What I learned today (A movie review)

1) No matter how secure the secret government facility, there will always be an unguarded network of tube-like service entrances;

2) The head of the most important secret government agency, charged with the greatest of responsibilities, will be a knuckle headed moron;

3) No matter how many people are after you, using all sorts of equipment, there is always time for a long good bye;

4) A man can be slammed on the floor, wall, and ceiling by a Golem-like evil monster bad guy as many times as you like and he'll be fine. If he's The Rock; and

5) Race to Witch Mountain is a good movie.

Escape to Witch Mountain started out as a SciFi novel by Alexender Key, then it became a , Disney movie in 1975
which in my view was not a bad film. For a 1970s Disney film. Here's a taste of it:

The same scene happens in the new movie, but slightly different. Well, nothing like this, but one can see the similarities.

(There was a remake of this film in 1995, which I've not seen.)

As is often the case with Science Fiction, the new film is NOT a wreck of the original film. Science fiction tends to be accumulative. The V-ger hand wave, the Star Wars convention, the X-files references, and in this case, a handful of key references to the original film (the most significant being the vehicle switch after the big chase scene) are the kinds of things that are only possible in a decades-later remake that does not try to keep faithful to the original film.

I would like to note the main car chase scene (the whole movie is a chase scene... I'm referring to the post-convention chase scene involving the Las Vegas Police, the Federal Agencies, and the protagonists) is novel. Ever since the French Connection, movies have tried to outdo earlier efforts with resepct to the chase scene, and there have been great efforts in this regard. This movie took the whole thing one step forward. Except for the very first few seconds and the very last few seconds, the car chase scene in this film was utterly chaotic, in the mathematical sense.

There was no chase scene. There was just chase-ness. And scene-ness.

Every single thing about this film was predictable, as it should be in a remake of a classic. (Even the identity of the actor playing the role of the car mechanic was predictable to me. Before they showed who it was or you heard his voice, somehow I knew who it was going to be. Why, I'm not sure . Maybe I have Alien Powers or something.) The details are what matters in this sort of film, and the details were well done.

Trailer:

A music video that claims to have some connection to the film: