Also, we don’t know that they’ve been studying us “for years.” The movie explicitly states that the crop circles that have shown up in the past are not the same as the ones that show up right before the alien invasion. All the previous ones, like crop circles in the real world, had been shown to be hoaxes. The new ones couldn’t be explained through any of the known crop circle hoaxing methods.
And, as emrkp pointed out, we don’t know why they made the crop circles. You can make all sorts of guesses, but it’s worth pointing out that one of the explanations believers have put forth for “real” crop circles is that they’re the impressions made by the alien spaceship’s landing gear.
Yeah, but isn’t “extrapolating from current technology” the main reason why we have these collections of dumb predictions from the past, like quotes from respected scientists why human flight was, and would always be, absolutely impossible?
Okay, I can buy the slave theory. In fact, that’s the only theory that makes the entire thing make sense.
I was annoyed by the plotholes in this movie too, though, and while I would have been able to ignore them if the movie was scary, I didn’t think it was.
When they showed the “Frightening” scene of the alien in that 3rd world country, which seemed to freak out the characters onscreen, all I could say is “That’s it? A grey naked guy?”
I was dissapointed, to say the least. It should have been scary, but for some reason, it felt more stupid then scary.
How about GHOST SHIP, which takes place in the Bering Sea. The characters are frequently shown swimming in the ocean without thermal wetsuits. At the end, the heroine just floats away in the sea until she is rescued.
HELLO? ARTIC OCEAN? FRIGID WATER? HYPOTHERMIA? Didn’t any ot these people see TITANIC?
On a far better note within the horror genre movies, it seems like there is a plot hole in the Night of the Living Dead movies. The zombies are supposed to eat humans for food…however, we see legions of zombies that are at the most missing a bite or two. Doesn’t it seem like zombie victims would be totally devoured by the endless armies of flesh eating ghouls, and that there would be nothing left to reanimate. Then again, maybe the zombies stop feeding as soon the victim dies…
Well, I have to admit I wasn’t too frightened either. Could have been that I was too busy laughing, of course. I suppose the series of speculations put together by Miller put together COULD be plausable. I’ll buy the ‘slave’ possibility, though why you would bother with all the bullshit of setting up a coordinated operation to simply snatch some people, when they could simply have snatched them unawares is beyond me.
I’ll buy the mystery of the crop circles too. Maybe they WEREN’T communications or signal devices but strange totems to their pagan gods. Sorry though, not buying the door thing. That door was hardly ‘baracaded’, it was merely locked with a few boxes piled in front, if I remember correctly…and it was just a wooden door. As to the aliens just ‘playing’ with the humans…thats really out there. After all, the whole purpose of this thing was the attack (to snatch humans or whatever), and here was a nice group right there where one of their crop circle things was at. They KNEW they were there, they TRIED to get at them…but they were foiled by a wooden door.
I’m not buying sending even ‘slaves’ down into what is obviously a hostile environment for them though without protection and at least SOME weapons or support. What would be the point? We’re not even talking about humane reasons (or the alien equivelant) either…but simply practicallity. How were the aliens going to capture ANY humans? How could they grab them or hold them…they sweat for gods sake. Humans, by their very need of water, are surrounded by the stuff. Its all about us, and we have to live right next to it. Even if they chose a more logical place to attack us (like, say North Africa), anywhere there are humans there is water…lots of the stuff.
In addition, if they had THAT much trouble with an isolated farm house snatching unarmed humans (well, I guess they DID have a baseball bat and a few glasses of water), how could they hope to have a chance of snatching more heavily armed humans, like firemen equiped with hoses, or gardeners?
The radio thing though. Its amazing that advanced aliens (assuming the slave MASTERS were of course) would use 2.4ghz for their transmissions (remember, it could only be picked up by the broken baby monitor, but it could be picked up all over the farm and in town so it was pretty wide spread). I’m surprised that garage doors and WiFi units around the world weren’t going haywire, clueing in the humans that something was up.
Really I’m just giving you a hard time Miller…I’m having too much fun with this. Its almost like getting to pick appart the movie a SECOND TIME!! Woot!
Guess it’s all relative. I found the scene with the video very chilling, because I was sold on the reality of the characters and the world they inhabit. It was scary because I was judging it not as a movie-goer, but as a character in the movie’s reality. It didn’t really matter what the alien looked like, because what made it scary was that in a world that was identical to ours, all of a sudden there are aliens walking around in secret, spying on us. Sure, I’d seen scarier aliens in other movies, and I assume all the characters in the movie had, too. But to the characters in Signs, this alien was real, and that video was proof of it, and that’s what made it scary to them. And I found the characters intresting and realistic enough that whatever made them scared made me scared.
