Maybe this is why the AI couldn’t do naval invasions. They were always looking for the wrong sea.
Oh man, I loved this movie as a kid and even read a book about the making of it, which got me interested in the whole “making of” side to films–and that interest continues to this day. It’s even got Ray Walston!
Looking back I can’t say it’s a great movie, but it’s certainly an interesting movie at least worth watching as a novelty and for Williams-Duvall, if you can get past the general WTF of it all. :)
The real Order of Malta is a Catholic chivalric order descended from the Knights Hospitaller. It’s been around for 900 years and is a sovereign entity under international law. I always assumed it was based in Malta, but apparently now its headquarters are in Rome.
The Freemasons are, as usual, just pretenders.
They (usually referred to in English as “the Knights of Malta”) were based in Malta for a long time and defended it against a massive Ottoman fleet at the Great Siege of Malta, which I read a history of about uhhhhhhh 20 years ago. The KoM had Greek fire, and they would soak these wooden hoops in it, light them up, and roll them down the hill their fortress was on, and the Ottoman Janissaries wore these loose robes and headdress things that caught on fire really easily.
The book I read was really exciting, but the English author was all about the one member of the KoM who was English; IIRC he was like the recording secretary or something. And in the end the author gets all sentimental about how the guy who was Master of the Order at the time of the siege had the English guy entombed next to him in the KoM’s vaults or whatever, and I was like coughtheyweregayyoumoroncough
Come for the weird Altman Popeye, stay for the John Many Jars history fanfic.
-Tom
I think it speaks to the paucity of the modern imagination that when something like this comes up of course the only possible explanation is that they were secretly gay, a kind of cultural imperialism of the mind that can’t imagine the very real circumstance that people in different times and places think and thought differently than we do on a whole host of subjects, and instead imposes a meaning on events that is itself very much a snapshot of our own ways of thinking right now and not reflective of some Timeless Truth.
Or maybe they were gay, who knows.
It’s true, I don’t have much of an imagination.
Or maybe they just fucked a bunch, local talent being more fluid. Are we far enough away from 9/11 to mention that in general, there’s a ton of boyfucking going on in Afghanistan at the least? My buddy went over there as a contractor and learned enough Pashtu to realize that it was a pretty normal thing.
“…no homo.”