My thoughts exactly. They aren’t aliens - they’re demons. The comparison to aliens is a deliberate choice because many of the phenomena attributed to aliens these days (lights in the sky, mutilated livestock, strange things happening in the corn) used to be attributed to the Devil in pre-modern times. It’s not water that hurts them - it’s holy water.
The movie is a modern-day retelling of Job, with Mel Gibson losing his faith and cursing his life after his wife is taken from him, ultimately learning from the “swing away” sequence that there’s a greater purpose behind things that seem to be random chance. Those divine reminders, not the crop circles, are the eponymous signs.
There’s a weird misconception I see all over the place regarding the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me about how the American and British sub crews leave the Russian sub crews in their cells and thus allow them to die making them all guilty of murder. But this is entirely ignorance since you DO see Russian sailors, they just also happen to be wearing white sailor uniforms that look similar but not exactly the same as the British sailors. They even make a point to show one of the Russian sailors giving James Bond ammo during one of the shoot-outs as a way of showing the international cooperation going on at that point. The reason people seem to think this is because none of the Russian sailors are given speaking lines making it obvious they would be Russian.
I’ve also heard people claim that the nudity in some of the James Bond intros (there’s a couple like in The Spy Who Loved Me where you can see bare nipples) was a mistake as it should have been in shadow and that HDTVs have “ruined” them by making the image too crystal clear and removing the impliedness of the nudity by making it overt, but people in the theaters would have been seeing it in basically HD as well right? There shouldn’t be any “upgrade” in visual quality from the original 35mm prints and the first 720/1080p HD releases
Well, we see Vito whack Fanucci so he can continue to build his dirty business in New York in peace.
We see Vito extorting the landlord so that Signora Colombo can stay in her apartment. And Michael extorting Senator Geary pays dividends all over the place.
I think it’s pretty well implied that Al Neri murdered her.
Well, that’s because no one really had any gambling debts. But we do see a lot of other debts incurred to the Corelones that get paid one way or another.
Fair point re: Dottie (temporarily) bailing. I’d still say the character they established was all in, when she was in. If the filmmakers intended Dottie dropping the ball deliberately to be a reasonable inference, I’d say that overall it’s poor storytelling. If something foreshadowed it, say, a major plot point that Dottie struggled with her “win at all cost” orientation, that sometimes winning isn’t most important in a competition—well, that might set up an interesting “did she or didn’t she?” ambiguity.
As it stands, we have a stoic, no-nonsense, intense competitor, one who hasn’t given a hint of any namby-pamby, “maybe winning isn’t really the most important thing” inclination. She seems to define the “fuck your feelings” archetype, at least within competition.
I do agree that the movie does provide the opportunity for different interpretations. But as in all things, I think we can agree, my interpretation becomes the definitive one.
“drive me crazy” is too strong but I certainly can’t go with the degree of confidence people have that Kevin Spacey’s character is definitely Keyser Soze.
I mean, he certainly could be but it is equally possible that Soze is never seen at all or doesn’t really exist and is indeed a fairy story told to infant criminals.
I think it is undeniable that Kint is the mastermind behind the events in the film but that doesn’t make him Soze.
I don’t think that’s clear at all. For all we know Kint got away and this was some schlub they mistook for him. He was making everything up, nothing he says can be considered real.
Like at the end of Dr. Strangelove, when Slim Pickens rides the H-bomb to the surface, and then you see a bomb explode - how do we know that that was the same bomb? It could have been any H-bomb, dropped by any plane.
Well we know that he was the only “Usual Suspect” survivor of the boat and that he was there and identified as a key figure by the badly burnt sailor.
We also know that he was spinning a yarn, on the hoof, to the detective. Playing a part in order to distract and be able to be released. He is picked up by “Kobayashi” and certainly appears to be a person of substance.
The bits that we can rely on don’t paint him as someone unrelated to the events.
There is one small plot hole you could cling to, if you want the film to have a happy-ish ending. Pickens’s plane is the only remaining bomber, and the President asks Premier Kissoff if the doomsday machine will be triggered if it manages to bomb its target. His reaction makes it clear that it would. However, the plane is leaking fuel and can’t reach its intended target, so they go for the nearest “target of opportunity”. It isn’t confirmed that bombing this new target will activate the doomsday machine.
As I recall from reading the script, the crew of the bomber (called the “Leper Colony”) was meant to be multi-ethnic/-religious as something of a parody of the same trope in classic war movies. Let’s make sure that every race and religion gets to play their part in bringing about the end of the world!
It’s reminiscent of another movie that was widely misunderstood at the end of it-- Spielberg’s AI. (spoilers ahead) At the end of the movie, after the human race had died off, what a lot of people thought were aliens were excavating a deep layer of snow and ice to recover artifacts of the dead race. But they weren’t aliens, they were advanced descendants of the autonomous robots that humans had created. They were the successors to us.
A big one for me is people thinking the beings at the end of AI: Artificial Intelligence are “aliens”. It’s understandable because they have that standard skinny, bald, bug-eyed space alien look. But given the nature of the film, they are clearly meant to be highly evolved robots.
Because he is smart enough to assume Vizzini is smart enough to notice if he wasn’t tensing up Vizzini would assume it’s in both glasses.