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avortac4's Replies
I don't quite get your point. He wouldn't be 'alone for all eternity' if the others are dead, he would get .. THE PRIZE!! ... which is never specified, so the writers didn't have to do any brainwork at all.
Neat, convenient.
I have about a thousand questions about all kinds of things relating to the prize, motivations, mechanics, bodily functions, limitations of the immortality, the rules, the creators of the rules, why people would ever obey them, what makes a thing 'holy' (though I am SURE they mean 'sacred'), and a host of other things as well, so your question is like one drop in the ocean of questions I have.
Yes, I have wondered about not only his, but other people's motivations about wanting to kill other immortals (well, 'immortals', since they can be killed)...
Also, the old question of 'if two of them are friends, WHAT forces them to try to kill each other?'.. Is it pure greed for the prize? Wanting to die anyway, so it's basically a favor?
This movie is your typical hollyweird mess, where writers were thinking things like 'camera shots', 'transitions', 'effects', 'locations', 'cultural aspects' and LOTS OF LIGHTNING and whom to hire, and so on, but not so much on WHY things are happening, WHAT forces the rules to exist, and so on. Motivations? Pff, who cares, as long as they try to kill each other WITH SWORDS AND LIGHTNING!
I know there are 'sequels' and 'TV shows' and fanfiction and whatever, but this movie itself does REALLY not explain much, and even the tiny backstory about him being originally a 'highlander' does not explain pretty much anything, so it's almost like a fake backstory so you'd THINK there is a backstory, when there really isn't.
The REAL backstory would be HOW did this whole thing start, WHY did everyone get born to the places and eras they were, did they choose their locations, why did they forget they are 'immortals', why did SOME of them know, and others didn't, and so on and so forth...
"AND MAKE SURE JAMES BOND HAS A SAMURAI SWORD WHEN HE FIGHTS THE EVIL GROWLING VILLAIN IN THE LIGHTNING STORM!!"
..and we heard Morpheus say, 'if we knew what he knows, Neo would probably be dead', and Neo's name is Anagram of One, and his name is Thomas, as in doubting thomas, and his last name is Anderson, which basically means 'Son of Man' (Ander - Android - Andrist - Mis-Andrist, just like female would be Gyno - Gynoid - Gynist - Mis-o-Gynist)..
...SO.... let's go mug'em! Sorry, I meant.. let's.. let's...
"LET'S DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!", they suddenly heard Smith proclaim as he entered the super high-tech, efficient surveillance room where the Agents can have anything they want, even some less conspicuous way of tracking people.
And so they did.
If they are so keen to murder everyone, that they use this Cypher-betrayal-that-the-Oracle-the-Bitch-Won't-Mention thing to just kill everyone they can and capture Morpheus, then WHY won't they act upon ALL THIS INFORMATION they worked SO HARD to be able to acquire?
They install a bug, tap a phoneline, follow and research Neo, go to his workplace to capture him - JUST TO DO NOTHING?!
WHY!
What kind of incompetent cartoon fools are these?
These are worse than ANY villain that ever existed in any saturday morning cartoon!
What is wrong with these agents? WHY do they do only HALF of their job, then suddenly go into deep pause mode? Did they bug or glitch? Did they fall into some digital coma?
I swear this movie makes no sense, but the more I think about it, the MORE it seems to not make sense... this is not good for my blood pressure.
The agents' tapping ability - among pretty much all their 'brainy' abilities' is worse than horseshit. At least that can be used for manure.
I mean, how do they tap a phoneline, install a friggin' physical, unnecessarily spiderlike 'bug' inside someone's NAVEL (why would this EVER happen, even in the Matrix?? WHY? WHY A SPIDERBUG IN THE NAVEL?! Can't the machines think of something more sophisticated, clever, intuitive, organic, fitting within the 'human world system'? Can't they check the human history and see NOTHING LIKE THAT has ever been done, and mimic the things that HAVE been done to control people?)...
I am sorry, this movie is so childish, when you think about it..
.. how do they tap a phoneline, and then not know exactly what is being said?
Alternatively, they HEAR the conversation, but they don't act upon it. So let me get this straight, the strategy here is:
1) Install an unnecessarily spiderlike (and big) bug (which looks like a LITERAL bug, groan!), unnecessarily into someone's navel (instead of sleeping drug, hypnosis, and a MYRIAD of less conspicuous ways of controlling/tracking someone, heck, install a tiny microchip in their shoe or under their skin or whatever).
