Question: Why did Arthur tell Aurora that Jim woke her up even though he promised to keep it a secret?
Answer: Because the ship had been malfunctioning due to collision with the asteroid it had effected Arthur as he is part of the vessel. This shows something is wrong with the ship as previously indicated, Arthur's sudden change of behaviour being integral to what is going on.
Question: Why announce to the passengers you're passing a star for viewing when everyone is supposed to be asleep? Can't imagine you would waste time programming that?
Answer: The computer detects there are people awake so it gives this kind of information. It's not clever enough to understand that's not supposed to be the case, but since pods shouldn't malfunction they never put that kind of programming into the computer.
Question: How would they have gained access to the command ring from the main ship? The main ship arms are spinning anti clockwise and the command ring is spinning clockwise, so they're out of sync. The command ring also appears to be spinning faster.
Answer: With difficulty is the answer! Question is why are command ring and engine room spinning in different directions, to make this an issue?
Answer: To spin the ship on its axis, you have to spin it against something. You can use side rockets to push it against the thrust of the rockets, or you could push it against a core rotating in the opposite direction. The conservation of momentum, with the right balance of mass between the inner core and the outer spirals, will make the two parts rotate one against the other, without carrying fuel for the rockets.
Question: If he can't afford more than crappy coffee and oatmeal, then how does he afford all the alcohol and fancy restaurants he goes to?
Answer: I think the breakfast is free, however the lower class doesn't get a fancy meal for free but a more basic type. The restaurants and bar on the other hand cost money.
Answer: Perhaps customers at the bar and restaurant are allowed to run a tab that doesn't have to be settled until they are leaving the Starship Avalon and about to go to Homestead II. (This could be risky given the different resources of the passengers.) Or maybe the bar and restaurant are included in the fee for some passengers and staff would typically be at the door to allow admission to these passengers; Jim - awake and roaming - may be assumed to be eligible to use the bar/restaurant when, under normal circumstances, he would not be permitted to enter.
Answer: I wondered about this, too. His lower-class passage limits his breakfast choice. However, it seems that any passenger should be able to upgrade their individual meals at anytime and order what they want, as he does in the multiple on-board restaurants. It may be that breakfast, for whatever reason, is exempt from that option.
Yeah but they simply push a button for the breakfast and actually order food from the restaurants. You might think he would just go ahead and go to one of the restaurants to get his breakfast, but maybe they aren't open yet at that time. The ship seems to be more of a cross between a luxurious cruise and boot-camp. The breakfast is perhaps standard ship protocol.
I agree the paid for bar and restaurant don't probably open until 'Evening time' on the ship (You don't want your workers getting drunk all day, Jim is work group). The ship has a day and night clock system as heard by the announcer. I suppose Jim could change his wake up and sleep time to get a decent breakfast in the Chinese, but then his dinner would be basic and he wouldn't be able to have a drink before bed. What would you choose? Basic breakfast, good evening meal with drinks or good breakfast, basic evening meal and no drinks.
Question: Wouldn't Aurora and Jim eat up all the food before the spaceship got to its destination? It's 2 people and 90 years, that's a lot of food and liquids.
Answer: The ship is equipped to feed five thousand people for three months. That's 450,000 days' worth of food, which would last 2 people over 600 years. So they have plenty but even if you consider the idea that they lost a lot of food because the ship malfunctioned it's quite possible more food is stored than originally needed, they grow their own food or have found others ways to synthesize food with the future technology they have available.
Question: Laurence Fishburne is obviously a person who would be familiar with the workings of the entire spacecraft. Wouldn't he have known that the Autodoc had the capability of putting a person back into hibernation? Why wouldn't he have informed Aurora of this after being told that she was purposely awakened?
Answer: I suspect he was too busy with fixing the ship and his own health.
He's a technician, not a medical person, and likely had no idea if the autodoc could safely keep someone in suspended animation for long periods. It is also possible he may not have known it even had this particular function.
