Fr8monkey
Deity
Spoilered for length...
Spoiler :
1. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Was all that really necessary? – It would really have been useful if Henry Jones Sr. had found out, or, if he knew, mentioned the bit about the Great Seal. You know, the Great Seal that the Grail Knight tells them the Grail can’t pass, and which sets off a highly localized earthquake when Elsa tries to pass with the Grail. Because, as it turns out, the whole race against the Nazis to get to the temple and giving a fake grail to Donovan so he could die gruesomely wasn’t necessary at all. The Nazis could never have removed the Grail from the temple anyway! I mean, leave aside the point that Donovan clearly had no idea how to get past the booby traps, and Elsa wasn’t much help to him, so without Indy and his dad there they probably wouldn’t have gotten to the Grail anyway. Once Henry Sr. had been rescued, they could’ve just gone home.
2. The Empire Strikes Back: Time dilation – Luke and R2D2 leave Hoth to go to Dagobah at the same time Han, Leia, Chewbacca, and C3PO leave to go… well, they never really say what their initial destination is. Anyway, on Dagobah, Luke embarks on an intensive Jedi training course with Yoda — it’s never stated, but it’s heavily implied that this takes a long time; and besides, you would think a full course of Jedi training would take at least months, right? (We know it’s a full course, because when Luke comes back in Jedi, Yoda tells him he doesn’t need more training.) So, at the same time that Luke finishes this months-long training and runs off to Cloud City, his friends have clearly just gotten there a short time before. Yet all they did on the way was flee from a Star Destroyer and fly down the gullet of a giant space worm. That must have taken hours, not months. So was the Millennium Falcon flying at close to the speed of light (but not at light speed) for a while and thus experiencing time dilation?
3. Star Trek IV: The ease of time warp – So, all you have to do to go back in time is slingshot around the sun on a carefully-calculated route, right? It’s the same thing they did in the TOS episode Tomorrow Is Yesterday. If it’s really that easy, then any warp-enabled ship can do it any time, so surely someone in the Klingon or Romulan empires must have figured this out. The Klingons might be too honorable, but why haven’t the Romulans taken advantage of this, and used it for all sorts of nefarious purposes?
4. Star Wars: The Death Star’s slow attack – So the Death Star follows the tracking device on the Millennium Falcon to the rebel base. They jump out of light speed, and, for no clear reason, emerge on the far side of the planet Yavin from the moon where the base is. This light-speed jump takes a split-second, but now they have to wait minutes so they can clear the planet. Not only that, but the Death Star is capable of blowing up entire planets, not just moons, so why don’t they just blow up the entire planet of Yavin? Surely that would effectively destroy anything on its moons as well.
5. Gremlins: Feeding after midnight – Don’t get them wet; OK, fine. Don’t expose them to sunlight; sure, why not? Don’t feed them after midnight; um, how’s that again? If you can’t feed them “after midnight,” at what point during the day does it cease to be “after midnight” so you can feed them again? For that matter, how does the mogwai know what time zone it’s in? Suppose I get my mogwai in New York and then take a vacation to San Francisco — should I not feed my mogwai after midnight Eastern Time or Pacific Time? And what about Daylight Saving Time? Considering the consequences, these details seem pretty important.
6. Star Trek (the 2009 movie): Old Spock biding his time – Kirk gets marooned on the ice planet by Young Spock, and Old Spock saves his life. Then Old Spock tells Kirk that there’s a Starfleet outpost nearby, and they trudge through the snow to get there. Now, Old Spock was marooned there a while before by Nero, and he knew that Nero was going to try to destroy Vulcan. So why didn’t he seek out this Starfleet outpost he knew about until after Kirk arrived? Don’t you think that maybe it would’ve been a smart idea to warn Starfleet that someone was about to try to destroy Vulcan, and, oh, by the way, he’s from the future?
7. Spider-Man 2: Doctor Octavius’s arms – OK, so Octavius had to invent these heat- and magnet-proof metal arms, controlled by sophisticated AI, that attach directly to a human body and interface directly with the brain. So why, exactly, does he need Harry Osborn to finance his big fusion experiment? Is there any doubt that the technology behind these arms would be worth millions, if not billions, of dollars? He could buy and sell Harry.
