I know that objects in fiction are frequently ridiculous and unworkable, but sometimes they’re just too cool and atmospheric. Fiction, especially escapist fiction, shouldn’t be mistaken for real life.
Nevertheless, sometimes an item seems to make sense until you think abiout it too much.
The Disco Volante is Max/Emilio Largo’s boat in the James Bond book/film Thunderball/Never Say Never Again (although in NSNA they translate it into the less exotic Engish “Flying Saucer”) It’s a hydroplane bloat (which means the front of it can rise up on a pair of high-tech “skids”), so it not only looks cool but can go really fast. But it also has a Secret Underwater Hatch, through which Largo andf his henchmen can go out at night and steal nuclear weapons.
Only you can’t really have the two together. If you ever use the hydrofoils in daylight, people will see your Secret Hatch, and it won’t be secret anymore. I don’t care how carefully you try to hide it – if you want a secure watertight hatch, it’s gonna show. So Largo can never use his nifty expensive hydrofoils.
“Hey, Largo, can you show us your boat’s top speed?”
“Uhhh, no. Not today.”
“But you said that yesterday. The yachy races are coming up and…”
“Business. I have too much business. Yes – that’sd it. Maybe another time.”
Bruce Wayne built his headquarters in The Batcave, supposed to be a real Bat Cave, beneath Wayne Manor (Convenient. It’s a good thing a Water Buffalo didn’t come crashing through the window at Stately Wayne Manor that night, because it’s unlikely he’d have have found a buffalo wallow nearby.) In both the comics and the films, it’s supposed to be a real “working” cave, with a hefty bat poppulation.
But I’ve been reading fiction set in such a cave, and watching “The World’s Dirtiest Jobs” lately. These bring home the point that real bat caves are filled with guano, frequently (if they’re old and long-used caves) to a depth of several feet, because the bats bring home food and drop the remains to the floor, and poop before they take off.
Rich in phosphates, though, which before modern fertilisers were artificially produced were the primary source of agricultural fertiliers - so much so that an island like Nauru, which is nothing but a rock covered in birdshit, was a cash-cow to the colonial powers which administered it. Where do you suppose that the Wayne family fortune came from, if not batshit?
Well, we don’t see the Disco Volante go hydrofoil until the very end, and it splits in half before it does it. I’ve always thought that was just a last-resort means of trying to escape, and had never been used since the yacht was built. All the other time, it’s just a normal boat. And maybe the underwater hatch is in the back half that was jetisoned.
Even if that’s all wrong, they only talk about the top speed in relation to the boat’s rendezvous with the bomber, and that happened at night. No one would have seen the hatch anyway.
And anything that helps you score with Fiona Volpe is money well spent, isn’t it?
Most villains’ headquarters in the later James Bong films were unworkable. Consider You Only Live Twice, where Blofeld lived in a secret giant underground headquarters inside a volcano. It probably cost more to build than all the money he expected to make by his extortion scheme, and it would have been impossible to keep the building of it secret – thousands of people had to have been involved. Not to mention the tunnels had to be blasted in the rock, which can’t be kept secret. And wasn’t that the one where they launched the missiles that “ate” the other missiles? Such things can’t be cheap, either.
They were operating at a major loss, even if they got away with it.
Batman villians were better – they usually operated in abandoned warehouses, of which Gotham City seemed to have hundreds.
“Everyone here who has stolen two atomic weapons and gotten away with it, raise your hands.”
Here’s the part of Thunderball I could never figure out. After the DV shows her split personality and Largo and James go speeding toward the rocks, all the henchmen on the left-behind part are still fighting. Guys, you’re on a well-appointed raft and trying to hold off the fucking U.S. Navy (or was it the Coast Guard?), and there is no way your boss is ever coming back to give you your next paycheck. If it was me, I’d have turned my gun around and fired at that bastard in the hydrofoil for hanging me out to dry.
Only if you focus exclusively on the movie’s theme of genetic discrimination. But Gattaca also conveys another, equally important message: although our genes need not limit our humanity or place in society, physical disability does. If you watch the film while keeping this aspect in mind it makes much more sense.
