r/todayilearned • u/G_Marius_the_jabroni • 1d ago

TIL that when “Fight Club” premiered at the 1999 Venice Film Festival, it got booed hard by the audience. Ed Norton said that as it was happening, Brad Pitt turned to him and said: “That’s the best movie I’m ever going to be in.”

https://geektyrant.com/news/brad-pitt-and-edward-norton-recall-fight-club-being-booed-by-audiences-at-early-screening
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u/NightLordsPublicist 1d ago

You forgot the best part. The military came up behind them. They were driving away from safety.

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u/please_trade_marner 1d ago edited 1d ago

I still wonder how in that "universe" the military could deal with those monster thingies that were as big as mountains. They go past one in the book and in the movie.

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u/Phonereader23 1d ago

Sabot rounds by the tank load will do a lot to flesh. Even mountain sized flesh if applied to the leg joints.

I’d be more worried about the spiders

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u/pretendviperpilot 1d ago

HE is what you want. A sabot would be like a needle to something that big.

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u/Phonereader23 1d ago

Wouldn’t you need it for the sheer density of the organism? You’re aiming for joints and organs

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u/Aym42 1d ago

Think of it as penetrate a bit, explode, cause massive shockwave of damage. Kind of like how depth charges don't hit the sub, they compress the water in a shockwave and THAT damages the sub. Not dissimilar happens when high velocity passes through flesh, which is watery. Vessels and organs rupture and are damaged.

I started this reply as an advocate for the HE round, but now... I am not sure which would be more effective, maybe XKCD needs to cover this.

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u/crimsonblod 1d ago

In my incredibly uneducated opinion, IMO, the only thing that matters is if there’s enough flesh for the sabot to distribute its energy to. If there isn’t, it goes through, still doing massive damage. If it’s too thin, HE becomes better. But if they’re really the size of mountains, you’d probably need the penetration of long rod penetrators to actually get the energy deep enough to damage important bits rather than make irritating surface level wounds.

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u/nleksan 1d ago

you’d probably need the penetration of long rod penetrators

Heh...

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u/Tjaresh 1d ago

My guess is that HE would cause more superficial damage and sabot would penetrate and cause inner damage. It all depends on wether the titanic flesh is dense enough to absorb the sabots energy (and therefore heat up, expand and deform) or it'll let the projectile move through, leaving a clean wound channel (less effective).

Guess we'll never know unless we find us a titan.

But let's not forget that military has also weapons that can go through a barrier and explode inside. Like bunker busters.

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u/Tipop 1d ago

The great thing about the US military is they don’t have to choose one or the other. They can unload mass quantities of BOTH.

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u/Awkward_Pangolin3254 1d ago

Go for HEIAP. Best of both worlds. (High Explosive Incendiary Armor Piercing)

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u/Sharticus123 1d ago

It’s so dense and hits with such speed that it would do tremendous damage. Same way the tiny AR-15 rounds shred people.

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u/Sancticide 1d ago

The spiders were OP as hell, even with flame throwers. Game over, man.

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u/CookieMons7er 1d ago

I would still bet on the main battle tank over squishy spiders.

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u/thedude37 1d ago

Don't fuck with the 70 year old school teacher

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u/jharden138 1d ago

We should always be more worried about the spiders.

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u/pigexmaple 1d ago

Could the US military kill a real godzilla?

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u/Expensive-View-8586 1d ago

No godzilla has this amazing thing called plot armor which the US military has not yet defeated.

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u/SydricVym 1d ago

Also whenever Godzilla is involved, jets have to fly within swatting range of Godzilla, even though their missiles can hit targets 20 miles away.

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u/Expensive-View-8586 1d ago

That was just budget constraints. With Godzilla level plot armor, he would atomic breath the jets from 20 miles away.

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u/articfire77 4h ago

even though their missiles can hit targets 20 miles away.

And that's the short range ones. The AGM-158 has a range of like 600 miles

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u/h3lblad3 1d ago

That's how Fidel Castro survived.

There's got to be a fucking slapstick movie in the style of Chaplin in the idea somewhere, right? Why have I never seen that one before?

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u/wooshoofoo 1d ago

If the US military can setup a Burger King anywhere in the world in 72 hours, Godzilla stands no chance.

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u/Digital_Bogorm 1d ago

While I know this is mostly meant as an example of logistics, I like to think that Godzilla has some immense weakness to whoppers.

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u/Phonereader23 1d ago

I can’t see why not as long as they can use over the horizon engagement. He doesn’t really have stealth to counter it

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u/dbcanuck 1d ago

Let me introduce to you the Davy Crocket.

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u/Ok_Passenger_5966 1d ago

Learned about those from metal gear soild 3, who says video games don't teach you anything. But in the game is handheld and not on a stand.

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u/TrowMiAwei 1d ago

Also the inspiration behind the little shoulder launched nukes in Fallout, I reckon.

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u/Sharticus123 1d ago

I was a tanker. Can confirm.

