Apologies to anyone who pre-purchased tickets to The Fifth Element earlier this year. I went to the sales vendor (trycelery.com), and marked the tickets as shipped. What I didn’t know is that when I did so, it would email each and every one of you a “Great news! Your order is on it’s way!” without warning me it was about to do so. But don’t worry. Nothing is on its way. It’s just confirmation of that ticket long ago. I’m writing them a sternly worded email now.
[Editor’s Note: Knowing nothing of sportsball, I invited fellow Cooper designer Brendan Kneram to bring his considerable skills in both sportsball of design to write a review of this scoreboard seen in the movie. -Chris]
The Big Hurrah for students before they graduate Starship High is a game of Jump Ball followed by a Jump Prom. For the contemporary viewer, Jump Ball strongly resembles American Football with the occasional gravity-defying maneuver added for good measure. This similarity is further emphasized upon closer inspection of the scoreboard, making its first appearance when Johnny Rico finishes his first of two scoring plays (I hesitate to call it a “touchdown” because Rico is awarded only five points instead of the six given in American Football). The first impression is of its underwhelming high school aesthetic—it looks like something found in the 20th century, not the 23rd—and even the information conveyed is insufficient to make sense of the sport. It’s possible that the threat of invasion by giant killer-insects caused some sort of civilization-wide regression in scoreboards, but I do find it hard to believe that such an advanced civilization would fail to innovate anything for the design of a physical scoreboard in over three hundred years.
When Ibanez and Rico are in Federal Transport Hub 39 set to leave for Basic Training, we see Ibanez use a public kiosk for news and information. To do so she approaches a kiosk that tells her to “LOG IN,” and she slips her paper ticket into a slot just above waist height, and types on an adjacent small keyboard, mounted at a slight angle for easy typing. The kiosk reads the ticket and displays her surname on the screen. Continue reading
After the Communications Tower is knocked off, Barcalow, looking out the viewport, somehow knows exactly where the damage to the ship has occured. This is a little like Captain Edward Smith looking out over the bow of the RMS Titanic and smelling which compartment was ripped open by the iceburg, but we must accept the givens of the scene. Barcalow turns to Ibanez and tells her to “Close compartment 21!” She turns to her left, reaches out, and presses a green maintained-contact button labeled ENABLE. This button is right next to a similar-but-black button also labeled ENABLE. As she presses the button, a nearby green LED flashes for a total of 4 frames, or 0.16 second.
She looks up at some unseen interface, and, pleased with what she sees there, begins to relax, the crisis passed.
Let’s presume he is looking at some useful but out-of-character-for-this-bridge display, and that it does help him identify that yes, out of all the compartments that might have been the one they heard damaged, it is the 21st that needs closing.
I know it’s a very quick interaction. And props to the scriptwriters for thinking about leaking air in space. But this entire interaction needs rethinking.
