Question: Throughout the movie it's suggested that Quaid/Hauser isn't experiencing anything at all and what he's experiencing is in fact a memory implant. My questions is, did the events actually happen or were they simply the memory implant Quaid purchased at Rekall?
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Answer: Although left deliberately ambiguous, it should be noted that the director's intention was for it to be all part of a dream / delusion. Indeed, despite the ambiguity, more evidence exists to indicate that the story was imagined as opposed to reality.
Question: If the piece of the All Spark is still locked up where Mikaela works, why don't the Decepticons go after it? It seems easier to obtain.
Answer: That's exactly what Wheelie (the small remote controlled truck) was doing. He was caught by Mikaela and didn't get word to the Decepticons that there was another shard they could use. After she captured him and threw him in the metal box he was more concerned with his own survival than letting the Decepticons know there was another shard of the All Spark.
Question: Are General Grievous and Asajj Ventress the same rank, or is one above the other?
Answer: Grievous is general of the Separatist army. Ventress technically has no rank, being Dooku's personal assassin/enforcer/aide. In terms of personal power within the Seperatist movement, both are probably about equal, but, in rank terms, the Seperatist forces would obey Grievous over Ventress.
Question: What is the celestial object seen at the end of The Empire Strikes Back? Is it the galaxy? Or something else?
Chosen answer: It's a galaxy. Given the distance that the fleet would have to be away from it in order to see the whole thing like that, it seem unlikely that it's intended to be the galaxy that the saga takes place in, but another one that's relatively close to it.
Answer: It is the Star Wars galaxy. Haven was the codename of the Rebel Alliance's predetermined rendezvous point far beyond the Galactic Rim, where the Alliance Fleet regrouped after the Rebellion's defeat at the Battle of Hoth in 3 ABY. The rendezvous point lay near the coordinates 2.427 by 3.886 by 673.52 above the galactic plane.
Question: I've read that Anakin joined Palpatine because he felt remorse over the death of Windu and that he would have been expelled from the Jedi order for sure. Couldn't he have just lied and said that it was Palpatine that killed him and that he played no part in it?
Chosen answer: No, because it's wrong. Anakin joined Palpatine not out of remorse or fear of being expelled from the Jedi Order, but because he thinks that, with the Sith Lord's help, he can save Padme from dying. If he turns Palpatine in, he believes that she'll die and that's not an option for him.
Question: Why did the Tusken Raiders kidnap and torture Shmi Skywalker?
Chosen answer: They hate the moisture farmers, who they regard as having encroached on their territory. They kidnapped Shmi and tortured her to gather information for a future big raid on the local moisture farms.
Question: When Spock throws Kirk off the ship, Spock intends to immediately return to Earth, something that we've seen to take about five minutes, and he would certainly want to get there as soon as possible. But Kirk is able to crash land, wander the ice planet, get saved by Old Spock, learn his entire back story, travel to the outpost, meet Scotty, and get beamed back - and the ship is still in warp. Why weren't they already back to Earth?
Answer: Because, as they clearly state, they're NOT heading back to Earth. That's what Kirk wanted to do, but Spock decided to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet instead - their disagreement is what gets Kirk thrown off the ship in the first place. We don't know how far away the fleet is, so it's not unreasonable that the Enterprise could still be in warp at that point.
Question: How did Robbie survive?
Answer: Robbie said that he only wanted to watch it happen, and not interact. He most likely ran off somehow and hid from the aliens before you saw the burning Humvee indicating the death of the military squadrons flying/driving in.
Chosen answer: Dumb luck? A soldier chased him off from the fighting? Who knows?
Robbie's survival is a movie all on its own.
Question: How come Boston was relatively intact with no signs of destruction?
Chosen answer: The Martians hadn't gotten that far yet.
Question: Why does the technology in the original trilogy not look as good or as advanced as the technology of the prequel trilogy?
Chosen answer: The real reason is that our technology has advanced in the thirty years since the original movies were made, so better effects were possible. The "in-movie" reason is that he rebels are operating illegally, and therefore their equipment is all jury-rigged and pieced together from stolen or broken scrap, not manufactured like the devices featured in the prequels.
