Now is the frustrating Winter of discontent. There was freezing fog as I set off for the swim after failing to secure a trip to South coast to watch Durham play Sussex at Hove. I was able to get one night for £10 at 5 am in the morning an hour before the official start and I could have gained three nights for a total of £60 but then adding the petrol, the car parking, the match fees and all the rest of the expenditure I realise I was being unrealistic given the state of my finances. It is but one of several bitter pills being swallowed.
I seem to have a hit a new pattern of behaviour overnight with several short sleeps of about an hour and then. Increasing longer periods so that the night before there were as last night about three wakings of an hours and then of two and then yesterday morning of three so that it was 6.30 when I woke for the final time and decided there would be no immediate visit for the swim. I seriously considered going to try a late evening visit although the mind and the body were never in it and I abandoned the proposals around 7.30.
This morning there dense fog and a think coating of frost on the cards parked at the pavements. I cannot remember if I noted the bright shaft of orange which challenged the blackness on the previous early morning visit and which heralds the start of dawn as early as 6.30. There does appear to have been rapid jumps over the past two weeks.
I caught the juxtaposition of two radio interviews this morning which had my mind wondering away from the previously agreed plan for the day. Melvin Bragg, Lord Bragg to the likes of you and me, was introducing his Thursday morning Brains Trust type of discussion on the nature of the expanding universe. I wonder what happens when the accelerating objects at the our edges of the expansion collide with other universes expanding in our direction. Perhaps better not to swell on such thinking. Then there was David Clark, I wondered if was South Shields former Member of Parliament David Clark, explaining the results of his searches into government information about flying saucers. Later I saw the TV interview and it was another David Clark. There was also the news that the serving military man who provided Wikileaks with several hundred thousands Embassy measures and on Iraq and Afghanistan is being charge with treason or words to that effect. The NATO commander was apologising for the accidentally killing a of a group of children when a bombing or rocket attack went wrong in Afghanistan. There is increasing signs that despite the rhetoric once Gaddafi and his is command decided on toughening it out the UN and EC and the USA and the UK are bluffing and hoping that those closest will rebel or at least divide.
I came of tired around ten and decide to recover with a film Armageddon but before then various catch ups. I also need to observe that it now seems that irrespective of whether I sauna or indeed swim my metabolism cannot cope with continuous activity, including intellectual activity for more than five to six hours at a time without refuelling by resting and at times sleeping. I may have to adjust my approach accordingly. I became so tired around ten I had to stop.
Last night I watched the fourth episode, again of the Sopranos, season on,, and this time I am seeing more than I did on the first watching, although if I remember I stated with the middle to end series and then found a re run from the commencement. Two things became more clear. Jackie Aprile was the acting boss not of a rival mafia in New Jersey but of the one family with Tony a senior captain controlling the waste disposal business as his particular interest but using the a strip club as his office. In this episode the captains are seen enjoying giant lobsters with wine when they hear the news of the death of Jackie in hospital and one of the dames, bare chested wearing a thong, moments that that was one of those moments when you will also ways remember where you were. Tony who has already tried to make peace with Junior now decides that the best approach is to make him the new boss who can take the official and media flack while he has the real power with the support of the captains.
Tony is experiencing the bad trip effects from his visits to the psychiatrist with bad dreams but has become attached to the psychiatrist. He uses a police link to get reports on her life style and interests and this leads to her current male friends being severely beaten by the detective contact.
Tony’s son A J gets into fights at school with a former best friend but when they arrange to have a settle once for all fight after school, the other boy pulls out on learning who the boy’s father is. The boy remains oblivious until elder sister explains to him the realities when the attend the funeral of former acting Mafia boss Jackie.
Christopher arranges for his girl friend to help him after discharge from hospital and they then find Brendan with his face blown away while in the bath of the flat the trio share. Christopher thinks Tony was responsible because he gave drugs to the daughter, Meadow, rather than see her find some on street. When Tony and he work out it is Junior’s doing, Tony deals with the situation by severely beating the enforcer Mikey with the help of a Staple gun Carmela insists that Tony continues with the Therapy or risks their marriage.
