Hey, what a coincidence…we also watched it on demand tonight, and we enjoyed it. I’ve long since given up on expecting a plot arc that makes sense in any sci fi movie… I’m just happy if no character does something incredibly stupid, and by that standard this movie was pretty good.
Just watched this tonight, and have an idea about the first one. Nothing fleshed out, but in the beginning when Tom Cruise is fixing one of the drones, he uses a piece of bubble gum to fix something. Victoria said something like “we don’t have a replacement for that” and he puts the gum on something and it starts working. So maybe the aliens use the human creativity/ingenuity to solve problems in a way that a machine cannot?
It’s the only thing makes sense, when you think about the uselessness of that scene with the gum.
I saw it in the theater and actually enjoyed it - it was a middle-ish Twilight Zone episode as far as I was concerned. I had a few nit-picks (as we all do) but on the whole, a well-spent two or so hours.
If I were aliens that could crush a moon, however, I’d still have put my ocean-suckers as far out to sea as possible
And how, exactly, could Manhattan be buried up to the level of the observation deck of the Empire State building in mud?
Even though Jack says the aliens blew up the moon, it (the moon) looks like it’s a LOT larger in the sky than usual. The aliens might have “just” pushed the moon toward the earth until it got to the Roche limit, where the tidal forces placed on the moon by Earth would rip it (the moon) into a ring over a period of time. For the moon, the Roche limit is between 20 and 40 times closer to the earth than it is now – which is close to about how much larger the moon looks in the sky.
Furthermore, having the moon that close would raise the tides – by a factor of between 8000 and 64,000. Since tides in Manhattan are typically one meter high, this could do all sorts of fun things to Earth – and not just the Empire State Building.
However, moving the moon that close would eventually cause Earth’s rotation to slow down drastically until it’s tidally locked with the Moon. I don’t think time’s explicitly mentioned anywhere in the movie – I guess Jack’s trips could take hundreds of hours – but that seems like the kind of thing Jack would bring up if it were so.
Also, moving the moon that close would take so much energy that one might as well do something more direct with the energy, like boil the oceans or burn off the atmosphere. That would make for a very short and/or different movie, however.
Just saw in on HBO. Really liked it, in spite of the many flaws and plot holes. Some of it is derivative of other movies like Moon, Wall-E, Solaris, Independence Day, The Matrix, The Jetsons.
I think it’s safe to assume that The Tet doesn’t “need” all those Jack and Vicka clones, nor did it really “need” an invasion force of Jacks. So I’m guessing it just created them for it’s own unknown AI-based motivations.
T-e-t works in mysterious ways.
As Berserker stories go, this one was pretty good. Saberhagen would be proud.
I would assume it would be a combination of volcanic ash and sediment deposited by massive megatsunamis, all caused by the destruction of the Moon during the initial Tet…offensive.
There could have also been somewhat of a “dune effect” since the depth of the mud wasn’t consistent. In Midtown it was around 900 feet deep to reach the Observation deck. At the Manhattan Bridgea few miles downtown, the mud only came up to the bridge deck (about 150 feet). In Washington, DC, the Pentagonwas still visible. Miles away at the Raven Rock Military Complex in Pennsylvania, the entrance wasn’t covered at all.
In reality, the correct answer is “because it looks cool”.
Also throw in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Logan’s Run as influences on this film.
Saw the movie a few nights back on DVD and enjoyed it, despite the plot holes and the rather heavy-handed emotional button-pushing at the end. Very cool sfx (I want a flyer like that!) and I didn’t guess the twist(s).
TV Tropes has a good analysis: Oblivion (2013) (Film) - TV Tropes
The Adam Sandler movie Click has a scene set in 2033, and One World Trade Center (although an earlier design IIRC) is clearly visible on the Manhattan skyline. The Hugh Jackman movie Van Helsing, set in 1887, shows the Eiffel Tower under construction; it was finished two years later.
Actually, it was not the White House but the Capitol we see. FWIW, I also don’t think the Washington Monument could lean at that kind of an angle without toppling.
That is a fascinating article - thanks! Best I’ve read in a long, long time.
True, as others have noted, it’s better than Prometheus. But why do we accept that giant-budget sci-fi movies have to be full of plot holes and implausibilities?
Again, as previously mentioned by several, Moon and WALL-E are far more satisfying attempts to tell a science fiction story.
Why do these major studios/money people seem to be so indifferent to the quality of the writing?
(Rhetorical question, of course.^_^)
I liked the movie while I was watching it. But afterwards, all the plot holes and things that don’t make sense came crashing down on me.
One thing that still bugs me is that when his real wife wakes up, she shows no sign that she knows Jack or Victoria. There’s the moment over dinner when she starts laughing and Jack waves a giant clue in our faces by asking Victoria if she’s ever met the woman before. But that’s it. I dunno. I just don’t find it realistic that she wouldn’t have at least said their names upon first waking up. But the movie would have turned out totally different if she had.
