Oh man, my wife and I watched that over the weekend. You couldn’t just suspend disbelief, you have to suspend all brain activity to enjoy it.
At one point the Chris Pratt character learns about something that happens in his future but in the past from the perspective of 30 years in the future. My wife says it probably happened because of the time loop; I said no, I think it’s before the time loop and now it won’t happen in the new reality. But I said don’t think too hard about time loop paradoxes with this movie, nothing good can come from that; it ain’t no ‘Dark’.
See, Time Loop Paradoxes I can deal with. Time Travel Messes Up Everything, after all. We have no idea how the universe would actually deal with such things, so I’m okay with them screwing around with it. Hell, “Send the toxin to the past so we can use it as soon as the attack occurs” should have been the default plan all along!
But laughably bad tactics? We already know that doesn’t work!
I wasn’t saying I have a problem with all time loop paradox plotlines. My point just was, I’ve seen clever time loop plotlines, and this was NOT one of them.
having been involved in some way with the military pretty much all my cognizant life, watching movies with any military interaction drives me nuts. My favorite examplpe is US Navy Seals - and not just because I lived with a seal for over a year and had a whole bunch of interactions with seals, but because I lived in the area and know the route he took from Virginia Beach through Portsmouth, into the James River [blech!] to swim around through the Chesapeake Bay to the Amphib Base [or now the Joint Operations Base] making what would have been in traffic a 45 minute commute into a 4 hour hazmat dive with no gear. Oy.
And I have reloaded my own ammo upon occasion when I wanted a specific underpowered load, or to make salt shotgun shells for dog abatement. I suppose I could melt down some silverware to make an anti werewolf load …
Ok Spoilers - but he makes it back with the magic green goo clutched in his hand and the whitespikes have just destroyed the future portion of the jump gate. So lets all give up, can’t get the magic goop slung back forward.
Um HELLO MORONS - you have the toxins, male and female versions. You know when the critters show up and where they show up. Why can’t you stockpile 25 years worth of weapon and goop development, park an assload of TRAINED warriors around the site and wait for them to show up and kill them when they pop up? So what you can’t find when they actually landed, you do know roughly where they show up, you would have soldiers equipped with something other than piddly 5.56 [hello, Ma Deuces, BARs, SAWs, hell, PRG Kaboom and snake and nape runs with toxin cocktails. THUD BRRRRPS. Sheesh.] And none of this Russia closed the borders … if the world shows up at the borders with an actual solution to the future extinction of Russia I think the politicians that didn’t want it let in would soon be dead and the borders open.
I hate to be put in a position of defending this movie, but you’re missing a plot point:
By the time the Pratt character’s grown up daughter invented the female-killing green goo in the future, it was too late to manufacture a lot of green goo and fight the whitespikes in 2051, even if the whitespikes weren’t overrunning that last stronghold. So sending Pratt back in time with the green goo WAS the plan, so they could have 25 years to manufacture and stockpile a lot of green goo, then, as you said, “park an assload of TRAINED warriors around the site and wait for them to show up and kill them when they pop up”. So as soon as Pratt landed back in 2021 clutching the green goo the future was presumably saved.
Then, Pratt and co. figured out that, instead of waiting for the whitespikes to show up in Russia circa 2040 or so, they realized the whitespikes were already there, suspended under a glacier, and they could take out the whitespikes before they started attacking, with even less loss of military lives.
Like I said - that should have been the plan all along.
Even if they’d been able to manufacture the toxin in the present and send it forward to win the war in 2050, what have they won? A devastated world, destroyed cities, and about 90% of the human race wiped out. How many more will starve to death before they re-establish agriculture, healthcare, and all that?
Nope, screw the time line, hit the aliens as soon as they appear, and let the chips fall where they may!
Pratt showed up back in 2020 [?] with the green goop, with 30 years until the ‘end of the world via alien munching’ so yes they DID have time to make a tankerload of goop, and decide which weapons to put into production/scrounge up out of all the armories in the world. They didn’t need to wait until 2050 to start cranking out the goop, scrounge weapons and train an army up. There was no time paradox to worry about, just 25 or 20 years of time to get ready - the exact reason they blipped back in the first place, but instead of blipping people forward in time, they just keep everything in the past building up supplies and training and creating doctrine so that starting in 2040 they can build the training cadre and table of organization they need to have ready in the next 5 or so years to be ready for the whitespike breakout in a reasonably known area of Russia [wherver they were first reported, not at the glacier site]
Yes, I’m agreeing with you there, that should’ve been the plan, and that was the plan. But you said–
I thought you were saying that the plan was to manufacture green goop, then bring it back to the future. Which plan was ruined by the wormhole closing. But no, the plan was what you’re saying- prepare to fight in 2040(ish). THEN the Pratt character got the idea that they didn’t even have to wait until 2040 or so when the critters first show up, they could take them out in 2020.
