Nerd Stench - Page 9

Ambler, have you seen Time Crimes?  It demonstrates the Causal Loop beautifully.

Seen from Skynet's point of view, the loop is that Skynet is fumbling and engineering the defeat that it sought to prevent when it sends a Terminator back to the 1980's. Not only does Reese go back through Skynet's time machine and father John Connor, the attack on Sarah by the Terminator is itself a tip-off that leads Sarah to teach her son how to lead the resistance when he grows up.

Without Skynet's attempt to alter its destiny by changing the past, the destiny that it's trying to avoid wouldn't come about. Without the time travel, there's no John Connor to lead the resistance and Skynet wins.

Yes.

Edited because I have no idea why the hell I posted what I posted where I posted.

Maybe I'm just a moron but what exactly is the purpose of Batman doing that laying down thing in the tumbler in Batman Begins? Is that to help him steer better or something? Or does it help him shoot the missiles better? And if so how? Is that based on some actual real life thing or is it just there because someone thought it looked cool?

 

Probably that.  The explanation is it gives the driver more protection when doing high-speed driving, and in case of enemy fire.  But it seems like it's sticking the driver closer to danger.

 

Unconventional piloting positions are an easy sci-fi trope.

It's probably just to set up Gary Oldman's terrific reaction shot when the dashboard of the car he borrowed threatens to swallow him whole. It doesn't have to be anything more logical than that; this is a billionaire who cleans up the city by dressing up as Dracula and assaulting the criminalized poor instead of donating to schools. His ideas don't all have to be reasonable ones.

The idea is that it protects him from possible back injuries when the car is doing rampless jumps and so on (you notice he generally only does it before he starts leaping about).

Is this... auto... auto-erotica?

 

HWOOOAAAAARGGGGHHHH!!!!

 

I think the explanation that Bruce Wayne is just a crazy person who added that it for no reason in particular is my favorite. I certainly like it better than the protecting his back one.

 

As long as we're discussing  Begins, another thing that's always nagged me...that part after Gordon finds Falcone tied to the searchlight....where Batman is on the pillar of that building as the sun comes up...what....what exactly am I supposed to be looking at there? I mean I know I'm seeing a shitty unconvincing dummy of Batman propped on a pillar but in the universe of the movie what is Batman supposed to be doing there? Crouching? It also doesn't look like they bothered to give the dummy legs. That might be part of the confusion for me. The only reason I never asked about this is because I figured the answer was something really obvious.

 

I'm pretty sure that's not a dummy. You're seeing Bats with his cape hanging all the way down and out, draping the pillar and wrapped around him. Fits very much into the iconography of the character as well as Nolan's love of operatic imagery.

Correct. It's not a dummy and it's classic Batman iconography that anyone familiar enough with the character should recognize.

I have a theory that the guy with the Porsche (voiced by James Cameron!) who leaves a message on her answering machine and cancels his date with Sarah in the first "Terminator" is John Connor's biological father. She's already pregnant before the events of the film begin and Reese is just a rebound.

Do we know that she slept with him? Oh, wait, of course she did, he has a Porsche.

No, they didn't. In fact, until the night of the premiere, Gabriel Byrne thought he was Keyser. The story goes that BRyan Singer was outside the theater with him post-screening, trying to calm him down cause he was so pissed.

Another Batman Begins question...

 

During the "I won't kill you, but I don't have to save you..." moment, what's the deal with him tossing his Bat-shuriken at a window in front of him?  He doesn't exit that way.  He exists out the rear when the cars explode and decouple for some reason.  What happened there?  Did breaking the window cause it?

That wasn't a Bat-shuriken. It was one of those mini bombs he used at Arkham to break through the wall, I think. As for why it made the train break in half I have no idea. 

 

Edit: As long as I'm here when the Tumbler goes into stealth mode why can't the cops see him? All he did was turn off the headlights. There still driving right next to him and their lights are on. 

 

No, when he's over R'as, he has two batarangs in his hands, like makeshift Wolverine blades.  He tosses those through the window Joon speaks of.

Right, now I remember. He breaks the windows with the shuriken and THEN throws the bombs behind him, which is when the train breaks away. I haven't seen it in a while though so I might be remembering it wrong. So I guess the question is why he broke the windows first. 

 

Edit: Nevermind. It looks like he does break it with a shuriken. No mini bombs involved.  

 

 

Edit 2: Just occurs to me I have the screenplay of Begins. Maybe that can shed some light on some of this stuff. 

HOW???

 

Nolan can't even make THAT clear!  Hahahaha

No, I figure he throws the batarangs at the window, while the camera is on the window breaking he pulls a minibomb, then the camera's back on him and he tosses it behind him to break the car apart.

