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I'm with danton90 here. That conversation seems to be a hint about Peter's background (and why he doesn't look like Steve at all -I thought at first that he was adopted-). If Annie had always known that there was something evil with her mother she wouldn't have had another baby (Charlie) after going through such lengths to "save" (kill) Peter before he was even born.
Nothing to do with mental illness, as confirmed by the director on various media sources. King Paimon is very real.
When Annie found her mother's book "Invocations", King Paimon is depicted riding a camel and carrying three heads with him. Three heads are used in the summoning ritual (Ellen, Charlie and Annie). Also, in the note Annie finds near the beginning of the movie Ellen states that "Our sacrifice will pale next to the rewards", suggesting that in order for the ritual to succeed and offering/sacrifice is required, hence the deaths of the three female members of the family. Let's not forget that "it is documented that King Paimon has become livid and vengeful when offered a female host" which would explain why he would "require" the heads of Ellen (for failing to give him a male human body), Annie (for preventing Ellen to have access to Peter, therefore ending in Charlie's body as a substitute) and Charlie (not sure why, but "livid and vengeful" sounds bad enough to even hate his own female host).
To answer your questions:
a) You should have paid more attention to grandma's funeral (both to the people attending it and the family dialog)
b) No one in the family ever carries a epi pen (see point a). Peter didn't need to be high to drive her to the nearest hospital like a madman. He didn't have an epi pen and the party was in a house in the middle of nowhere, so one can understand why he might have thought that he had a better chance driving to the nearest hospital instead of calling for an ambulance and waiting for it to come to the middle of the desert.
c) Charlie did not need to stick her head out of the window JUST at that moment. I guess that the director didn't want to spend movie time showing us Peter driving for miles with Charlie's head out of the window and he preferred to get to the point.
But anyway and more importantly,
> They sure went through a lot of trouble to accomplish every other step in their ritual for me to believe the A Wizard Dit It trope was being invoked in that particular scene.
a) You didn't get the miniatures metaphor
b) You weren't paying attention during Peter's class about Heracles
c) You definitely haven't watched "The Omen"
[quote]- "What is Heracle's flaw?"
- "Arrogance"
- "Okay. Why?"
- "Because he literally refuses to look at all the signs that are literally handed to him the entire play"[/quote]
When Annie has the nightmare where she tells Peter she didn't want to have him and that she even try to have a miscarriage on her own, my guess is that he's from a different father (not from Steve). We know very little of the character's background stories (despite that the director wrote detailed biographies and backstories for all of the characters before even writing the screenplay and that he claims that the original cut of the film could have easily pushed over 3 hours, mostly consisting of more family dialog) so we can just guess (but that scene between Annie and Peter has many hints).
I'm curious about how a Director's Cut of the movie would be, or at least I'd like to see some deleted scenes added to the bonus features of the DVD/Bluray release.
It seemed to me that the house where the party took place was quite isolated (it looked like a house in the middle of the desert). When he is driving to the hospital he first takes a rather abrupt path before arriving to a road. And everything seemed quite deserted and far from any city.
Calling an ambulance might have been the right thing to do, but I can understand why someone would think that they might have a better chance by rushing to the hospital if they were in the middle of nowhere.
[quote]And why doesn't the family keep live ten epi pens inside every car? They can afford it.[/quote]
They were careless regarding this. It is shown at the grandma funeral that Charlie was eating chocolate, and the father asks her if it has nuts, to which she answers that it doesn't. Then the mother asks the same question, pointing out that they didn't bring an epi pen with them.
To be honest, I don't really like the TV series. I like the comic way more, it's more elaborate and less flawed than the TV adaptation. It's more gory and less PC, too.
Regarding the herd, it's complicated. You can't simply draw them away and hope that they won't come back, or that you'll doom another community of survivors by sending the herd in their direction (I know what you'll say, "f*ck other survivors!"). Also, you can't always control sound. Let's say you're holed in a good spot (like a prison, or a walled neighborhood), if a group attacks you the gunfire will attract zombies. And, as you pointed out before, a good amount of zombies will eventually go through anything. Be it a fence, or a wall.
I use to watch the TV series because I'm curious about how the show writers address what happens in the comic series. And it's been quite disappointing as far as for the seasons I've watched. I would definitely recommend the comic (there's a LOT to read, though).
Blame the person next to you so the alien will attack him.
[quote] They use this fact in exactly ONE episode and then never use it again.
It was that sort of stupid story logic that caused me to dump that series back in Season 3.[/quote]
And by doing so you missed the concept of "herd" in the tv series (and the comic) and its special appearance in seasons 7 and 8.
[url]http://walkingdead.wikia.com/wiki/Herd[/url]
Attracting a single zombie with sound to kill it = easy
Attracting a herd of thousands of zombies with sound = you've got a problem
I like your explanation, but I think it's missing a few things.
