Question: Maybe I missed something, but how was Esther able to fool everyone practically all her life and hide the fact that she's a 33-year old sociopath? When Kate finally learns the truth by getting the phone call, they show a photo of the "real" Esther, so at least those records of her exist somewhere. How could the boarding school not have known her true identity?
Answer: High quality makeup was an important part of her disguise as the alternative ending make apparent. Her fake freckles were the master's touch.
Question: I still don't understand why Leonard switches clothes with Jimmy and steals his car after he kills him. "I'd rather be mistaken for a dead guy than a killer." That makes absolutely no sense. Driving around in Jimmy's car and wearing his suit would make him the prime suspect in the investigation. He was much safer when he was just an anonymous guy driving around in a pickup truck.
Answer: It is never explicitly given. The most Leonard says on the subject is: "I'd rather be mistaken for a dead guy than a killer." Speculations include (you can make up your own motives as well) : (1) The clothes and car are so much nicer than his. If you are willing to kill someone: stealing is not really a "crime." Why not take the nicer objects? (2) It could be part of his "routine": Kill a man, take his clothes and car. The clothes he had on and the truck may be from the man he killed a year ago. (3) It could be that he wants to make the killer of his wife suffer even more, and takes his clothes as a way of humiliating him. Leonard takes the man's life-his clothes and car, which are wrapped up in his identity-just as the man took his. This idea seems to work with a theme in Memento about "Identity" (especially mistaken identity). Natalie thinks Leonard is Jimmy, then thinks he is Teddy, then learns he is Leonard. Teddy is "mistaken" for the second killer, Jimmy is "mistaken" for the 2nd killer. Sammy's story as a part of Leonard's story, etc. (4) It could "simply" be explained as a "plot device": Leonard has to do it, otherwise he won't find the note in "his pocket" and meet Natalie. (5) Leonard doesn't want to admit he's a murderer. He's lying to himself. If he's the victim, then he cannot be the murderer. (6) Leonard takes Jimmy's clothing as part of his routine of killing J.G.'s he becomes another person, he's the victim not the killer, thus "I'd rather be mistaken for a dead guy than a killer." and that's why he also takes his car, so he has to, once again, find his wife's killer and kill him.
Question: What motivated Bob Taylor (an earlier abductee of the same perpetrators) to implicate himself in the current abductions by stealing the girls' clothing items and taking them to his home?
Question: Who is Luke talking about when he covers up his hand and says that he has a promise to keep to an old friend? Who is the old friend?
Answer: Yoda. When he was departing for Cloud City to save his friends in the previous film, he promised Yoda that he would return to Dagobah to complete his training.
OK. But I thought he was talking about the holeish thing in his hand since he covered it up when he said it. I must have misunderstood it.
The hole in Luke's robotic hand reminds him that he got that robotic hand in the first place because he lost his duel with Darth Vader at Cloud City - a confrontation Yoda warned him he was not ready for.
Question: Billy admits that he shot his wife and daughters to save them from a more horrible death at the hands of the vampires. Grieving, he says, "I tried to shoot myself, too, but the fucking gun jammed." But Billy is a deputy sheriff, and any competent law officer can resolve a jammed gun in a matter of seconds. Did Billy actually chicken-out of killing himself after murdering his family?
Answer: Perhaps Billy was not a competent law officer. Or maybe you were right he chickened out. Billy could have killed himself in other ways. Other ways more quiet than gunshot.
Exactly. How could he go on living after killing his whole family? A minor problem such as a gun jam shouldn't have prevented him from committing suicide. In fact, he couldn't become a law enforcement officer without demonstrating a proficiency with firearms, including the ability to field-service his weapon quickly in an emergency. The simple procedure for fixing a jammed firearm is at the top of the list of required skills.
Are we ignoring that he was obviously extremely distraught at this time? My take on this has always been that he pulled the trigger, the gun jammed, and he just gave up on everything. He literally didn't care enough about anything at that point to even bother taking his own life anymore. Let the vampires take him; or not. His family is gone, by his hand no less, nothing at all matters anymore. I didn't see it as an inability to clear the jam, I saw it as a psychological breakdown that resulted in complete and total apathy. The jam was nothing more than the straw that broke the camel's back.