Because they typically portray stuff that isn’t or couldn’t be real?
The drones reminded me of Wall-E’s “girlfriend”.
The last thing Julia remembered was getting ready to investigate an extra-terrestrial object. The next thing she knows, she wakes up in what is obviously the future surrounded by her husband and fellow crew-members who have no idea who she is. My own personal fanwank is that she immediately realized they weren’t the real Jack and Vica, that something horrible had happened and opted to keep her mouth shut.
Kind of sucks for Vica 52. She ends up being the last single girl on Earth. Tech 52 finds Julia. All the other Jack and Vicka’s presumably couple up in their towers. Even The Droneslayer and Ms. Drone Proof looked like they end up together.
Here’s something: Why didn’t Jack (since he had access to books from the past) ever question how humanity:
[ol]
[li]Defeated an alien race given our level of technology[/li][li]Moved to Titan…again given our level of technology.[/li][/ol]
The film shows him collecting books. Wouldn’t he have been able to figure that humanity couldn’t have beaten a spacefaring race at any point less than 200 or so years ahead of where he was?
This took me completely out of the film as it was exceptionally odd that he collected and enjoyed artworks from his “era” and didn’t somehow realize that things were “wrong.”
That’s precisely the line of reasoning that resulted in Prometheus.
shudders
I don’t think I understand the complaint. (I have not yet see the film.)
If you get random books, at random times, from random sections of a public library, with no idea whether it’s fiction, etc, the only thing that speaks to “tech levels” is the construction of the book itself. A history book about the crusades doesn’t tell you the tech level of the U.S. in 1974 (gleaned from the copyright page in the book).
My point is this: If I were mind-wiped (and after some of the things that I have seen that might be a blessing) but I still retained some trace memories (enough to make me long for things from the past) it wouldn’t take very long for me to extrapolate from that past an eventual future. Or futures. It may not be exact (people in the early 1970s would have difficulty predicting… say… the insane levels of video game popularity which exist today) but most intelligent people could see the logical progression of technology.
Books from the 1990s would indicate to someone living in 2014 that deep space travel was still at least a century away. If jack was reading books from Earth’s past and he encountered no technology which indicated that human beings had the ability to to defeat an alien race or travel to en masse to the moons of other planets in our solar system, then it seems that would make him curious to discover more.
The film completely ignores the fact that even the ruins of the civilization which still exist should tell Jack (Victoria is a lost cause) that human beings were not advanced enough to defeat an alien race.
I think the answer to most of those is:[spoiler]Aliens are bastards!
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AliensAreBastards[/spoiler]
Problem is, does Jack know what year it is? Does he know how old those books are? It’s been a while since I saw the movie, but aren’t his memories of the past only dreams, they’re not actually direct recall memories?
And then if he believes the tech all around him, the drones, the massive water processors, the bubble jet, etc is all human tech. And seeing that sort of stuff, I would easily believe humankind was able to fight off aliens and travel to Titan.
How would he know what “given level of technology” they had in his “era” just from some random junk he finds in the ruins of a pockmarked wasteland? The book he keeps quoting from is 200 years old. And it’s about Ancient Rome. He didn’t assume they defeated the Scavs with phalanxes of legionnaires.
Although he did know the Odyssey looked “pre-war”.
This. With no memories, to a certain extent Jack has to take what information he is presented. A few tops of buildings and rusting husks of derelict ships isn’t enough to definitively indicate pre-war level of technology. But we also know that something doesn’t sit right with him. Probably because what he sees out in his daily patrols doesn’t reconcile on some level.
He just assumes that their memory is “wiped” for security reasons. Which really makes no sense since their 5 year old memories wouldn’t have much tactical or operational use to an enemy anyway. But the real reason is that they don’t have any memories from before they were cloned, other than presumably what was copied. And that would be just enough to allow them to speak, eat, do their job and not lay about the tower like an infant shitting themselves. I’m also going to presume the vestigial memories of Julia just sort of got mixed in there by accident.
Here’s a question. Where does all the water go? The Tet is “only” like 30 miles across. And the hydro rigs are much smaller. Big by space ship standards, but hardly enough to drain the planet of it’s oceans. And it seemed like there was a lot of water left considering they kept saying the Earth would be a dried out husk at the end of their mission in a few weeks.
The film tells you what happened to it: It’s converted to energy to fuel the TET.
While that actually causes even more plot holes/contrivances ( like why the TET itself didn’t use comets or better yet TITAN for its source of water as both are largely made up of water and neither would require fighting an intelligent species) it also explains where the water would have gone.
However, since it would probably take decades or centuries for a small ship to convert all of Earth’s surface water into energy, that would also require the creation of hundreds or thousands of Jacks and Victorias.