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[Starver]

Don't worry, I've both read Homestuck and watched Dr. Who. I can do a stable time loop pretty easily.
What I'm annoyed about isn't the time loop, it is the fact that Peters motivation for wanting to destroy the human race was never explained. In fact they didn't even explain how Railly recognized Peters, as she spots him before Cole. Cole might have a chance of knowing him from seeing the same events in his childhood, but Railly wouldn't.

The time stuff is fine, I get that easily. But the end is actually full of plot holes.

I'm just saying (at length) that I don't think Peters' motivation is the point.  It happened.

I considered mentioning something like that episode of Bablyon 5 (one of the few without time-travel in it... ) called "A View From The Gallery".  A 'breakout story', of sorts, the plot follows the station mechanics/maintenance men (Mac and... Bo/Beau?) around B5 during a crisis.  The crisis is happening, and M&B are involved (definitely helping the efforts, on at least a couple of occasions) and interact with what is happening, and make comments intended to interact with the fourth wall.  But the battle is a background.  The cause behind the Hostiles' actions is incidental, although is given a reasonable justification through some secondary (but, outside this episode, normally primary) characters' overheard/witnessed dialogue.

To that end, I feel free to give Peters (again, if he's the 'incidental antagonist', as I'm assuming) a reasonable justification of him just being crazy enough...  And has the means.  (If he had had a different means he would have done that, instead.  If he lacked any sufficiently/potentially civilisation-ending means he could have gone all Boston on a more limited target.  Or stewed in a fugue of his own making until dying, unhappy and friendless.)  The result is not so vague. It happened, caused chaos, loss of reliable records from which the surviving/recovering future civilisation drew in order to (mis-)target their mission.  Not an intentional effect...  And the cause, or the motivation to the cause, is... Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Film.

This isn't a plot hole.  It's a "do we need to explain everything?" fact that 'is'.  How did the younger version of Peters get to school?  Did he walk, or take the schoolbus?  Was he home-schooled?  The answer might explain something (various different susceptibilities to various possible bullies, or chance to be a bully himself...  and/or perhaps he had time to think... muse... stew, even... while on his own), but need not be included if (in some people's opinions, at least) the character's intentions can be painted by their on-screen actions...

(Maybe there's a film or series of films out there (conceptually!) that covers how things got into that state, and how it progressed...  Leaving 12M, retrospectively, as a  'breakout' film, just like M&B had their moment in the spotlight, against the background of B5...  I see that as potential in the superset of all possible films, not as a hole in the subset of this one film's plot.)


The Railly spotting bit?  No, can't remember enough fine detail within the movie to comment.  You can have that point, in lieu of me having any immediate idea about it.  Could have arisen due to a capricious cutting-room-floor incident.

fakeedit @Tiruin: Wasn't when you posted...  But I think I've said all I really can say about 12M.  Very little of which needed to be said anyway, methinks...  There'll be something new coming up in a while, though, I'm sure, whether I'm involved or not!!!

[scriver]

Yeah, I can't say the non-characterization of Peters is in any way to the detriment of the movie, given that it would be fairly irrelevant to the point of the movie.

[Max White]

Eh, maybe I have just been spoilt then. I've seen a ton of things with self for filling time loops with twit endings that made you think 'Holy shit! That makes so much sense and I never even saw it coming! How the fuck did they pull the wool over my eyes so well?!?!?', for example Tsubasa Chronicles. This is just sort of 'Oh, by the way, deus ex machina bitches!!!! Everything we have been feeding you hasn't just been misleading, it was been bullshit!'

I mean fuck they had time travel to work with, it would have been easy to send Cole back to one point and have him cause something to happen to Peters to explain his actions, and would have fit in with the theme of the film. They even made an effort to show how unreliable time travel is! But instead we get plot dickery.

Or you know, even better, they showed at the start that prisoners were being forced to go on very dangerous surface runs. What if Peters was actually from the future, sent back for the same reason as Cole, but decided to fuck humanity as revenge for his crappy living conditions? Now that would have been satisfying.

[Neonivek]

Ok here is a general Nitpick

The "True Self Lesson" Beauty pageant ending.

