All the Things Wrong with Indiana Jones 4

Normally I write about a movie after I see the whole thing, but this one is so terrible it deserves live blogging. Surprisingly, the whole alien subtext isn't the most offensive part.

1. NUKE THE FRIDGE - hah!
2. Cate Blanchett's accent - all over the place, totally did British in a few spots, flat-out American in others. I thought this woman was supposed to be a good actress?
3. The magnetic box - for a box so magnetic that it draws gunpower from across the room, its pull on nearer objects is completely inconsistent. For example, it pulls the crowbars in only AFTER they are used to open the wooden case (held together, presumably, by metal nails).
4. Shia LaBeouf's silly "Eric von Zipper" hat - we're supposed to believe this joker is bad ass?
5. The fact that Indiana Jones is both a tenured professor and decorated spy - it wasn't even convincing when Sidney Bristow was a literature grad student cum spy in Alias, so I sure as hell don't buy that an adventuring archaeologist can balance the publish or perish pressures of academia with fighting the Cold War.
6. The motorcycle chase scene - not just the improbability of the high-speed skirmish, which I'll allow is characteristic of the Indiana Jones fantasy world. After the chase, Indiana Jones GOES BACK TO HIS OWN HOME to research the crystal skull document - and the KGBs don't think to look for him there.
7. 3 times it drops - the gang survives three Amazonian waterfalls without a scratch, or so much as a lost fedora.
8. The vacuum UFO - it sucks up the double-agent guy with incredible velocity. Meanwhile, Jones standing 6 feet away, and holding the double agent by a whip, it totally suction-free.
9. I take back my first observation. The alien subtext wasn't so bad, but the alien text-text was insane.

All in all, not as bad as I thought it would be.

How the Earth Was Made

It weighs on my mind, this History Channel documentary. Scientists say that in 2 billion years, Earth will become a wasteland. It will have consumed all the energy in its liquid hot magma, causing the plates to stop moving and ending all life-generative cycles. No more fluffy clouds, blue skies, blue oceans, green life. Global warming, the coming ice age(s), the colliding of the continents into Pangea Ultima, and the subsequent mass extinctions are all the least of our concerns. It's inevitable that Earth will become as dead as Mars.

It makes me sad to think that life will not go on forever, and as distant as that day is, it makes me not want to sweat the small stuff. Suddenly all this economy junk, and job searching, seems so trivial; how many millions of us are there who aren't really living, but just pushing papers in this made-up system that's basically there to delegate our plentiful resources (ie food) - and most of all, to create false desires? It's not that I wasn't aware of our robotic existences before. It's just that being robotic seemed so much less objectionable when you can dream that there is something better to come. The reward doesn't even have to be personal - in fact, it almost surely won't be personal because the essential sacrifice of the robotic life is that you're sucking out your youth for some task you hate, until you're 65 and practically too old to enjoy anything you built up for yourself...

No, the idea of the reward is this vague notion that the world is bigger than you, and will somehow be enriched by you in a lasting way. The most palpable version of this hope is the expectation we put on our children that they will be better and happier than us, and for this hope plenty of parents are willing to sacrifice plenty of their own happiness. I used to think it was silly, irrational, narcissistic, and slightly unjust to put this hope on a whole other class of self-aware human beings. The desire to leave a part of you behind through these younger people who have lives and individuality of their own - it's selfish and stubborn.

But now that it's been suggested to me that all traces of us will be obliterated on one certain day, I suddenly understand that hope. It has nothing to do with leaving a part of me behind, personally; all my descendants will probably be long dead (in the mass extinctions of an ice age) and my own body will probably be specks of particles floating in space. Nevertheless, I HAVE to believe that there is permanence in the world, that all the beautiful things of the world and all the things I love will be this way forever. Even if everything dies except the hardiest bacteria, I have to believe that the oceans will still be there, so that something else recognizable (as we might be recognizable to the extinct dinosaurs) can make a comeback.

So I decided that I'm going to stop believing in time. Everything is simultaneous, and therefore unexpired. Time is just a construct, a convenience, like a number divided by zero, or any negative number. Dinosaurs are a figment of our imaginations, perhaps an aberration in the soil. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are made up, semi-real figures, like the way Agamemnon was this made up, semi-real king of kings for the dark age Greeks.

I also came up with this theory that because everything is simultaneous in a big-picture sense, that everything must be cyclical to our micro-observation. Specifically, I thought about the Big Bang theory and decided it's a statistical improbability. How could this big collision and explosion of particles happen only once? Is there anything else in this world that happens only once? Assuming that there was only one Big Bang, how can we explain where all the matter came from, or why they started to collide? What the heck was there before the Big Bang?

The better explanation - based on no scientific knowledge whatsoever - is that there is an infinite cycle of continuous Big Bangs. The matter shoots out away from the center until their energies stabilize and start forming orbits and solar systems. Stars use up their energy and become black holes - which we know exert tremendous gravitational pull. Matter gets condensed once again into these fields of gravity until this gravity becomes one central, enormous force that overcomes all the centripetal energy of the original explosion. The condensing of matter once again generates collisions and heat and produces another Big Bang.

Parallel universes exist, except that they are sequential (if you believe in this construct of time). Somewhere, in another one of the Big Bangs, it is statistically certain that another solar system formed much like ours, and that there was another planet very similar to Earth. Given the infinite number of these do-overs, it is also fairly probable that there was another girl out there named Rex who saw a documentary (by the Discovery Channel, perhaps) that prompted her to write a blog-like post nearly identical to this one. This Rex may have rejected time, too, but on the rationale that we exist in God in simultaneity, and not in infinite cycles. This Rex may have reached the same conclusion that we only have love to define ourselves, but she may have decided to become a mystic or an artist rather than a lawyer and comic.