The Force Awakens?

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens is perhaps the most anticipated film of all time, so naturally, it fails to live up to the hype. Having said that, if it HAD lived up to the hype, it would win every Oscar ever. As a an action film however, it is probably one of the best of the year.

Trying to avoid spoilers as much as I can, the film starts with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) having gone into hiding and the First Order, which is the remains of the Empire, gaining ground on the Republic. Our main character is a badass female orphan, played by Daisy Ridley, who was a complete unknown with only 9 previous credits to who name, most of them bit-parts in TV shows. I'm confident in saying that she has a long and prosperous career ahead of her.

Ridley's character, despite being played incredibly well, and being a very deep well developed individual, is involved in one of my biggest gripes with the film. She seems to violate previously established lore, which might annoy some hardcore fans, but most people at my screening were too busy laughing at the humour in the scene to really care.

Speaking of humour, funny moments are spread liberally throughout the film, but not too much to break the tension. Most of the humour derives from nostalgia more than anything else. In fact, much of the film relies upon nostalgia, with the plot leaving much to be desired (I shall speak no more on that at this time).

There is little originality in the film, but that's acceptable in a movie like this one. Some things are new spins on the old, such as BB-8, an astromech droid based on a design for R2-D2 that wasn't possible to implement for the original films because the technology didn't exist. If you told me that Wall-E and BB-8 were designed by the same person, I'd believe you. BB-8 is the archetypal, "Disney Lovable Robot" and the kids are sure to love him,

This is the darkest and grittiest Star Wars yet, and there were many times I went to take off my 3D glasses forgetting that they weren't tinted. Those representing the dark side do a wonderful job, though JJ Abrams may be pushing the whole anger thing a little too far.

As with every film, somebody has "a bad feeling about this." The line is so forced by now though, that I actually think that the film would be better without it, though I'm sure many hardcore fans would disagree. 

The score is perfect, John Williams is a brilliant composer, and Star Wars just wouldn't be the same without him, and he's hit the nail square on the head here.

My only other gripes are probably specific to the 3D version, with the choice of focus driving me insane throughout the first half hour of the film. The sudden jumps in focus between one character and another, and the fact that often more than half of the screen is blurry but standing out plays havoc with the eyes, but I think that most 3D movies suffer from this.

The opening crawl is absolutely glorious in 3D however, and by the hour mark, I was too caught up in the action to notice any cinematic choices that I'd disagree with.

If you've never seen a Star Wars film, don't make this your first, but if you loved the others (or even just the original trilogy), see this at the first opportunity.

Plot: 3/10

Sound: 10/10

Special Effects: 8/10

Nostalgia Value: 10/10

Overall: 7/10

The Watchmaker

The Watchmaker Argument

So I've decided to do a series of posts on philosophy of religion, I'll discuss interesting figures in philosophy, such as Plantinga and Kierkegaard, but I'm going to start with the watchmaker argument.

The watchmaker argument, often called the watchmaker analogy, was first put forward by William Paley in 1802, as an argument in support of intelligent design.

A Watch (Source unknown)

The argument goes something like this; I'm walking along a beach, and I find a watch on the ground. I can see that a watch is complex, and it doesn't seem rational to assume that a watch randomly made itself. I naturally assume that there must have been a watchmaker.

Why then should the universe be any different? It's many orders of magnitude more complex than even the finest Swiss watch, so surely it must have had a creator, just like the watch did?

Helix Nebula (Source: Hidden Universe, IMAX)

The Creator's Complexity

Now there are a few possible objections to this argument, the first that I'll be covering relates to the complexity of the creator. 

A watch is much less complicated than a human, with a few years training, I could start to make my own watches, and I could buy one on Ebay for just a few dollars. I cannot build a human from scratch, the closest I can come is reproduction, where I let the new human develop by itself. Not even our greatest scientists could make a human from scratch, they could clone one, or make an embryo from existing DNA, but they certainly couldn't build a new human.

Dolly, a cloned sheep (Source: Wikimedia)

The creator of the universe then, should be much more complicated than the universe itself, and if we require that the universe have a creator because of its complexity, then surely the creator must also have a creator, which must also have a creator, ad infinitum.

Of course, we know that the universe had a beginning, a requirement that the creator doesn't have. It is conceivable that the creator exists outside of time, particularly when you consider than many think that time is just another dimension of our universe.

Our Experience of Watchmakers

Another objection, first posited by David Hume, is that we have no experience with making the universe. We would expect the watch to have been made by a person because every watch we have encountered before has been made by a person. Our experience has shown us that there are many watches, and none have appeared randomly.

By contrast, I've only ever encountered a single universe, and we have no real proof that any others exist. Even if we do accept that there are many universes, we have no evidence that any of them have makers. We thus shouldn't expect that all universes have builders, the same way that we do of watches.