The latest episode of Blue Bloods has a terror attack in central New York, after, 9/11 as its theme. The way the whole family becomes involved starts to grate but is something I will have to get to used to although it has less credibility than the Walton’s because of the setting.. In this instance the programme concentrates on the dangers of stereotypes( and profiling) as the bomber is a suburban housewife and white, the estranged partner of a peaceful Muslim who longs to be reunited with his lost love and son who has left him because he will not be radicalised in the way that she has. Hoe she came to believe that the three of them dying together and killings and wounding dozens of other would get them to heaven together is not explained although in the final moments she is captured and the child rescued into the arms of his father. This is about it for the week with the suspense the wife and children of the detective going to the zoo in central park and having a phone failure which means she does not get the message to return home I love you cannot explain now message.
Grandpa is also in the city centre with the daughter lawyer at a different venue. The other debate is when and what to tell people in the city. The Commissioner takes it upon himself to delay advising everyone to get out of the city because he hopes his force will come good on locating the bomber and because he does not want everyone to panic. As usual the whole family get together around a table for a meal, this time for the birthday of one of the children. Selleck is so proud of his son who keeps the ring of the secret society the Blue Templers in his locker and I was pleased to see that one review of the original episode which also commented on the ability to get the van re-sprayed in the blink of an eye.
I did see a film full of psychological truths except it was not based on fact. Peter Warlock the contemporary British composer whose most famous work was a collection on songs called the Curlew. His real name was Philip Arnold Heseltine. He was born in 1894 and died in December 1930 either as a suicide or distracted leaving the gas fire on without lighting.
In the film Voices from a locked room Heseltine is the music Critic of the influential Journal and is a missionary against the work of Warlock, complaining about the derivative nature of his music, its lack of originality and vision. His editor has to insist he re writes his reviews because they are libellous. He attends the opening night of an American Chanteuse at a posh nightclub. While at the club she is told that he is known as the grim reaper and later in an adjoining phone booth she overhears Heseltine phone in the review of an earlier piece by Warlock thinking it refers to her and berates the man, When she arrives home in the early hours she finds Heseltine on her doorstep with a copy of the paper which also includes a positive review of her performance.
They become friends and lovers and she is introduced to his society friends who flock to he night club to see her based on his recommendation. She is also surprised when his supposed closest male friends warns her off a relationship. Because he is so obsessed with attacking Warlock claiming the he is threatening to sue and also making threats on his life and possession she goes to see the composer only to find that it also Heseltine leading another life and that the cause appears to be related to his childhood and relationship with his mother who refuses to encourage her son to obtain professional help.
The truth is that the man was brought up in Wales, the home of his mother and her second husband after, his father died when he was still a child. He was educated at Eton and then for a year at Oxford sand one term at University College London and without reading one fo the several works on his life I do not know what his studies were cut short. It is said in Wikipedia that he was a self taught musician and while his interest had been classical he was introduced to contemporary music by a master at Eton College. He married an artist model whose nickname was Puma.
According to Wikipedia he was said to suffer from depression and to have an interest in the occult as testified by one authoress who claimed he had introduced her to the subject. He is also said to have enjoyed cannabis tincture, would compose obscene limericks and was interested in flagellation. None of this is in the film which is perhaps why the film does not appear to have been released until later. A second film, Peter Warlock, Some Little Joy was made in 2005 and several writers including D H Lawrence in Women in Love, Aldous Huxley in Antic Hay, Osbert Sitwell in Those were the Days and Anthony Powell in Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant all featured characters based on Heseltine. But for once I do not plan to investigate further although I am intrigued.
