Ah, but you're forgetting - that only happened because the trained cartographer with the 3D mapping drones... got them lost.

The original script (ironically written by the screenwriter who did the Catwoman script) was a much better movie. You can blame this on Executive Fuckery.

Yeah. That was the last movie I saw like this. Keep in mind, I love the book and movie. But watching the movie, I keep going “oh come on” how does he know how to program a translator in excel. Still a great movie.

Isn't that because human computer technology was based on reverse-engineering a downed alien scout ship?

I only saw the movie, but I thought the same stuff for the most part. It would have helped if they were training him, but from what I remember he was only teaching his specific area and then thrown into having to do it with like almost no time for training. Yeah definitely not going to happen lol.

The destroyers at the Battle off Samar took multiple hits from Yamato's 18.1" guns. The initial hits were armor-piercing rounds that passed right through without doing much of anything, but they took multiple hits before sinking even after the Japanese switched to high-explosive shells. I think a single hit on a destroyer from a 12" shell would certainly not sink it, and depending on where it hit it would probably not even be seriously disabled. Given the close range (less than 1000 yards), the destroyer's deck guns would still knock out the sub pretty quickly.

If that is a plot point in the movie then I completely missed it. I guess if the aliens were running Bonjour and their displays were VESA compatible it would make Jeff Goldblum's job a lot easier...

I disagree. But that’s OK. I like simple, family friendly (for the most part) jokes. If I want raunchy, doubled over laughing, I watch Dave Chappell. The difference is I can watch one with my kids present. Different strokes, bro, and that’s A OK.

Rocky, the alien, was doing the vast majority of the work in their communication - being careful to only use words already in the list recognised by the laptop, except when absolutely necessary to introduce a new word, and also saying the words in an order suitable for English grammar. The laptop was only doing single-word speech synthesis from Rocky's sounds, a fairly simple task.

In Excel? In space? How did his M365 account not expire? Or connect back to MS to validate when he opened it up next time?

Or how there is always a path to drive through. Even in War of the Worlds (2005) when a jet liner crashes in the street, they can still drive away.

I personally think this is due to the writers all living in LA and not being able to conceive of getting anywhere without driving.