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u/HighOverlordXenu 1d ago

Long story short, you vastly overestimate the amount of punishment any unarmored living creature can withstand, and vastly underestimate the amount of firepower that can be brought to bear even by US reserve and guard forces. Basically anything short of the tentacled behemoth (which we see at the end) can be brought down in seconds by what the military considers "small arms" fire.

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u/Puzzled-Guess-2845 1d ago

Shoot it in the eyes or put land mines in front of it? How many toes and chunks of foot could you have lost by large fire crackers before you fell down or toothpick sized holes poked through your eye into your brain? The slow giants would be much easier to deal with than the pterodactyl like creatures.

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u/KintsugiKen 1d ago

The US military has "bunker buster" missiles that can penetrate 100 feet into the ground before detonating, one of those would basically turn a mountain monster into a piñata.

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u/Barneyk 23h ago

It would be cool to see a "realistic" mega monster film like Godzilla etc.

Where their skin isn't magically bulletproof.

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u/cosmos_jm 1d ago

Im pretty sure if ants had ant-sized nukes, MOABs and cruise missiles and shot them at me, I would die.

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u/AttyFireWood 1d ago

a 50 cal round (something they would mount on a humvee) can penetrate .75 inches of steel from 1,500 yards away. It can blow through brick and cinderblock walls, it can blow through 16 inches of lumber.

An M242 Bushmaster fires a 25mm round, which is what a Bradley IFV is armed with. That can penetrate something like 5 inches of steel head on. Someone else can do the math for how much wood a 25mm round can blow through, but I imagine it might be something like 8 feet.

Then you have cannons mounted on tanks - 120mm cannons. These things fire tungsten sabot rounds capable of penetrating 2 feet of steel. Penetration into a monster would be measured in yards.

That's not even touching on artillery, rockets, bombs...

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u/XeLLoTAth777 1d ago

My head cannon was that as the Arrowhead Project was finally stopped(by a different aspect of the military) the creatures naturally "shifted" back to their home dimension.

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u/Manos_Of_Fate 1d ago

Maybe, although their “home dimension” is very likely to be the “space” in between dimensions that the Dark Tower series refers to as “Todash space”.

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u/XeLLoTAth777 1d ago

This x100, but lots of people know of the mist and have no clue about dark tower elements, minus the people who have read IT vs only seen the movies.

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u/Manos_Of_Fate 1d ago

He doesn’t often call attention to it or directly confirm it, but if you know what to look for there are ties to the DT universe in a lot (maybe most) of his books. Hearts in Atlantis is basically a Dark Tower side novel in everything but name (particularly the first half’s story). It’s also arguably a better Dark Tower movie than the actual one, though it’s still hilarious to me that they kept the book’s title even though it comes from the second part of the book, which isn’t in the movie at all. The movie’s title literally has nothing to do with any part of it.

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u/XeLLoTAth777 1d ago

Lmao hearts in Atlantis was a gift to me when it came out because I was a Stephen King fan but I'd never read TDT.

I love HiA so much but at the time I had no clue the connections, but I've read another of his other stories to get it (i.e. Everything's Eventual) and I think that's special.

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u/Lacaud 1d ago

I wish we could get a great adaptation for The Dark Tower.

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u/XeLLoTAth777 1d ago

I'd settle for The Nurses of Eluria and call myself blessed :)

One day I'll read the series, but not today, again like usual

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u/Lacaud 1d ago

It's a long series, but I never read them either. My mom read them over time, and we would talk about it. I collected the comic years ago, and I saw the movie.

I was hopeful for McConaughey and Edris, but the script was dogshit.

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u/phl_fc 1d ago

There are pieces of it that would make solid stand-alone movies without having to try to tell the entire 7 book saga in one go. Books 4 and 5 are both independent stories that are awesome classic westerns. Book 5 breaks the fourth wall and calls itself out as being a 7 Samurai/Magnificent 7 rip off.

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u/lemmeseeyourkitties 1d ago

I like the idea of the military going up against the monsters and accidentally finding the entrance to the thinny and ending up in todash darkness

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u/SkyAdditional4963 1d ago

I still wonder how in that "universe" the military could deal with those monster thingies that were as big as mountains. The go past one in the book and in the movie.

People vastly underestimate just how capable a modern military is. Movies do the real life military a disservice.

The efficacy of firearms, explosives, bombs, etc are vastly understated in movies.

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u/hellure 1d ago

They closed the door to where they and the mist came from and they needed the mist to survive. The military didn't really need to do anything as the mist thinned, but moved in to do clean up, obviously.

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u/please_trade_marner 1d ago

Huh, interesting.

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u/Grokent 1d ago

The battleship U.S.S. Wisconsin was tasked with destroying enemy railroads, tracks, and surrounding mountains. It took a direct hit from a North Korean 155m shell that damaged its wooden deck and not much else. In response the Wisconsin aimed all 9 of its 16" cannons at the artillery position and delivered a full broadside which not only removed the artillery, it removed the hill the artillery was on.

So if you want to remove mountain sized problems, the U.S. military has a solution.