I think, in general, for a movie to really be scary, it has to sell you, not on the danger represented by its particular bogeyman, but on the fear of the human characters struggling against the bogeyman. If the characters aren’t interesting or believable, then they’re merely props to be abused by the monster, and the monster itself becomes the star of the movie, instead of the motivation for the action. Such movies can be fun (Freddy v. Jason, anyone?), but they’re not particularly frightening.
I think they were grabbing people up by the thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Which would be hard, maybe impossible, to do in secret. They also might have been working against some sort of time table we don’t know about. Maybe they had to clear out before the Space Cops showed up and pinched them for interstellar kidnapping, or biped slavery, or cruelty to animals, or whatever.
We don’t know what the purpose of the attack was. Could’ve been anything. Maybe the aliens are psychics who feed on fear, and having a bunch of terrified humans locked in the basement was like a buffet to them. They also don’t appear to be particularly strong aliens. Maybe they come from a low-grav planet originally, and a locked wooden door is a serious impediment to them, especially when they weigh 30% more than they’re used to. The ignorance of the characters (and, by extension, the audience) to the motivations of the aliens is the entire point of the movie.
The attack was apparently global: they did attack us in North Africa, and every where else, and places with little rain would have been hit harder than places that tend to be moister. And they did have weapons: the poison gas they could exude, which may not have been a part of their normal physiology. Good point about the sweat. Maybe it’s only fresh water they have an aversion to, or maybe that little amount of water merely stings badly, whereas a full glass burns. I’m sure they were expecting humans to figure out how to fight back, the trick was just to see how much they could get away with before any effective resistance could be organized, at which point they’d pull out, and any aliens who got left behind… well, that’s just too damn bad.
Sure, once they figured out what sort of effect water had on them. Besides, apparently they used that gas on a larger scale elsewhere in the world. I seem to recall there were radio reports about clouds of the stuff sweeping through cities. If they can project the gas further than the range of a garden house, then they win.
I don’t know a lot about radio, so this is all going to be sketchy, but I assume it was blind chance that the baby monitor happened to be set to the same frequency as the alien communications. And most other people probably assumed they were picking up someone’s cell phone, or a radio station out of Canada, or something. The kid in the movie was, for some reason, pre-disposed to think it was aliens, and went to some lengths to improve reception to prove he was right. Most other people would have just grumbled about how they don’t make things like they used to and turned their radio or whatever off. I have no doubt whatsoever that the government knew about it, but what were they going to do? "My fellow Americans, this is your president speaking. Today, NASA received radio messages from outer space. We don’t know who sent them, or why, or what they’re saying. We just though you’d all like to know. Try not to panic and run riot in the streets, okay?
No worries. It’s just a movie. I don’t expect anyone to agree with my opinions. That’s why they’re opinions, and not facts.
Interesting info. I was not aware of said improvement. Standardization reaches earth orbit. I back away from my previous comment.
Hmm. How do we know that the plane (and Bond) had already reached terminal velocity when 007 caught up with it? If they hadn’t, they should have been accelerating downwards at the same rate and, since Bond hit the cliff a few seconds after the plane, would rendezvous in the ground (not good in the middle of a Bond movie ), rather than the air.
Even assuming terminal velocity had been achieved, it seems (intuitively) unlikely that differences in terminal velocity would have been significant enough to bridge the time gap between the “departures” of plane and man. If so, this speed differential should have been responsible for knocking Bond dead unconscious upon reaching the plane. Further, the trajectory arc described by Bond’s fall meeting with that of the aircraft? Come on. Considering that neither man nor machine could steer to arrange their rendezvous, how did Bond manage to do exactly that? If not a rape of physics, surely one against probability.
Hehehehe, man Miller this is your favorite movie in the world isn’t it? Common admit it!
I liked the movie myself, I thought it WAS rather scary. I was even able to ignore all the religious propaganda crap I couldn’t relate to anyway, and enjoy the ride.
I didn’t even start thinking critically about some of the ‘plot holes’ until well after the movie.
Heh. It’s not even my favorite M. Night Shyamalan movie, which is Sixth Sense, and Sixth Sense doesn’t even crack my top ten. But I did like it an awful lot, and have spent a lot of time defending it from people who hated it, so I’ve got lots of counter-arguments ready. I haven’t yet found an error in it that I couldn’t explain away to my own satisfaction, if not to the satisfaction of anyone else. I keep lookin’, though.
I checked this thread out yesterday as I was about to watch Signs - nothing!
TODAY? page after page. I thought 6th Sense was awful - but this was ok - it was about faith and you cant prove or disprove anything so the holes were ok with me. By no means was it a great movie however.
This may not strictly be a PLOT hole; more a continuity error - but in Pulp Fiction they make repeated references to the fact that Marvin has had his head blown off and that there is a body without a head in the car and then…
we see him with his head in place renderingmuch of the urgency unfounded.
Maybe it’s just me.
