Odds and Ends

Is it too soon to talk about Rogue One?  We went to see that last week, and really enjoyed it.  I notice nobody is talking about a couple of big spoilers in it, so I won't.  At least not yet.  Before we caught it, it had been out for a couple of weeks, and a common reaction was that they got a good fit into the the Star Wars universe without the screwup that Disney critics seem to have lived in fear of since Lucas sold the rights to Disney.  A good story, the cast is good, and a solid, fun movie. 

Yesterday, we caught Passengers.   Fran Porretto over at Liberty's Torch had talked about seeing it and enjoying it. I had seen the trailer a few weeks ago and thought it looked interesting, but wasn't sure I'd go catch it.  I'm glad we did.  As Fran points out, it's essentially a love story in a science fiction setting.  It's unique in that the cast is essentially three people, although a fourth has about a five minute cameo.  Those three are the two stars, Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt,  and someone I had never noticed before, Michael Sheen, who plays an android bartender named Arthur.   

Passengers is sort of a generational travel space story.  Pratt, Lawrence and over 5000 others are in "suspended animation" for the 120 year journey to another planet for colonization.  The part "over 5000" is the crew - nobody is awake and tending the ship; it's all driven by computers.  After an accident in space, Pratt's sleep chamber malfunctions and wakes him up.  Is it accidental that a mechanical engineer who can fix things is the one awakened?  That's never addressed.  It takes him a few days to realize he's alone and find he's 30 years into a 120 year trip.  He must come to grips with the facts that there's no hope of a rescue, no chance to go back into the long sleep, and that awakening early is a form of death sentence in solitary confinement.  Over a year later, after Jennifer Lawrence is awakened, the two fall in love and to put a coarse summary on it, it does kind of follow the Hollywood template of Boy Meets Girl, Boy Wins Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Wins Girl Back.  Along the way, he has to fix lots of things on the ship and eventually save all 5260 lives.  All that said, the sets are beautiful, the CGI ship and other effects are magnificent.  It's hard to tell which parts of some sets are real and which are CGI, which is as it should be.  Oh, and there's a really big plot element I'm not telling you.

All that aside, and shifting subjects bad enough to give us both whiplash, I've spent my shop time trying to re-pack my ballnut with ball bearings (last story).  It's harder than it looks online.  This video gives me hope of being able to re-pack the balls without needing a BRT.  My problem is that I need the BRT for about 5 minutes.  If I rebuild the nut on the screw, like most videos show, I need a fancy BRT to remove it from the ballscrew.  But it's already off the screw.  If I could rebuild the ballnut on something simpler like a piece of doweling or something to hold the balls in place, then put the ballnut onto the screw, I'd be better off. 

Avalon, the ship in Passengers.  That bright "flame" at the right (forward end) drives shields that protect the ship going at half the speed of light.