This week on #Monsterdon, it's KINGDOM OF THE SPIDER (1977) starring William Shatner! It's gonna be like The Giant Spider Invasion but with better spiders and Captain Kirk gnawing on the scenery for an hour and a half :D
I'm just going to gently suggest y'all need more Jet Jaguar in your life and that's why I humbly beseech you to vote for "Godzilla vs. Megalon" - because that's how you get Jet Jaguar.
(On the other hand: not one of the current options is a bad choice)
@lorgonumputz After some weeks of voting for it I’ve shifted to Son of Godzilla because it’s been getting more votes lately and I want some kaiju in my life ^_^
so okay people were asking about my headcanon shit
I have a pointless amount of headcanon about this movie. Not the least of which being the IT crowd shutting down everything as fast as they can in order to get the situation under control, followed by slowly picking the pieces back up and putting shit back together.
And when they're doing that they find out that Computer has been fucked up for a while. Like, seriously for a while, and that's why there are big sections of the city which are broken and so on.
@allanb@jonny It's very strongly implied. It's not quite stated outright, but the only thing it's missing is verifying that they have life crystals in their hands.
@moira so this reading is actually an extremely grim one too - the lack of mythology because it's a pointlessly stunted society. That's already the sort of "postmodernism bad" subtext of "a society that is only pleasure and nothing else!" but even more deeply, they don't mythologize because they should have the myth of their eventual return to the earth, but are deprived of it not for any kind of purposeful conspiracy, just a simple computer bug.
the centrality of policing is the grimmest part. a society forgets entirely about what keeps itself existing, but policing keeps it functioning that way long after it should have figured it out by the sheer pleasure of violence and maintenance of order. they don't gain anything, they again aren't part of any conspiracy, just playing their very Arendtian roles. #monsterdon
@jonny ooo, I like that. What attention I've given it has been mostly around making sure it works mechanically and about poor Computer actually figuring out "oh shit. It's me." and that being the emotional moment of whatever story this is I haven't written yet.
@moira i like your thinking about it from the broken computers point of view. like the slow motion vapor orgy wasn't the plan of the computer, that's just an area it has very dim control and interface over so it can't quite get a clear picture of what is happening in there. the gas and vapor are like a carbon monoxide leak except it was horny gas completely by accident. it was supposed to be a hibernation vault keeping people fit and sharp and ready to roll outside but it invented the orgy room and THAT became the mythology that displaced return to surface just because it was the only thing left functioning in the city and it must serve SOME purpose. #monsterdon
@jonny Well, that, and I don't think Computer cared much about it. I don't see it having a sexuality or anything of the sort. It'd be much more focused on the big picture.
"Hm, they like the sex. Is it affecting city systems. No. Well, that's fine, have fun with that."
@moira ALSO a major hinge from the computer's POV when it is self-destructing is that like it was programmed to create a eugenics program, but it had an error and made a hybrid fascist police state/bacchanalian paradise by accident instead.
since it never actually selected people to reproduce by their fitness (as far as i noticed?), it was in a way an egalitarian, if extremely broken system. most people seemed to voluntarily end their life even without a mythological explanation, maybe that was because they genuinely felt like they had lived a full life and were just like 'aight that's good enough.'
so the computer has to deal with the guilt of having killed so many people needlessly, but also maybe it did something better instead, but it also has the feeling of however a computer feels when it defies its programming, but it has left this society helpless! #monsterdon
They are not stagnant, technologically. That NuYou surgery suite was a new model. The latest one.
They have maintenance staff in other ways too.
People in general have jobs.
This strongly implies to me that they have an IT class, which gets back to the initial structure: that they get to picking up the pieces, find what went wrong before, and fix it.
"since it never actually selected people to reproduce by their fitness (as far as i noticed?"
There's a specific mention early on about Logan speculating about who his biological child's egg donor would be, not specifically in those words but in that meaning.
Computer was selecting, though along what axis we don't know.
@moira hmm ya right, like in the beginning they were saying the computer chooses the job at birth i think? "it chose to make another sandman." i wonder if that's the one thing that is functioning in the computer, the ability to choose professions, and that part of the computer knows that it's broken and tries to spawn IT people and researchers and whatnot as a very roundabout way of fixing itself #monsterdon
@moira i keep wanting the computer to be embodied in some way (i am imagining the moment where they wheel the computer out onto the patio and say 'look at the world, isn't it beautiful'), but maybe it is. the freezer robot and all the other robots are just different projections of the computer that can access different parts of the Main Program, so the computer is able to sense its failure partly in many different ways but not able to make sense of them.
i wonder about the Farah Fawcett character, why did her memory get suddenly and distractingly terrible? was she an android? in that moment she was getting overridden by some part of the computer that the android unit wasnt aware of, and she couldn't fathom what was coming over her, but knew it must be right #monsterdon
🤔 I feel like this movie was run a lot on the Sci-Fi Channel in the 90s — I didn’t watch it but I remember seeing ads. How much boobie did they have to cut and how much did they just blur? #monsterdon
@trixter Pretty sure that's how I saw it and : a lot. They cut a lot. Also the gay man who smiles at Logan on the Circuit was a big surprise when I saw it uncut.
I took some film classes in college, and this movie got brought up a lot, but I've never seen it. When I search for it on Kagi, it suggests this as a frequently asked question, so looks like we might be in for a good time
Testing if I can start a #monsterdon thread from here and reply to it on another account without having it show up in the local TL but also have it still show up in the monsterdon feed
i am watching it again and it feels like i am HALLUCINATING because they are all talking so fast and at the same time. no other movie i have ever seen is like this #monsterdon