Decided to make a non-spoiler (except where I might exceptionally decide to put them in) summary of various intermediate messages, rather than go all necrotic over old posts. (Already seen a response re: Drake Equation which said much the same as some of my points.)
Re: Dark Knight "phone-tower mobile internet connection" thing - the device looked very much like a 'mere' Wireless LAN device that I often use. Which means either that it wouldn't actually have the same range,
or with a suitably precompiled list of preferred wireless gateways (and their assorted passwords, which I wouldn't put it past the villains of the moment to have) and a sympathetic OS/client program (which is, after all, just making a large series of individually
small on-line interactions), it could actually use the wireless access points 'leaking' from the various businesses and public/semi-public access points all across the city.
Another Re: Dark Knight, Bane is different in the movie to the various representations I've seen from other media. But then so is so-and-so's father (seems pretty normal and not impossibly preserved for his age). I'd treat all that as a reinterpretation of characters. The same names, largely the same
type of person, but ultimately not as "supernatural" or "superscienced" and more real-life (as a contrast to some of the stuff with the bomb... and there's no real explanation as to how a certain person ever got to go to a certain café, by the end.
The Wing had lost its half-decent autopilot (removed to allow creation of the bomb-jammer), but in the epilogue it's shown that Bruce had fixed the autopilot of the original problems... I'd have to see the film again, to be sure, but could he have actually fixed a copy (or made a new copy) of the autopilot and had time to put that back in The Bat in-between jammer creation and the 'final flight'? Obviously it wasn't shown on-screen, but then that would have been a [spoiler]!
Ah, actually, someone else mentions this, a few posts further on from the point that inspired me to write this section...
And the core-thing exploding: However difficult it would be to get it to do so, or strange that it would be possible, remember that
in-universe there was just
one person capable of setting it up to do so (and of defusing it). Basically a physics-trained 'hacker' who had found some new trick (of an unexplained type), probably as a hypothetical "what if" that he didn't realise would excite the bad guys (and dismay the good guys) as much as it did. Whatever, it was a trick unanticipated, until that point, by Bruce and his tech team. He'd been sure it had been a safe thing to make that could never be weaponised, and pulled the plug once he realised it could be. Still a bit of a jump, but given the handwavium already employed in getting Waynetech stuff to work, a little finger-wiggling to subvert it to another end isn't too much of an ask.
Blake and the bus: Shows how he's going to Try To Do The Right Thing, even against all the people who Don't Want To Let Him.
Bane's voice: Yes, a common complaint, I hear. Behind the distortion was some quite clever characterisation and intermix of accents, apparently, but it got lost quite a bit.
Shawshank Redemption question: Blu-tac?
Back to Avatar, and the "things going at 0.7c", c.f.
relativistic baseballs. (Faster, but for smaller mass.)
On to the Matrix Trilogy, and my basic complaint about them. It alll ends wrong. "It's Matrixes [/Matrices] all the way out" would be a good summary of what I think should have been the revelation. L1: green-code Matrix, L2: firey Matrix; L3+:
But as the Trilogy doesn't go in that direction (despite heavy hints that it might), I'm not spoiling anything by putting this in plain text... However, it would explain (or by-pass) some other people's niggles about Matrix logic.
Similarly with the Terminator set: It's arguable that there's consistent time-loops exhibited in the movies (but the information transported is not always reliable/factual). A lot could have been done with that premise, but they go the cheap way round of "changing the future via the past". Done too much.
Here's a new niggle (for a film I've not yet seen mentioned): Can someone tell me how some of the guests for the ceremony at the end of Snowhaite And The Huntsman got there? At least two should not have been so ambulatory.
And here's one actual message to quote, without caring how in or out of context I'm taking it:
I think you might be thinking a little too hard about this.
And?
(Oh, and here's a second quote...
So has anyone else watched the 'This is How X Should of Ended' cartoons?
...I doubt it. "Should of" makes no sense. Please, it's "Should have", or "Should've" if you're contracting it. But that's non-movie nitpickery.)