Paint CHiPs
Viva Le Me
Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Location Location
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quote:
Originally posted by Buddha's Penis!
i agree, that's retarded. thanks for saving me the pain of discovering this for myself.
I guess this is what got me. And your comments in CHiPsJr's thread seemed (to me anyway) that you already had your mind set on not liking this movie in the first place, and this comment seemed to indicate that CRSR's comments (a weakness he thought in a movie he really liked) sealed it for you. So you dislike a movie you've never even seen for reasons that even the most hard nosed of critics see as a minor flaw in a great movie. Sorry, just one of my pet peeves, I know I'm overreacting. I hate people who read spoilers and then engage in discussions in them without having seen the movie, especially when they use it to cast judgement on the movie as a whole, which, as I said, they haven't seen. Old holdover from my Ain't it Cool News days. Gets me in flame mode.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and make my comments in this vien (the picking apart conjecture vien). I still don't see it as a plot hole. Even on that sort of level (a level it shouldn't be judged at, as I'll repeat again), there's still no reason it doesn't work.
The first and most important thing to point out if you want to talk about the science of it is that we have no real knowledge of the aliens with which to base our assumptions on. The only hard facts are what we see of them directly, i.e. that concentrated amounts of water harms them and, if enough of it gets at their head, they die. Also, they are very physically developed but not neccessarily superhuman (they can jump and run almost superhuman, but you can trap them in rooms so they can't burst through walls), their forces are hostile, they can blend in, etc etc. These are the things that we know because we are shown them directly. If I had my old film studies textbook I would give you the word for the various degrees of fact in movies, there are a couple (where’s pj when you need him?), but you get the idea anyway. One of the things those textbooks like to point out, and that I’ll invoke here, is that how a director chooses to present something is never accidental. It’s a deliberate decision, and thus there is a reason for it. Keep that in mind.
Then there are some assumptions that are somewhat safe to make based on the assumptions that the people in the movie make (tv and radio mostly). That they're invading, that this isn't their full forces, that they use hand to hand and not their technology so that we don't use nukes and thus render the planet useless (this coming from the textbook the kid has, which is supported by the fact that they aren’t attacking with huge armies of land rovers and shit or bombing the shit out of us, they’re infiltrating and taking us out in small groups, basically), etc. Also, somebody on the radio (not experts, just a guy) noted that they weren’t here for the planet’s resources, they were here for US. We were the resources they wanted. This is supported by the radio guy’s talking about how his whole family was taken, and that they use concentrated amounts of poison to take us out. Also supported by the final TV reports that they took a good many of us. Also supported by the direct evidence we have, that the alien in the end doesn’t just go and slaughter everybody in the house, but rather takes the kid hostage (and yes I realize that was for a personal vendetta reason, but the fact that instead of huge claws and shit, the alien has evolved a small spike meant to deliver a wisp of gas at a very close range would seem to indicate this, and it makes sense being as how they were wanting to attack a small farmhouse that had no other significance EXCEPT that it contained people). So yes, this was never DIRECTLY proven (again, for a reason), but if you pay attention, I think it’s a safe assumption.
The resource they wanted was us.
Why? This is one of the things the movie deliberatly (and wisely) left blank. You could go for a million different explanations if you felt like conjecture, from a Matrix style “use us as energy”, to a Twilight Zone “they wanted us as slaves” to a million other possible explanations that we simply can’t know. But that’s not really important. In a different kind of movie it might be, but in this one, it’s not important. But suspension of disbelief (which only works well when the autuer works it well, which in this case he does) demands that they want us for some good damn reason.
So in that light, their raid was pretty successful. If they were simply harvesting humans, they got a good many of us, then we figured out their weakeness, and they strategically retreated, having already accomplished most of their objective anyway. If they were intent on taking over the planet, that would be a collosal failure. If they just wanted to get people, then they gave better than they got. Smart aliens.
Of course, once again, this presupposes a number of things that Shymalon deliberatly leaves vauge just SO this sort of discussion DOESN’T become tantamount in the movie (which it doesn’t in the theater experience, it’s only when you get overly analytical people on an internet message board in sci fi fanboy mode that it does, and even then everybody involved admits it’s only a small piece of a great big picture), but seeing as how we’re taking it to that level anyway, I’ll throw that out there. That’s my take on that anyway.
