Question: During the beginning of the film, why does Jim fake his death? Was it to frame Ethan?
Answered questions about specific movies, TV shows and more
These are questions relating to specific titles. General questions for movies and TV shows are here. Members get e-mailed when any of their questions are answered.
Answer: In addendum, Jim actually had no clue that Ethan would not follow orders and abort mission, as planned. The girl Ethan was with had to die in the new, unplanned manner, because she followed the target. Seeing the other operative, she was caught off-guard, and he knifed her to death.
Question: I've noticed in some episodes the person playing Dr. Bashir is credited as Siddig El Fadil and in others he's Alexander Siddig. At what point in the series did he have the name change?
Answer: He changed his name after the third season because people were having difficulty pronouncing his last name."Alexander Siddig" is the name he typically goes by as his full birth name, "Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abderahman Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi", is far too verbose and complex for screen credits.
Question: Does anyone know where I can find a script or transcript for this movie?
Answer: Try this. www.starpulse.com/Movies/Talented_Mr_Ripley,_The/Script/.
Question: How did the alien egg get on board the Sulaco? I thought it was by the Queen but she did not have that organ that she was connected to when we first see her and so she couldn't reproduce eggs.
Answer: Agreed the Queen could have stowed the eggs away on her body as Alien bodies, especially one her size, could easily have a couple of eggs hidden upon her, and we would not know. They are masters of disguise these creatures and can merge in with their own environments or others...what's to say an egg can't look like part of the Queen's body? In addition, could Facehuggers not attach themselves to the Queen's body and merge with it somehow? Flatten themselves against her skin maybe?
Answer: As we don't know the precise details of the Alien reproductive cycle, we don't know for a fact that the Queen would be unable to produce eggs without the sac seen in the film. The only other possibility is that somebody got the egg up there somehow. The only possible candidate would seem to be Bishop, who would have had to somehow have got the egg from somewhere, and flown it up to the Sulaco while Ripley was off rescuing Newt. There doesn't seem to have been time for this, so the only remaining option seems to be that they did indeed arrive with the Queen in some fashion, either laid while up there or, possibly more plausibly, rescued intact from the destruction caused by Ripley and carried somewhere on the Queen's body.
Question: Why do Anakin and Qui-gon have to cover up the fact that it's Anakin's pod they want him to race? Anakin says, "You could make them think it's yours" (or something like that), and Qui-gon later says that he acquired the pod in a game of chance. Why the deception? What does Watto care, who built the pod?
Chosen answer: As a slave, Anakin is not allowed any possessions of his own. Anything the Skywalkers have, ultimately belongs to Watto, so if Watto discovered Anakin had a pod, he would claim it for himself and maybe have someone else race it. The Jedi, of course, needed Anakin to race, since he was the best pod pilot around (and to test his Jedi capablities).
Question: I read an interview with Peter Jackson that basically showed him this site and he commented on it. One of the mistakes was the notorious car question and Jackson said "We saw it but we didn't think anyone else could, so we left it in". However, a trivia just posted has stated that in the commentary, he denies knowledge. Did anyone else see that article and/or hear any other reports. I'd hate to think I was losing my mind....
Chosen answer: The article is at http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3540652/. You're not losing your mind.
Question: Please explain this line to me: in the hospital talking to the camera, she says, 'Mom still cries when she sees a tilt-o-whirl and a fat lady in a tube top.'
Question: Does anyone know why the runes at the hidden door of Moria were written in Elvish and not Dwarvish?
Answer: It's because that door was the principal route between the Dwarven realm and the Elven land of Eregion, who were on very friendly terms. Most of the visitors using that door would most likely be elven, so using elven runes could be considered a courtesy.
Question: What happened between Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman after she asked him about the necklace? I was a bit confused as to what happened to their relationship, for example, did they spilt-up or did they just try to work through it?
Answer: I think it's left up to the viewer to decide. From what we are shown (the final scene at Heathrow) they could have been working through it or they could have broken up, so the viewer must decide what outcome they believe more plausible or pleasing.
Question: I'm not really sure about it, because I realized it only after I went out of the movie theater but I think that when the Bride removed Elle's eye, it's the wrong eye - left eye instead of right eye. am I right?
Answer: Elle's eye patch is always on HER right eye, so Beatrix removed Elle's left eye.
Question: Was Minas Morgul (originally Minas Ithil by the Gondorians and sister city of Minas Tirith) reclaimed by the Gondorians after the war?
Answer: It's never stated. Assuming that it survived the turmoil of Sauron's destruction, the Gondorians would have taken control. Whether they would allow such a place of evil to continue to stand is an open question.