8. Independence Day: The computer virus - This movie has so many unanswered questions that one is forced to conclude that most, if not all, really are just plot holes after all. But then there’s the computer virus that Jeff Goldblum uploads into the alien mothership, that is ultimately what allows the humans to defeat the invaders. Ask any software developer, and they will tell you that it is ridiculously hard to write a virus on a PC that works on a Mac, or vice-versa, and those are two computer systems that were designed and built by human beings. The likelihood of being able to successfully write a virus on a human-built computer of any sort that would affect a computer built by telepathic aliens is infinitesimal. Of course, this is an alien species that has managed to travel in huge ships across vast distances but has never invented a clock (hence the countdown timer they use before initiating their attack), so who knows what sort of vulnerabilities their computers might have?
9. Raiders of the Lost Ark: Indy on the U-boat- The Nazis stop the cargo ship and take the Ark and Marion to their submarine. The crewman tells the captain he can’t find Indy, but then notices that Indy has, of course, swum over to the sub and is climbing onto it. There’s stirring music, Indy waves at the crewmen, he climbs up onto the conning tower, he looks around for a second, and then… the movie cuts to the interior of the sub, where it gets underway, and then we see the red line moving across the map. So how, exactly, does Indy survive this journey? He has no special equipment, can’t get into the sub (the hatches have already been closed, since they’re about to get underway), and it’s about to, y’know, go under the water, in that way subs do. Now, I remember reading once that they scripted (and possibly even filmed) a scene where Indy ties himself to the periscope with his whip. This is, of course, patently ridiculous, since it requires that the sub go no lower than periscope depth on the whole trip and, even if that happened, he’d still probably die. But Indy does tons of things that should get him killed, so we’d have believed that if they’d shown it. But they didn’t.
10. Back to the Future: Marty’s parents’ bad memory – Even though Marty is only in 1955 for a week, he plays a pretty pivotal role in his future parents’ lives. It stands to reason, then, that they would remember him pretty well, don’t you think? Now, I’m not George McFly, but most men would probably have a few questions if one of their children grew up to look exactly like a friend from high school that their wife dated briefly.
11. Monsters, Inc. - Did the Little Girl's Parents Think She Was Kidnapped?
Pixar's Monsters, Inc. is about a place powered entirely by the screams of little children, much like Disney World itself. The monsters living in this Monstropolis are currently in the middle of a scream shortage, so the corrupt CEO of the one company that runs everything secretly plans to kidnap kids from the human world and strap them to a machine in order to harvest their fear more efficiently. The first lucky kid to get this honor is Boo, a little girl who slips into the monsters' world during an implied kidnapping attempt and befriends a giant blue beast named Sully and a one-eyed atrocity called Mike. After about a day of shenanigans, Mike and Sully uncover the conspiracy and finally manage to get Boo back into her own bed, and she resumes her life as if nothing happened. Everyone lives happily ever after!
12.The Incredibles - Why Didn't the Government Tell the Family They Were in Mortal Danger?.
The Incredibles is set in a world where superheroes have been forced to retire by the government, until they are brought back into action by a vast conspiracy that's killing them off -- it's essentially Watchmen, except with less gratuitous nudity. Hold on, if the National Supers Agency is so good at keeping track of superheroes ... how come nobody noticed they were being killed off? Dozens of them. Wasn't this, like, their one job?
13.The Iron Giant -- What Happens When the Rest of the World-Destroying Giants Show Up?
The Iron Giant follows the friendship between a 10-year-old boy and giant amnesiac robot from outer space who is currently being hunted by government agencies, since they view him as some kind of secret doomsday weapon. As it turns out, he actually is a secret doomsday weapon -- as soon as he gets his memory back, the lovable 50-foot-tall steel monster turns into a terrifying 50-foot-tall steel monster. If that ending made you feel good, you got it all wrong. And here's why.
If there was a sequel to The Iron Giant it would have to deal with the fact that someone had to send this robotic weapon thing to Earth (a small detail the movie never acknowledges), and they probably aren't gonna give up after one failed attempt.