The aspect of Blue Bloods which interested is the treatment of the motives of the bomber. This was personal, almost a family matter and designed encourage Americans to be opened minded about Muslim’s with the bomber being female and white while husband was portrayed as ethnic Muslim and peaceful. While the bomber talked about taking her husband and her son to a beautiful place there was explanation of why she was prepared to also kill and maim the large number of adults and children involved given the stated size of the car bomb which had been identified. Previously I have mentioned the Fox news Channel programme which stated that the Iranian leader believed that the Christian Apocalypse was similar to Muslim teachings about how heaven would be reached for all true believers after God has destroyed and sent to hell the non believers through the forces of famine, fire, water and plague.
I was therefore fascinated to suddenly find on Sky Anytime the appearance of three programmes, two documentaries and one film epic on the same subject. I only view one of the documentaries on the history channel which suggested that apparent build up of flooding around the world, the Asian Tsunami, New Orleans, Australia etc and the earthquakes, in Haiti and New Zealand for example were indications of a gathering momentum. The programme argued that there were 1 million deaths a year from Malaria and other Mosquito transmitted diseases and that along with famine humans were not concentrating enough attention and resources to prevent that which was preventable.
The documentary also explained that at some point the earth would be hit by a meteor of sufficient size to create a seismic explosion of such magnitude that the world could be destroyed. There was reference to such an explosion which is said to have devastated the evolving planet 65 millions year ago. I also said earlier that Melvin Bragg and his guests were this morning talking about the nature of the expanding universe and I mentioned the possibility of several such phenomena in space and what would happed if the accelerating forces at the end of two developments collided.
In therefore could not resist a showing of the extraordinary long (150m) film Armageddon, created for release in 1998 I suspect because of the approach of millennium. The film has four good actors. Bruce Willis is a rough neck driller, regarded as the rest in the world. Ben Affleck is his number two who he regards as a son and Liv Tyler is the daughter who has effectively been raised by Bruce and his team on oil rigs and gas drills over past two decades since her mother left him holding the baby. The one thing he did not wantwas his girl to get involved with a roughneck, yet she was expected to be with him wherever he went and in effect treated her emotionally in some ways more than most men and women couples trust and interact together. The fourth character is another member of the team, an unstable genius played by Billy Bob Thornton. He and part of his team are on an oil drill which strikes oil as some Asian entrepreneurs are visiting and when the USA government call comes to save the world from extinction. Before this a space shuttle is destroyed while it is being fixed and meteor showers of significant size blow up part of New York (i.e. before 9/11). Coinciding with NASA working out that the problem is a large chunk of space rock heading directly for earth, a lone observatory with an expensive and powerful telescope also identifies the situation and calls on the government to claim the right to name the new sighting.
The film opened within two and half months of Deep Impact with Morgan Freeman and while I have seen both films for some reason they are not listed among the 450 films mentioned in the film section of these writings. The solution worked out by NASA is to send two space shuttles when the 6 mile lump of rock is behind the moon and drill to a depths of 800 hundred feet/metres and then detonate a hydrogen bomb remotely controlled from earth, which will have the impact of splitting then rock in such a way that the trajectory of the pieces will take them out into space away from the earth planet and presumably the moon! I m told that the science in this film is considered dodgy.
Willis agrees to assemble two teams, the back up led by Affleck and arranges for some of the best men with whom he has previously worked to supplement his immediate team. One is a biker, another a gambler and others womanizers. It does not require imagination that the idea of training such individualists for a space flight and such an important mission does not fill the command structure at NASA with any enthusiasm after Willis has kicked out the astronauts who were being trained along with a space drilling equipment for an ongoing project to Mars.
His men only agree to participate in the mission, knowing that returning is unlikely, by making requests which vary from cancellation of parking tickets to not paying any government taxes on what they earn for the rest of their lives.
The stress of the training and the mission is such that despite the timetable he insists that everyone has an overnight break of ten hours so that they can indulge their fancies and let off steam. Affleck and Tyler make love and decide to marry much to the horror of Willis while one of the party gets permission to call on his ex wife and son he has not seen since babyhood because of the court restraining order he has taken, he calls to say sorry and to give his son a model of a space shuttle.