Also, I don't think that's how navels work, so the 'reality illusion' has been broken in three separate ways FOR NO GAIN/BENEFIT or REASON! WHAT were they thinking?!
2) Tap Neo's phone.. for .. reasons?
3) Act upon the info both things bring you in following ways:
*crickets*
What happened here? Did the agents fall asleep? Did they see where Neo is, listen to where he's supposed to meet the man the agents supposedly want 'arrested', where also other 'unplugged' people are gathered, so they could get/kill them all easily with one explosive, raid, helicopter attack, demolishing the building, etc... again, about 800 different ways and more..
..then say, ooh, we know Neo is in that building, and we heard his conversation with Morpheus - they are probably going to unplug him..
As a sidenote; what was that 'translation challenge' supposed to be about?
If you don't know any japanese, can't use a translation tool, can't ask anyone.. how are you supposed to not only read that sentence, but translate it, too? Heck, I would have had trouble with that, and I have translated longer things. I could only read a few of those kanji, and the only thing I could really discern from that was 'tree', 'you have to say this line' and a few other details, but not the whole meaning.
How was that supposed to work? Those challenges were pretty ridiculous. If I, knowing how to read kana and a few basic kanji, and can speak the language 'conversationally' without too many problems, couldn't complete that challenge, what chances do these gits who don't even know the basic social rules of Japan have?
Who thought they could complete that challenge? Is there a method of translation they could have thought of, if they can't use translation, take a pic, or ask anyone? Telepathically divine the meaning? What were they SUPPOSED to do, I am just curious. It would be one thing if they could ask strangers for help, but nope. So I am puzzled..
Forgot to mention the typical modern kid mindset: they see something absolutely mindblowingly ASTONISHING, something like the Swiss Alps, lakes, gorgeous architecture and the cutest villages possible, and what is their reaction?
'That's pretty.' said in a monotone voice.
Really? If THAT is just 'pretty', then what the heck does it take to make you gasp out of sheer admiration? I would be near speechless, or trying to find proper adjectives to describe the immense, rare beauty I am suddenly so privileged to be allowed to see..
..these people barely muster 'oh, this is probably my favorite place, haha' and about 8 separate occasions, 'oh, that's pretty' in a very unimpressed way, and THAT'S ABOUT IT.
What the heck is wrong with these people?
Isn't it enough they disrespected Japan in a major way by breaking their every possible train and public behaviour rule in existence, but they had to also disrespect Switzerland's sublime and evocative, almost mystical beauty by reacting to it in such a lackluster, casual way?
How about the way they said 'He's not in a MAGICAL place, it is just a place!'
How the F dare you?!
If an old, beautiful castle surrounded by the most breathtaking nature and amazingly soul-caressing architecture in the mountain villages of Switzerland is not magical, WHAT the hell is??
What is wrong with these twits? Seriously!
I can't fathom why anyone would watch them... Pegasus is sometimes right, but he certainly has bad taste when it comes to picking 'favorites'.
If your favorite youtube channel is ugly young people that talk like [forbidden word]s and discrespect every single culture, people and country they invade, casually treat every place in the world as their personal playground without any kind of actual appreciation as to what their privileged little rich kid eyes are seeing... you have some serious mental issues.
Please stop calling him Zack.
"I'd say the biggest problem,would be Hollywood finding an actor (or actress) who has the acting chops to BE the movie. That is one hell of a tough job - to be the only person in a film and to carry every single scene."
Tough job?
Why would it be tough? Isn't that what acting is supposed to be all about, to be able to tell a story or fulfill a premise believably? If hollyweird is populated with sub-par actors, that's their own fault for casting talentless hacks instead of people with talent.
If you are saying that amidst ALL actors on this planet, a powerful force like hollywtf is 100% incapable of finding a slightly-above-mediocre actor (this could pull it off just fine - look at Keanu Reeves in The Matrix or Sam Rockwell in 'Moon'), you must be delusional.
Also, why would THIS particular thing be any tougher than ANY acting job? There are plenty of people that have acted plenty of all kinds of weird situations and roles, from Spock to Data to Picard being Borg and whatnot.
Why would THIS particular role be somehow different? What makes this role somehow more difficult?
You are looking at this from some kind of weird angle, when the reality is, this is the story, these are the lines you have to say believably, this is the premise, this is the story, now act. NO PROBLEM for any actor in my opinion. Anyone that knows how to act should be able to pull off this role.