 

Perfectly clear.

 

It's a GHOST car!

 

Okay, according to the screenplay the reason Batman breaks the window is to catch some wind in his cape so he can lift off immediately. Also apparently the Tumbler was originally supposed to explode since it does in here. That's what blows up the final pillar of the tracks. 

 

This bugs me every time I watch BEGINS. Either they didn't have the budget to make the Tumbler go into some kind of high tech stealth mode, or Gotham employs the world's most vision-impaired cops.

Gotham City's just dark. How dark? Hella dark.

Darkity dark dark darka darka.

Why don't any of Batman's fellow superheroes help him out during the No Man's Land story? Was that ever explained at all? I just started reading and the it hasn't been brought up so far. 

Because constantly leaning on the shared universe is bad storytelling.

 

 

Well, there is that...

 

Batman's cotiere of allies are scattered throughout No Man's Land. Robin and Nightwing keep asking to help and Bruce tells them no. Oracle stays in her apartment. The doctor is helping people in the park, and Jim Gordon is still there with his people.

 

Superman, Wonder Woman, the JLA in general, always struck me as law abiding people. If Congress says No One In, then they will stay out.

There was an issue of JLA during No Man's Land that showed Flash and Wonder Woman stopping evildoers from getting into the city to make things worse. The last page was a sequence about "whaddya mean the Justice League isn't helping Gotham? We've got some of out best people in there! Batman, Huntress, Oracle..."

Couldn't sleep last night so I spent it thinking about this: what are the terminator's muscles made of? As we know, a T-800s is covered with real flesh and blood so that it blends in with humans. And this also makes it close enough to a living organism so that it can use the time machine. But:  its skeleton has pistons and engines and can operate by itself. So how do the muscles stay firm and in shape? They're not really getting any stimulus or exercise, so they should deteriorate. A T-800 that looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger coming out of the T-factory should look like Stephen Hawking who can fuck you up a few months later.

I have two theories.
1. Some sort of electrical stimulation node which is located beneath the artificial skin and muscle but above the endoskeleton, perhaps built into the artificial muscle itself or on top of the metal, powered by the battery or movement of the cyborg.

2. Alternately, perhaps the skin and muscle on a particular T-800 isn't necessarily meant to be long-term. It seems from the movies that the terminators pretty much show up and try to kill their target, only needing to blend in for long enough to get the chance for assassination. In the future scenes, since they're detectable by dogs and they used to be rubber-skinned, I think they're only really meant to pass for human long enough to get close. Plus, great big chunks of flesh are going to get shot off every time they get into a fight. Even though they could eventually heal the damage, it's probably more efficient to just flay the terminator and put it in a new suit, or else convert it into a foot soldier.

There is an element of the first film that seems to have fallen by the wayside in later entries: the idea that Terminators are not merely machines but cybernetic organisms. Flesh is an integral part of their constitution. The original Terminator becomes progressively "less-than" as it takes damage, and only its inability to feel pain allows it to keep going until no part of it functions anymore. The revealed mechanical endoskeleton is not the Terminator's true form liberated from a cosmetic flesh husk; it's the barely destructible remnant of a formerly complete entity. I've always been annoyed by the sequels' assertion that naked endoskeletons would be useful for anything in the future war. They're just there to look cool.

 

ETA: and good god I've posted and re-posted pretty much this same exact idea on like the last three pages of this thread. I need to get out more.

Edited by Hammerhead - 1/24/13 at 8:58am

Great point, Hammerhead! Doesn't Reese say that the T800s sweat and have bad breath? If the muscles are there for a reason (beyond looking human), they need some kind of vascular system, etc. If this is right, the endoskeleton couldn't punch through a windshield since it isn't designed for that kind of mayhem. I need to think about this more next night.

 

And you don't need to get out more. That would ruin your nerd stench.

How have there been six Star Wars movies and we've never seen any nerfs being herded?

Are Nerfs not the giant hamsters that Anakin and his milf lover Padme watch roaming the grass?

I wouldn't say Padme is a MILF, since she is not a Mom until late in RotS. Also how old is Padme? She seems the same age in PM and AOTC. Was she a 16 year old Queen? And if so, who the hell would listen to anything she said?

She's 14 in Phantom Menace.  At least, according to Weird Al.

Always wondered this myself.

The best my mind can explain it away is that she and every person from her world are super long lived. The last of the Númenors.

(I know I'm mixing nerd universes, I don't know why some people consider this to be a crime punishable by death)

Are nerfs indigenous to Naboo?

As my scifi sensibilities lean more towards the Trek than the War, please excuse my ignorance. I thought little Ani was 6 and Amidala was 18, which meant for the 2nd film, he would have been 17 and Amidala nearly 30.  Wikipedia says Anakin was 9 and Amidala 14, which indeeds make the age gap better.