Question: Is it me, or is the samurai sword that Uma Thurman uses in Kill Bill the same one Bruce Willis uses in Pulp Fiction?
Answer: Check out the trivia. It's already in there. (Yes, same swords).
Question: After the fall of Sauron, Barad-Dur and Mordor as a whole, what was Mordor used as? Did it serve any purpose after the war? For example, did the survivors build a city/buildings?
Answer: It's never stated. It's certainly unlikely that there were any survivors on the plain of Gorgoroth, the north-west part of Mordor where Mount Doom and the fortress of Barad-dur were located. The remainder of Mordor, the more-fertile lowland area called Nurn, where slave-farms produced food for Sauron's armies, probably fared much better, but precisely what happened after Sauron's fall is never mentioned.
Question: After King Elessar (Aragorn) dies in 120 FA, what exactly happens to Arwen?
Answer: Arwen leaves Gondor after Aragorn's death, now ruled by Eldarion, their son. She travels north, to the now-deserted remains of Lorien, to Cerin Amroth, a grassy mound at the very heart of the realm where she and Aragorn first pledged their love to each other. She passes away there in 121 FA.
Question: What happens to Osgiliath after the war? Is the city rebuilt?
Answer: It's not clear what happens. Minas Tirith continues to be the capital of Gondor. It seems likely that Osgiliath would be rebuilt to some extent, but it probably never regained its full glory.
Question: Does anyone know the name of the ruins that the Fellowship pass on their journey? (a friend told me it was Weathertop revisited - I know that's not it.)
Answer: You're right, it's not Weathertop - looks totally different and completely the wrong direction. The Fellowship are heading south at this point, parallel to the Misty Mountains, so they're most probably in the land of Eregion, which, as a trivia point, is where all the Rings (other than the One Ring) were forged. Eregion and its largely Elven population were destroyed by Sauron during the Second Age, thousands of years prior to the War of the Ring - no placenames from that era are known, and the region is still largely uninhabited. The ruins that they pass are most likely the remains of some sort of outpost - it looks too small to be an actual settlement.
Question: What is A.J. doing when he burns Mark's CD? Why would he ruin his CD, if that's what he's doing?
Chosen answer: He is making sure the CD can't be played anymore because nobody really likes Mark's music.
I never understood that part because they were singing along to the song Mark chose to play.
Question: Does Voigt Kampff (sp?) mean anything?
Answer: Not specifically named for anything, but the following snippets of an essay called "Philip K Dicks Human Vision" by Kyla Bremner, shed some light on possible influences on the name: "The German and Italian names of these tests perhaps allude to the fascist regimes of Hitler (Mein Kampf perhaps?)...and the crimes against humanity which [were] perpetrated less than thirty years before Dick was writing this novel...Deckard and Bryant's discussion of Lurie Kampff, who modified Voight's scale to make the Voight-Kampff Altered Scale...[he] is deliberately portrayed as a psychiatrist in the mould of the likes of late nineteenth-century sexual psychologists such as Havelock Ellis or Richard von Krafft-Ebing, both of whom were instrumental in laying down the foundation from which Sigmund Freud developed his theories...The curious similarity between the name of the Voight-Kampff test, Krafft-Ebing's name, and Hitler's manifesto, Mein Kampf, seems to link the three in a manner that suggest they are all interrelated..."
Question: One of the trivia entries states that Ridley Scott prevented any members of the cast from seeing the chestburster until the scene was filmed so their reactions would look more natural. However I've dug up numerous sources (such as IMDB) that says this is not the case and the cast had indeed seen the creature before hand. Which is the correct version of this story?
Answer: The version that I've heard the most often, which seems the most plausible, is that the cast were pretty much aware of what was going to happen - the chestburst effect requires machinery, a fake torso and so forth, so it's a bit daft to imagine that they weren't aware of what was coming. What they weren't expecting was the sheer amount of blood squirted everywhere, so their reactions to being sprayed with blood are, to some extent, natural.
Poor old Lambert got the brunt of it.
Join the mailing list
Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.
Answer: Jim fakes his death so that the IMF won't come after him. Jim's aim is to give the impression of a blown mission, but to ultimately end up with the NOC list himself - something that he succeeds in doing. He's selling this to Max for a LOT of money, enough to set himself up for life, but he needs the IMF to think that he died in the blown mission. He leaves Ethan alive so that Ethan can tell the IMF that he 'saw' Jim die, so that they won't come looking for him. He frames Ethan so that Ethan won't come looking for answers.
Tailkinker ★
Surely, they would need a body to confirm his death. Such an organisation would not trust any secondary source information.