Ah, I don’t know. You can camouflage a lot by the use of judicious bottom paint. Remember, when the boat is hydroplaning, it’s going to be sending up lots of spray and moving past at about 50 mph. Not a lot of time or opportunity to be examining the hull up close.
But yeah, figure the hydrofoils are for getaway purposes. If you need them, then, well, your plans have already been foiled…
In the comic books you occasionally see that the cave system is quite large and that the headquarters takes up a small part of it. Occasionally he disturbs the bats when venturing into the less-habited parts of it.
Yeah, but the bats must get into his part of the cave all the time (They showed them flying around inthe serials, although I’m sure that was for atmosphere).
I’ll bet the Giant Dinosaur and the Giant Penny and the BatComputer are all streaked with Bat Guano. Alfred must have to come down there on a regular basis and mop the floors, and wash everything down with ArmorAll.
Yecchh.
Some other superhero fortresses that have bugged me:
Avengers’ Mansion: The third floor is an aircraft hanger. This is simply insane when you think about it. The teams’ super high-tech quinjets blaze out of of a hanger a mere three floors above ground level and jet across Central Park. Even before 9/11 the idea is absurd. The noise alone would cause any pedestrians who happened to be walking by to go deaf. Imagine if some supervillain ambushed the quinjet as it was taking off and caused it to crash in the park (where it would most likely kill innocent people). And it’s especially ridiculous given that Avengers Mansion is located on Fifth Avenue in the toney Upper East Side, where home owners take their quality of life (and hence, the property values of their estates) VERY seriously. I can’t imagine current mayor Bloomberg allowing that.
the Baxter Building: Mostly the same as above, considering that they have a rocket capable of travelling to the moon & back docked in a silo jutting off the side of it. And who in the world would want to rent or lease the business lofts below the Fantastic Four’s headquarters?
Titans’ Tower: That’s got to be the most structurally impractical building ever. How in the world does that last overextended level keep from collapsing?
Charles Xaviers’ School: At least the above three buildings were publically known to be superhero headquarters, and so super-high-tech construction would be expected. But how did Xavier explain the Danger Room to the construction company that built it? Or the Blackbird hanger? Wouldn’t you think somebody might happen to notice a supersonic jet routinely taking off & landing on the schools’ grounds? (aside: I LOVED the bit in the film “X-Men 2” when the military top brass examine aerial satalitte photos of the Blackbird - “It comes out of the tennis court!”) And how’d the Prof afford it? One assumes he charges his students a tuition, but it seems unlikely that most of them could afford what the Prof. must be forced to charge. (And it makes me wonder about the nerve of the Prof. - charging tuition from kids whom he then sends out on life-threatening missions against lunatic mutant terrorists!)
It’s New York! People who rent below the Avengers or the FF get a fantastic break in price. Who cares about the occasional blast-off when you consider the location and the view?
And I’ll bet all of Professor X’s charges are on some kind of Financial Aid. Full scholarships from the Rotary Club and stuff like that.
Not really. The society is 100% unworkable and just plain stupid. And though you might read such a meaning into the film, it’s not what the creators intended; they were talking about genetics. Further, the one actual physical disability relevant to the film (the heart condition), is evidently not enough to stop them from shooting the guy into space. (The guy in the wheelchair was merely a plot device to allow someone to take his place.)
FF: Covered in comics on occasion. People have had real issues working there, they had trouble keeping renters… but New Yorkers have a certain appreciation of the perverse. I would gladly work in World Trade II.
Professor X: Covered in Damage Control: He makes people forget they did it. Duh.
I’d have to check on the Avengers, but I believe Quinjets are really quiet. They’ve had trouble in the past, been banned from Manhattan launches at least twice, though. Explaining the Hydrobase era, for one.
The Blackbird launch is sometimes out the side of a cliff over the Hudson, sometimes out of the swimming pool, depending on the artist and writer. The cliff and the Hudson is workable.
But surely if the film’s creators had needed a simple plot device, they could have just created a MacGuffin out of whole cloth; this is science fiction, after all. Perhaps Ethan Hawke’s character Vincent Freeman illicitly aquired genetic material from cloned tissue, for example, or a cryogenically frozen cadaver; that wouldn’t have been much of a stretch. But they didn’t do that.