So WHAT if you have to 'carry' a movie, that's not, in acting reality, any more difficult than being the star of some other movie with other people in it. Are you saying that if you can't do dialogue with some other actor, it's somehow suddenly harder to act or get in character?
No, it isn't. You obviously haven't acted.. it doesn't matter WHAT the role is, this kind of role could actually even be EASIER than most roles, because you do NOT have to constantly be spewing dialogue and showing emotions and whatnot. You could just walk around saying nothing with a stressed-out look on your face..
Wow, you are writing my thoughts somehow!
I thought I was the only one on this planet that thinks this way... hmm, wait, that sounds somehow familiar a premise.
In any case, I 100% agree with you - hollyweird just DOES NOT have the guts or talent to make a movie about any premise. They HAVE to inject the 'expected', so women would also see the movie.
Someone talked about forcefully injecting Square Dancing into every movie. So you buy pr0n, and it has square dancing section in it, EVERY single time. You watch any movie or read any story, square dancing is everywhere. This would be almost as annoying as what they are doing now, with the 'injected romance'.
There HAS to be some woman in every movie, it's pretty difficult to find movies that do not. Even the SUPER rare movies that do NOT have square dancing - which is to say, 'injected romance' - almost always have women in them. There's ONE movie I can think of that does not have a female character, but even that movie has female actors.
It's even made by a celebrated hollyweird moviemaker, if you can believe that.
We should all know it... but I will tell ya: It is, of course, 'Bad Taste', possibly from 1987, if I remember correctly.
A really goofy movie, but very funny and fun as well.
I don't mind 'comedic relief' (as I think it's called, instead of 'comedy relief') at all, because I hate horror anyway, and love comedies, so it's always welcome to me. I can't understand why anyone would WANT to watch a movie without humor, I guess that's just my nature... I just love humor, so please inject as much of that as you want.
However, 'injected romance' is what REALLY ruins pretty much EVERY SINGLE MOVIE EVER!
It's like inserting some robots in EVERY single 'chick flick', would women like that? No. Their movies are pure romance and completely robot-free, so why do OUR robot movies have to have romance every single time? IT MAKES NO SENSE!
In any case, yeah.. I am not gonna flame ya..
It WOULD be more interesting and more 'SCI-FI' (or at least futuristic), if someone could live by themselves on a planet where everything was automated, so that it would function 'forever'.
For example, robots doing EVERYTHING important and menial, all the necessary jobs. So when the robots start breaking down, there would be repair robots that would repair or replace those, and they would keep making new robots.
I would love to see a movie that PROPERLY explores this premise, so it's not so mundane and boring. What would a 'King of the Planet' do if they were the only individual and did _NOT_ have to worry about survival, infrastructure, food, shelter, electricity, transportation, etc. and they COULD travel to any location easily and comfortably, nothing would ever run out.
I would love to see what would happen in THAT scenario, because otherwise, this stuff always devolves into the basic things of 'survival', 'whee, I am the king', 'I am going insane', 'thank God I found other people', 'now I am jealous and want to kill the other people' and so on.
It always devolves into something crappy like that, when it could just be this 'forever loneliness' that never ends, and there would NOT be any other people whatsoever.
I think the movie 'Moon' pulls off this kind of thing pretty well, but even THAT can't fully commit to the 'alone' premise, so it becomes yet another hollyweird movie instead of actually exploring an interesting premise.
I guess no one has the guts to make the kind of movie I am talking about.. sure, it'd be difficult and annoying to be the only one because you have to 'survive' so much, but if everything was taken care of and everything was always automatically repaired and maintained, THEN what..? You would never have to think about survival or longevity. You could just do whatever you want.
In the end, I don't think much can be done with this premise, because characters are what drive stories so much.
"Having this happen in winter could easily cause the food supply to disappear in a hurry."
What?
Could you elaborate on that, please? How is grid disappering going to make some storage full of canned food empty all of the sudden? There would not BE a 'supply' per se, because no one would be 'supplying' anything, as there wouldn't be anyone TO do anything like that.
There would be multiple vast piles of canned food, though, so how would all that disappear? You are not making a lot of sense here.
Grid wouldn't need some powerline to be knocked over (how does a 'line' going to get 'knocked over' anyway? You mean a cable would be cut because some pole or metal structure got damaged and fell over? Mere wind would not be able to do that, and is it really called 'windstorm', or maybe a hurricane, tornado, whirlwind, or or..?)
