Ugh…thank you! I feel so dumb
I’m in the Weygand camp but to me the more important point is, what the hell are letters of transit? I mean, regardless of who signed them, the Nazis are going to be all, “Well, we got this guy who’s been a thorn in our side for years and his wife in our clutches but we gotta let him fly to Lisbon because of a couple papers he has?” I don’t think so.
They’re a MacGuffin of the first water.
That The Godfather Part II depicts Vito as a good man, and Michael as a bad man, with the bad Michael thus being responsible for destroying what the good Vito created. It doesn’t. It depicts instead how everything Vito did to bring about his family’s rise was only a lead up to the inevitable fall. Vito, not Michael, was the architect of his family’s destruction. Not by conscious design, but by negligence and recklessness. There was a fatal flaw in Vito’s plan to begin with, he didn’t see it, and his descendants paid the price one way or another.
It’s a morality play about the fruits of criminal enterprise: corruption, death, and grief. Simple as that.
Are you seriously using an IMDb crowd-sourced submission as a cite??? Plus, there are over 50 submissions there - did you have a particular one in mind?
I mean to be fair you are right, now I’m making assumptions. But I think that’s just the problem with the question in the first place, you have to just make a bunch of assumptions to get it to work.
I gotta ask where you got this information from. I’ve never heard anything like it. Nobody in the film asserts this. It’s not in the Wikipedia or imdb websites on the film. Cite?
If it is, it’s only to the 1960s movie version. There’s nothing in John Wyndham’s original novel about salt water (I’m pretty sure it’s salt water in the movie) being toxic to the plants r dissolving them. In fact, the plants in the novel aren’t even alien things from outer space – they’re bred here on earth. The BBC serial version, which is much more faithful to the book, doesn’t have anything about water being damaging to them, either. I think the film just needed a quick way to wrap things up. It’s actually not a bad movie – much better than I’d expect it to be. But this is not one of its high points.
That the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi defeated the Empire with sticks and rocks. The Ewoks did take the stormtroopers by surprise, and did manage to destroy some AT-ST walkers plus kill or wound some stormtroopers. But once the imperial troops got their act together they beat back the Ewoks. We even see defeated Ewoks being rounded up by stormtroopers after the fighting ends. It is only when Chewbacca shows up in a captured AT-ST that the tied turns back in the rebels favor.
In fact the exact moment that the Ewoks start to lose, as per George Lucas in the DVD commentary, is when we see two Ewoks get blasted and go down. One gets up, sees their companion dead and lets out a mournful howl.
For me at least, that pales in comparison to the fact that you have a far more technologically advance civilization that has navigated interstellar space to reach us, yet they seem to be totally befuddled by locked doors and boarded up windows.
Not true. But, if anything, Carpenter made his film so that it acts very much like a sequel to the original. The film takes a lot of stuff from the 1951 movie:
1.) The alien ship is a flying saucer in both films. In John Campbell’s original story “Who Goes There?”, the ship is described as looking like a submarine. This was part of a trend in the 1950s to take alien craft from science fiction stories that were definitely NOT flying saucers in the original stories and making them flying saucers because that was the new and trendy thing. They did it with The Day the Earth Stood Still and This Island Earth, too.
2.) In fact, Carpenter borrowed that wonderful scene from the original film where the scientists stand around the rim of the craft and demonstrate that it’s a disc. In the original, it was a clever and dramatic way to show that it was a saucer without actually showing the saucer – all they had to build was one fin sticking up out of the ice.
3.) The scenes with bringing the THing in ther block of ice into the compound, and of it attacking the sled dogs are in the story, but they were shown in both versions of the film, as well.
4.) Setting the Thing on fire in the rec room and having it charge out intio the snow was definitely taken from the original film; it has no counterpart in Campbell’s story.
The Carpenter film is far more faithful to Campbell’s story, but the film also pays homage to the earlier film.
The lost scene has a guard saying: “You’re the most wanted man in the Reich, but you have these papers, so what can I do?”
I can buy the “letters of transit” thing. How would the Nazi soldiers know that Rick, Ilsa, and/or Laszlo were wanted in the first place? They’d have Official Paperwork telling them so. If someone shows them Official Paperwork telling them that the bearer is not someone to be arrested, then they’d follow that, too, if they had reason to believe it was genuine.
