As odd as it sounds, that’s not the problem I have with some James Bond movies. As unlikely as it is to be able to assemble such a secret organization and to construct a base, it makes sense as something that people might want to do.
I roll my eyes at the henchmen and underlings that participate in such an enterprise that can’t possibly be worth it to them. There are people with guns defending the secret volcano lair while Blofeld sneaks out the back; dude, you can’t be paying me enough to stand here and die. Or the people building Drax’s satellites to dispense toxic nerve gas; they’re making something that’s going to kill everybody on earth, themselves included, in a few days, why?
In the film, “The Firm”, we see a law firm that was supposed to be one thing - a relatively generic law firm which was very generous to its employees and practiced relatively generic law, maybe just a little on the shady side (certainly not illegal). But, it turned out to be something completely different - an enterprise that existed solely for the purpose of helping The Mob launder its cash and manage its assets.
In “The Firm” only a very small number of partners knew the “real deal”. The conspirators limited the information and thereby limited the risk.
But, for the James Bond villains, there never seems to be any alternate explanation for the secret base. There are never any employees who are shocked to learn that their nerve gas project was really meant to kill people rather than reason X.
I wonder what their monthly employee meetings are like.
This movie came immediately to mind when I read the thread title. I saw a few bits of it as my husband was watching, and I just couldn’t take it. He gets upset if I snark too much and it hurt to hold it in.
*Signs *was another that made my head want to 'splode.
I’m willing to suspend a certain amount of disbelief, but I have my limits. Obvious fantasy and some sci-fi can work if its consistent within its world, but if you want me to accept totally bogus science in a real-world setting, it ain’t gonna happen.
I’ll also toss in stories that paint the government as a monolithic, lock-step organization without a conscience. Put it in a fantasy world and I may accept it, but I was a DOD employee for 37 years and the very idea that we all thought the same and would blindly follow orders is beyond laughable. And don’t get me started on secret conspiracies!! For the most part, civil servants, and military folks, are just like anyone else, doing a job for a paycheck. They come from the same labor pool as any other business in the country and you’re just a likely to have a whack job in the Pentagon as on Wall Street or in a factory or in WalMart.
You can work through the details and maybe explain it sometimes. In You Only Live Twice Blofeld was trying to start a war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. so that Japan could emerge as a world power; maybe he had help within the Japanese government or his troops were hyper-partisan Japanese willing to die for the cause. In Moonraker most of the technicians at Drax’s secret base were launching space shuttles, but probably didn’t know what they were carrying.
But sometimes when you stop and think about it, things can’t be explained away like that. The movies would prefer that you not stop and think about it.
While I’m on the subject, though, another movie that doesn’t hold to its premise is Goldfinger. We’re told that Goldfinger loves gold. He says as much himself, he loves its brilliance and divine heaviness, and welcomes any enterprise that lets him increase his stock. Even the theme song says he loves gold, and if Shirley Bassey sings it, it must be true. So what does he do? He tries to blow up an atomic bomb at Fort Knox. This won’t increase his stock of gold, and will raise the price so it will be that much harder for him to get more gold. WTF, Auric?
Yeah, I know. Nowhere in the movie does it say he loves the value of gold, or the things he can buy with it. He loves gold for its own sake. Making gold more valuable would defeat his purpose of acquiring more gold.
The movie improved on the plot from Fleming’s novel, where Goldfinger (who was a KGB paymaster in the book) really DID intend to rob Fort Knox. As Bond points out in the film, that’s ludicrous, so they wisely changed it.
THe thing I find unbelievable is that, having broken into the actual vault, Goldfinger did not himself try to take a souvenir. That is precisely the kind of thing he would do, if only to brag that he had the only ingot of Fort Knox gold that hadn’t been blasted, melted, and irradiated.
There was an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show where it was revealed that Laura had lied about her age when they got married and she was only 17 at the time, so they had to get re-married because their marriage wasn’t valid.
In the Sandra Bullock movie The Net, the premise is that there is a vast conspiratorial group of computer hackers who are plotting on taking over the world, or something. When Sandy finds out about it, they put a computer virus into all of the world’s computers to delete all references to her having ever existed. When the good guys defeat the bad guys, and kill the virus, all of a sudden, all of the bad work the virus did in every computer everywhere in the world just somehow, suddenly, is reversed.
The most recent James Bond film with the massive SPECTRE facility in the meteor crater in the middle of the Moroccan desert really did make me wonder how they hired all of these people, if there really were that many evil people who were rushing to work for this organization, and where did they live and shop out there in the middle of the desert.
There’s a standard sitcom/movie plot where a long married couple (happy or unhappy) find out that due a bureaucratic snafu (like the officiant forgetting to file some paperwork or not being authorized to conduct weddings) they aren’t really married and hilarity ensues (especially if they have kids). It doesn’t work that way in real life and ministerial errors like that are almost never grounds for voiding a marriage.
And this was a single tank guarding a single crossroads from a single, depleted company. The last fight was over the top war porn, but we’re not talking U-571 here.
An ideal tsunami will rear up to several hundred feet and fall at you right at the beach (“Deep Impact.”) This is way too ideal. This means the speed of the wave will drop from supersonic at mid-ocean to zero right at the beach. Coupled with the steady slow down, wave height will rise from 10 inches mid-ocean to several hundred feet at the shore. Usually, it’s a wall of water not more than 30 feet high, racing several hundred feet inland; a bit like a giant tipping the ocean and letting it spill ashore.
In Interstellar, the whole crux of the film is finding the key to anti-gravity so they can lift the space-worthy shelters into space, either on some other planet or in orbit of our sun.
The question I have is, why the fuck would you bother lifting the space-worthy habitats into space? Leave them on Earth, where you have access to a planet full of raw materials, and an atmosphere, that while it kills wheat & ocra, won’t kill everyone in the habitat if the door is left open. What possible benefit could there be to moving the habitats into the harsh environment of space, since they would keep out the tainted Earth’s atmosphere just as well?
Am I wrong on that? It really seems like the whole film just assumed that leaving Earth was superior, without explaining why.
I have an uncle who worked for Blofeld. He quit just to get out of the volcano base, said it always smelled like “a day-old barbeque grill filled with dirty socks”. I just asked him about the meetings, and he said they had a dweeb from middle management say the same thing every week: “Okay, I’m going to remind someone again about not making popcorn in the employee break room because it always burns and besides Edna from Accounts Receivable is on a diet and her office is right next door, and all unmarked Tupperware in the fridge will be thrown out this Friday, and don’t bang the mailroom carts into the pallets of nuclear warheads in the hallways, the admins are saving those for the self-destruct sequence.”
Not a movie, but a TV series based on one: that early 90’s War of the Worlds series that supposedly was based on the 1953. Basically, it’s thirty-five years after the Martians invaded, costing millions of lives and billions of dollars worth of damage across the world…
…and nobody remembers this. The flying machines are stored in secret warehouses, the Martian bodies are stuck in barrels filled with formaldehyde or syrup, until of course they revive, but as far as anybody but Our Hero is concerned… “Martians?? Invasion? You’re nuts!”
I keep laughing about this … Reminds me of the monthly meetings at Evil Corp (from the Mr. Robot TV series) Sounds like there might be room in the mix for an intramural softball league.
