ReRyRo

Corrected entry: It becomes quite obvious as the movie progresses that the aliens want to capture and use (or digest) humans, so it defies logic that the first one to appear immediately starts vaporizing every human in sight. Since the people posed no threat, the only reason to vaporize them would be if the aliens simply wanted to be rid of them - which they obviously didn't. So this initial vaporization was simply a manufactured plot device by the movie makers.

ReRyRo

Correction: There are plenty of humans to go around. They don't need all of them. What they first wanted to do is collapse human society. That usually works if you start killing indiscriminately.

lionhead

Maybe they needed 20 billion people. So we don't know that there "are plenty to go around." And again, the people they vaporized were no threat. And they didn't need to "collapse human society" (and you have no way of knowing what they "wanted" to do); they merely needed to remove threats. So, again, it defies logic to unnecessarily vaporize what's later shown to be desirable to them, if not required by them.

ReRyRo

You don't know what the wanted to do either. Seeing them kill so many people, logically shows that they don't need all those people.

lionhead

Maybe they didn't need 20 billion people. Maybe they didn't have the "human harvesting" equipment ready. Maybe they just felt like it. Who knows. Either way, I'm not sure we can't apply our concepts of logic to an alien race.

You might try reading the original novel. While I don't disagree that it defies logic, the fact is that the only person that could address the why of this was H.G. Wells. While the filmmakers changed a number of details to base the story in the present (2005), in the U.S., from a family's point of view, the tripods being buried...the basic story itself, on the aliens illogically torching lots of humans before they began harvesting them, is pretty much the same as in the novel.

Correction: Doesn't defy logic in the slightest. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the initial "invasion" (vaporizing every human in sight and starting battles) was to disrupt and take control of the human population. Thus making it easier to harvest human blood/tissue from the remaining population. (Which, from my memory at least, were implied to basically be used to fertilize their terraforming efforts/the red weed.) If you wanna take somewhere over, you can't just wander in and say "Ok, this is MINE now!" That's not how war works. You have to show force, assert dominance and then get rid of any possible opposition.

TedStixon

Correction: "So this initial vaporization was simply a manufactured plot device by the movie makers." This 'manufactured plot device' was written by Herbert George Wells, 110 years before the 2005 movie. While there are differences between the original novel and the 2005 movie, there are a number of similarities. One identical plot detail being that the aliens' tripods started by incinerating countless humans before harvesting them to fertilize the red weed. I can't recall if the novel explained why.

Corrected entry: Nothing in space could communicate with whales in the ocean without radios. It wouldn't matter if it was generating the loudest sound in the universe, or had the most sensitive mike and most powerful amplifier - sound can't travel through a vacuum. The probe couldn't "hear" the whales, and the whales couldn't hear the probe.

ReRyRo

Correction: This assumes that the probe, which does not appear to be a 'mechanical' device, uses a communications technology that we are familiar with, and there's no reason to assume that it does. It's a fictional, alien probe, which is likely using a fictional, alien technology to communicate with the whales.

wizard_of_gore

You're describing fantasy fiction and not science fiction. The whales are not equipped with alien technology to send and receive, so it doesn't matter what technology the probe contains The movie makes a point of "playing" the sounds of whales and the sounds of the probe. Sounds, by definition, are vibrations of a medium - there is no medium here to carry the vibrations, and even if there were, they would have to be so powerful as to cause worldwide, catastrophic shock waves in order to reach.

ReRyRo

Star Trek does often dabble in fantasy under the guise of "too advanced for our puny minds." The probe's signal is not itself a sound but some kind of energy (or something) that can inexplicably drain power from starships, cause giant hurricanes, and produce a sound when it hits a medium. The probe presumably has sensors that can detect the effects of a whale call and extrapolate/ "hear" it much the way the Enterprise bridge screen can "see" across vast distances using sensor data.

TonyPH

3rd Feb 2016

Space Cowboys (2000)

Question: What are the chances of four guys of their age ACTUALLY passing the physical to the required standards? I know they all kept reasonably fit but they struggled with running etc. so it seems unlikely they would pass all the tests. I know movie rules dictate suspense of disbelief to a certain degree, I'm just wondering what their chances would be in reality.

The_Iceman

Answer: Eastwood would be out on height alone and the rest probably have high blood pressure. https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/606877main_FS-2011-11-057-JSC-astro_trng.pdf.

Chosen answer: It wasn't a matter of how physically fit they were, but that their particular combination of knowledge, skills, and past experiences were needed for this specific mission. The physical criteria would be amended in order to recruit them for that mission.

raywest

They were specifically told they wouldn't be given an easier ride and would need to pass the exact same tests as the younger astronauts. The physical criteria wouldn't have been amended to suit them so is it possible for 4 guys of this age to pass?

The_Iceman

Remember that at some point in the process it became a political issue - the old cowboys were wanted for their PR value, so physical test results would have been "fudged", if not ignored altogether.

ReRyRo

Agree that the physical requirements were a major plot point and part of the 'deal' for the team to go, but there was some relaxing of requirements and politics. In general, the answer is YES, old folks can go to space without major fudging of the requirements as was demonstrated by lots of astronauts in their late 50s, a few in their 60s, and John Genn at 77. Just recently an 82-year-old woman flew on Jeff Bezos' tourist rocket.

1st Aug 2017

Escape Plan (2013)

Factual error: When Ray figures out he is on the ship, he makes it back to his cell, creating a flood along the way, he then swims through a lot of water. When he returns to his water drenched cell and escapes with Victor, his clothes are bone dry. (01:54:30 - 01:55:20)

Tony

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: I really don't think so. Their clothes are completely soaked, like their hair and skin.

Sammo

Nope...watching the scene many times in slo-mo, it's clear that Arnie's shirt is soaked, but Sly's is just as obviously dry.

ReRyRo

In the first shot when he comes out from the cell he is more than knee-deep in water, with water splashing everywhere, and there are showers of water everywhere when the shot changes: if the shirt were dry you would see stains created by the water spashes and by soaking wet Arnie leaning on him and touching him, since it is impossible for a dry shirt to stay dry through what we see onscreen, let alone the multiple takes most likely they had to do: instead the color of the shirt is uniform. Plus his hair, face, his T-shirt underneath is wet, why would they throw a dry shirt on him on that mess, and how would it stay dry? I think it's simply the light to make them appear different, Arnie is on the darker side of the corridor. However, that's just my observation.

Sammo

Corrected entry: In the scene in the Jeep when Garlick announces to the passing troops that Cronauer is in their midsts and Adrian does his riff, after the convoy starts moving again, more than a dozen trucks go by with all the troops grinning broadly and giving Cronauer "kudos," even though the majority of them couldn't possibly have heard or seen his Jeep "performance," and wouldn't even know who he was.

ReRyRo

Correction: Or someone spread the word via either CB, Grapevine-telephoned it down the line, or ran the news? Ask any soldier, they'll tell you how highly the entertainers are valued, how hard they'd listen, how fast the news would spread.

dizzyd

The "correction" is mere conjecture, not based on any evidence from the movie itself, but rather simply an opinion of how the plot could have been written and portrayed. I wrote up the actual scene as it played out on the screen as a mistake because without any supporting evidence from the movie makers this scene is a mistake. If one was to invent potential back stories for each scene in a movie then just about any mistake could be explained away as intentional, depending on the extent of one's imagination. But it wouldn't be a commentary on the movie.

ReRyRo

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