What sort of made me really understand how terrible this ending was, was oddly enough a recess episode. Basically the premise to these endings is as such. Character, usually female, enters a contest that has a very strict code of conduct (usually a beauty pageant) that requires makeovers, vocals, and ways of saying things.

They enter it and are winning but when it comes to the ending speech they reveal that... They weren't the sort of person who likes what they do in these pageants and they would rather be doing something else or look different. They of course win on the premise that "The winner of this contest should be someone who just be's herself".

Why do I have a problem with it? Because NONE of the other contestants ever project anything short of 100% honest belief in the contest and its way of life. In Recess Spemony beats the Ashleys with that speech and I just went "Wait a minute? The Ashleys act like that all the time. They were being their selves just fine and didn't join this contest as just a farce."

It kinda donned on me that the real premise of those episodes seems to be less "be yourself" but rather a mean spirited jab at beauty contests. Which I admit I don't like them... but a lot of that hate seems to be directed to the contestants who are portrayed as "fake".

Mind you, Don't think this ending ONLY affects this kind of movie. Sister Act 2 also had that ending where her team won because they were "True to themselves and everyone else was fake". Winning with improv where it was clear that the other teams in fact worked MUCH harder then they did and didn't have huge talent discrepancies (especially the team to beat).

----

Ugh you know what! How about just when a movie ends where it feels like the team who won, won because of superficial reasons.

"Ohh we did a slow song, that means our song was much more meaningful"

Me: "ARE YOU KIDDING!?! that other team blew you out of the water. Sure it was fast and up tempo but their vocals and Choreography were spot on. Heck your dance only made sense from the camera's perspective, from the audience you look stupid!"

DANG it I nitpicked Highschool musical (and a ton of other movies)

[Starver]

I see what you mean, Max (says I, ignoring the fact that I said I wouldn't post again on this controversy), but I would consider your solutions more Deus Ex than how it actually was.  You make it sound like you want it all to be so much an All You Zombies thing...  The be-all and end-all (and start-all).  (Which is not to say I dislike AYZ, which I assume you've already read, or "By His Bootstraps".  Excellent demonstrations of a closed loop (or closed and knotted loops!).)

What we have is a temporal play on top of a standard (if extraordinary, in its own way) world-event.  And I like the fact that the film is about the 'humble' ontological paradox that is a side-show in the grand scheme of things[1], even while the world turns in (apparent) independence.  Albeit going all wobbly with it, but in a consistently Novikovian way.


[1] There's a lot of good fiction out there that (like "A View From The Gallery") focusses on the side-story.  Add in a CTC and I'm laughing!

[10ebbor10]

Stealth

Unmanned AI vehicle gets hit by lightning, and it's neural net goes haywire. Starts downloading the internet and stuff like that.
Commander decides he wants it back in the fight as fast as possible.

Rather than taking the sane option (wipe and reinstall from back up), the plane goes in the air with a corupted AI. Predictable results happen.

Edit: Though it's a fairly good film in that it doesn't portray the AI as stupidly evil for no reason. It just loaded up a hypothetical strike scenario against Russia.

[Lightningfalcon]

Starship Troopers.  Where do I began.  First thoughts upon openining scene-
WHERE THE HELL IS THERE POWER ARMOR!? And why are they grouped so close together?  In the book Rico was afraid that 1 mile apart would risk friendly fire!
Second thought- WHERE ARE THERE AWESOME WEAPONS THAT REQUIRE THEM TO BE A MILE OR MORE APART?
Then came the scene with the Morality instructor, whose name I remember but can't spell.  Ok, at least they include this.  Maybe to movie won't be so bad after all.  Noooooope.  Instead of talking about how they could hole a conference on whether violence solves things with Hitler, Napolean, and others, he says they should hold it with the city fathers of Hiroshima.  to me, this changes it from talking about how violence stops evil to violence shoudl be used to murder civilians.
Then comes the recruiting office.  In the book I felt like it was almost completely empty.  In the movie it is packed with people.  In the book, the recruiting officer told them why they shouldn't join, and was completely missing three limbs.  In the movie he encouraged them, and had two limbs.  Then, later in the book, the main character meets the recruiting officer again, where he has three fully functional prosthetics, saying that he took them off to scare people off from joining. 
Another thing is that not once did I hear talk about WHY you needed to join the federal service to vote and hold power.  In the book it explains that this is so you know what responsibility is.
Then comes training.  The fight scene had a completely different tone to it.  In it, it seemed like the trainers were needlessly cruel, and Zim just wanted to beat up the recruits in a fight.  Then came the talk about how you needed different levels of response to a threat, or rather a lack of that talk.  Zim, instead of explaining why you needed to be able to throw a knife, and later telling him to just aim in the general direction, throws the knife at the recruits hand.  At this point I just stopped watching the movie. 

