6 Movie Plots Made Possible by Bafflingly Bad Decisions
When it comes to making wise decisions, characters in a movie have a huge disadvantage: they don't know they're in a movie. The good guys wouldn't have been surprised by Darth Vader winning if they'd known from the outset they were in a movie called "The Empire Strikes Back."
But even then, you can't watch certain movies without realizing that these guys really should have seen it coming. Like...
#6.
King Kong
The Plan:
"Don't worry, Mr. Denham, we'll get you on your way in a jiffy. Let's just have a look at that shipping manifest. Let's see... 12,000-pounds of bananas... 250-pounds of animal tranquilizers... 300-pounds of raging gorilla... What's that you say? Oh, yes, it looks like you're right. Thirty thousand pounds of gorilla. My mistake. Well, everything seems to be in order. Sign here."
Why They Had It Coming:
We understand that Denham was supposed to be eccentric and ambitious to the point of insanity. But he didn't sneak Kong back into the U.S. by hiding him in his suitcase. A whole lot of people apparently signed off on the deal.
Do you know why they don't let you just take tropical monkeys home with you whenever you feel like it? It's because that would be a REALLY FUCKING BAD IDEA. And we're talking regular-sized monkeys here. Seriously, go on vacation and try passing through customs with a screeching live monkey clinging to your back.
Sure, the guys in the customs office in 1933 New York weren't dealing with the same restrictions we have today, but a little bit of basic common sense should have told them that a motherfucking three-story ape is not an acceptable import. Really, taking any kind of giant monster through customs shouldn't be this easy, or even possible.
He was royalty, though.
But not in the King Kong universe. Just stop and think about all the people who had to go along with his plan to display a giant, rampaging monkey in front of a Broadway audience. The trucking company should have refused to transport anything that could conceivably beat one of their trucks in a fist fight. The police should have stopped him for transporting unsafe materials. The theater owner should have taken one look at Denham's plan, a plan to stuff hundreds of people into a room with a giant gorilla and then wait for something interesting to happen, and he should have told the man to go directly to Hell and take his monkey with him.
This is apparently a world where not only did dinosaurs not go extinct, but somehow lawyers and insurance companies did.
#5.
Demolition Man
The Plan:
"Things are going well. I've released cryogenically frozen criminal, Simon Phoenix, to murderdeathkill my only enemy in all the world, and I've made sure to insert a program into this dangerous criminal's mind that makes it impossible for him to turn around and kill me, which he very much wants to do since I've been messing with his brain and treating him like the hired help, and also because he's a psychopath who pretty much wants to kill everybody."
Stallone threatening the least valuable part of Cocteau's body.
Why They Had It Coming:
"Oh, also he says that all he needs to complete his mission is for me to unfreeze a team of five fellow criminals from his old gang. Makes sense. What's that you say? The other murderers haven't been programmed with the 'don't murder me' safeguard? Eh, I'm sure it'll be fine."
There are all kinds of problems with Dr. Raymond Cocteau's plan to rid his utopian future society of the menace of graffiti, not the least of which is the issue of overkill, but his failure to protect himself from anything that isn't played by Wesley Snipes definitely tops the list. If the man who wants you dead asks you for the necessary supplies to make you dead, perhaps you should put a little extra thought into your answer. "No," for instance, might not be a bad choice.
Oh, come on. How can you say "no" to a face like this?
And even if you assume that giving an unfrozen crime lord from the past his own posse is a necessary risk, Cocteau already knows that people's brains can be fixed to make them not murder you. He already tried it, and it worked out just fine. What, did he fucking forget? Did he prematurely cross it off his "To Do" list by mistake?
Come to think of it, maybe Dr. Cocteau should have made the "don't kill Dr. Cocteau" programming mandatory for all the inmates in his cryogenic prison. You know, just in case of the incredibly unlikely event that something should ever go wrong with your warehouse of frozen psychopaths.
"I'll be the judge of that!"
#4.
Deep Blue Sea
The Plan:
"As it turns out, sharks have a protein in their brains which could lead us to a cure for Alzheimer's. Our scientists are already hard at work developing sharks with freakishly large brains. Oh, also their bodies are freakishly large. And their teeth and jaws. So! All we need now is someplace where we can house these deadly creatures and periodically poke at their heads with giant needles!"
Why They Had It Coming:
"Well, let's see, there's this abandoned submarine base in the middle of the ocean, totally isolated from civilization, with most of the structure underwater where it could easily be flooded. And there's a huge hole in the floor. Dear God, it's perfect!"
You know what might have been a better place for this lab? How about a nice little facility in the middle of Arizona, with a couple of big saltwater fish tanks? They didn't make these sharks so they could study giant super-shark behavior in a natural environment. The swimming death machines don't really need to be out in the actual ocean for this experiment to work. Being eaten alive does not need to be a common workplace accident.