14.Madagascar -- What Happened to the Ship's Crew?
In Madagascar, a group of talking animals living comfortable lives in the Central Park Zoo are sent to a nature preserve in Kenya under pressure from animal rights activists, which results in them becoming stranded in the wilderness along with dangerous predators and, even worse, annoying dancing lemurs. On the boat ride to Kenya, the crew of the ship carrying the animals is overrun by a group of sociopathic penguins, who take over the vessel and set sail toward Antarctica. Amid the confusion, the main characters are washed overboard and drift to Madagascar, where they learn important lessons about friendship and being true to their own nature, etc.
Pretty much everyone in this movie got a spinoff of some sort, except the ship's crew ... most likely because they're all dead.
16.Aladdin -- Did the Genie Create an Entire Country for Aladdin to Rule?
This classic Disney flick tells the age-old tale about the boy who wants the hot girl beyond his social stature and finally gets her through perseverance and deception. Also, Robin Williams with reality-warping powers.
When he frees the Genie from his tiny lamp prison, Aladdin gets his share of three magical wishes that can give him anything he wants. Knowing that the princess could never marry him if he was poor because of the law (also because ewww), he makes the Genie turn him into a prince. Princess Jasmine resists him at first, but is eventually charmed by his singing voice and impressive on-the-spot lyric creation.
The exact wording of Aladdin's wish to the Genie is "I wish for you to make me a prince" -- not to make him look like a prince, or to make him pass for a prince. He wants to become a full-fledged prince, and that's exactly what the Genie does ... with some disturbing implications. For the wish to come true, the Genie must have made an entire nation spring out of nowhere. Aladdin has to be the prince of something, otherwise he's just a guy in a pimp costume and should ask for his money back. When Jafar asks him where his kingdom is, Aladdin doesn't seem to know, but that doesn't mean the Genie didn't create one. The wish wasn't really fulfilled if there wasn't really a kingdom somewhere.
17.Sleeping Beauty - Why didn't Sleeping Beauty's parents just invite Maleficent to their party?
The whole story of Sleeping Beauty happens for one reason and one reason alone; the Evil Fairy didn't get invited to a celebration of the baby's birth. That's it. If they had invited the woman, she wouldn't have done anything bad — or at least nothing as bad as condemning the baby to die on her 16th birthday. The movie points out that everyone, literally everyone, else in the kingdom was invited, so it's easy to see why Maleficent is in a bad mood about being snubbed. And in a way, she has a right to be. Yes, no one wants her there, but it's a family event. Everyone has to put up with at least one person that they don't like when it comes to family events. Just suck it up, offer her a lot of wine, and hope she passes out in the corner for most of the party.
18.Pinocchio - How does the magical child slavery ring in Pinocchio stay open?
Pinocchio was a surprisingly dark film, with the darkest sequence being when a bunch of 'bad' boys are turned into donkeys by a sinister magical amusement park. The boys are lured away from school and onto a boat by a carnival barker. The boat takes them to Pleasure Island, an incredible amusement park where they are given pie and ice cream and roast chicken and told to go on rides and start fights. They're given tobacco to smoke and encouraged to ruin works of art like stained glass windows. Eventually, they start turning into . . . something else. The barker says, "Give a bad boy enough rope and he'll soon make a jackass of himself." The boys grow ears, tails, and finally turn into donkeys. They're crated up, sometimes screaming for their mothers, and put on another boat bound for 'salt mines.' My main question isn't about the moral implications of this. No — my problem is economic. Is there some kind of massive donkey shortage? How is selling mules to salt mines going to generate enough revenue to support two boats, a massive amusement park stocked with alcohol, tobacco, and an endless supply of stained glass windows?
19.Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - Was that prince employing the dwarfs in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as forced labor or what?