In any case, why does it have to be 'windstorm', and not 'snowstorm' or something else? Does it HAVE to be a storm, can't it be just a dead tree falling or some natural rock fall or or or..?
In any case, gas would probably last for some time, but not that long. Electric cars powered by solar panels would be the best bet for that sort of transportation, because those don't usually get 'knocked over', and an automated solar panel farm should be able to provide enough electricity.
The visitors, however, would come. How come people are all jazzed up about all these mysterious 'SCI-FI'-premises, but no one thinks about the UFO phenomenon that has been happening on this planet as far as anyone can remember and beyond?
Would make no sense to leave a whole planet empty, when it could be easily inhabited.. this is a beautiful planet - well, it would be, if all the warring, polluting apelike half-animal bipedal mongs were removed from it.. or if the populaces were replaced with actually good people.
This is not a particularly interesting premise, and NO ONE seems to be able to explore it in movies without introducing people eventually anyway..
The cure for your fears is not to avoid what you think causes them - it is to face them.
If you have social anxiety, you can't cure it by avoiding people and taking pills. You can only cure it by going as much into social situations as possible, until you are numb to it all. You can only hold to fear for so long when you are facing them, eventually you will be forced to release them.
Have you ever heard of conditioning? How about rejection therapy? If you are afraid of being rejected, BE rejected as much as possible, by the 100th time, it won't feel like anything.. or you will be just happy about it.
Face your fears, don't avoid and hide from them and then take some lab concoctions to mess up your body's natural chemical balance.
Of course, realistically, people living in better worlds, would not leave a planet this empty, they would come, land, and help you or take you to a better world.
Maybe they would let you help clean up this one and build a good world here.
In any case, the 'lone survivor' would sooner or later start seeing UFOs more and more, until the planet is populated again. It would be a sin to waste a whole planet and not populate it, wouldn't you think? This means, no one could stay alone for long on a planetary scale.
It would, of course, be quite funny to think that there might be people elsewhere, but since you can't really cross the sea alone (unless you are some kind of madlad), you would never know about it.. perhaps HAM radio stuff might let you talk to them.
I wonder how long you could survive on whatever you find in supermarkets, though.. it's an interesting thought. It wouldn't be very healthy to never get any fresh vegetables or fruits, but canned food should last you a long time.
In the end, this is kind of a boring premise, even if it promises a bit of luxury at first. Being alone is not a problem for anyone that doesn't hate themselves too much, but it would be a lot of work to survive in a world without infrastructures. Then there might be animals, so that could be dangerous. Being woken up by a slap from a Bear claw is probably not fun for anyone.
In the end, it's like a boring version of Survival Man, that has no possibility to go anywhere interesting without other people (which is why they had to inject the other people into the story).
There are more interesting 'SCI-FI' premises out there, I don't really find this one particularly fun to think about longer than about half an hour. After that, it's just same old routine every day, just to survive.
The important point in that situation, of course, besides hoarding the matches, electric cars and such, would be to find guns (probably easiest in USA), so you can end the 'experiment' when you want.
Hey, I have played that game before.. pretty good stuff!
My contribution:
"Greta Thunderberg's Fever Lust"
"Male Barbie Can't Exist, We Decided"
"It's Impossibly Hard To Live The Most Privileged Life"
How about other movies?
"Back to the Mutilated Present"
"The Tryinator 2: Normal Day"
"Drugspotting"
"Drug Users Trip on Violence without eating Oranges"
"The Story that Eventually Ends"
"Unplugged Nerds Fight Computer Programs"
"A Couple of Days of Ultron"
"Running Around Blowing Things Up with Very Little Blood Involved"
"Rambo: Very Little Blood II: Blowing Up Even More Things"
"Ninja III: Reincarnation Again and Again"
"The Story of a Car Factory with New Japanese Owners"
"Regular-Sized, but Young Women"
"Multiple Shells Without Any Ghosts In Them"
"Ghost Oppressors And Unjust Imprisoners"
"The Tube: NBC Experiment Literally in Television"
"Tiny Skirmishes and Family Feuds On Some Planets (Stars Do Not Get Involved)"
"Cruel And Selfish Media Mogul Misses Childhood Sled"
"Airhead Teen Mass-Murders People In Space Because He Got a High Score On A Simple Game"
"A Psychotic, Fat and Ugly Hag Tortures A Has-Been Writer Inside Cottage"
"Multiple Fatal Nightmares in Teenagers' Minds"
"A Professor-Archeologist Fails To Get A MacGuffin"
"A Schitzo Imagines Impossibilities Before Blowing Up Buildings"
"A Big Group of Weird Cosplayers Fight Each Other" (Probably too generic?)