[Bdthemag]

If you go into Starship Troopers expecting everything to make sense, and for there not to be cheesy stupid things in the plot, then I don't know what you were expecting.

[Xantalos]

If you go into Starship Troopers expecting everything to make sense, and for there not to be cheesy stupid things in the plot, then I don't know what you were expecting.

Honestly.
Picture this as an alternate universe.
Where everyone is stupid.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

... Am I the only person who thinks the new Star Trek sucks on a level not seen?

[Lightningfalcon]

If you go into Starship Troopers expecting everything to make sense, and for there not to be cheesy stupid things in the plot, then I don't know what you were expecting.

They could of easily done cheesy stupid things.  But, at the very, very least, give them power armor.  Or, you know, combined arms tactics.  Like a tank.  Give them a tank.  Then they can use that to run up to the bugs and hit them with their swords, or whatever the mobile infantry tactics are.

If you go into Starship Troopers expecting everything to make sense, and for there not to be cheesy stupid things in the plot, then I don't know what you were expecting.

Honestly.
Picture this as an alternate universe.
Where everyone is stupid.

That's a valid enough point.  This is a universe where people are to stupid to consider having armor that a bug can't easily peel apart. 
Or maybe this is an AU where hollywood is put in charge of stuff.  That I can accept. 

[Delta Foxtrot]

-Starship Troopers Movie-

That's the issue right there, you watched a Paul Verhoeven film and expected it to be not-Paul Verhoeven film. The guy is an anti-fascist Van Horn of Hollywood and it was never even an option that he would make a film with the same look and feel that the book had. Yes it would have made sense for the MI to use all those things you mentioned, and that's precisely why they didn't.

[Sergius]

It's pretty clear to someone that has even cursory familiarity with the book and writer, that the movie itself is nearly a satire of the book. Book is pro-military, sorta, while the movie is making fun of that. It's not even very subtle, with all the ridiculous We Want You ads, and bug anal probing.

In Starship Troopers movie, marines zerg-rush YOU!

EDIT: Just in case, I'm not saying that the movie is a super ethical brilliant parody fun happy comedy time. I think it's a rather crappy movie, and probably would have been better to stick to the original instead. And I'm one of the people that think if the book was serious about only having military people vote, then Heinlein was a shithead (I read somewhere that what he thought in reality was the opposite tho).

[Il Palazzo]

Yeah, don't let yourself be deceived by the title of the movie. ST is closer to Harrison't Bill the Galactic Hero than actual Heinlein's Starship Troopers, on any level but the most superficial one.

[Lightningfalcon]

It's pretty clear to someone that has even cursory familiarity with the book and writer, that the movie itself is nearly a satire of the book. Book is pro-military, sorta, while the movie is making fun of that. It's not even very subtle, with all the ridiculous We Want You ads, and bug anal probing.

In Starship Troopers movie, marines zerg-rush YOU!

EDIT: Just in case, I'm not saying that the movie is a super ethical brilliant parody fun happy comedy time. I think it's a rather crappy movie, and probably would have been better to stick to the original instead. And I'm one of the people that think if the book was serious about only having military people vote, then Heinlein was a shithead (I read somewhere that what he thought in reality was the opposite tho).

I remember seeing somewhere that Heinlein there was some other service that you can serve in, don't remember what it was, but that was how 95% of citizens got their citizenry, and only 5% was in the military.  And in the military, only a very small percentage was actually infantry who did fighting.