Ever notice that, even though the dwarfs in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs are pulling fist-sized diamonds out of the ground, they don't seem to have a lot of money? Don't get me wrong, they have enough money for food and a house — but the house is in the middle of nowhere, they make their own furniture, and they obviously don't employ someone to keep it clean. And then notice their attitude towards the Prince and the Wicked Queen. Since those are the only two royals around, the dwarf cottage has to be somewhere between the two kingdoms. When the Queen comes around, they decide first to chase her and then to kill her. Clearly, they have no particular loyalty to her. Then the Prince comes by and decides to make out with Snow White's corpse, and they stand aside. Then he carries her off to a fabulously bejeweled kingdom while they stay, sleeping seven to a room, in their shack in the woods. Seems fishy.
2. The Empire Strikes Back: Time dilation – Luke and R2D2 leave Hoth to go to Dagobah at the same time Han, Leia, Chewbacca, and C3PO leave to go… well, they never really say what their initial destination is. Anyway, on Dagobah, Luke embarks on an intensive Jedi training course with Yoda — it’s never stated, but it’s heavily implied that this takes a long time; and besides, you would think a full course of Jedi training would take at least months, right? (We know it’s a full course, because when Luke comes back in Jedi, Yoda tells him he doesn’t need more training.) So, at the same time that Luke finishes this months-long training and runs off to Cloud City, his friends have clearly just gotten there a short time before. Yet all they did on the way was flee from a Star Destroyer and fly down the gullet of a giant space worm. That must have taken hours, not months. So was the Millennium Falcon flying at close to the speed of light (but not at light speed) for a while and thus experiencing time dilation?
3. Star Trek IV: The ease of time warp – So, all you have to do to go back in time is slingshot around the sun on a carefully-calculated route, right? It’s the same thing they did in the TOS episode Tomorrow Is Yesterday. If it’s really that easy, then any warp-enabled ship can do it any time, so surely someone in the Klingon or Romulan empires must have figured this out. The Klingons might be too honorable, but why haven’t the Romulans taken advantage of this, and used it for all sorts of nefarious purposes?
4. Star Wars: The Death Star’s slow attack – So the Death Star follows the tracking device on the Millennium Falcon to the rebel base. They jump out of light speed, and, for no clear reason, emerge on the far side of the planet Yavin from the moon where the base is. This light-speed jump takes a split-second, but now they have to wait minutes so they can clear the planet. Not only that, but the Death Star is capable of blowing up entire planets, not just moons, so why don’t they just blow up the entire planet of Yavin? Surely that would effectively destroy anything on its moons as well.
5. Gremlins: Feeding after midnight – Don’t get them wet; OK, fine. Don’t expose them to sunlight; sure, why not? Don’t feed them after midnight; um, how’s that again? If you can’t feed them “after midnight,” at what point during the day does it cease to be “after midnight” so you can feed them again? For that matter, how does the mogwai know what time zone it’s in? Suppose I get my mogwai in New York and then take a vacation to San Francisco — should I not feed my mogwai after midnight Eastern Time or Pacific Time? And what about Daylight Saving Time? Considering the consequences, these details seem pretty important.
6. Star Trek (the 2009 movie): Old Spock biding his time – Kirk gets marooned on the ice planet by Young Spock, and Old Spock saves his life. Then Old Spock tells Kirk that there’s a Starfleet outpost nearby, and they trudge through the snow to get there. Now, Old Spock was marooned there a while before by Nero, and he knew that Nero was going to try to destroy Vulcan. So why didn’t he seek out this Starfleet outpost he knew about until after Kirk arrived? Don’t you think that maybe it would’ve been a smart idea to warn Starfleet that someone was about to try to destroy Vulcan, and, oh, by the way, he’s from the future?
7. Spider-Man 2: Doctor Octavius’s arms – OK, so Octavius had to invent these heat- and magnet-proof metal arms, controlled by sophisticated AI, that attach directly to a human body and interface directly with the brain. So why, exactly, does he need Harry Osborn to finance his big fusion experiment? Is there any doubt that the technology behind these arms would be worth millions, if not billions, of dollars? He could buy and sell Harry.
