In True Lies, you see this guy that passes through an x-ray, unshielded, on his way to work every day. Then you see that he’s unhappy with his sex life. And you see that he has kids.
Those kids aren’t his. No dude who gets his junk x-rayed every workday is gonna have happy sperm.
At the end of the movie, they watch a mushroom cloud appear, a few miles away. They’re gonna die of radiation poisoning before too long.
In World of Warcraft, there’s a dude who’s worried about his wife, so he asks you to go investigate. You go and find her corpse and come back and tell him, and he gets all teary and thanks you. Then he asks the next schmuck who comes along the same question. And so on, for eternity.
I decided that the real point of the game is that you’re a demon in Hell, tormenting these damned souls who are doomed to spend eternity reliving the worst moments in their lives.
Gene Hackman more or less plays the same character in them too, 20 years apart, even dressing fairly similarly. Different name of course, but it’s not too big a stretch to call Enemy of the State a “thematic” sequel to The Conversation.
Sean Connery in The Rock is actually James Bond, captured subverting some American mission or spying on America or something. Of course the UK disavows him, the US hides him away, and the monicker James Bond is passed on.
In The Matrix, humans aren’t batteries, they are brains in jars used for computing by the machines and the simulated life is just to keep them working well in sync within the mainframe. Some of the brains in jars get a little too good at spotting the discrepancies and are dropped into a second simulation, the whole we-are-all-batteries one we see in the movies, allowing them to continue operating well. The batteries thing never made any sense, and even if you can buy that, the idea that there would be any need or reason for the pod people to ever develop any muscle or bone mass beyond absolutely necessary, so no wakey-wakey and turning into a real boy with a bit of time and some work-outs.
My fanwank for The Matrix was that the machines mostly believed the “batteries” theory, but really that’s because the machines were stark raving mad. Their real motivation was a singleminded hatred of humanity, but because they wanted to maintain the belief that they were superior to human in their mechanical rationality, they invented the idiotic “battery” theory to justify their behavior.
Well, or that the Architect’s five previous failures tried different fictions. The “battery” explanation is just the current theme, tried as an experiment. If it failed (as the Architect seems convinced it would), maybe next time around the premise will be that imprisoned humans are chemical-processing machines, since they can produce certain enzymes more efficiently than the machines can synthesize them and so forth…
The ancient civilization of Valyria in A Song of Ice and Fire is much later misremembered as Valusia of Robert E. Howard’s Thurian Age of human prehistory (featuring King Kull the Atlantean) and the Atlantis of that time used to be a minor island in the time of ASOIAF, as King Kull says: “The hills of Atlantis and Mu were isles of the sea when Valusia was young.” Both King Kull and later, Conan the Cimmerian are distant descendants of the Baratheons.
Oh, and Elric of Melniboné is a distant relative of the Targaryans.
Actually, now that I think of it, the Westeros/Hyborian age timeline would be reversed from what I wrote above: as the Nemedian Chronicles speak of the Hyborian Age as “an age undreamed of” between the time that “the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the Sons of Aryas”…hmmm… “Aryas”= Targaryen Patriarch? That would make the Hyborians the “First Men” and in that case Conan et al., would be the ancestors of the Starks… magic was, after all, much stronger in the Hyborian age as well.
Further connection with the Lovecraft/Howard/Martin worlds: the Drowned God that the Ironborn worship is actually one of the Old Ones.
Or yet another alternate fanwank – the humans in Zion are lead to believe the pod humans are batteries. They believe it because they’re basically all high school dropouts with mad computer skillz when they get freed – just like the character Mouse (Morpheous essentially says so). Those are the only ones The Oracle permits (suggests, urges, gives hints towards, whichever) that Zionists (heh) are to free. One could conjecture that Neo refuses to believe on the deck of the Nebuchadnezzar because he actually recalls basic thermodynamics from college. Or because he’s a drone built by the combined efforts of the Oracle and the Architect and has inside information sub-consciously. Whichever works for you.
The machines enslave humans for any of a number of reasons – they’ve mercifully put some humans at the conclusion of the war into prison camps indefinitely, they want some human slaves out of malice or retribution as above, they’re terraforming the damaged Earth and will release us when they can (or think they will), or when they advance and can relocate the human race to a safe (for both sides) planet. Or they need to keep some subjects for study, in case of future uncertainty, or just to understand human intellect. I pretty much got all those possibilities from other sci-fi stories that have humans enslaved by machines.
Basically, the Wachowski Bros (and studio execs) had heard of all of those too. So decided to make their movie different at all costs. But left it open ended enough so they didn’t have to stick to one story.
Star Trek and the old British SF show Blake’s Seven are set in the same universe. One tows the official Federation line, and the other is cheaply made rebel propaganda.
There’s the long-standing theory that Zion was just as much a computer-generated illusion as the “contemporary” Earth was. It was just a second layer of illusion to catch anyone who managed to slip out of the first layer.
So the idea that computers were using humans as batteries was just another made-up story.
I always liked the idea that in the Mirror Universe that ancient Vulcan history turned out differently, and Surak & his followers were the ones driven into exile (& later became the Romulans). Of course ST: ENT kinda disproved this, but In a Mirror, Darkly was very good.
Twelve was the minimum marriage age for girls and 14 for boys under Canon law (derived from Roman law), but only royalty and the nobility actually married that young. Most women didn’t marry until their early 20s, and most men didn’t until they were about 30.
There was a prequel novel written that explains a lot of modern technology (including computers) was derived from the Roswell ship.