Tailkinker

31st Jan 2013

Skyfall (2012)

Question: Why did M send Bond back out into the field if he didn't pass all the tests? She stated he wasn't allowed unless he passed every test, so why did she say he could when the tests stated he's not fit enough?

Heather Benton

Chosen answer: Because she believes that people are more than just the sum of their test results. Regardless of what the tests show, she still believes that Bond is the best person for the task ahead, that his skill, experience and tenacity will allow him to rise above a few bad test scores and get the job done anyway.

Tailkinker

Question: How exactly does Batman acquire the "Clean Slate" that Catwoman has been looking for the whole movie, and from whom? Daggett suggests that it's a little too good to be true, so is it even real?

Answer: Daggett suggests that it's too good to be true because he believes that it doesn't exist; that it was in development, but it never worked. From what we see in the movie, however, it seems that that's a cover, that Bruce obtained the "Clean Slate" in order to keep it out of the wrong hands. Exactly how he did that is unclear - most likely he covertly bought up the company developing it, Rykin Data, moved all the project materials to somewhere secure, paid the developers handsomely to sign strict confidentiality agreements, then let Daggett buy the company to find that the "Clean Slate" wasn't there, leading him to believe that it was simply a gangland myth.

Tailkinker

26th Jan 2013

Doctor Who (2005)

Chosen answer: This is an instance of the Doctor interfering, albeit indirectly, with his own timestream. He sends the invites to his younger self, Rory, Amy, River and the older Canton because he knows, from his memories of those events occurring, that they are the ones who get invited. It's a somewhat circular situation, but that's time travel for you.

Tailkinker

Question: Why was CPL Upham treated so badly by the other soldiers? they were only Privates (E-2), but a Corporal is E-4. They should've seen him as a superior and respected him, shouldn't they?

wolf8265

Chosen answer: Upham isn't a soldier, he's a clerk, recruited from another unit because of his linguistic skills. His rank is irrelevant; untested in combat, he would not receive any respect from the other soldiers until he proved himself worthy of it.

Tailkinker

21st Jan 2013

Skyfall (2012)

Question: What relationship does Silva have with M? M claims he was a former agent, whilst Silva refers to M as "mother" or something along this lines.

Jaffacake

Chosen answer: He's an agent who worked for her when she was section chief in Hong Kong. They are not related - Silva refers to her as "mother" or "mummy" as a nod to the fact that recruited agents are frequently orphans and thus their superiors often take on something of a parental role - a noted theme in this particular movie.

Tailkinker

Question: Verbal is presented as a person who has worked with Keaton presumably for some time to have earned his trust. But since Verbal is really Keyser Soze, this would mean that Soze had been "underground" as Verbal for quite awhile establishing his relationship with Keaton. Can we really expect that Soze would have been "playing the part of Verbal" for the length of time, presumably years, he would need to in order to establish a bond of trust with Keaton? And what could have been Soze's original motivation? It couldn't have been that he foresaw this particular situation that he was going to need a criminal of Keaton's caliber to help pull off. The relationship with Keaton would have had to have begun long before Keyser Soze would have known that he needed Keaton to assist in pulling off this particular job. So why establish the relationship with Keaton in the first place?

Answer: Soze, as is established in the movie, tends to work anonymously or through intermediaries, with the result that, generally speaking, those working for him are unaware of their actual employer. But Soze still needs to keep informed about players and events in the criminal fraternity, so it makes reasonable sense that he would have a number of fake identities that he could use to keep tabs on things directly when necessary. Soze has, as is stated in the movie, encountered Keaton previously in his "Verbal" persona, although Keaton specifically states that they've met "once or twice before", which suggests that they haven't actually worked together. It's not necessary for Soze to have spent years underground masquerading as Kint for this to be the case, just that he use the persona on those occasions when he was in the right area. During those occasions, he encountered Keaton, probably to evaluate him for use in a future operation after Keaton interfered with his earlier smuggling operation.

Tailkinker

Answer: They are not presented as crime partners! Verbal only says they met a number of times in prison as the way Keaton knew Kint.

Answer: They were briefly in lockup together months earlier where Kint got a "6 month suspended sentence" as divulged early in the film. Kint does leverage this brief relationship to secure Keaton's spot on the team. But why go to such lengths to secure him? Because he felt the storming of the ship was a 5 man job, and he knew Keaton had several murders along with a storied past in his history that made him a reliable and strong team member.

7th Jan 2013

Skyfall (2012)

Question: What is the song being played when the helicopter is approaching Skyfall?

Chosen answer: It's a cover version of John Lee Hooker's "Boom Boom", done by The Animals.

Tailkinker

7th Jan 2013

Doctor Who (2005)

Chosen answer: Given that we hear her voice throughout the episode over loudspeakers within the asylum complex, it seems fairly clear that, when not speaking directly through the Dalek shell speakers, she does indeed sound like her original self.

