The same is true of sharks, which also have 'denticles', scales that have the same structure as vertebrate teeth.
Being in a kind of nitpicky mood, I did some approximate calculations, based on the apparent height of that thing they're jumping off. By eye, I'd say that it's at least 250 ft (80m) above the water. Martian gravity is around 0.4G, for an acceleration of about 4m/s2. So unless I've got the math totally wrong, Captain Carter and his lady would take about 6 seconds to fall the distance, and would be moving at around 25m/s when he hit. On Earth, you'd only need a fall of about 30m (and 2.5s) to attain that speed.
So it's equivalent to a fall of 100ft, and I'm pretty sure that dropping two people with a combined mass of, say, 120kg (250lb, swords included), onto a wooden boat from that height is going to do some damage to _something_.
For some reason, this sloppiness on the part of the film-makers bothers me much more than the armies of multi-limbed green whatdoyoucallems, the fact that Woola looks like an overstuffed sofa, or the fact that if Dejah had really grown up in 0.4G she'd be about nine feet tall and liable to snap when Captain Carter seized her in his manly embrace. Suspension of disbelief can be very selective.
I've always had trouble with John Carter leaping around all over the place: Burroughs himself seems eventually to have figured out that it was neither probable nor heroically dignified, and quietly dropped it from later stories.
But in the top sample, Carter doesn't even jump _up_, he jumps _down_, from a height of what looks to be about 200 feet. It's not clear to me why Dejah needs to be in his arms for this - since jumping _down_ is presumably as much within her powers as the next Martian - nor how he avoids destroying himself, her, or the boat on landing.
Granted, if you're prepared to swallow a Mars inhabited by six-limbed green dudes with tusks and the seventh Barsoomian ray of propulsion, it might seem petty to complain about the improbability of Captain Carter's celebrated powers of leaping, but it does make suspension of disbelief that little bit harder.
Done. Unfortunately, it comes with the metabolism of a tortoise too. But so long as you're not in a hurry, that's cool.
"They would appear," said Ford doubtfully, "to have turned into a bowl of petunias and a very surprised looking whale ..."
"At an Improbability Factor," cut in Eddie, who hadn't changed a bit, "of eight million seven hundred and sixty-seven thousand one hundred and twenty-eight to one against."
["The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy"]
I was being somewhat flippant and yes, "Altered Carbon" isn't torture porn in the sense of "Saw" or "Hostel" (although I did feel that there was an element of violence-for-the-sake-of-violence in the novel).
The scene in which Kovacs is loaded into the body of a young woman (real? virtual? I can't remember) to be tortured is one that, if rendered properly, would cause the audience to flee screaming for the exits. But I think - as CJA suggested - that it might end up just being more brutality-as-entertainment (i.e. torture porn) in the same way that the rape scene in "Girl with a Dragon Tattoo" ended up being what one reviewer called "rape porn".
I did find "Altered Carbon" a slightly uncomfortable read because of the violence, specifically because I felt that the author used the violence less to enhance his world or move the story along than to hold the reader's attention. It felt more than a little gratuitous and exploitative. In that respect, it was a little like torture porn: the creator shows you something that in the real world would horrify you, but which passes as entertainment in fiction. I'm not drawn to torture porn (no interest in seeing "Saw" or "Hostel"), and - for me - "Altered Carbon" crossed a certain threshold in that direction.
I agree with CJA that there's a danger (hell, call it a likelihood) that a Hollywood director would turn out a movie of the book that was _just_ torture porn, and that there's more to the novel than that. Still, I think that if the film has torture porn aspects, you couldn't claim it was being completely unfaithful to the source text.
In fairness, Hollywood has a lot of experience in making torture porn. If anyone can do justice to that aspect of the novel, it's probably the US film industry. Last time I looked, they were pretty comfortable with stories that involved shooting people and blowing them up, too.
We'll just have to introduce other predators to keep the rodent population down.
I'm starting work on my LOLSnake images now.
If you want more examples of this kind of thing, read up on Ronald Maddison [en.wikipedia.org] Sydney Gottlieb [en.wikipedia.org] and Maralinga [en.wikipedia.org]
Sequels are so last year.