If he gave up on everything, why did he covertly signal Eben with a flashlight? If Billy had truly given up, why not just walk out into the street and be slaughtered by the vampires, rather than continuing to hide?
Question: In the last part of the movie, how are they supposed to drive the snow vehicles? There is a scene before where they cut the wires of all the vehicles to disable them for the quarantine. Am I missing something?
Chosen answer: By disabling the snow vehicles, they are making sure that the creature can't use them to escape from the quarantine zone. Since the creature can assimilate anybody, it would probably know how to use one.
Question: I was wondering, and I've seen the movie, do Rob and Beth live? And will there be a number 2?
Answer: Whilst they have made a second film, 10 Cloverfield Lane, it does not have much, if anything at all, to do with the first film. So we aren't told what happened to Rob and Beth.
Answer: We will not know unless they make a sequel. Right now they are still deciding if they want to make a sequel or not.
Question: Why didn't the lady who was originally with Mid-Size Sedan decay quicker, and we were able to see her body intact when she hit young Trent in the water?
Answer: Because she was 'freshly' dead when she hit Trent.
Question: How could WOPR not know the difference between a game and real life?
Answer: While merely speculation, the WOPR is not alive and knows only what it's been programmed to do. It would have no concept of life or death, and as such would see no difference between the simulation and the real thing. That being said, an easy way to make it see the difference would be to program it to not waste physical resources. It would then see the use of all its actual warheads as less desirable.
Question: Maybe I missed a major plot point, but why exactly does Tom kill his lover at the very end?
Chosen answer: Tom & his lover are travelling on a boat. The rich girl, who knows Tom as Dickie is also on the boat. If they were to meet, Tom's false identity would have been revealed, and the lover would have been able to figure out that Tom actually murdered Dickie.
Answer: He had to kill him. Tom couldn't kill Meredith because she wasn't alone and Peter was.
Question: I found it odd that Slim's real name is never revealed. Why does she have this nickname, with no explanation as to why she never tells anyone her real name? Was there a deleted scene?
Answer: I wonder if the nickname is related to the difficult times in her life. Her father was not around. She and her mother did not have much money. Maybe she felt that she had a "slim chance" of life getting easier.
Answer: From memory her daughter says "I don't even think you're that slim" making a dig she's not that skinny, maybe it's due to her being thin?
Question: At the end of the movie we find out that it was really soy sauce that was injected into Nick's arm. Wouldn't injecting soy sauce directly into your blood stream still kill you, or at least have some sort of ill side effects?
Answer: Soy sauce is mostly soy protein and salt in water- it might raise your blood pressure for a while, but assuming you're in reasonably good health, and presuming it wasn't a ridiculously large amount, your liver will filter it out after a short while.
This is incorrect, there are several variables in this but given the syringe size I'm guessing that he injected approx 50ml. Now 50ml injected intravenously would almost certainly cause sepsis and he would die from septic shock within a day or so. The reason for this is that soy sauce is a fermented product full of several different types of bacteria in large quantities which would be quite friendly in the gut but disastrous in the blood stream. Also the sodium and yeasts and funghi in the sauce would not be good either. If however the injection was subcutaneous but not intravenous then it may not be fatal but it would certainly give him a very nasty infected cyst that would have the potential to be fatal if not treated correctly.
Question: When does Rachel realise if she shows the film to someone else she won't die? And if she knew, is that why she showed it to Noah, to kill him on purpose?
Answer: At the end of the movie, she is crying about why she wasn't killed and Noah was. She vocalizes "What did I do, that he didn't?" That's when she sees the copy she made. It wasn't that she just showed it to someone else. She made a copy and Aiden watched that copy. Aiden is why it skipped her.
Almost right. It's just the copy. Copying the video makes it skip you. That's why she has Aiden make a copy as well.
You have to show the copy to someone else as well. That's why Aiden asks Rachel at the very end "What about the person we show it to? What happens to them?"
But doesn't he have less than a day left by then? Hardly a time to relax, they need to make a terrible decision, quickly. I always had the idea making a copy was enough because of that.
He watched the tape the morning of either Rachel's 4th or 5th day, so he should have at least 3 days left by this point. Though it appears the film was being inconsistent with the markings that Samara leaves on the tape's viewers, since Rachel noticed Samara's hand print on Aiden's arm and then his nose started bleeding. For Rachel, she got her nosebleed before receiving the mark on her arm.