Question: What makes Taylor think they're on a planet in the constellation of Orion some 320 light years from Earth? How did he come to this conclusion?
Chosen answer: Because that's where the ship was originally headed. Some sort of malfunction made it turn around and return to Earth.
Question: What caused the original nuclear devastation depicted in the movie?
Answer: I think that this is meant to be a mystery. Taylor/Charlton Heston, an astronaut, leaves a world set somewhat in the future after 1968 (when the movie was made) but still recognisable to cinema-goers at the time, to travel through a "time vortex" to arrive in a world in a distant future, which has changed beyond recognition. Taylor meets the orangutan Zaius/Maurice Evans, and Zaius hints that he has some idea of what had happened, but Zaius' knowledge is either limited, or else Zaius is not going to tell Taylor (or his fellow apes) the full story. At the end of the movie Taylor discovers that, at some point between his leaving his own time and arriving in the "Planet Of The Apes", the world had been devastated by a nuclear war, but I think that the exact time, causes of, and course of this nuclear war are deliberately left as a mystery. Sometimes I think a bit of unresolved mystery actually improves a story, and I think this is the case here.
Chosen answer: World War III.
Question: After the B-2 bomber launches the nuclear missile towards the city destroyer, the B-2 is shown to be retreating, yet the nuclear missile is in fact travelling even faster than the B-2. My question is, was the B-2 destroyed when the nuclear missile struck the ship? Did it get out of there in time?
Chosen answer: Cruise missiles fired from a B-2 have a 100 mile range, so it would have escaped.
Question: How did the Psychlos originally find Earth?
Question: Is Jonnie correct in his assumption that there are other Psychlo colonies out there?
Chosen answer: Between the book and the hideous box office take, no he is not correct. In the book, Psychlo got turned into a sun and all the other colonies tried to teleport their ore shipments home and were wiped out by the resulting explosion.
Answer: If there were other colonies out there, they wouldn't love as much as their home planet just like earth. Besides even if there was, they've been mostly defenseless without their fleet on the homeworld and will already be on the verge of extinction.
Question: How could one nuclear weapon destroy the Psychlos' home planet?
Chosen answer: It's actually very similar to what scientists of the time thought would happen on Earth if a nuclear bomb was ever detonated. They were convinced that the entire atmosphere, being made up of several combustible gasses, would erupt in flames killing everyone on the planet. On Psychlos, their atmosphere reacted with the radiation released by the bomb. It's the reason the Psychlos could not enter the irradiated areas of Earth where the last groups of free humans lived: their breathing apparatuses would explode.
Question: It's been shown in the film the the aliens are technologically more advanced than us. Then, how come, with all their technology, they were unable to defend themselves from something as simple as a computer virus?
Answer: Remember that the aliens had to interface with our satellite computer code first...David simply "reverse engineered" the code to create the virus. When it was uploaded, they didn't have enough time to combat it.
Answer: It was also a bit of a tribute to "War of the Worlds", in which the alien invaders with much more advanced technology ultimately succumbed to ordinary terrestrial pathogens in the original novel by H. G. Wells as well as its many screen adaptations.
Chosen answer: Its supposed to be an exercise in demonstrating how the aliens underestimated their opponent, but in reality it's merely a convenient plot device.
Answer: I was wondering the same thing. Since the Harvesters had our satellites meant they could eavesdrop on every single conversation. David and other people in the facility probably put up a firewall on the computers and cameras, so that the aliens couldn't see or hear what they were planning on doing.
Answer: Maybe there were no viruses in the planet where these aliens came from so they didn't have any countermeasures against them.
Answer: They could defend against it, hence why they bring the nuke. The virus drops the shields, and the nuke destroys The Mother Ship. David even says that the shields will be down for a few minutes.
Utopia (1) - S3-E11
Question: The Doctor says that if a Time Lord were to absorb the energies of the time vortex they would become a vengeful god. Why exactly would they become vengeful?
Chosen answer: Given that their entire race was wiped out by the Daleks in the Time War and the Daleks are still around, I'd say that a Time Lord would have something to be vengeful for. That much power would go to anyone's head.
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Chosen answer: Its left deliberately ambiguous for the viewer to make up their own mind about what's real and what's fake.
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