Now clearly internal logic and plausibility weren’t considered a major concern by the moviemakers. Even apart from the multiple plot inadequacies highlighted in your link, the film tries to pass off the Marin County Civic Center as a futuristic spaceport, so the level at which disbelief must be suspended is high. But even so, they plainly didn’t want to dilute their premise with needless complexity, and hinting at the existence of a black market in genetic material would have undercut the supposed omnipresence of the system that drives the movie’s suspense. Instead, they adopted a plot device that wouldn’t distract from the main storyline, simply because it’s so sensible that no one would ever question it. So Jude Law’s character Jerome Morrow is physically handicapped. That’s why he’s a bitter recluse, and why he obviously can’t take his rightful place at the pinnacle of society.
In reality, of course, it’s understandable that paraplegia would cause depression. But the society of Gattaca is the one place where a purely physical disability logically shouldn’t matter for jack squat. Remember, this is a world where a job interview consists solely of a genetic scan. Why should Jude Law’s character, a product of this society where there’s only one gold standard of worth, care so much about losing the use of his legs? He’s still superior to everyone else, regardless. He still has the same genes.
Vincent is wronged by discrimination that keeps him from reaching his full potential, because he is more than just a product of his genes. In the end he proves this by exerting himself past the point where his genetic profile claims his heart should have failed (a phenomenon which can be timed with a stopwatch?!) so it turns out that the entire system isn’t even accurate anyway; I guess nobody ever bothered to check. If the filmmakers had genuinely wished to make a case for intrinsic human dignity here, they would have had Vincent’s heart actually explode here, as he sacrifices himself in a vain effort to achieve his goal. Instead, we simply learn that the profiling system doesn’t work, which by extension seems to imply that a genetic caste system would be okay as long as the results were accurate. Of course, unlike Vincent’s bogus heart ailment, Jerome has an actual disability to contend with; unfortunately this film’s message holds out no hope that he can ever surmount it.
So the filmmakers are actually making a very clear point with the character. It wouldn’t make sense for Jerome to take any actual inspiration from Vincent’s triumph over his heart disorder (whoops! --except he never actually had one); instead, he realizes that Vincent needs his identity more than he himself does, since he can never actually accomplish anything anyway. And, of course, when Vincent’s quest is achieved and he is assumed into orbit, Jerome’s function is accomplished and he is free to immolate himself. This message is far too integral to the film to be accidental.
I suppose, if we wish to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt, we might more charitably interpret that Jerome is supposed to be the “Richard Cory” of Gattaca: he has everything that Vincent wants, and yet he’s driven to take his own life for no good reason. He ultimately fails in life despite his perfect genes, while Vincent challenges his genetic destiny and eventually realizes his dreams. Unfortunately this interpretation doesn’t work, since the movie establishes that Vincent’s gene profile is all a crock anyway. Jerome is therefore left as the only character in the movie with any genuine disability to contend with, and he whizzes that big time. So the movie never actually depicts anyone overcoming their limitations, and I am forced to retain my original interpretation, that the filmmakers believe physically handicapped people should be set on fire.
Or, in hindsight, you may be more on target with your “unworkable and stupid” evaluation of the film. Still, I have to give them credit at least for the little Jetsons noise all the cars made. That was pretty funny.
In the X-Men: Evolution TV series, there’s one scene with construction vehicles driving onto the Xavier property to refurbish the wrecked mansion, and passing by a sign on the main gate reading
Which, although funny, kinda raises it’s own problems. Like, why are they ADVERTISING themselves? They’re hurting their own credibility, and potentially outing their client! :smack:
(Though maybe I’m overthinking it—Xavier had been outed already by that point in the series; maybe the CCC just works on known bases that still have secret inner designs. Which puts us back at square one…)
[Geek overdrive]
Aaaand…the Blackbird, as I remember, is actually supposed to launch over “Breakstone Lake,” not the Hudson, or even the Atlantic. (And there is no Breakstone Lake IRL. I checked. God help me, I actually checked…)