"A Group of Ignorant Islander Lesbians Let One Of Them Try To Change History, Affecting Nothing Signifigant"
"An Otherplanetarian Comes to Earth, Only To Return In A Hurry After Doing Nothing Interesting" (I guess this could describe multiple movies)
The whole 'Clockwork Orange' still bothers me - there are barely any Clocks, Works OR Oranges in the movie. More aptly, there are drug users, milk and violence in it.
I was also very disappointed, when I saw a movie called "Hudsucker Proxy". No one sucked even ONE HUD in that movie, there were no proxies programmed in the movie that even COULD have done the job, and I don't even think a HUD was even shown - for those, you have to go watch a movie like "Top Emotional Drama in the Sky (With Same Rock Song Played Over and Over)" or something.
Maybe 'white' people could be called 'No color for you!', but that would be going too far, plus, it would be too funny and a certan great TV show-specific..
So of course every pyramid becomes an ego-based 'tomb', every stone becomes 'slaves put it there' (even though it has been proven to be logistically and factually impossible, and this is why the pyramids remain mostly still a mystery to those that don't understand the stones were levitated there and cut with energy tools, not metal tools - the truth is more fantastic than fiction)..
In reality, pyramids were initiation chambers.. should I even bother explain something like this to people that have NO concept of what 'initiation' even means, and probably associate it with some kind of cults and stupid, materialistic, useless 'rituals'..?
The pyramid shape focuses energies, so when you put the initiation chamber at the correct point, about 2/3 from the ground up, the pyramid shape focuses and sharpens cosmic energies and Earth energies to a very specific point as strongly as possible, which means that you can leave a physical body in that room for a very long time without it needing nourishment or starting to 'rot' in any way (the energy is the only reason why your body doesn't rot - it does not live without you keeping it animated.. so as soon as you depart, it starts rotting).
So an initiatee could leave their body for long periods of time to be initiated on higher levels, and this is conceptualized in the bible when Jesus the Christ did this so he could be purified and reach enlightenment so he could preach the truth as a pure, cosmic being, untainted by the animalistic side of the physical body (hence the temptations and getting rid of lusts and such).
Obviously he was a high-level spirit to begin with, and the body's seed came from a higher entity, so it could hold such powerful entity, but an Earthly incarnation still taints you to a level, so to be able to give the message as purely as possible, this kind of initiation was necessary.
But people are morons, so they distort these simple, obvious historical truths, so we have the bible and egyptologists..
"It is why the Greeks developed western civilization, because of the Mediterranean climate. It is the question of time"
You made QUITE the leap of logic here..
No one 'developed' or invented 'western civilization' (groan), and climate has NOTHING to do with it.
The reason why the ancient Greeks had so much philosophy, art and leisure, was because they had SLAVES.
So before you call them civilized, research your history and think what you are saying. The reason is not climate, the reason is literal slavery. That is why they had time to philosophize and to 'cultivate', but they didn't exactly invent computers or interstellar space travel. Basically they were people with a lot of time on their hands (climate does not give you time, just by the way, think where the time comes from - not having to do the stuff someone else does for you!), that did what they could with what they had.
Not all Greek people were all that civilized, and this did frustrate many that tried to be. There was one philosopher that carried a lantern with him, searching for 'humans', and never found any (or something like that), underlining the barbaric state of the masses even in the culture you call 'developers of western civilization'.
Also, as Gandhi pointed out when asked about what he thinks of 'western civilization' - 'It would be a good idea!'
This is not a mere joke. There is no true civilization in the west.. only in ancient India, ancient China and Japan, and of course all the Atlantis's priesthood-influenced cultures, like ancient Egyptians, that were spiritually on such a high level, modern people could NOT imagine it whatsoever. (Which is why egyptologists misunderstand everything, because they are looking at cultivated, sophisticated, truly and actually civilized culture via the lens of modern, nihilistic, materialistic barbarism that you call 'western civilization')..
The Dr. Strange stuff has SO many more examples of this, just by the way.. the 'healing everyone by a time travel spell' thing would be extremely useful in healing people, bringing them back from the dead and so on.
Of course the whole time travel and multiverse stuff means no one has to think about anything, nothing HAS to have any consequences.. HISHE makes a really good point showing why it has become such a horrible mess because of all that, because now Dr. Strange should be able to bring back, fix and heal anything and everything, and get any object and travel easily with portals and sling rings and.. just SO MUCH OP in there.