This is where the assholes running Game of Thrones first lost me. (There were plenty of others, but let’s go with “tactics” for now.) A pack of Webalos could run better battles than Jon Snow. They made me watch episodes more than once because I missed dialog while yelling at the screen about how stupid the characters were acting. Magic? Sure. Resurrection? OK. Battle planning, intelligent, total lack thereof? No.
People do things for reasons related to fashion and not just function. I can believe that, at some point in the future, there’s a weird trend for hexagonal-shaped doors.
I’m usually pretty willing to leave my disbelief at home when I go see a movie. I can only think of twice when I broke.
The worst was the 2009 version of Star Trek. Alternate timeline, fine. Bunch of cadets led by an even less-experienced cadet, no problem. But the scene where hotheaded teenager James Kirk is driving a classic Corvette across the dirt roads of Iowa, and then a giant screen on the dashboard flashes NOKIA to indicate he’s getting a call? Never, NEVER would anyone rip out the dashboard of a 300-year old perfectly preserved car to put in a video screen! Took me right out of the rest of the film.
The other time was in my early 20s. I was reading some second-rate spy thriller about a multin-national group of villains who were plotting to take over the world because all the current governments sucked. The mooks capture the hero, took him to the basement and, of course, left him there alone. At that point, something in my brain screamed, “Why don’t you just kill him?” All the James Bond movies I had enjoyed since I was 12 years old suddenly turned to crap, and I’ve never watched another one.
And if it was an “original” 300 year old Corvette there is no guarantee that the original dashboard remained intact or had to be replaced at some point.
To say someone would NEVER rip out the dashboard of a 300-year old perfectly preserved car underestimates the stupid things people often do to “fix” or “restore” antiques or classic cars. I have head multiple stories of people ruining antique cars and furniture by trying to stupidly paint an/or restore them themselves .
My suspension of disbelief tends to stop whenever you have two super-advanced armies of interstellar civilizations massing with their anachronistic weapons in dense phalanx formations as if they are fighting the battle of Gaugamela with “laser spears” and “plasma catapults”. Later Star Wars and the MCU and DC films are guilty of this. Maybe because it looks very cinematic and is relatively easy to create massive armies of CGI mooks shooting glowing beams at each other.
In my mind, such a battle would be like the Battle of Hoth from Empire Strikes Back. The AT-ATs are spread out hundreds of yards apart. The Rebels are dug in behind defensive fortifications (including a theatre-wide shield protecting from air and orbital bombardment). There are specific tactical objectives beyond “deploy a massive scrum of disposable troops”.
I don’t know. Whenever I see these big epic CGI battles, I’m always left thinking "with their technology, how do they not immediately cut this mob down with Gatling fire, particle beams, and “Macross missile-pod” salvos?
Kirk’s stepfather: Hey, are you out of your mind? That car’s an antique. You think you can get away with this just 'cause your mother’s off-planet? You get your ass back home, now! You live in my house, buddy. You live in my house and that’s my car. You get one scratch on that car and I’m going to whip your a…
(Kirk hits the media button on the phone, cutting off the conversation, as the Beastie Boys play)
So we can surmise two things
The car’s owner, at least, considers it an “antique”
He doesn’t like so much as one scratch on it.
Also 3) Nokia survived the World War of the 1990s and flashes its early 21st century logo every time the phone rings. For that matter, the Beastie Boys also survive into the 23rd century!
And 4) It’s my disbelief, and I’ll suspend it whenever I see fit, thankyouverymuch.
ANYTIME a bad guys plan involves having dozens of steps that all must be perfectly timed based solely on expecting what the good guys will do. Silva in Skyfall and Joker in Dark Knight are the two most popular examples which also caused a massive rise of copycats in fiction.
If somebody stopping 30 seconds to tie their shoes will cause the entire bad guy plan to derail, the plan will never work ever in real life and I don’t believe it.
Tangent… only recently did I begin to consider the fact that our “spaceship Earth” is moving at a tremendous rate, and if one were to go back in time, one must also go back in location to not appear somewhere millions of miles away from home.
Now whenever I think of time travel stories this bothers me. It would be pretty cool if some writer worked the details of that particular problem into their time travel.