They set off and the President of the USA in tandem with other leaders announce to their people the seriousness of the situation for the first time and the once only attempt to prevent it happening. A larger than average bit of the rock lands in central Paris turning half the city into a crater while another lands in the Asian Pacific. Everyone who can goes into caves and underground shelters in the feint hope that there can be some survivors while others join in prayer and everyone sets out to be with their families.
The mission meets with initial disaster and communications failure. They need to refuel at a Russian space station which blows up because of a fault but fortunately both craft manage to get free with about 90% of the required fuel and to rescue two of drilling crew including Affleck who goes back to get a trapped comrade.
The shuttle in which the duplicate drill team led by Affleck crashes killing pilots and at least one of the team and then miraculous they find the drilling machine is intact and manage to get iy out of the ruined shuttle and then to power it in such a way that it manages to fly over a chasm and to get to where the others have landed, some 26 miles from where they should, and therefore creating problems for the drilling equipment on the mission. Then because of communication problems there are only a dozen minutes to complete the drilling and remote control detonation. When the first drilling runs into problems the Presidential order is given to remotely detonate the available bomb in the hope that it will reduce the impact if not change the overall trajectory. Bruce pleads for more time as does the NASA chief knowing that any premature detonation will be futile. Someone at NASA manages a communication override which stops the detonation but the order is given to proceed but before this can be enacted a secondary communications system comes on line so they have the full time available before the rock passes the point of no change.
There is further disaster when the drill strikes a gas pocket killing a team member and blowing up the drilling equipment. Willis advises NASA that they have failed and to prepared for the worst. Then the other team arrives and the drilling depth is achieved. However the surface begins to heat up and the remote trigger mechanism is damaged so someone must stay behind to press the manual trigger while the rest leaves. They draw lots and Affleck is the loser but Willis who goes to the surface to see him off does a switch so that he remains and Affleck returns to care for his daughter. They return to a hero’s welcome after the project is a success.
The film received a mixed reception with four technical Oscar nominations and Bruce Willis awarded the worst acting award, a Razzle.
I end with the question. How did the New Treatment Book, Revelations come to be included and who write It. No one seems to know.
I seem to have a hit a new pattern of behaviour overnight with several short sleeps of about an hour and then. Increasing longer periods so that the night before there were as last night about three wakings of an hours and then of two and then yesterday morning of three so that it was 6.30 when I woke for the final time and decided there would be no immediate visit for the swim. I seriously considered going to try a late evening visit although the mind and the body were never in it and I abandoned the proposals around 7.30.
This morning there dense fog and a think coating of frost on the cards parked at the pavements. I cannot remember if I noted the bright shaft of orange which challenged the blackness on the previous early morning visit and which heralds the start of dawn as early as 6.30. There does appear to have been rapid jumps over the past two weeks.
I caught the juxtaposition of two radio interviews this morning which had my mind wondering away from the previously agreed plan for the day. Melvin Bragg, Lord Bragg to the likes of you and me, was introducing his Thursday morning Brains Trust type of discussion on the nature of the expanding universe. I wonder what happens when the accelerating objects at the our edges of the expansion collide with other universes expanding in our direction. Perhaps better not to swell on such thinking. Then there was David Clark, I wondered if was South Shields former Member of Parliament David Clark, explaining the results of his searches into government information about flying saucers. Later I saw the TV interview and it was another David Clark. There was also the news that the serving military man who provided Wikileaks with several hundred thousands Embassy measures and on Iraq and Afghanistan is being charge with treason or words to that effect. The NATO commander was apologising for the accidentally killing a of a group of children when a bombing or rocket attack went wrong in Afghanistan. There is increasing signs that despite the rhetoric once Gaddafi and his is command decided on toughening it out the UN and EC and the USA and the UK are bluffing and hoping that those closest will rebel or at least divide.
