OMFG, it’s the third page and nobody’s mentioned Battlefield Earth! Where fighter jets sitting in a hanger for a 1000 years with no maintenance are still able to fly.
Titanic.
I mean, come on! Am I supposed to believe that a massive passenger liner can somehow be completely sunk by ice? I mean, where were they supposed to be sailing to, the North Pole?
Ridiculous.
To be fair, it seemed like Costner was the only one in Waterworld with gills.
Lemur866:
I made the same point many, many times on this board – until I found out that Shyamalan himself had referred to them as “aliens”. So screw it.
I guess I could come up with some half-baked science fiction explanations for everything in that movie (we might consider the possibility that the aliens are only damaged by freshwater instead of saltwater, for instance), but I’d only be making up for the writer/director’s lack of thought. The aliens are just a McGuffin; I guess it’s just one of those movies I like even though it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Like Planet of the Apes.
Come to think of it, some of my favorite movies have blatantly stupid premises that somehow work. Escape from New York, for instance. The entire island of Manhattan, some of the most valuable real estate in the world, is abandoned, skyscrapers and all, to the country’s prison population. Obviously ridiculous if looked at from the real world, but with the right comic book mentality, it’s great.
I live in LA…and I come into contact with the ocean… mabye 3 times a year? And only by choice. They crashed near Los Angeles, they settled or were settled in Los Angeles. It’s a weakness in the movie if you decide that it’s completely ridiculous for people to leave near danger. Like Earhquake zones, cities with water levees, tsunami prone places, etc.
Similarly, with SIGNS “Oh my god why would aliens go to a dangerous place?” WTF People go to dangerous places all the time. Call it ‘adventure tourism’. And considering like I said earlier, we know fuck all about the aliens judging them by human standards or even using human reasoning to try to explain or be confused by their actions, makes so little sense. HUMANS don’t act completely rationally or understandably all the time and you guys want ALIENS to think and act like us? These aren’t Trek aliens who are just an analog for the human condition. They are fucking aliens who we know nothing about. To have a problem with their biology is also completely ridiculous as well. So biology is done? No new things are being learned about the biology of all creatures? Really? Including alien life forms? We know everything about everything? Really? Huh… didn’t get that memo.
The Rock - The only way to resolve a hostage dispute on Alcatraz is to dig up some 70 year old commando who escaped from there?
Con Air - An Airborne Ranger goes to prison for seven(?) years for accidently killing one of a gang of drunken knife wielding rednecks while defending himself and his pregent wife? And then prior to his release he has to be transferred via a plane full of hardened psychopaths?
Gone on 60 Seconds - Dude has to steal 50 exotic cars in one night or they kill him and his brother? First of all how the hell do five guys steal 50 of ANYTHING in one night? And they have to kick that mobsters ass anyway so they might have saved themselves the trouble.
The One - There are multiple dimensions and whenever you kill yourself in one of those other dimensions you get stronger? Except Jet Li is a big pussy in all dimensions except two? Stupid.
The Last Action Hero - Point taken, but I still thought it was a stupid movie. The concept was done much better and funnier in True Lies.
What? How? Huh?
New York experience: 10 cars a night? Not a problem. And your more exotic car was, until '95 or so, less likely to have decent antitheft than a cheaper… simply because it would tend to stop running.
I’m sure when he said True Lies, he meant The Purple Rose of Cairo. People get them confused all the time. A clue:
(1) One has Jamie Lee Curtis performing a striptease.
(2) The other doesn’t suck.
Now, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, and I only saw it once for obvious reasons. But didn’t they say something like “he is one of those”, when commenting on his gills?
Because True Lies lacked an annoying little boy.
I’ve never seen The Purple Rose of Cairo but as it’s a Woody Allen fim, I’m sure it does suck.
Don’t you get a salty breeze from the ocean every now and then, or does the layer of pollution protect you? 
I don’t remember where the newcomers crashed, but the U.S. government (under Reagan) had put them all been in quarantine for a while, so they could have been “settled” just about anywhere. L.A. probably wasn’t the best choice, but I liked the movie (and the subsequent TV series a lot), anyway. It doesn’t come anywhere near meeting the criteria of this thread.
I can’t recall the title, but I was watching some movie where the psycho bad guy who’s just just killed somebody loses his gun only to have it picked up by a bystander who, instead of blowing the psycho away, tells him not to move, which of course leads to the bystander being attacked, overpowered, disarmed, killed and the movie dragged out. I actually yelled “shoot him! shoot him! SHOOT HIM!” at the TV and “FUCK!” when it became obvious that my advice was going to be ignored. I switched off the TV immediately, swooning in frustration. If you’re such a fucking moron that you’d point a gun at a psycho and not use it, you deserve a horrible death and zero sympathy.
Note: this wasn’t that crappy TV adaptation of Koontz’s Intensity, which had at least two virtually identical moments to the one described.
Taking it away from the sci-fi theme for a bit…
Anybody remember a 1992 laugher called Shining Through? The premise of this film was that the US needed a secret spymaster inside Nazi Germany (and quick!), so they decide to send Michael Douglas’ secretary, Melanie Griffith, with her cover story being that anybody that blonde surely can’t be a spy. Much less a Jewish one.
Or some such foolishness. Truly a stupid, stupid premise.
What do I win?
I think Push You down meant to say “Kindly explain how Last Action Hero and True Lies share the same concept, would you?”. It’s certainly what I wanted to ask.
But our air is full of wator vapor! I think even most people who are into “adventure tourism” would avoid places where the very air will corrode their skin and lungs. I mean, it isn’t just that they came to a planet covered with water, and where it regularly falls from the sky, it’s that they did so with no helmets, no suits, no masks, nothing to protect them! even if “adventure tourists” got free rocket trips to Venus, I doubt they’d go naked!
Did you see the Jamie Lee Curtis striptease? Because that part DIDN’T suck. You couldn’t even see sucking from there.
“Sucking” is probably what would have ensued if the bad guys hadn’t had the unfortunate
timing to interrupt her routine…
You are right most “people” wouldn’t go to planet where the very air will corrode their skin and lungs. Do you know what the an alien would do? Do you? It is so completely open ended its impossible to say why the aliens in Signs are there in the first place. They could be test subjects of other aliens. The aliens as we saw them could actually be protection suits for smaller sentient creatures. Who knows!
If the movie had tried to give explanations tht didn’t make sense THEN people have room to argue but since we are told nothing about them and we see very little of them, poo-pooing that aspect of the movie is just arrogant “I’m so fucking smart I can poke holes in a movie” posturing.
Hate the movie because it sucked not because you want to show how smart you are.