8. Independence Day: The computer virus - This movie has so many unanswered questions that one is forced to conclude that most, if not all, really are just plot holes after all. But then there’s the computer virus that Jeff Goldblum uploads into the alien mothership, that is ultimately what allows the humans to defeat the invaders. Ask any software developer, and they will tell you that it is ridiculously hard to write a virus on a PC that works on a Mac, or vice-versa, and those are two computer systems that were designed and built by human beings. The likelihood of being able to successfully write a virus on a human-built computer of any sort that would affect a computer built by telepathic aliens is infinitesimal. Of course, this is an alien species that has managed to travel in huge ships across vast distances but has never invented a clock (hence the countdown timer they use before initiating their attack), so who knows what sort of vulnerabilities their computers might have?
9. Raiders of the Lost Ark: Indy on the U-boat- The Nazis stop the cargo ship and take the Ark and Marion to their submarine. The crewman tells the captain he can’t find Indy, but then notices that Indy has, of course, swum over to the sub and is climbing onto it. There’s stirring music, Indy waves at the crewmen, he climbs up onto the conning tower, he looks around for a second, and then… the movie cuts to the interior of the sub, where it gets underway, and then we see the red line moving across the map. So how, exactly, does Indy survive this journey? He has no special equipment, can’t get into the sub (the hatches have already been closed, since they’re about to get underway), and it’s about to, y’know, go under the water, in that way subs do. Now, I remember reading once that they scripted (and possibly even filmed) a scene where Indy ties himself to the periscope with his whip. This is, of course, patently ridiculous, since it requires that the sub go no lower than periscope depth on the whole trip and, even if that happened, he’d still probably die. But Indy does tons of things that should get him killed, so we’d have believed that if they’d shown it. But they didn’t.
10. Back to the Future: Marty’s parents’ bad memory – Even though Marty is only in 1955 for a week, he plays a pretty pivotal role in his future parents’ lives. It stands to reason, then, that they would remember him pretty well, don’t you think? Now, I’m not George McFly, but most men would probably have a few questions if one of their children grew up to look exactly like a friend from high school that their wife dated briefly.
11. Monsters, Inc. - Did the Little Girl's Parents Think She Was Kidnapped?
Pixar's Monsters, Inc. is about a place powered entirely by the screams of little children, much like Disney World itself. The monsters living in this Monstropolis are currently in the middle of a scream shortage, so the corrupt CEO of the one company that runs everything secretly plans to kidnap kids from the human world and strap them to a machine in order to harvest their fear more efficiently. The first lucky kid to get this honor is Boo, a little girl who slips into the monsters' world during an implied kidnapping attempt and befriends a giant blue beast named Sully and a one-eyed atrocity called Mike. After about a day of shenanigans, Mike and Sully uncover the conspiracy and finally manage to get Boo back into her own bed, and she resumes her life as if nothing happened. Everyone lives happily ever after!
12.The Incredibles - Why Didn't the Government Tell the Family They Were in Mortal Danger?.
The Incredibles is set in a world where superheroes have been forced to retire by the government, until they are brought back into action by a vast conspiracy that's killing them off -- it's essentially Watchmen, except with less gratuitous nudity. Hold on, if the National Supers Agency is so good at keeping track of superheroes ... how come nobody noticed they were being killed off? Dozens of them. Wasn't this, like, their one job?
13.The Iron Giant -- What Happens When the Rest of the World-Destroying Giants Show Up?
The Iron Giant follows the friendship between a 10-year-old boy and giant amnesiac robot from outer space who is currently being hunted by government agencies, since they view him as some kind of secret doomsday weapon. As it turns out, he actually is a secret doomsday weapon -- as soon as he gets his memory back, the lovable 50-foot-tall steel monster turns into a terrifying 50-foot-tall steel monster. If that ending made you feel good, you got it all wrong. And here's why.
If there was a sequel to The Iron Giant it would have to deal with the fact that someone had to send this robotic weapon thing to Earth (a small detail the movie never acknowledges), and they probably aren't gonna give up after one failed attempt.
14.Madagascar -- What Happened to the Ship's Crew?
In Madagascar, a group of talking animals living comfortable lives in the Central Park Zoo are sent to a nature preserve in Kenya under pressure from animal rights activists, which results in them becoming stranded in the wilderness along with dangerous predators and, even worse, annoying dancing lemurs. On the boat ride to Kenya, the crew of the ship carrying the animals is overrun by a group of sociopathic penguins, who take over the vessel and set sail toward Antarctica. Amid the confusion, the main characters are washed overboard and drift to Madagascar, where they learn important lessons about friendship and being true to their own nature, etc.
