In a very special The Monte Hall Effect, Tim and Tola's friend and colleague Shane Malone joins them as guest judge/panelist to help them unravel the vast mysteries of Roland Emmerich's 2022 box office bomb "Moonfall" and to discuss a new TMHE feature called 'Splainin' Science, the University of Minnesota vs University of Colorado, the brilliant XKCD description of the Saturn V using only the thousand most common words in the English language, the Roche Limit, rigging Twitter polls for fun and profit, bad Dungeon Masters in Dungeons and Dragons, the descent and fall of Roland Emmerich, COVID screwing up Hollywood, turning three well thought out movies into one dumpster fire, "2012" being available right now somewhere on basic cable, feeling bad for the actors in "Cats", the genius of Emmerich's 2019 WWII film "Midway", Stanley Tucci dodging a bullet, wasting Donald Sutherland, realizing the moment when you know a film is going to be a garbage fire, how NASA Mission Operations work, we once again question the effectivity of Hollywood's science consultants, how airlocks don't work, how inertia doesn't work, how Shuttle thrusters don't work, turning a hero into a villain, the amazing Captain Al Haynes from the 1989 United Airlines Flight 232 that made that famous emergency landing in Sioux City, Iowa, this new thing called solar weather, showing things rather than just telling the audience that they happened, Tim trying to describe the film, blaming some of this film's stink of sad on COVID filming constraints, Emmerich's cannibalizing his film "2012", the genius of Michael Peña, NASA not being one monolithic tightly structured organization but rather 19,000 people stretched out over more than a dozen independent centers, speculating on lunar orbital mechanics, John Bradley committing as an actor and turning in a compelling performance in the middle of this silly nonsense, missing the opportunity to put your science fiction actors in red shirts, dated nerd love for Elon Musk, Federal contigency planning, Strategic Air Command, using a neuralyzer on the POTUS, Chekhov's muscle car, someone inexplicably slipping a "Shining" reference into the movie, the world's most benign tsunami, attempting to fly museum relics, Concorde G-BOAG's certificate of airworthiness at the Seattle Museum of Flight, ground support equipment and its role in getting a vehicle ready for flight, the spectularly stupid theory that the Moon was manufactured by ancient aliens that some stupid people actually believe, Dyson Spheres vs Ringworlds, the role of tides in the rise of terrestrial life, numerology, the Theia Impact theory of lunar formation, thermal implications of the Chicxulub impact, Shane gets to use a Legends of Zelda reference, first watching and then outrunning a collosal tidal wave, surfing a tidal wave in your vehicle filled with cryogens, the fragility of airplanes and spacecraft, how privacy laws prevent Americans from understanding the real world impacts of violence, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Fuzz Aldrin as a great name for a cat, how Millenials don't read paper newspapers, side quests, the impossibility of having the token Chinese character in a Chinese-government-financed film be LGBTQ, things getting magically fixed when the DM realizes they screwed up, glaring inconsistencies on the behavior of the Big Bad in the crater tunnel, an entire scene lifted from Cameron's "The Abyss", The Aliens Are Us!, all these characters (except John Bradley) being just plot devices not recognizable characters, simplistic moral tests, Fred Saberhagen's "Berserker" series, Star Trek's Cornucopia of Doom, taxonomy of solutions to Fermi's Paradox, hiding out from the xenophobes, Steven Universe, a short discussion of Earth's possible AI future, the Kaspersky Labs product placement moment, Shane recommends "Crier's War" by Nina Verela, an entire scene lifted from Peter Hyams' underrated "2010", the missed opportunity to incorporate the always awesome Buzz Aldrin, denouement-free films, Chinese piety, Saturday Afternoon Basic Cable Immortality, and blaming Marvel and DC when your latest blockbuster fizzles out at the box office. Final score: Science 19%, Fiction 36%, and Film 45%.
Shane can be found at shaney_plays on Twitch and shaneyplays2839 on Youtube.
Next up for Tim and Tola: Daniel Espinoza's 2017 Science Fiction Horror film "Life"!