I didn’t think Oedipus knew about the prophecy at all. His parents were given the prophecy when he was born and decided to have him put to death as a baby. The guy they sent to do the job took pity on the baby and it ended up being raised another family as their own.
Of course, your logic applies just as well in reverse to Jocasta, who definitely knew about the prophecy.
Similarly, in so many of these “prophecy says child will kill so-and-so” stories, the person predicted to die always assigns the task of killing the kid to some random schmuck who always lacks the stones to do the job. Dude, you’re a king. You’ve probably spilled a river of blood to get where you are now, and you balk at skewering a baby destined to kill you?
Ah, but if fate works at all, it works because people think this time it isn’t going to happen.
Of course, you know I was going to mention Alien. There are so many possibilities to choose from, but the top is when Dallas is hunting the aliens in the air shaft. Lambert is tracking the alien. She loses the signal. And the cavalcade of stupidity begins:
Dallas stands in a cross shaft. If he moved two meters down any one of the shafts, he would double his chance of survival. The alien can come from any one of four directions; moving down the shaft would mean it could only come at him from two.
Lambert sees the alien’s signal. She tells Dallas it’s coming at him. But she never bothers to tell him from which direction.
And the piece de resistance of stupidity: Dallas doesn’t bother to ask (even though he has time to do it).
Well almost any B horror movie has rampant stupidity in it. Friday the 13th built an entire franchise out of it and dozens of knockoffs.
But one of my favorite stupid parts of a really stupid movie is in the movie Spirits.
After seeing the ghost in this haunted house they’re investigating the obligatory skeptic in the group says the next morning “I don’t believe in ghosts!”.
Geez, Lady, what are you a republican? You saw the ding dang ghost! It freakin’ spoke to you! I don’t believe in unicorns but if one walked into my house and poked me in the chest with its horn I think I’d be able to muster up some belief.
28 Days Later is, indeed one crowning moment of stupid after another. I’m glad others see that.
My contribution is Wolf Creek. The director takes about 15 minutes of good story and stretches it to 90 minutes by two methods - 1. spend 45 minutes watching the characters go about their normal lives unmolested, doing nothing particularly interesting or relevant. But # 2 is the crowning moment of stupid. [spoiler]Liz and her friends have been drugged by a serial killer, in the middle of the Outback, and she wakes up trussed and stashed in a trailer in his compound. She quite resourcefully and gustily cuts herself free with some broken glass, climbs out the window and remembers to close it again to avoid broadcasting her escape, and locates Kristy, who’s being tortured by Mick. She craftily creates a diversion that will seem to him to be a natural accident and not done by an escaped prisoner. She thereby manages to get into the torture room, get his gun, and sneak up on him from behind.
Then, instead of shooting him in the head, she quavers, “Let her go!” Pretty dumb, but she does wind up shooting him and grazing his neck, making him fall unconscious, and she does try to shoot him again, but the gun won’t work. So at this point, I’m imagining myself in this situation, and thinking I’d use the gun butt to beat his head to a pulp, plus slit his throat with his big giant knife, just to be sure, leaving us leisure to find our other friend and make use of Mick’s survival equipment and vehicle to escape safely. But no, she actually cries and gently taps his back with the gun butt, and then the girls run away, leaving him to wake up, grab his weapons, and hunt them down. The end.[/spoiler]
Kendall, Miller, fair enough. That’s an angle I hadn’t really looked at before. (I even watched the DVD commentary for Out of Gas, but the only thing they had to say on that scene was embarrassment at Mal having to wave such a small pistol around.)
I maintain my stance on The Message, though. I’ve even read attempted explanations of how that went down and tried to conceive of my own reasons. Was Tracey supposed to act like he was going to be given up? No, that kind of deception had no role in their plan. Mal knew Tracey when they were military and expected Tracey to simply follow orders? Yeah, that’s more plausible, especially since he’s done the same in Bushwacked (“Go get your sister.”), but even Book didn’t try to calm Tracey, just gave him the same macho lines Mal did.
#1: The aliens download all of their race’s knowledge directly into one guys head, over a period of week/s. The guy then fools the aliens by pretending to still be a “dumb human”, and the superior aliens decide not to run any real tests and just send him back with the other human slaves.
