X-Men: First Class (2011)


Hey, look at that, Crimea is Russia. In fact all of Ukraine is Russia. According to this film, the entire Soviet Union is Russia, and not just in imagery, all the dialogue refers to the Soviet Union as Russia.

The film's story revolves around the 1962 "Cuban Missile Crisis" and it's all: Russia this, and Russia that. That's not too bad though, "Russia" is an inaccurate term often used during the Cold War, and I must give the film credit for including the missiles in Turkey aspect, which sparked it all off to begin with.

On the doors of the Soviet "war room" we see two imperial Russian crests, a common sight in Russia today. Common today but an impossible abnormality in the Soviet Union. It's akin to a Tom Clancy film, depicting the IRA waving Union Jacks and singing God Save the Queen. A complete contradiction.

At first, I thought perhaps they were filming on location, in a Russian museum or something, but no, this was a mock-up in London, so they deliberately chose to put those emblems on the doors. An honest mistake? Perhaps (the film is riddled with mistakes), but...

The film makers went to such a bizarre effort to make the Soviet Union appear as Russia. Here on the "war room" map, we see the Soviet Union marked as российская сфср (Russian SFSR). Russia was but one of the socialist republics of the USSR. This is like showing a map of Europe, where all the European Union countries shaded one colour and titled as "Germany". Or the United Kingdom and Common Wealth labeled as England.

It's odd though, because it's written in cyrillic. They could have written any old rubbish and no English speaking viewer would know any better, but why go to that effort and not just write, Союз Советских Социалистических Республик, or simply, СССР. They wrote СССР elsewhere, but why not here...

By the end of the film, Michael Fassbender had given up, and just spoke with an Irish accent. So pronounced was it, that I thought perhaps Magneto was being played by Dylan Moran.

But for all inaccuracies, most people will only care about J-Law's blue boobs.

info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1270798/

Carl Sagan Vs. Neil deGrasse Tyson



"For me, the most ironic token of that moment in history is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the Moon. It reads: "We came in peace for all mankind." As the United States was dropping 7.5 megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity: We would harm no one on a lifeless rock. "

Excerpt from Carl Sagan (1994, pp.206-215)
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
New York: Random House
via:  http://alexpetrov.com/memes/astro/apollo.html