When they’re stopped at a checkpoint and the guard says “Papers please”, they give him the Letters of Transit, instead of giving him their IDs.
Yes, it’s in the book. There are several mentions of the Man in Black looking nervous and frightened at times during their discussion over the wine glasses. It was all part of his act to get Vizzini to think he had won the game so he wouldn’t back out of it.
Interesting you bring up WoTW in comparison to Signs, because I thought of similarities between them as well, but not in the sense you do. To me, the twist in Signs (whether it’s water or impurities in water that kills the aliens) is a “dumb throwback” similar to WoTW.
When I read H.G. Wells’ WoTW as a kid, I thought the twist that “we couldn’t stop the conquering aliens, but the humble microbe could” was genius. That’s because I was still just a dumb kid. Can’t blame H.G. Wells either, because in the late 19th century the understanding of how microorganisms caused illness was still a relatively new thing. Nobody but H.G. Wells was likely wondering how aliens would be able to handle microbes, so the twist was a clever idea for the time. But these days we’re well aware of the danger of unfamiliar microorganisms-- the Apollo astronauts stayed in quarantine when they got back from the seemingly sterile moon just in case.
So when the Signs aliens, who are presumably much more technologically advanced than us, land on Earth and walk around basically naked, with no protective suits or apparently any protection of any kind, and it turns out that water kills them unless it’s triple reverse osmosis filtered, it’s a stupid plot twist, I’m sorry.
Similarly, I thought the Tom Cruise WoTW movie was also stupid because they used the same microbe plot twist, instead of updating it for the 21st century. Also, the scene where the family was hiding in a basement and the tentacle-like alien probe came through the basement window, looking for them, but was thwarted because they hid behind some junk. Am I supposed to believe that these aliens who are so far superior to us that they’re conquering us with no trouble at all, do not have infrared tech?
More so than the rest of the film? The whole movie has a sort of cartoon reality.
But: why are they here? Did they arrive to conquer us with their superior technology, or is this their equivalent of going bowhunting? Or of running with the bulls? Or — ?
I’ve not seen Signs recently, but they don’t say anything like “The aliens are being defeated with new info we’ve received” do they? They just say “The aliens are being driven back.”
Which makes a lot more sense. Cause you know what aliens vulnerable to water be it normal, or impure or “Holy” (A theory I read yesterday which makes some sense if its just Mel Gibsons family) and vulnerable to baseball bats…you know what else those aliens would be vulnerable to? Guns. Lots of guns.
The only good thing Vito does is make his family rich and powerful, using theft and murder to do it. I don’t think anyone watching Godfather II thinks of Vito as a good man.
Years ago on this Board I floated my theory that this is the way the alens get rid of their excess population, especially the stupid and unwanted ones. KInda like what happens at the end of Douglas Adams’ Hitchiker’s Guide series where one entire ship of superfluous colonists ends up away from the others and they realize they’ve been jettisoned.
I just…arrrgh, don’t get me started on M. Night Shayamalan movies. OK, he had one great idea for a plot twist, but then he kept trying to come up with another twist just as good, and coming up far short, like a crack addict trying to reproduce that first high.
Take ‘The Village’. So, (spoiler alert for an almost 20 year old movie) it’s a fakeout double plot twist-- first, the fairly easy to guess ‘decoy’ twist, that the monsters are actually the elders of the village in disguise, to keep the youngsters safely in the village and out of the scary woods.
But then, when the guy gets stabbed, they send the blind girl to get the medicine and it turns out the 19th century village is really set in the modern day, because the parents wanted to shelter their kids from the dangers and corruption of modern day life. Whoa!
But… why send a girl who not only does not know the secret, but is blind, to get the medicine?!? Can anybody fight my ignorance on that-- was there some sort of good plot reason to send her? The ‘elders’ knew the secret-- why didn’t one of them get off their lazy ass and get the antibiotics? Or, better yet, why not create a fake version of a 19th century village which is all safe and quaint, yet one in which modern medicine had been discovered already?