Actually, you need to do both: make a copy and show it to someone else. This is further explained in The Ring 2. At the beginning, the guy had made a copy but since the girl covered her eyes and didn't watch the whole thing, he was still killed by Samara. So making a copy is not enough in itself to be spared if no-one else watches it. The same goes for Rachel. She made a copy on the 2nd day, but Becca tells her she only has 4 days left when she visits the psych ward indicating she hadn't been spared yet. It's only after Aidan watches the copy she made that death skips her for good.
Answer: No, it's wrong. Just making a copy won't save you; you need to show it to someone else, and then this someone else is cursed instead of you. The Japanese movie explains it well. Plus, in the official second movie, a man dies from Samara after making the copy because nobody watched it. Also, at the end of the 1st movie, Aiden asks from the copy, "What will happen to the one who will watch it?"
Question: Who's idea was it, or the reason, Kubrick decided to kill off Gunnery Sergeant Hartman? Was it to merely show the casualty of war?
Answer: It was Gustav Hasford's idea. It happened in the original book that the story is based on, "The Short Timers."
Question: Why, near the end of the film, does Caleb start writing numbers which are supposed to be predictions of future events, when the world is going to end?
Answer: Great question. Probably writing predictions for the "new" world.
So did someone decode the list? Just for s* and giggles :).
Answer: I think Caleb started writing the numbers so he could tell his father the coordinates of the location he needed to take the children in a last ditch effort, since the girl whom originally wrote the numbers didn't complete them. He un-"knowing"-ly made the same mistake and interrupted him again.
Question: I always wondered about this. As a cop, McClane knew about weapons. While handing over the machine gun to Zeus, he explained how it worked. But he did not tell Zeus to switch the safety catch off. How on earth could McClane forget to tell something crucial like that? Zeus isn't even pissed about it later on, while it could have cost him his life.
Answer: And Zeus mentions about brothers knowing how to shoot guns.
He said it was racist to assume that brothers know how to shoot guns. He admitted he didn't know how to use that model.
Chosen answer: A simple omission, in the heat of the moment he forgot to mention it. He may have thought, since he just took the gun off an enemy, that the safety was already off.
McClane probably did that intentionally as Zeus didn't know much about guns. In fact, you hear McClane say "Don't be a hero, you find him, you come get me."
Of all the possible answers, this is definitely not the one. There's no way he handed him the gun and then purposely did not tell him that the safety was engaged. There would be no point in that.
Question: How exactly do both the Terminator and Kyle find addresses? We are led to believe that is the reason for the phone books, but none of the addresses in the phone books match up to the addresses where either the first Sarah is killed, nor the apartment of our Sarah.
Answer: My two cents: The T-800 Terminator does indeed, rip out the page of a phonebook for the address, but remember, he was looking for any and all Sarah Connors, not a specific address. He did not know which Sarah would give birth to John Connor, so by process of elimination he began terminating any woman with the name Sarah Connor. He did plug the first Sarah Connor (a housewife), then went to kill the other Sarah Connors in the phone book.
I already gave that answer, but apparently that's not what the question is asking.
Answer: Gonna be totally honest... that might just be nothing more than a simple continuity error. They accidentally made a phonebook prop that didn't match up with the locations where they shot, and assumed most people wouldn't notice or care. (And to be even more honest, I never noticed it until I saw this question today.)
Answer: Both the T-800 and Kyle look up Sarah's address in the phonebook and it's Kyle who rips out a page. Neither uses a police computer; that's the T-1000 in Terminator 2.
But that doesn't answer the question (and it's already been mentioned) since the information in the phonebook appears wrong.
Answer: Kyle, as we are shown, uses a police computer to find the addresses. The T800 just uses the phonebook as you mentioned. He rips the page out and takes it with him.
Except 2 of the addresses in the phone book don't match. So how does the Terminator find them using the phonebook?
The Terminator is just blindly killing everyone in the phone book whose name is Sarah Connor (apparently a common name). Process of elimination. So, the day he arrives, unrelated women named Sarah Connor start dropping like flies, and the police believe it's the work of a serial killer. Our heroine Sarah Connor barely escapes this sweeping extermination by sheer luck and Kyle's intervention.