Industry insiders tell me that the latest trend in originality-challenged Hollywood is crossovers. So next year we can look forward to:
"Jurassic Shark" - a theme park owner unwisely attempts to one-up Seaworld by resurrecting extinct super-predator Carcharadon megalodon
"Raiders of the Lost Shark" - it's Shark Week all summer, as Indiana Jones takes on another fishy menace
"Star Trek Wars: The Wrath of Fett" - Boba's spent a long time at the bottom of a sarlacc pit in a galaxy far away: when he finally gets free, he's in a mean mood, and it's up to the crew of the "Enterprise" to stop him from taking his revenge
"Blade - yes, _that_ Blade - Runner" - Wesley Snipes fighting replicant vampires in a gloomily dystopic Los Angeles
"The Bourne Serenity" - Mal and the crew find themselves in serious trouble when a brainwashed CIA assassin is sent to recover River Tam
"District B9" - the aliens from Neil Blomkamp's award-winning film are transferred to an impoverished Parisian suburb, where they demonstrate a surprising aptitude for parkour
"Quantum of Wallis" - Thames Television's "Edward & Mrs Simpson" adapted for the big screen, with Daniel Craig playing an MI5 hitman sent to prevent King Edward VII from marrying American divorcee Wallis Simpson
"Alien vs. Terminator" - the face-off we've all been waiting to see, as Arnie shows those pantywaists Ash and Bishop how a _real_ robot deals with xenomorphs
Yo dawg, I heard you liked sharks ...
What's interesting about this is what it tells us about her future spiritual development. We know she started out Catholic and got into kabbalah in 1997. If she's reached the S's now, then I predict that we'll see her make the switch to Zoroastrianism some time around 2028.
I don't know if it's an "everybody in the world dies" candidate, but at the end of "Alien Resurrection", the protagonists set the USM Auriga on a collision course with Earth. You can play around with the impact calculator [impact.ese.ic.ac.uk] to try to decide what happens when a 4,000m-long spaceship impacts, but if it hits anywhere with a population, there are going to be some significant casualties. (My memory was that it was targeted for the Weyland-Yutani HQ, but perhaps Call managed to steer it away - can anyone confirm?)
Hmm, curious scientists explore mysterious area untouched since dawn of time ... I think I've seen this movie. Maybe more than once. If I remember correctly, this kind of thing never ends well.
If he wanted glowing eyes that let him see in the dark, he should have followed the approved procedure: kill a few people, get sent to a slam where they tell him he'll never see daylight again, dig up a doctor, and pay him 20 menthol Kools to do a surgical shine job on his eyeballs.
Some people just don't know the right way to get things done.
The Big Foreplay.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ... I'm sorry, did I say a long time ago? That is, it seemed like a long time ago, but that was before I went back in time, which I guess makes it an even longer time ago, except that I'm really from the future and ... what? I don't know. My future, your future, Luke Skywalker's future - the future, dammit! Besides, all of this has happened before and ... oh right, no, that was the other franchise. But it's the same deal. Actually, here's the twist. You see, this guy Anakin got into the time machine and travelled back in time to Tatooine before he was born and he was ... well, I guess he was missing Padme. I mean, he's a teenage boy, you know how they are. And this chick looked really familiar, so he ended up making out with her and then ... after he got back, he kept like, looking in the mirror and being all, "No, Anakin, I am your father!" Yeah, I know he ended up using that line later on too. Anyway, this is the bit that's really gonna kill you, you know that second Death Star looked kind of like the first one? That's because it was. They somehow got the whole thing into the time machine and ... yeah, kind of ironic that the rebels blew it up too. You get that a lot with time travel. What? No, of course I'm not making this up. Boba Fett told me, swore it was all true, he'd heard it from some Jedi. Hey, could I get another glass of that blue milk?
"I'm not a lousy kisser, it's this damned lag!"
We already have a device for transforming our inner thoughts into audible sentences. They call it "alcohol".
"I love the smell of Greek fire in the morning ... The smell ... you know, that crude-oil smell ... Smelled like ... victory."