Workplace safety aside, you have the bonus concern of what could happen if one of these monsters escapes, which actually happens in the opening minutes of the film. Here's an idea that might help you keep your killer fish from escaping: Don't put them out in the fucking ocean! We don't care how strong your fence is, it's still not as much of a deterrent as miles and miles of dry, shark-smothering land.
"Hey, good idea! And that would also be a perfect place to test our new air-breathing sharks and our prototype shark jetpacks!"
I've always liked the assertion that the machines in The Matrix chose to give humans a virtual reality out of sympathy. Because, even if they chose humans as their energy source, there's no reason the humans' brains would have to be stimulated for that to work out. But they gave humans a way to live their lives anyway. This theory is not only supported by the film (Smith's comment that the first version of the Matrix was a failed utopia, and that the current version is at the "peak of human civilization"), but also by the Animatrix prequels, which show that the machines wanted - and tried repeatedly - to peacefully coexist with humans. Instead of wiping humans out when they won the war, they took pity on them and gave them the world they wanted. While using them as a power source. Symbiotic!
ReplyThat's a legitimate criticism of The Matrix. Yet whenever I watch it, Morpheus's lecture about "25,000 BTUs of body-heat" and "more more bio-electricity than 120-volt battery" just seems so authoritative and scientific.
ReplyFor the Matrix, why not do both? Harvest energy from the core and also from humans. As long as humans are an energy source and appeased in their own virtual world, there is no threat of war/rebellion/revolution.
ReplyAlso the reason the Matrix wasn't a perfect world was because humans did not like it, and in effect a perfect world created an imperfect Matrix... meaning lots of people would wake up (which defeats the purpose of putting them in the first place).
The architect balanced the Matrix while the Oracle created the chaos - it was a system of checks and balances to create a "Good enough" world for us. >_
"There is no threat of war/rebellion/revolution"
... Wait, when did that happen? I thought the three movies were about people being pissed about being used as an energy source, and you didn't seem to change that.
here's a cinematosophical thought: what if the actual program of the matrix was that every single person in it was Neo, everything else (including the cake, and bad knee armor) was a lie, and that by getting each person to achieve resurrection was kind of like overclocking a processor?
ReplyI couldn't read this because of the sarcastic tone. It angried up my blood and made me punch a hole in my wall.
ReplyAnother thing that baffles me about The Matrix, is why did the machines program the Matrix to be so damn boring? If i had the choice between battling an apocalyptic horde of robots or working in a damn cubicle i'd choose the robots fighting every time, and i know i'm not alone in that viewpoint.
ReplyInstead of "over-worked, under-payed cubicle worker simulator 3000" why not put all humans in something like "millionaire, playboy, heavy-metal super-star/espionage agent simulator 3000"?
The movie specifically addresses your question, stating that the human mind rejected perfect realities- so the robots simulated the "height of human civilization"- the 1990's.
why did the machines even need to give the humans a simulated world? why not just sedate them?
Replyhow about Terminator 2? why did the T-1000 not just get out of the truck, form himself into a large, sharp wheel, and just roll over john like the annoying little roadkill he is?
And why have the matrix world be 1999? That way they are raising a civilization with hackers and phone phreaks. Set it in 1899 and they be trying to hack into the matrix with telegraph keys. make it 1799 and they'd be using butter churns.
Maybe the machines got all machine-logic on the situation and analyzed life expectancy rates in 1799... Or maybe the machines wanted to build a world with an actual digital record of it to make it legit...? Or maybe it's just social commentary on how in the late 90's everything is so pre-packaged and boring that it could seem like a form of social control.
what i never understood about the matrix was why they even needed the matrix. they say it's a prison for your mind, but if they were siphoning off our natural electricity then, since the brain is basically electricity, there is basically no mind to imprison. you've given them a electrical lobotomy
Reply"This is apparently a world where not only did dinosaurs not go extinct, but somehow lawyers and insurance companies did."
ReplyI want to live in that world.
If executive meddling hadn't happened, The machine's motivation for enslaving humanity would have made a lot more sense. Originally, The Wachowski brothers intended for the machines to enslave human beings for the processing power of their brains, not an energy source. "Oh, but people won't understand it!" If you're four, maybe. If so, you shouldn't be watching a movie with a machine-gun killing spree in it.
Reply"It's the equivalent of powering New York City with millions of hamster wheels in hamster factories all over the planet, only these hamsters have a tendency to escape, organize and try to murder you in your sleep."