This of course does not make any sense. I never read the book but I assume an MI troopers armor is man sized and not giant Anime robot sized. That said, any weapons, armor, sensors, energy sources and propulsion equipment can be made bigger and more powerful when placed on an armored chassis. Maybe they are more powerful than an M1 tank, but I imagine that the tank in the future would have lasers, hover and/or be, in fact, a giant anime-style robot. MI would still be better off supported by mobile armor and vice versus.
“Weight” is meaningless but “mass” isn’t. It still takes more energy to push a spacecraft full of tanks and weapons than an empty one.
Now in interest of this thread not turning into a dorkfest of “the Enterprise C class can only achieve warp factor 9.5 with it’s home theater system activated” on with the plot holes:
Peal Harbor - The B-17s have been stripped of everything non-essential until they are forced to lauch several hundred miles ahead of schedule. All of a sudden, several hundred more pounds of crap can be found (including a phonograph) to jetison.
Ocean’s 11 - Is there any doubt that these guys left enough evidence around the casino to tie them to the robbery? Least of all a SWAT team just packing up and leaving a crime scene.
Well, you said it yourself…you didn’t read the book. Basically, MI troopers had special powered armor, so they were like your anime robot in fact. Thats why they didn’t use tanks at all. The armor could run at incredible speeds, jump 100’s of meters in the air (fly really), was incredibly strong and tough, etc. The basic weapons were pulse rifles I think, with nuke rocket launchers and an assortment of granades…some of the troopers also had heavy weapons too. If you’ve ever read the John Ringo’s A Hymn Before Battle series, you have the idea of what MI was like. It was nothing like the movie at all (unfortunately).
They didn’t use tanks at all, because they weren’t as efficient as MI, so the book was comparing them to tanks of the past (like your M1A1 example…and they could destroy them by the boat loads). Each MI trooper was LIKE a tank unto himself basically, and the ability to be inserted from orbit, coupled with its incredible mobility and firepower made it the ultimate infantry system (according to the book).
We naturally take the rest from where? Human children must be exposed to speech in order to acquire speech. Since we don’t know the full details of the catastrophes suffered by the human race while Taylor was out in space, it’s not impossible (within the context of a science-fiction story, at least) that something might have happened to interfere with the ordinary process of speech acquisition. Say, air pollution rendered a couple of generations mute. Or the apes, during their rise to power, went around cutting vocal chords. Goodness knows. But if something horrible happened that prevented humans from being able to speak for a long enough period of time, their children would have no one to learn speech from.
Still, in the number of generations that must have gone by you’d expect the human race to have come up with something. Children do pick up language easily and naturally, and if they’re exposed to even just a fragmented pidgin language they can turn it into a flourishing creole. Even with speech lost, they could have developed a form of sign language. But again, we don’t know what happened to the human race while Taylor was in space. The basic premise of the Planet of the Apes film is that humans managed to completely destroy their own civilization and couldn’t recover, thus making room for the apes to rise to power. If you don’t find that premise plausible then that’s fine (although I’d recommend staying away from science-fiction films altogether, as most are even more far-fetched), but it’s not a plot hole.
Sheesh by now I was hoping someone would have commented on my Mission to Mars idea. Say I’m stupid b/c I didn’t consider factor X, Y, Z or say “hey that’s a good idea it would have worked”
In Batman: Forever (which is an enormous POS, but is Citizen Kane next to Batman and Robin), there is a car chase where batman is making his escape in the batmobile.
In order to escape, he fires a grappling hook out of the Batmobile, to the top of a building. He then escapes by driving up the wall. The badguys can’t follow him so thats the end of the chase.
Except, when he drives to the top of the wall, where does he go? Presumably, he’ll just be hanging at the top of the building. The badguys just have to wait at the bottom watching him dangling. Sooner or later, he is going to have to lower himself down again sheepishly.
Actually, this is correct. Its very hard to dump heat into space, because it very inefficient. Assuming you could get by without breathing, you could hang out in orbit for a very long time unprotected - the total vaccuum essentially acts as a very good insulator. NASA did some experiments with this. Space may technically be “cold” but it doesn’t act that way on matter, really.
I didn’t say it was a bad movie, I just said it was ludicrous. Without assuming a lot of continuous circumstances to stop the propogation of language - and I cannnot see how any of those could exist, its quite silly. But I didn’t say I wouldn’t watch it or I am deeply offended at the the plot hole.
Sorry though, not buying the door thing. That door was hardly ‘baracaded’, it was merely locked with a few boxes piled in front, if I remember correctly…and it was just a wooden door. As to the aliens just ‘playing’ with the humans…thats really out there. After all, the whole purpose of this thing was the attack (to snatch humans or whatever), and here was a nice group right there where one of their crop circle things was at. They KNEW they were there, they TRIED to get at them…but they were foiled by a wooden door.
Humans, by their very need of water, are surrounded by the stuff. Its all about us, and we have to live right next to it. Even if they chose a more logical place to attack us (like, say North Africa), anywhere there are humans there is water…lots of the stuff.