Why are most male zombies clean shaven?

Does hair growth immediately stop upon zombificaiton?

Why then are a number of the rage zombies (people infected with a virus but not technically dead) from movies clean shaven as well even after months of being infected?

That is a really good question. Hair and fingernail growth continues for weeks after death from what I understand, plus the Zombies must be circulating blood or ichor or something simply to move. Maybe they shave and get haircuts? Who knew?

That's an illusion. Decaying flesh loses mass and recedes, exposing 'ungrown' hair and fingernails.

 

Or so I've heard.

If only living tissue (or things wrapped in living tissue) can go through the time machine in The Terminator, doesn't that mean that your outer most layer of skin, hair, and finger nails wouldn't go through? We would have seen bald, eye brow less time travelers, as well as Reese writhing around in pain because of his finger and toe nails.

 

In The Dark Knight, Wayne and Alfred find one of the Joker's henchmen's fingerprints on a bullet fragment from a bullet he personally loaded into a clip. But even if he could reconstruct the bullet, wouldn't the heat from firing the gun have melted it? I think the finger print would have definitely melted. I saw a crime documentary where the police couldn't get finger prints off the dashboard of a car because it sat in the sun for a few days, which melted the prints. A gun shot is definitely hotter than the interior of a car on a hot day.

 

But let me get the rest of this straight. The henchman who loaded that bullet uses his own apartment to hold cops hostage? And the Joker knew that Batman, or at least, someone, would get a finger print off that bullet, go into the guy's apartment, so he left a telescope there with a timed device that would raise the curtain, drawing fire from police snipers? And the thing is, I'm willing to pretty much buy the whole thing as plausible since it's so well done and is compelling, but do I have the Joker's logic right? I know that you could theorize that the Joker always has a backup plan, and we just see one way his plans play out. But why lead the police directly to the apartment of one of his own henchmen? Did the henchman himself know? He must have if he held the cops in his apartment.

 

It all superficially keeps the plot moving forward, but in reality, it just represents a few extra beats to keep the commissioner's funeral scene moving along, and lets Batman tell Dent who he's holding captive afterwards. I don't even care that the Joker had no reason to think that anyone had the means to reassemble the bullet to get a finger print. Movie logic wins that one.

 

I still love the movie and am willing to write off these internal problems as movie logic, but do I worked this out correctly? Because it seems like a lot of planning based on the off chance that Batman will find the fingerprint of a shattered bullet.

Well, he is fucking Batman after all.

Forgive me if this has been covered already, but Iron Man/Avengers question.

 

In Iron Man 2, rather a lot of screen time is given over to Tony addressing a design flaw in his Arc Reactor, as he has discovered that it is slowly killing him. The visible result is that his circular 'chestlight' is replaced with a triangular one on his new Mark VI armor. We see this element carried over at the start of Avengers, but when he changes into the Mark VII armor for the climax of the film it's got the circular configuration again. And images from Iron Man 3 depict the Mark VIII armor continuing to stay anti-triangular. Meanwhile throughout both films and what I've seen of 3, Tony's personal Arc Reactor, the one under his shirt, embedded in his chest, appears to remain circular at all times even though that's the one I'm assuming he really needed to fix. In order to not die.

 

So what's up here, besides the fact that the triangular design looks dumb?

Just spitballing: the second movie makes it clear that he's installed separate arc reactors into each suit, so that it has its own power supply. There'd be no reason to replace the initial power source, since the new element is harder to make, so as he builds new armor, especially since he's constantly replacing it (but keeping the obsolete models), he just produces circular arc reactors, which are faster and less resource-intensive to make. As for his own chest piece, since we never see his bare chest, the circular cradle would still push out a circular light from under his shirt, even though the light source itself is triangular.

In the comics, at least, there was a thing where the circle shape was actually a factor in the power of the Uni-Beam, because Norman Osborn's Iron Patriot suit had a star-shaped chest piece which was much weaker. I wouldn't be surprised if they mention that with the War Machine suit.

Then why build the Mark VI with a triangular chestpiece at all? Did he look back at that and decide it was overkill?

 

And I dunno, it sure looks to me like the unit under his shirt is genuinely circular. You can see the pattern of individual lights.

The housing for the chest piece is circular, but the element that it houses (and what gives off the light) is triangular. I think they just made the piece in the armor to match thematically -- a new Tony with a new "heart", and a new suit to match his call to action in the third act.

 

But the triangular chest piece in the suit looked crappy, so Joss Whedon had the Avengers suit redesigned with the circular piece. It makes sense for Tony to switch things up, too. He likes to tinker.