Tailkinker

Question: Did Bruce/Batman plan on faking his death before the flood made reconnecting the bomb impossible? It seemed like before that happened the plan was just to deactivate the bomb, then hopefully things would go back to normal. Does Bruce just realize the opportunity this would create in the last minute and take it? Also, does Bruce have to sneak back into Gotham to tell Selena that they're going to run away and start a new life, because it seems impossible it was a plan they already had worked out as a nuclear bomb was about to go off.

Answer: Well, as no details regarding Bruce's thought processes are given in the film, it's impossible to say for sure, but, no, the most likely chain of events is that he never intended to fake his own death in such a manner, because the aim all along was to reconnect the reactor core and prevent the bomb from ever detonating. Most probably the plan was to eliminate Bane, stop the bomb from going off and then simply retire Batman again, once the city was back on its feet, just as he did before. When the plan to reconnect the reactor core was scuppered, he had to improvise, the result being that the world considers Batman to be dead, rather than simply having disappeared again. And, no, Bruce snuck back into Gotham to stop Bane - given that she betrayed him to Bane, it's pretty unlikely that he had any serious thoughts regarding a new life with Selina at that point. Although he believes that there's more to her than she claims, it's only when she selflessly returns to help him save the city, despite the very real chance of dying in a nuclear blast, that a life together really becomes a possibility.

Tailkinker

Question: Even though everything seems to be resolved at the end, Gotham was still in rough shape when Bruce faked his death. Thugs and actual villains from Arkham were loose in the city, and there was no Batman to stop them. Although we see towards the end that Bruce really does want to hang up the cowl, it seems unlikely that he would leave Gotham behind if he didn't have belief in them to sort things out. How did Bruce plan to solve this? Did he plan Batman's "death" to look like he died as a martyr, just like his parents death did? Ras' al Ghul did tell him that after Thomas and Martha's death Gotham was inspired to keep itself alive. Or is Bruce just putting his faith in John Blake to step in as the next Batman?

Answer: Gotham wasn't in great shape when he retired after the events of The Dark Knight, but, with the new powers bestowed upon them by the Dent Act, the city authorities were able to clean up the city without his assistance. While the Dent Act has been somewhat discredited by the revelations about Dent himself, the positive effects on the city that it brought would be obvious to anybody, and thus it's unlikely, particularly given the role of the police in ending Bane's rule, that those powers would be stripped from them any time soon. It will take time, but they have what they need to do the job, regardless of what Blake ultimately decides to do.

Tailkinker

7th Jan 2013

Doctor Who (2005)

Chosen answer: Amy and Rory travelled with the Doctor for a long time in their lives, alternating between travelling with him and long periods (some as long as two years) having a normal life at home; Amy specifically states, I think, that they do their best to try to keep their ages at least roughly synchronised with their friends, to stop awkward questions about why they seem to be aging too quickly. This lasts for at least ten years - Amy is 21 when she first starts travelling with the Doctor, while Rory, who by all appearances was in the same class as Amy, and thus is the same age, states that he's 31 in "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship", which takes place some considerable time before their eventual departure from the series (the episode "The Power of Three" alone covers an entire year). By the end of their travels with the Doctor, Rory and Amy are probably about 33 years old. Given that they first started travelling with him in 2010, they would have lived through until around 2021 or 2022, making their appearance on the hillside in 2020, when The Hungry Earth was set, very easy.

Tailkinker

4th Jan 2013

The Dark Knight (2008)

Question: Why not just say that Harvey perished in the hospital explosion? It wouldn't cover up the people he killed, but still it would be painless and easy.

Brad

Chosen answer: Well, as you say yourself, it wouldn't cover up the people he killed. It would also immediately raise questions that couldn't be plausibly answered, principally why a senior public official was left to die in the explosion of a building from which everybody else had been evacuated. Likewise, it wouldn't explain how Dent's body was found a long way from the hospital a considerable time later - given the number of police officers who attended the scene, enough people would have seen the body that there's no realistic way it could have been kept a secret. Finally, there's a myth to be built; in terms of Dent's legacy, being brutally murdered at the hands of a crazed vigilante is a much better story to arouse public feeling than him simply dying in an impersonal explosion. For the apparently quite draconian Dent Act to be passed into law, Dent has to be seen as a martyr by the public, so that the public outrage is strong enough to allow such measures to be set up. The hospital explosion story, with all its holes, would never do for that; the story that they go with, that Batman killed him, works much better.