Not only that, but of course even the original Superman can always turn back time so you can always fix problems before they even happen.. no matter WHAT the problem.
So much OP when you think about anyone's powers, so no one is allowed to ACTUALLY USE their powers the way they would most realistically use them, where it would make sense, and so on.
Heck, I even read a Sergio Aragones comic where Darth Vader 'force-gropes' a woman. Sure, you can call it sexist or whatever, but if you give someone this kind of telekinetic 'touch-power', why can't we see it use in this kind of casual scenario more often, when it's a FACT that people WOULD use it that way in real life, if they had such an ability?
And I am not letting any women off the hook, women are very gropey and touchy-feely when it comes to high-status men - if an average fatso suddenly had this power, I bet 1000 bucks she would use it to force-grope some celebrity men, guaran-friggin'-teed!
Of course I don't mean it should be limited to this kind of pervy stuff, but a force user would realistically use the force for everything! Why walk when you can hover/fly? Why reach for the salt shaker when you can make it fly to your hand.. and so on. EVERYTHING would be so much streamlined, absolutely no one would do anything 'normally' anymore.
Seriously, would you? I wouldn't.
The last thing I want to say about this little movie, is the 1960s lifestyle, feel, sounds, etc.
The 'walking' sounds are a bit much sometimes - all that clipclop multiplied a bit too many times, and the 'S'-sounds sometimes sounding like they clip..
But the typewriter sounds - ahhh, balm to the wounds, music to the soul!
The oldschool telephone sounds, wow... I could just live in those sounds and swim in them and throw them up in the air so they will rain back all over me, ah. What amazing time it was to be surrounded by sounds we never hear anymore in our daily lives, and I am realizing just how much I miss those.
The offices also look so different from anything you see in movies anymore, and the absolutely luxurious house, although 'small setting' in a movie perspective, would be amazingly paradiselike to live in. The old cars, don't even get me started.
All in all, an intense, mesmerizing, glorious adventure into a different world... the world of the 1960s moviemaking, sounds, visuals and lifestyle, only ruined by its smallness on all levels.
The scope of the story is tiny, even if the idea is supposedly big. The settings, the premises, the areas are a bit claustrophobic, you don't ever get any sense of 'vastness', no matter how much they talk about space.
BTW, why doesn't the secretary just murder both of the people, since the chloroform does not seem to affect her at all? If she can murder by pure concentration, why doesn't she?
It's a 'packed' little movie, but in the end, let down by the very fact, that it IS, indeed, a 'little' movie, when it could have been so much more. The poster promises a lot that the movie just doesn't deliver.
It's a valiant effort and surprisingly interesting for what it is, but in the end, I would rather watch a couple of the more classic episodes of The Twilight Zone - at least there's a chance it will make a bit more sense and lend a sense to a bit more grandeur.
I mean, you have to learn to crawl first, then you can learn to walk on all fours, then you can learn to stand, and only then can you learn to walk. Only THEN can you even hope of learning to jog, run, or kick, and only then can you learn to START learning how to learn the very basic Tae Kwon-Do kicks!
You can't just go straight to the most sophisticated and demanding 'Break 7 boards with one jump' type of spinkicking and win the world championship!
You have to at least learn to walk first.
So I found it VERY peculiar and curious that they would jump STRAIGHT into this super complicated and SUPER demanding thing that requires basically an Adept-level spiritual level to even be able to attempt it... instead of, let's say a bit more modest goals, first.
How about.. telepathy? That's low-level spiritual ability everyone has, but most have put to a coma. Animals have a low-level telepathy in a very instinctual and primal form, which is why dogs always know the EXACT moment you decide to start heading back home - this has been proven with cameras and timing things, there is no doubt. A dog will react to the owner's real intention to head back home EVERY time at the same second the decision is made.
(Of course there are also animals that have dulled these instincts, or have had them dulled by people)
There are real projects that have been going on WAY longer than '20 years', about things like Remote Viewing and other so-called 'psychic abilities'. These are WAY easier to utilize and train than what these people immediately try to do.
I would even say telekinesis would be WAY easier to do than all that 'space travel with materialization feature installed' stuff they are trying to pull off. Seriously, WAY!! easier.
Even predicting the future accurately would be more doable by low-level cretins, like this planet's populace (especially nowadays, but even in the 1960s).