#2: This is the part that REALLY bugged me. So now that they’ve packed the guy’s head full of information, he of course plans a revolt. The problem? They use army planes from the year 2000… except in the movie it’s supposed to be 3000.
You can’t even start a car if you let it sit still for a year or two, but these F-16’s and going to fire up and be capable of launching missiles after 1000 years of neglect?
That movie was so stupid, I can’t even remember the other stupid stuff going on in it. Fortunately, time has erased most of that awful movie from my memory.
Time hasn’t made me forget I spent $7.50 to see it, I want my $$ back.
The really sad thing is that all of that stupid is directly inherited from the novel. Reading “Battlefield Earth” is what made me decide to skip the ten-part series of Hubbard’s “Mission: Earth”…I’m barely maintaining the reading of the twelve-part “Wheel of Time” and Jordan was about forty times better a writer than Hubbard ever longed to be. Even without an objective editor.
I have yelled at a lot of shit from Star Trek TOS (and I still enjoy it) but it gets me so mad that they apparently can’t quarantine their transporter room if they need to. There is no way thatanybody you beam aboard should just be allowed to run rampant throughout the ship. The fake Kirk would never have been able to cause so much trouble if they just had a remotely-operated force field. You could just drop the force field ahead of time if you were expecting people, or for visiting dignitaries.
Live and Let Die. Mister Big and his henchman have James Bond at their mercy, at gunpoint, on their alligator farm. They clearly want him to die. So, what would anyone holding a gun do to their intended victim at that point? Why, force him, still alive, onto an island in the midst of the swamp of hungry alligators, of course.
The end of Back to the Future. “We must hurry to the future and save your children.” Or we could take all the time we need to devise the perfect plan to save them and then go to the same exact point in time with a well thought up plan that actually works.
Well, in Back to the Future II, didn’t Doc do just that, having made several time jumps to ascertain when Marty’s kid gets in trouble, and then coming up with a (Doc-style) plan involving Marty pretending to be his own son at the Diner (Doc even got Marty a self-adjusting jacket like his kid wears).
But as a stand alone move, yeah, BTTF does end a bit weakly.
I think Checkov could be forgiven for having a momentary oversight - he assumed they had their man and wanted to stare him in the eye. I’m sure He would have looked down eventually.
But two things oug me about that scene: 1) Why didn’t the actual sabatouer who planted the boots in the locker think to double-check to make sure that those incriminating boots would fit the frame-up victim? Even if the frame-up victim had standard humanoid shaped feet, they might be too small/large, and all he’d have to do is try them on to show they couldn’t possibly be his pair. Surely a logical brainiac Vulcan would have thought of that.
2)There are NO SECURITY CAMS onboard the Enterprise? Especially in the locker rooms containing the private belongings of the crew? That’d be a quite simple way of finding out who put those boots in the locker, but no.
Even so, why the rush in 1985? “Hey Marty, hey Jennifer. You guys are going out this weekend? Great. Listen, Marty, come see me when you get back, okay? I’ve got a job for you.”
Okay, granted, it wouldn’t have been as interesting, but still.
Oh, Battlefield Earth probably wins the award for stupid. One can go on forever:
The alien teaching machine talking about Euclidian geometry. Wow – the guy who discovered it on their world was named “Euclid,” too. What a coincidence!
The alien who sees a starving human eat a rat because it’s the only food available to him after several days and deciding that’s his favorite treat.
The Denver Public Library – completely destroyed, yet with all books still intact after 1000 years.
Leaning to fly a harrier jet in about a week.
Needing the missing information to arm the atomic bomb and discovering it by accidentally turning on a projector that happens to have a slide of the information on it.
The problem is that the amount of security monitoring you have in the average 7-11 would invalidate the plots of about a third of the episodes. :smack:
I give that a pass because the whole thing was just a kicker joke at the end of the first movie, which was a standalone movie. It’s a fantastic little zing in that context. Only when there’s a (VERY disappointing) sequel does the logic of it start to matter.
Refresh my memory, since it’s been a good 15 years since I’ve seen the first movie and I haven’t seen the beginning of the 2nd one in about 10…
Didn’t his girlfriend come with them at the end of the 1st movie? And wasn’t the beginning of the 2nd movie them arriving in the future? Was the girlfriend with them? I honestly can’t remember the answer to any of those questions with any certainty at the moment.