Tailkinker

30th Dec 2012

Taken 2 (2012)

Question: Where did Kim learn how to drive stick-shift? Is her dad that paranoid to prepare her for driving a stick-shift car?

lionhead

Chosen answer: Hardly paranoia, as such, more just giving Kim options. Kim has a noted interest in travelling abroad; cars in Europe are far more likely to be manual transmission than in the automatic-dominated US, and thus, by teaching her to drive a manual car, Mills may have made it easier for her to, say, drive a hire car on her travels. Manual transmission cars also tend to get better fuel mileage, are usually less expensive, certainly give you more control and are, in my opinion at least, more fun to drive, so there are some practicalities involved as well. Really the question is why wouldn't anybody at least learn how to drive a manual car, even if they usually end up driving an automatic.

Tailkinker

30th Dec 2012

Doctor Who (2005)

Chosen answer: It's not so much that they're necessarily competing (indeed, the Doctor would be appalled to think that they were), it's really just that Amy has, at this point in the series, rather conflicted feelings about the Doctor and Rory. While on the verge of marrying the dependable everyman Rory, she feels an attraction to the Doctor, his exciting life and offbeat ways. As a result of this episode, she comes to realise that she does truly love Rory.

Tailkinker

Question: The Hobbit trilogy takes place 60 years before Lord Of The Rings, and it is shown that Bilbo takes the Ring from Gollum and escapes the Misty Mountains with it. What exactly has Gollum been doing for the past 60 years?

Casual Person

Chosen answer: It took Gollum a few years to summon up the courage to leave his cave to try to find Bilbo, but, unsurprisingly, he found that the trail had gone cold. Wandering in the hope of picking up the scent, he ended up on the edge of Mordor, where he encountered Shelob and became her servant, spying on her behalf, luring food into her lair and so forth. Eventually, captured by Sauron's forces, he gave up the names of Baggins and the Shire under torture, alerting Sauron to the existence and potential significance of Hobbits. He was freed, only to be captured again, this time by Gandalf and Aragorn who wanted to question him about the Ring before placing him in elven custody in Mirkwood. Escaping from there, Gollum hid out in Moria where he first picked up the trail of the Fellowship.

Tailkinker

Question: Why does this movie have so many differences than the book? Why don't they want to follow the actual story line according to the book?

dinieland

Chosen answer: Any book-to-film adaptation will require changes, because what works on the page will not always work cinematically, for any number of reasons. Given the length of some books (the Order of the Phoenix clocks in at well over 700 pages), there's no realistic way that everything could possibly be fitted into the length of a movie, and thus it regularly becomes necessary to eject certain subplots entirely, condense certain events, combine characters or whatever else might be necessary to tell the basic story successfully within a two hour timeframe. As a result, many cinematic adaptations can contain significant deviations from the original book, but ultimately tell what amounts to the same core story. This happens with most of the Potter films, particularly those based on the longer books, but ultimately the main storyline remains intact, even if they take a slightly different route along the way.

Tailkinker

24th Dec 2012

Skyfall (2012)

Question: Has the car Bond uses to drive M to the Skyfall home to hide her from Silva ever been used in any other Bond films?

Chosen answer: Yes, it originally appeared in Goldfinger. Aston Martin DB5s have also appeared in a number of subsequent Bond movies, but have not always been intended to be the same car.

Tailkinker

Answer: The DB5 also appears briefly in The World is Not Enough as a thermal image at the end and in a deleted scene. It also appears at the end of Spectre when Bond drives off.

Answer: The Aston Martin DB5 originally starred in Goldfinger then Thunderball in the pre-credit scene, then it appeared again in Goldeneye, Tomorrow Never Dies, Casino Royale (but this time it was owned by another character) and then Skyfall in which it gets blown up.

18th Dec 2012

Thor (2011)

Question: When Selving and Foster and Darcy were sitting on the top of that roof and Selving said, "I know a pioneer in gamma radiation." Do you think he was talking about Bruce Banner?

thor stark

Chosen answer: While no absolute confirmation exists within the film, it's hard to imagine that the description of a pioneer in gamma radiation who mysteriously disappears refers to anybody else.

Tailkinker

Question: On Dagobah, when Luke goes into the cave he finds Darth Vader and kills him, his helmet explodes and turns out Darth Vader is Luke. How does this make any sense?

Chosen answer: Luke is seeing visions relating to possible futures. In this case, it's effectively a warning that, if he embraces the path of violence, which he has at this point by keeping his weapons with him when Yoda told him to leave them behind, then he risks falling to the Dark Side and becoming just as bad as Vader.

Tailkinker

14th Dec 2012

The Avengers (2012)

Question: In the beginning of "Thor", the battle between Odin's army and Laufey's army happened in Norway. In (Captain America) the Tesseract was found in Norway during World War II. Do you think there is a connection ?

thor stark

Chosen answer: The Tesseract is described in Captain America as being "the jewel of Odin's treasure room", so clearly it has significant links to the Asgardians, making it perfectly reasonable that it was located in Norway. Whether its presence there is directly linked to the battle in some way is unknown.

Tailkinker

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