Ok. So I watched C&A last night (i was bored and curious) and wasn’t expecting anything amazing, but figured it would be fun.
I’m not saying anything about the aliens and their motives. I’m ignoring the weird alien girl and how the hell she got to that town. I’m even leaving aside the size differential between the aliens and their dinky little scout ships.
All that is fine. I don’t care.
What I want to know is: Where the hell did they explain why there was a fucking upside-down steamboat ruin out in the middle of the wilderness??? What the hell?
Haven’t seen the movie, but winding rivers like the Missouri and Mississippi notoriously change course over time. Steamboats that sank in these rivers are left behind when the river changes course, and eventually become buried on dry land miles from the “new” riverbed. A case in point.
So it doesn’t require alien intervention to find an old river boat apparently stranded far from the river. I’m not sure how it was depicted in the movie, of course.
It wasn’t even on flood plain-- It was in high desert. The nearest river was in a deep carved gully. And it wasn’t just on its side, but completely upside-down.
It was supposed to be an homage to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, according to Favreau. I must admit I’ve never seen Close Encounters, so I don’t know.
In-universe, I’m pretty sure the answer is just “aliens did it, 'cause they’re assholes”.
I thought it was pretty clear in the movie that the aliens must have put the boat there. It was in the middle of nowhere and upside down.
I’ve heard some people refer to it as a “plot hole”, but I don’t think it was. It didn’t bother me that they never showed or said exactly how the boat got there. One of the things I liked about the movie was that there wasn’t very much exposition. It’s cowboys vs. aliens, and the cowboys have no clue WTF the aliens are or how the alien’s advanced technology works. The people in the movie had a lack of information and context for understanding what was going on, so having minimal exposition in the movie puts the audience in the same situation as the characters trying to figure out what’s going on.
For the riverboat, I assumed that the aliens wanted to grab a whole bunch of people at once, and maybe the riverboat had a bunch of gambling or rich people onboard with a bunch of gold (and we see elsewhere in the movie that the alien’s primary motivation is to find gold).
But really I don’t think the audience doesn’t really need to know the exact details of what the aliens did to the riverboat - it’s just another of the many things the aliens have done that the humans don’t understand.
For me it was the whole “needing gold” thing. We can chemically make gold (as far as I recall the process costs more than the resulting amount of gold produced). Aliens can’t make gold?
I did like how the guy said “We were flying!” and thought “yeah, they didn’t have flight back then. That must have been quite a thing for him.”
That’s newfangled 21st-century thinking. The aliens are on Earth for something valuable. What’s more valuable to the stereotypical Hollywood 19th century Wild West than gold?
It’s a basic Western trope. The villains are after gold or want to use gold for some nefarious plot, and the heroes have to stop them somehow.
We still use real gold in electronics don’t we? I just figured the aliens were trying to corner the market in smart phones.
As for the boat, I dunno…they wanted a bunch of humans. Hey, there’s a bunch of humans. Let’s scoop them all out of this vessel and throw it away. Literally throw.
It’s actually makes sense,. It’s a heavy, rare, element, which humans tend to artifically concentrate. It’s also very useful.
Even with a massive technology gap, its entirely plausible that aliens who happen to be in the neighbourhood, and who really need Gold, would find it easier to swoop down and invade Fort Knox than mine for the stuff or try and transmute it.
No, it is not true. It can be created via nuclear reactions, which is what is shown in Bosstone’s link. This is very different from chemical reactions, and much more difficult.
Sister Vigilante is correct on one point. It costs more than the value of the resulting gold.
Talk of gold completely ignores all the gold available for free in the asteroids. Smaller gravity wells to deal with, too. Of course, you’d have to find the gold first, but we’ve done that with our own probes, so presumably an interstellar capable species could do it, too. It wouldn’t necessarily be refined but there’s many times more available in a few asteroids than all the gold ever found on Earth.
Now, if the gold was simply a nice bonus to other priorities (anal probes, of course), it’s a perfectly cromulent reason to come.
I figured the biggest plot hole was that the aliens did not try to simply *buy *the gold with technology, though I can’t remember if they could communicate with humans at all. That should be the easiest way to get it.