I came of tired around ten and decide to recover with a film Armageddon but before then various catch ups. I also need to observe that it now seems that irrespective of whether I sauna or indeed swim my metabolism cannot cope with continuous activity, including intellectual activity for more than five to six hours at a time without refuelling by resting and at times sleeping. I may have to adjust my approach accordingly. I became so tired around ten I had to stop.
Last night I watched the fourth episode, again of the Sopranos, season on,, and this time I am seeing more than I did on the first watching, although if I remember I stated with the middle to end series and then found a re run from the commencement. Two things became more clear. Jackie Aprile was the acting boss not of a rival mafia in New Jersey but of the one family with Tony a senior captain controlling the waste disposal business as his particular interest but using the a strip club as his office. In this episode the captains are seen enjoying giant lobsters with wine when they hear the news of the death of Jackie in hospital and one of the dames, bare chested wearing a thong, moments that that was one of those moments when you will also ways remember where you were. Tony who has already tried to make peace with Junior now decides that the best approach is to make him the new boss who can take the official and media flack while he has the real power with the support of the captains.
Tony is experiencing the bad trip effects from his visits to the psychiatrist with bad dreams but has become attached to the psychiatrist. He uses a police link to get reports on her life style and interests and this leads to her current male friends being severely beaten by the detective contact.
Tony’s son A J gets into fights at school with a former best friend but when they arrange to have a settle once for all fight after school, the other boy pulls out on learning who the boy’s father is. The boy remains oblivious until elder sister explains to him the realities when the attend the funeral of former acting Mafia boss Jackie.
Christopher arranges for his girl friend to help him after discharge from hospital and they then find Brendan with his face blown away while in the bath of the flat the trio share. Christopher thinks Tony was responsible because he gave drugs to the daughter, Meadow, rather than see her find some on street. When Tony and he work out it is Junior’s doing, Tony deals with the situation by severely beating the enforcer Mikey with the help of a Staple gun Carmela insists that Tony continues with the Therapy or risks their marriage.
The latest episode of Blue Bloods has a terror attack in central New York, after, 9/11 as its theme. The way the whole family becomes involved starts to grate but is something I will have to get to used to although it has less credibility than the Walton’s because of the setting.. In this instance the programme concentrates on the dangers of stereotypes( and profiling) as the bomber is a suburban housewife and white, the estranged partner of a peaceful Muslim who longs to be reunited with his lost love and son who has left him because he will not be radicalised in the way that she has. Hoe she came to believe that the three of them dying together and killings and wounding dozens of other would get them to heaven together is not explained although in the final moments she is captured and the child rescued into the arms of his father. This is about it for the week with the suspense the wife and children of the detective going to the zoo in central park and having a phone failure which means she does not get the message to return home I love you cannot explain now message.
Grandpa is also in the city centre with the daughter lawyer at a different venue. The other debate is when and what to tell people in the city. The Commissioner takes it upon himself to delay advising everyone to get out of the city because he hopes his force will come good on locating the bomber and because he does not want everyone to panic. As usual the whole family get together around a table for a meal, this time for the birthday of one of the children. Selleck is so proud of his son who keeps the ring of the secret society the Blue Templers in his locker and I was pleased to see that one review of the original episode which also commented on the ability to get the van re-sprayed in the blink of an eye.
I did see a film full of psychological truths except it was not based on fact. Peter Warlock the contemporary British composer whose most famous work was a collection on songs called the Curlew. His real name was Philip Arnold Heseltine. He was born in 1894 and died in December 1930 either as a suicide or distracted leaving the gas fire on without lighting.
In the film Voices from a locked room Heseltine is the music Critic of the influential Journal and is a missionary against the work of Warlock, complaining about the derivative nature of his music, its lack of originality and vision. His editor has to insist he re writes his reviews because they are libellous. He attends the opening night of an American Chanteuse at a posh nightclub. While at the club she is told that he is known as the grim reaper and later in an adjoining phone booth she overhears Heseltine phone in the review of an earlier piece by Warlock thinking it refers to her and berates the man, When she arrives home in the early hours she finds Heseltine on her doorstep with a copy of the paper which also includes a positive review of her performance.