You can't call a service rep if equipment on a spacecraft, billions of miles from Earth, has a problem. An onboard technician would have to be highly trained on every system on the ship. He wouldn't necessarily have medical training, but would have to have been trained on all the systems on something as important as the Autodoc. It was the only one on board.
Question: At the beginning it's seen that the autopilot knew about the whole "meteor field" in front of Avalon, as the rocks are visible on the projection of the ship right before the autopilot converts energy to main shield. It even "saw" the big meteor that hit Avalon. So why didn't the autopilot fly around and then return to the original heading? (00:02:27 - 00:03:00)
Answer: The ship was designed to fly through meteor fields and had protective energy shields to repel them (shown at the beginning of the movie). Meteor fields are large and flying around them would add decades (if not centuries) to the journey. As Jim Preston noted, one meteor somehow broke through the shield and damaged the ship.
Answer: The ship was traveling far too fast surely to change course in time, at half the speed of light.
Question: The ship is moving 50% of the speed of light, and Jim gets ejected. How did Jim have time to throw the door to change his trajectory? How did that throw outpace 50% of the speed of light?
Question: How did Aurora drown, then magically 'undrown' while being submerged?
Answer: The shock of the gravity returning and crashing her back down into the pool probably woke her up before she was unconscious too long.
Yes, and it should be noted that drowning is a lengthy process. Much longer than it's shown in movies. After a person falls unconscious, it still usually takes a good five minutes at least for the brain to go into failure and for death by drowning to occur. It's safe to conclude Aurora wasn't without air for long enough for the brain to go into death.
Question: Would it be possible for Jim and Aurora to make it to Homestead II if one after another took for example five years of hibernation again and again? If the auto doc would allow such thing. One of them would always become older, then they would change and so on. If I imagine this right, after four periods, that would all take five years, they would became "only" ten years older.
Answer: Jim almost went insane after only one year alone aboard the ship, at the beginning of the film. Asking Jim and Aurora to each take turns spending 5 years alone (REPEATEDLY, for the remaining 90 years) would be a psychological hell that they might not survive.
Chosen answer: Assuming this is something they would want to do, there's no way of knowing if it was medically possible. Continually putting someone into extended hibernation, waking them, then repeating the process may be more than the human body could physically withstand. The autodoc was not designed for long-term hibernation, only short-term for medical purposes. Also, the ship still had 90 years to go before reaching Homestead II, so they would have aged more than ten years.
Answer: A third person could have been woken up, and if they alternate; two people could stay out of stasis at a time in order to ensure all three have a chance to make it to the colony (each would age 60 years... so they would be old!). The issue with using the pod to suspend someone is that the pod can't be used to medically treat anyone (I would assume).
Question: Did Jim ever get an answer from homestead support?
Answer: No, at least not during the movie's run-time. Homestead stated that it would take fifty-five years for a response to reach Jim. If a return message ever was received, it was never mentioned in Aurora's epilogue. Most likely, both Jim and Aurora would be dead by the time it ever reached the ship.
Question: Why does Jim's ID bracelet open the first door of the bridge? (00:09:00 - 00:11:00)
Question: At the beginning of the movie, was Jim purposely woken up to fix the Avalon's damage or was it because his pod malfunctioned?
Answer: He wasn't woken up deliberately because he didn't have a crew wrist pass to give access to all areas, which you'd need to fix the ship.
Answer: Jim, who was a passenger and not a crew member, was not intentionally awakened to repair the damage to the Avalon. It was a malfunction, but because Jim happened to possess useful mechanical engineering skills (he "fixes" things), the ship's damaged computer system may have detected this information from his passenger profile and then mistakenly routed a signal to his pod, opening it.
Gus examined Jim's pod, and determined it had a malfunctioned clock circuit. The computer didn't wake him intentionally in any way.
Answer: Being that Arthur is an android, he takes everything that is said literally and without analyzing it. Once Jim and Aurora began their romantic relationship, Aurora casually mentioned to Arthur that she and Jim have "no secrets" from one another, which Jim, without realizing the context or the consequences, confirmed. Arthur then interpreted it to mean that Aurora knew Jim had intentionally awakened her from the sleeping pod.
raywest ★