ReplySo just like regular hamsters then.
well technically the machinces didnt lose and could probably kill the humans off whenever they want. but theyre very nice robots.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesIf they're so nice, why didn't they put us in WoW or something instead of a simulation of normal reality?
They tried to create a perfect world. Humans rejected it.
Perfection is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps the machines thought made a world where "everyone could be happy" was a very simplistic set of shapes which were logically perfect and in perfect mathematical alignment.
It would make perfect sense to a machine, and be totally consistent logic, but be a disaster for the humans forced to experience this world.
At least put me in a never ending redd dead redemption multiplayer or something
I don't know if this has been pointed out, but it was ridiculous for the carrier lady to have survived in 28 Weeks Later in the first place. Yes, she isn't affected by the disease, but in the beginning, she is left in a house full of them. They're not going to bite her and move on, they're going to beat the ever-loving s**t out of her until she's dead or one of them. How can I make this claim? Because she infects her husband and he proceeds to do exactly that. Just not a very good movie, especially compared to 28 Days
ReplyMatrix - how about the scientist, politicians, Commanders, and citizen that won the first war then dumped the defeated robots into one place. Followed by letting them get organized and no counter measures to shut them all off and stepping back a bit from a technological standpoint. Or, how about learning from what they did with their economy? Not giving them weapons? Delete anything and everything that had to do with war, armaments, access to the internet, harm to humans, how about an auto delete fail safe and virus that when something like that occurred an automatic shutdown happened?
Reply28 Weeks Later - And this person is in the same country why? Not some underwater, underground base? The arctic? Space? Auto-detonation of the building studying this thing transferring all the data someplace self if contamination occurred?
A monocled shark with a *top hat*!? And a stylish mustache to boot! I do say, my good men, you hath won the interwebs!
ReplyMy good sir, I do believe that you must have intended to write *thou hast.
Man, I wish everyone on line gave a s**t about politeness. I'm old.
Convenient crap scientists. Capable in creating all sorts of technology but utterly lacking in sense of proportion. What would be more fun?
ReplyThis reminded me that I need to watch Deep Blue Sea again. The first time I saw it seeing Samuel Motherfuckin' Jackson get eaten by the shark mid-rant almost made me s**t my pants. Brilliant filmmaking, that.
ReplyThey ate me! A f****n shark ate me!
ReplyDeep Blue Sea: The scientist working on the genetically modified Mako sharks didn't want attention called to them, because she was using illegal genetic engineering to enhance them. The facillity also caught, studied, and released normal sharks as part of their cover story. The Makos were a secret project. If they'd requested an inland facility, that would've raised questions and the scientist would've been fired and possibly sent to prison and we wouldn't get to see a shark being blown up, nor the resulting Mythbusters episode dedicated to testing the reality of that explosion.
ReplyRobocop 2: Perhaps you didn't notice: OCP owns EVERYTHING, including the cops and the insurance companies. People are too scared to speak out against them, because it could cost them their jobs, or worse, result in a visit from the druggie killbot.
Demolition Man: The reason the Caucteau wants Friendly dead isn't because of the graffiti. It's because Friendly refuses to be part of The Plan and is a promoter of the idea of free thought. There's no room in Caucteau's new society for such things as independent thinking. Anyone who doesn't act like a sissy "Barney & Friends" extra is considered dangerous.
Though, more disturbing is the subtext that Lanina may be John's daughter...
In regards to Deep Blue Sea: That was Jaws you're thinking of, with the shark explosion at the end.
In regards to Demolition Man: Lanina knows who John's family is. Specifically, his wife, since she looked up if his family was still alive, and informed him his wife died in the big quake of whenever. She knows who John's wife is, and would likely recognize her own mother, nevermind that John's wife continued to visit him well after he was frozen, AND his daughter was already born before he was frozen (and he didn't name her Lanina BTW, it never gives her name as I remember). My point, there is no chance Lanina is related to John Spartan.
Geeze, why don't you just poop *directly* on Vlad's erotic Demolition Man fan-fiction Veccon?
Large pelagic sharks are notoriously difficult to mantain in captivity in good health for extended periods of time. Just as an example, it was until very recently (2005, I think) that an aquarium managed to do so with a Great White.
ReplyOf course, it could be argued that with the kind of resources those guys in Deep Blue had on their hands, they could have found a way. But it this case, having the sharks on the sea actually was a simpler and more effective solution.
The sea lab was completely bonkers and retarded in construction, though.
they only needed the brains of the sharks, they could have disabled the bodies and put them on life support.
Asherdelampyr: That's always what I thought too. The potential for mayhem is so great that all measures should've been taken to make it impossible. Like, no access to the friggin' ocean maybe? Yeah, terrible planning that was just a lame set-up for the attacks. And the worst part is LL Cool J survived.