They become friends and lovers and she is introduced to his society friends who flock to he night club to see her based on his recommendation. She is also surprised when his supposed closest male friends warns her off a relationship. Because he is so obsessed with attacking Warlock claiming the he is threatening to sue and also making threats on his life and possession she goes to see the composer only to find that it also Heseltine leading another life and that the cause appears to be related to his childhood and relationship with his mother who refuses to encourage her son to obtain professional help.
The truth is that the man was brought up in Wales, the home of his mother and her second husband after, his father died when he was still a child. He was educated at Eton and then for a year at Oxford sand one term at University College London and without reading one fo the several works on his life I do not know what his studies were cut short. It is said in Wikipedia that he was a self taught musician and while his interest had been classical he was introduced to contemporary music by a master at Eton College. He married an artist model whose nickname was Puma.
According to Wikipedia he was said to suffer from depression and to have an interest in the occult as testified by one authoress who claimed he had introduced her to the subject. He is also said to have enjoyed cannabis tincture, would compose obscene limericks and was interested in flagellation. None of this is in the film which is perhaps why the film does not appear to have been released until later. A second film, Peter Warlock, Some Little Joy was made in 2005 and several writers including D H Lawrence in Women in Love, Aldous Huxley in Antic Hay, Osbert Sitwell in Those were the Days and Anthony Powell in Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant all featured characters based on Heseltine. But for once I do not plan to investigate further although I am intrigued.
The aspect of Blue Bloods which interested is the treatment of the motives of the bomber. This was personal, almost a family matter and designed encourage Americans to be opened minded about Muslim’s with the bomber being female and white while husband was portrayed as ethnic Muslim and peaceful. While the bomber talked about taking her husband and her son to a beautiful place there was explanation of why she was prepared to also kill and maim the large number of adults and children involved given the stated size of the car bomb which had been identified. Previously I have mentioned the Fox news Channel programme which stated that the Iranian leader believed that the Christian Apocalypse was similar to Muslim teachings about how heaven would be reached for all true believers after God has destroyed and sent to hell the non believers through the forces of famine, fire, water and plague.
I was therefore fascinated to suddenly find on Sky Anytime the appearance of three programmes, two documentaries and one film epic on the same subject. I only view one of the documentaries on the history channel which suggested that apparent build up of flooding around the world, the Asian Tsunami, New Orleans, Australia etc and the earthquakes, in Haiti and New Zealand for example were indications of a gathering momentum. The programme argued that there were 1 million deaths a year from Malaria and other Mosquito transmitted diseases and that along with famine humans were not concentrating enough attention and resources to prevent that which was preventable.
The documentary also explained that at some point the earth would be hit by a meteor of sufficient size to create a seismic explosion of such magnitude that the world could be destroyed. There was reference to such an explosion which is said to have devastated the evolving planet 65 millions year ago. I also said earlier that Melvin Bragg and his guests were this morning talking about the nature of the expanding universe and I mentioned the possibility of several such phenomena in space and what would happed if the accelerating forces at the end of two developments collided.
In therefore could not resist a showing of the extraordinary long (150m) film Armageddon, created for release in 1998 I suspect because of the approach of millennium. The film has four good actors. Bruce Willis is a rough neck driller, regarded as the rest in the world. Ben Affleck is his number two who he regards as a son and Liv Tyler is the daughter who has effectively been raised by Bruce and his team on oil rigs and gas drills over past two decades since her mother left him holding the baby. The one thing he did not wantwas his girl to get involved with a roughneck, yet she was expected to be with him wherever he went and in effect treated her emotionally in some ways more than most men and women couples trust and interact together. The fourth character is another member of the team, an unstable genius played by Billy Bob Thornton. He and part of his team are on an oil drill which strikes oil as some Asian entrepreneurs are visiting and when the USA government call comes to save the world from extinction. Before this a space shuttle is destroyed while it is being fixed and meteor showers of significant size blow up part of New York (i.e. before 9/11). Coinciding with NASA working out that the problem is a large chunk of space rock heading directly for earth, a lone observatory with an expensive and powerful telescope also identifies the situation and calls on the government to claim the right to name the new sighting.