In my mind, this is a much better objection than the complexity of the creator. Of course, just because the watchmaker argument doesn't necessarily hold doesn't mean that there is no intelligent design, and even if it did hold, it wouldn't tell us anything about the nature of the designer.

It seems then that the watchmaker analogy is of no use to us in any discussion about the nature of God, or even if He/She even exists.

Grid Girls

Grid girls have been the topic of much debate in the motorsport community in recent times. The World Endurance Championship (WEC) banned them at the start of the year, to much complaint from some members of the community. I'm not sure that an outright ban of grid girls was necessary, but we certainly need to have a close look at how we use promotional models, and not just in motorsport.

2014 WEC Grid Girls (Photo: Speedcafe)

Grid girls have an important roll in motorsport; they get your sponsors names on the big screens around the track and on the TV before the race starts. They are walking billboards, and teams and events need sponsors to run. It's the advertising that pays for the show.

Grid girls cause a few problems though, the most obvious of which is that they paint motorsport as being a boys club. The men are the drivers, and the girls are there for the convenience of those men. Of the 168 drivers entered in this years Le Mans, none were female, there hasn't been a female formula one driver in my lifetime, and the last time we talked about women at the top of rallying was in the '80s.

Michele Mouton, Former Audi Factory Rally Driver

This is a sport where women can compete on the same terms as men, and drivers such as Michele Mouton have proven this to us. Some could even claim that they tend to have an advantage, weighing less on average and thus being able to be faster.

Why then are women not racing? It's certainly not due to a lack of interest in young women. Whilst men do noticeably outnumber women around the racetrack, it's not like a significant portion of the fans at most racetracks aren't female.

Women are clearly being disenfranchised though, and that needs to stop. By having grid girls in the form we currently do, we tell women that we don't really care about them, motor racing is a men's sport, and women only really belong as eye candy.

Grid girls in their current form are doing a harm to women as a group. They limit the opportunities for women to progress and excel in motorsport. Now I'm sure that some of the people reading this are thinking to themselves that NASCAR and INDYCAR have female drivers, and it's true. There are even female test drivers in Formula One. But have a look at the photo below:

Carmen Jorda, Lotus Test Driver (Source unknown)

That's Carmen Jorda, the reserve driver for the Lotus Formula One Team. She was 18 seconds per lap slower than the winner in GP2 at Spa last year. She is an atrocious racing driver, but she is pretty. The Williams F1 reserve driver, who is also an attractive woman, just happens to be married to a man who owns 5% of the team, and 30% of another team, which happen to supply engines to Williams.

Danica Patrick is probably the most famous of the current crop of female racing drivers, but she made her career taking her clothes off in commercials for for a certain domain name provider. All of these women are attractive, and none are particularly spectacular behind the wheel.

The grid girl has just been put in the car, because that's an even better way of making money. Grid girls exclude half of your potential audience however. The recent Monaco Grand Prix did something that might help keep females from getting disenfranchised; they had grid boys.

Grid Boys at the Monaco GP (Photo: Motorsport.com)

Perhaps we need to consider half of the promo models on the grid being male, and the other half being female. If we're going to have the promo models, we should try and cater to everybody, and do so in a way that doesn't exclude half of the population from the event.

Let's stop the culture of treating women as nothing but sex objects, let's stop airing close ups of breasts (with the face cropped out) on international TV feeds, let's make the race track a place that women can feel safe and included. Let's give women a chance to make it on skill, not beauty in the world of motorsport.

Le Mans 2015

Porsche have won Le Mans... Again. So apart from how to be excited whilst getting very exhausted, what have we learned over the those glorious 24 hours? Well, we learned that Toyota were further off the pace than anybody expected, and are even discussing changing their hybrid system for next year. We learned that Audi can be beaten, even when they come into the race as favourites. We learned that Mark Webber is actually capable of finishing Le Mans, a feat he'd never achieved before yesterday. We learned that Earl Bamber, Nico Hulkenberg and Nick Tandy can drive.

The Winning Porsche (credit: David Vincent)

The number 19 Porsche drove an almost perfect race, avoiding trouble at every turn. That was what won Le Mans this year, a clean trouble free run. That isn't to say that the drivers were in any way inferior, they all have Le Mans wins to their name now, so they must have talent!

The other talking point of the weekend was Nissan, who failed to live up to the hype surrounding their return to top level endurance racing. Their car was down on power, mainly due to the fact that the hybrid system simply wasn't working. 

Nissan GTR-LM (Photo: Marshall Pruett)

Hopefully we'll see some improvement from them over the coming months, and they can have a real attack on the championship next year, though we need to keep in mind that the car is a Le Mans special, and may not be good anywhere else in the world.

I worry that the days of the Le Mans special are over, however, as the chicanes on the Mulsanne mean that outright top speed, which the Nissan certainly has, cannot dominate the race. Cornering has become more and more important at Le Mans, and that's where the Nissan GTR-LM lost out.