Speaking of sci fi fanboys, I would guess that, were it not for the fact that it were specifically aliens, this discussion wouldn’t happen. It never did for the Sixth Sense (“How can somebody possibly SEE dead people?” “Why the hell would dead people care about what happens in life anyway?” “Why would dead people still be hanging around, and if dead people do, considering the billions of dead on earth, wouldn’t the place be chock full of them, even if we suppose it’s only dead people with loose ends on earth?” etc etc etc.) But throw in the concept of “aliens” and everybody automatically becomes armchair scientists.
Which leads me anyway, to another question. Why DID Shymalon use aliens in the first place? My guess is that it was meant to invoke exactly the same sense of not being sure, and the sense of a complete lack of hope, that he was after. The notion of aliens holds a very specific place in pop culture (something he plays with a bit in using the crop circle angle, I think, a hoax that was unmasked for the most part but still that we cling to). There is a feeling of utter helplessness that you can play with aliens that you can’t really with dragons, or ghosts, or whatever. I won’t go into all that as I’m already digressing terribly, but it’s something to think about.
But anyway, then there is the final level of evidence, that stuff that, within the confines presented, we CAN’T know. Or even intelligently guess at. This conversation, for the most part anyway, is at that level. Shymalon wisely teases at this level constantly, but never offers anything but vague, varying accounts. And for a reason. Were he to try and get into lofty explanations of it all, this would cease to be the movie it is and instead would become Independence Day. The focus was never about the aliens. It was the family. It was hope, it was faith, it was whatever. I even have a hard time classifying this as science fiction. But it wasn’t the aliens. THEY were the McGuffins. We know they’re there, we know a little about them, and we know that they represent the complete lack of hope. We don’t know what exactly their plan is, who they are, where they come from, etc etc, because we don’t need to know it.
Which brings me to the water.
It’s funny to me that, given so little evidence, and the deliberatly vague nature of what evidence WAS given, a few are automatically jumping on this with hard nosed assertations that aren’t supported by anything whatsoever. We know that concentrated water harms them. That’s it. You splash a glass of water in their face, it hurts them. We don’t know anything about their physiology in regards to this, save that. It has been mentioned that our atmosphere, the air we breath, contains water. That’s true. But it isn’t akin to getting a glass of the stuff splashed in your face. Our air also contains a number of elements which, if applied to us in concentrated form, would be fatal to US, and we live here! Saying that because water hurts them in concentrated form when applied directly, makes it dumb that they’d even be here, is like pointing out the plot flaw in my life that a good dose of nitrous oxide would kill me instantly, but I walk around breathing the stuff anyway. There is a difference.
Also, why bother coming here if we have so much of it around? Well, for one, if they’re after human beings, none of us LIVE in the goddamned stuff. We have it around, sure, but the only contact I tend to have myself with water is when I directly apply it to myself, when it rains, or when I fall in a lake. I would imagine that, were it harmful to me in direct concentrated form, I could avoid it pretty easily. Of course, not everybody in the world is wanting to hurt me, and if they were that would make avoiding it somewhat more difficult…presuming everybody figured out that water is harmful to me. And even then, when they finally did, if I had another planet to fall back to….
You get the idea.
I don’t think that it is the chemicals in our drinking water that does it, though it could be and that would be an easy out. The only reason I don’t think so is that the TV alludes to the tide turning when a few middle eastern cities found a “primative method” of warding them off (again, this was left vague, but safe to presume). That presumption is that the primative method was spraying water on them, and I don’t think the Middle East puts flouride or much of anything in their water.
But I digress, again.
That’s my take on it anyway, but again, this is us working from vague assumptions that even the characters in the movie aren’t sure of, or things just alluded to. All we know is that if you spray water in an alien’s face, it can kill them (and even that we can’t be sure of, surely a baseball bat to the head a few dozen times probably expediates the process, maybe water is just a major irritant, like bleach or somesuch). There are a million ways of justifying this.
This movie isn’t interested in any of them. Because it isn’t that kind of movie, even if some can’t help but latching onto that aspect of it. And that’s fine. It just wasn’t something that even bothered me, or even something that I even thought about really, until I came back here and read this spoiler thread. And my reaction to this thread was similar to my reaction on discussions on the historical inaccuracies in Life is Beautiful. I was irritated and shook my head in disbelief and just sort of said to myself “Jesus Christ, can’t you put aside petty overly analytical bullshit and just watch a great movie?”
And I don’t mean to talk down on all this, because if it is something that bothered you, that MAKES it a valid discussion. That’s why I just spent a few pages analyzing the movie from this level, because even on it, I think it works. But, as has been said, this level of discussion and this line of conjecture is very incidental to the film itself.
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08-04-2002 02:30 AM