The film opened within two and half months of Deep Impact with Morgan Freeman and while I have seen both films for some reason they are not listed among the 450 films mentioned in the film section of these writings. The solution worked out by NASA is to send two space shuttles when the 6 mile lump of rock is behind the moon and drill to a depths of 800 hundred feet/metres and then detonate a hydrogen bomb remotely controlled from earth, which will have the impact of splitting then rock in such a way that the trajectory of the pieces will take them out into space away from the earth planet and presumably the moon! I m told that the science in this film is considered dodgy.
Willis agrees to assemble two teams, the back up led by Affleck and arranges for some of the best men with whom he has previously worked to supplement his immediate team. One is a biker, another a gambler and others womanizers. It does not require imagination that the idea of training such individualists for a space flight and such an important mission does not fill the command structure at NASA with any enthusiasm after Willis has kicked out the astronauts who were being trained along with a space drilling equipment for an ongoing project to Mars.
His men only agree to participate in the mission, knowing that returning is unlikely, by making requests which vary from cancellation of parking tickets to not paying any government taxes on what they earn for the rest of their lives.
The stress of the training and the mission is such that despite the timetable he insists that everyone has an overnight break of ten hours so that they can indulge their fancies and let off steam. Affleck and Tyler make love and decide to marry much to the horror of Willis while one of the party gets permission to call on his ex wife and son he has not seen since babyhood because of the court restraining order he has taken, he calls to say sorry and to give his son a model of a space shuttle.
They set off and the President of the USA in tandem with other leaders announce to their people the seriousness of the situation for the first time and the once only attempt to prevent it happening. A larger than average bit of the rock lands in central Paris turning half the city into a crater while another lands in the Asian Pacific. Everyone who can goes into caves and underground shelters in the feint hope that there can be some survivors while others join in prayer and everyone sets out to be with their families.
The mission meets with initial disaster and communications failure. They need to refuel at a Russian space station which blows up because of a fault but fortunately both craft manage to get free with about 90% of the required fuel and to rescue two of drilling crew including Affleck who goes back to get a trapped comrade.
The shuttle in which the duplicate drill team led by Affleck crashes killing pilots and at least one of the team and then miraculous they find the drilling machine is intact and manage to get iy out of the ruined shuttle and then to power it in such a way that it manages to fly over a chasm and to get to where the others have landed, some 26 miles from where they should, and therefore creating problems for the drilling equipment on the mission. Then because of communication problems there are only a dozen minutes to complete the drilling and remote control detonation. When the first drilling runs into problems the Presidential order is given to remotely detonate the available bomb in the hope that it will reduce the impact if not change the overall trajectory. Bruce pleads for more time as does the NASA chief knowing that any premature detonation will be futile. Someone at NASA manages a communication override which stops the detonation but the order is given to proceed but before this can be enacted a secondary communications system comes on line so they have the full time available before the rock passes the point of no change.
There is further disaster when the drill strikes a gas pocket killing a team member and blowing up the drilling equipment. Willis advises NASA that they have failed and to prepared for the worst. Then the other team arrives and the drilling depth is achieved. However the surface begins to heat up and the remote trigger mechanism is damaged so someone must stay behind to press the manual trigger while the rest leaves. They draw lots and Affleck is the loser but Willis who goes to the surface to see him off does a switch so that he remains and Affleck returns to care for his daughter. They return to a hero’s welcome after the project is a success.
The film received a mixed reception with four technical Oscar nominations and Bruce Willis awarded the worst acting award, a Razzle.
I end with the question. How did the New Treatment Book, Revelations come to be included and who write It. No one seems to know.
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