You just described the plot. Were you trying to answer the question? Because the question still stands. (As it is, it's either a mistake or plot hole in the film).
Perhaps I'm not getting the question. What is meant by "none of the addresses in the phone books match up"? Match up to what, the murder scene addresses? I wasn't aware that the murder scene addresses were prominently displayed.
Exactly. The addresses seen don't match. Specifically the first Sarah Connor's house number is "14239", but in the phonebook it is listed as "1823." And the real Sarah Connor lives in an apartment but the phonebook doesn't list an apartment number.
Perhaps though this all doesn't matter because phone books can quickly become outdated, the phone book he found could be over a year old. Someone moves but can still be listed in the phone book with their old address. He could have gone to the addresses but found someone else living there and then asked where the previous owner might be, and he was told (or he forced them). This might be how he found all the Sarah Connors.
Are any of the Sarah's listed as living at 1823? I've not got access to the film right now to check.
The first is listed as "1823." The second is "2816." The 3rd is "309." Although after reviewing the scene and thinking about it, for "309" (which is supposedly our Sarah J Connor), the full address isn't actually seen and the apartment number could have been listed.
Reese never uses a police computer; that's the T-1000 in Terminator 2. He rips out the page from the phonebook. The T800 also uses the phonebook but is never shown ripping out a page.
Question: At the beginning when Sam is having his premonition and he saves Molly, why does she die in the plane crash at the end? And why did Sam die similar to the guy in the first "Final destination" movie? It couldn't have been him cause Sam and Molly witness him being removed from the plane before they took off.
Answer: To answer your second question, Sam's death is not like any other death's from the first final destination movie. If you are talking about Alex, he was hit by a falling brick off-screen. To answer your first question, near the end, Peter though that Candice had deserved to live more then Molly, and attempts to kill her. Sam kills Peter before he has a chance to stab molly. The gun dropped by peter lands on the stove, and shoots off in the air. This is a sign that Sam saved Molly from dying, thus, putting her on Death's list, and making it all right to kill her on Flight 180.
This is in response to the answer. Your answer is dismissive to the nuance of premonition as depicted by the movie. This is extremely crucial: Premonition, as visioned by every protagonist, is the event that would have happened if the protagonist didn't intervene. Every events in premonition is supposed to be absolutely true. As such, in the premonition, Sam saves Molly. This means if the events weren't intervened by Sam, he would still have saved Molly, while the rest (Sam, Candice, Peter) would have died anyway. So Molly should be safe all along. It wouldn't even be wrong to say that 'death' hadn't even planned to kill Molly at the bridge. So your point about Molly being next in the list because Sam killed peter and death skipping Sam now to go on Molly isn't even valid. So if Molly was clean in death's perspectives all along, why did she die at the end? (because she didn't cheat the design, she wasn't even supposed to be in the list of death's order; as I mentioned earlier, it was never the intention of death to kill Molly as evidenced by the saving of Molly in Sam's premonition).
But Molly didn't die in his vision so she wasn't on the list to begin with so how can he skip someone's death that's not on the list and he kill his friend so why did he still die on the plane with Molly?.
Answer: Molly was never meant to die on the bridge because her and Sam were meant to die on Flight 180, just like how Nick, Lori and Janet were meant to die at the Cafe at the end of The Final Destination. It was basically just a cruel twist of fate that they would be on the exact same plane from the original movie. And Sam dying similarly to Alex doesn't really seem to have much of a purpose, unless maybe as a little throwback to how Alex died in his premonition, or is just a coincidence.
Answer: Molly was never on death's list. Peter killing the detective he then got his remaining years, then Sam killing Peter transferred those years to Sam, so when Sam and Molly were on the plane when the plane explodes that was the time for them to die, I'm not saying they were meant to die on that plane, they were just meant to die at that time. Just like when Nathan accidentally killed Roy who had signs of a brain aneurysm, so Roy would have dropped dead any day, hence when Nathan got Roy's life he died at the memorial, though in a more shocking way.
Answer: The boarding school was going by the falsified records that Esther had with her. They did not suspect anything, so they had no reason to dig any further at the time.
wizard_of_gore ★