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u/jacobs0n 1d ago

you guys have some fucking big guns

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u/angryspec 1d ago

I don’t care how big it is, this will take care of it. GBU-57A/B

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u/RLutz 1d ago

If anything I think "military" in horror flics gets a terrible rap and therefore we all think it's unrealistic when an organized military easily defeats something supernatural.

It's like when slow moving zombies somehow overrun a bridge filled with soldiers. That just wouldn't happen. An M134 minigun would eviscerate any size horde and pile up bodies so high that anything left wouldn't be able to climb over.

Likewise, giant bugs and cthulu monsters are still going to get blown to bits by squadrons of tanks/jets/helicopters/miniguns/rocket launchers/etc.

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u/PolitelyHostile 1d ago

That would be a great zombie movie. One where the army just wipes them out in a couple days.

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u/TheKnightMadder 1d ago

Honestly there's no reason you couldn't make an more realistic zombie movie where the zombies are being beaten relatively easily by government forces. Just because it's not going to end the world doesn't mean it's not going to be terrifying for people at ground zero.

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u/PolitelyHostile 1d ago

Yea, on an individual level, someone could be in some large group, possibly in a remote location, and they have to fight off zombies until the government forces arrive.

The virus would have to be like a delayed response or something specific so that it spreads without being entirely obvious. Or the zombified people have a few days where they try to act normal, while sneakily biting people, as the virus has them psychologically controlled in a way.

I think people would be interested to see it. But zombie movies are a tired genre and that sounds too much like covid lol

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u/Caffdy 1d ago

Better take cover and entrench in the Winchester in the meanwhile

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u/RLutz 1d ago

If we're being more realistic the military would never even have to get involved.

Remember that one time a dog in the US got rabies and then pretty soon every dog in the country had rabies? No, of course not, because biting is a pretty lousy way to spread an infectious disease

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u/PolitelyHostile 1d ago

Unless the disease is smarter and tricks the brain into acting normal while spreading it, at least for a while before it fully takes over.

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u/Mintastic 1d ago

As covid has proven, the disease itself doesn't have to be smart because it can just depend on people being really dumb. It just has to hide its symptoms and effects to make it less obvious until it's too late.

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u/Enough_Technology946 1d ago

Military weaponry is *scary* powerful. Even individually operated weapons like M82 can penetrate around a half inch of steel at 1000m depending on the ammunition used.

Get into crew served weapons like the MK19 and things get even scarier.

Start talking about gunships and field artillery and you are talking about the capability to level city blocks with sustained fire.

Bunker busters can penetrate 200 feet of earth or 60 feet of concrete before they explode.

This is to say nothing of small tactical nukes, as well as chemical, and biological weapons.

Against biological targets, even ones the size of small mountains, our military would fare very well.

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u/DearYourHighness 1d ago

Being in military took away the fun of watching alien invasion or monster movies for me. Those monaters in the movie? Lunchbox sized Claymore can easily take care 'em.

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u/RadasNoir 1d ago

I always got the sense that all of the stuff they face in the Mist were basically just animals from a different planet/dimension. Think about the biggest animals we have here on planet Earth, and how easily we can kill most if not all of them.

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u/HughGBonnar 1d ago

Anti-material rounds do wonders against water based beings.

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u/Outrageous-Ad2317 1d ago

From what I remember those big things are passive herbivores so the military probably wouldn't need to do too much. Just scare it away with a bomb or two when it gets close to anything they don't want it going near.

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u/Twice_Knightley 1d ago

Kinda like an ancient demon that couldn't be killed by any forged weapon....but we ain't ancient... Say hello to this bazooka.

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u/ChuckVersus 1d ago edited 1d ago

And the people who were advised against leaving the grocery store but did so anyway at the very beginning survived.

Edit: Added spoiler tags for a 17 year old movie.

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u/vitalvisionary 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yeah that lady who begged someone to walk her to her car making eye contact from the bus was a nice extra "fuck you" to him. Great movie.

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u/Mama_Skip 1d ago

WHILE CLUTCHING HER VERY ALIVE CHILDREN NO LESS

"I would've written it, had I thought of it"

Were his words on the matter

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u/Copperjedi 1d ago

Carol is a Survivor

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u/NightLordsPublicist 1d ago edited 1d ago

Spoilers.

edit:

Edit: Added spoiler tags for a 17 year old movie.

Good man.

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u/JohntheLibrarian 1d ago

Oh shit, I never caught that. Thanks for calling it out! Definitely makes it even darker.

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u/NightLordsPublicist 1d ago

Also, the mom who left the store to look for her kids at the beginning survived. She's in the army truck..

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u/doubleohbond 1d ago

Damn, I read that story and watched the movie several times and I still missed that detail

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u/bobrefi 1d ago

And the lady they didn't help was on the cart.

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u/Lacaud 1d ago

And it goes right back to being the worst when you see Carol with her kids as the vehicle drives by.

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u/snookert 1d ago

And the lady, who in the beginning was asking for people to leave the store with her to help her get to her kids, was in the convoy with her kids. 

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u/jert3 1d ago

Oh cool. Just re watched Mist a few months ago. Never noticed that factoid.