Pretty much everyone in this movie got a spinoff of some sort, except the ship's crew ... most likely because they're all dead.
16.Aladdin -- Did the Genie Create an Entire Country for Aladdin to Rule?
This classic Disney flick tells the age-old tale about the boy who wants the hot girl beyond his social stature and finally gets her through perseverance and deception. Also, Robin Williams with reality-warping powers.
When he frees the Genie from his tiny lamp prison, Aladdin gets his share of three magical wishes that can give him anything he wants. Knowing that the princess could never marry him if he was poor because of the law (also because ewww), he makes the Genie turn him into a prince. Princess Jasmine resists him at first, but is eventually charmed by his singing voice and impressive on-the-spot lyric creation.
The exact wording of Aladdin's wish to the Genie is "I wish for you to make me a prince" -- not to make him look like a prince, or to make him pass for a prince. He wants to become a full-fledged prince, and that's exactly what the Genie does ... with some disturbing implications. For the wish to come true, the Genie must have made an entire nation spring out of nowhere. Aladdin has to be the prince of something, otherwise he's just a guy in a pimp costume and should ask for his money back. When Jafar asks him where his kingdom is, Aladdin doesn't seem to know, but that doesn't mean the Genie didn't create one. The wish wasn't really fulfilled if there wasn't really a kingdom somewhere.
17.Sleeping Beauty - Why didn't Sleeping Beauty's parents just invite Maleficent to their party?
The whole story of Sleeping Beauty happens for one reason and one reason alone; the Evil Fairy didn't get invited to a celebration of the baby's birth. That's it. If they had invited the woman, she wouldn't have done anything bad — or at least nothing as bad as condemning the baby to die on her 16th birthday. The movie points out that everyone, literally everyone, else in the kingdom was invited, so it's easy to see why Maleficent is in a bad mood about being snubbed. And in a way, she has a right to be. Yes, no one wants her there, but it's a family event. Everyone has to put up with at least one person that they don't like when it comes to family events. Just suck it up, offer her a lot of wine, and hope she passes out in the corner for most of the party.
18.Pinocchio - How does the magical child slavery ring in Pinocchio stay open?
Pinocchio was a surprisingly dark film, with the darkest sequence being when a bunch of 'bad' boys are turned into donkeys by a sinister magical amusement park. The boys are lured away from school and onto a boat by a carnival barker. The boat takes them to Pleasure Island, an incredible amusement park where they are given pie and ice cream and roast chicken and told to go on rides and start fights. They're given tobacco to smoke and encouraged to ruin works of art like stained glass windows. Eventually, they start turning into . . . something else. The barker says, "Give a bad boy enough rope and he'll soon make a jackass of himself." The boys grow ears, tails, and finally turn into donkeys. They're crated up, sometimes screaming for their mothers, and put on another boat bound for 'salt mines.' My main question isn't about the moral implications of this. No — my problem is economic. Is there some kind of massive donkey shortage? How is selling mules to salt mines going to generate enough revenue to support two boats, a massive amusement park stocked with alcohol, tobacco, and an endless supply of stained glass windows?
19.Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - Was that prince employing the dwarfs in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as forced labor or what?
Ever notice that, even though the dwarfs in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs are pulling fist-sized diamonds out of the ground, they don't seem to have a lot of money? Don't get me wrong, they have enough money for food and a house — but the house is in the middle of nowhere, they make their own furniture, and they obviously don't employ someone to keep it clean. And then notice their attitude towards the Prince and the Wicked Queen. Since those are the only two royals around, the dwarf cottage has to be somewhere between the two kingdoms. When the Queen comes around, they decide first to chase her and then to kill her. Clearly, they have no particular loyalty to her. Then the Prince comes by and decides to make out with Snow White's corpse, and they stand aside. Then he carries her off to a fabulously bejeweled kingdom while they stay, sleeping seven to a room, in their shack in the woods. Seems fishy.
