and are not at all like the CGI we've all gotten
used to. The special
effects were not done by CGI at all. The story and acting are pretty good too.
mam
-- What TAC Is About. http://www.observers.org/Join.shtml Webcam, DSLR, CCD Imaging use NorCal AI. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/norcal_ai/ Designing and improving TAC's website. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/tac-ops/ Sub-scribe or Unsub-scribe from TAC http://seds.org/mailman/listinfo/sf-bay-tacReceived on Sun Nov 26 17:52:58 2006