[spoiler]First of all, some loose ends I couldn't figure out:
1. What was Abby doing searching around the home? It seemed the "cyberdate" was a scam planned by both her and her husband Wesley.
2. Who pounded on the door the morning he wakes up disoriented? He goes out but there's no one, and his neighbour also refers to that into the movie.
My take on the movie: It seems that Abby didn't like her husband (~25m) and she started to be keen on Carl ("Do you wanna know why I chose you? Because you looked like a pushover (...) I actually think you're alright.", while crying a bit, she also tells her real name). She ended staying at Carl's home. That's why the husband comes looking for her (~50m), and when we see Aileen hiding upstairs it's, in fact, Abby. The scene when Carl gets into bed with Abby and it turns out it's her mother (~54m) is also misleading, but it's the key moment of the movie. It's, again, Abby, she even "explains" that Carl asked her to stay. Carl then throws who he thinks is his mother out of the house, breaking her foot when pushing her downstairs (again, that's Abby, as we find out at the end). If you look closely, you can even see it's Abby pounding on the door through the glass.
> "While Carl is in jail his mother dies."
Not really. The call is real (Abby asks who was it on the phone) and it might have been the trigger of Carl's delusion. I thought that Abby looked a lot like a young version of Carl's mother. So in the end, the movie is about Carl's mind playing tricks on him because of the incestual relationship with his mother.
The movie does not show a clear timeline, hence the loose ends and plot holes (which can be justified because Carl's mind is a mess), but the most obvious explanation is that we are misled when the movie shows us Aileen when, in fact, it's Abby most of the time (at least until he throws her out of the house with a broken foot).[/spoiler]
She was gutted, as shown in the movie (~52m20s) and suggested by the butchering pattern the killer draws on Abby's stomach (~1h03m50s).
No explanation on "Why? Why? Why? Why?" as Sam shouts when bashing the guy's head with a rock, though.
[QUOTE]I suppose another thing I wondered about was how she would live outside the simulation (since Helena couldn't survive for long that way)[/QUOTE]
My guess is that she never left the simulator until the moment shown at the end of the movie. She doesn't need to acclimate to the real world since she is not going to live there, it's very likely that she's immediately transported from the simulator to a real ship to Celeste, both sharing the same environment conditions.
[quote]However, somehow (totally inexplicably) Alex knew Helena was pregnant[/quote]
He knew because his friend Xiao told him. They found out that Helena was pregnant, along with the fact that she could not survive in the outside world,when Alex brought her to his clinic to run some tests on her. That's why Xiao told Alex "There's something more" (~1h21m).
The ending is rushed and poorly explained, but after watching it a couple of times I think it's clear that Helena's "one condition" was not only to give their daughter freedom (not once she reached a specific age), but also that she would be one of the settlers to leave Earth and travel to Celeste when the project was ready to go. Hugo mentioned that "with a little luck we'll see the first ships take off in 20 or 30 years" (~22m). The news on the radio even reported that the first ships to Celeste could be launched in 15 years (~30m) The daughter looks like she's around that age and we also see an older Hugo meet her outside the simulator. As hinted by the background "launch countdown" voice when she is exiting the simulator, they came to take her to one of those ships.
Regarding Helena and Alex, the daughter briefly looks back in the end and we can see the shape of a person at the entrance of the simulator. That person is not clearly shown but it had to be one of the parents, probably her mother since Alex had some kind of sickness (he could be dead by then) and Helena was a genetically-exact copy of a very healthy and long-lived person (~1h03m). Maybe both were there, but as I said only one person is shown.
It's not a bad movie, but I don't really understand why they had to make a "poetic", almost open end instead of clearly explaining it, as they had been doing with everything all along the movie. It's a bit confusing and I can understand why people could be frustrated with the rushed ending being squeezed in less than two minutes (and be left with that "what the hell did just happen?" feeling).
What happened to Edie Peach? Last time we saw her on screen she was giving birth in the woods and she is not shown "exploding" like the rest of the Peaches. What was she giving birth to? Another "Smart Mouth"?
We also see "The Pestilent God" walking in the park just before the credits roll in (supposedly one year after the Peaches' death).
So... What happened to Edie Peach, the "thing" she gave birth to and "The Pestilent God"?
[quote]Then the WTH!?! ending out of nowhere...they shoulda snipped out the serial killer stuff...it was silly and Death stalking about the house was way cooler
And i know it wasnt Death but rather a serial killer that popped up in the last 10 minutes relating to none of the drama i had bought into prior...[/quote]
Well, blame King since that was originally in the book. I don't see why they should have removed or changed it, I bet it would have made King's fans quite angry if the adaptation wouldn't have been faithful to the novel.
I loved the twist, so... It's definitely something that had to be there.
"Meine Kinder sind für mich, was ich für sie bin. P M"
"My children are for me, what I am for them. P M"
Pau Alva has two children, so I'm guessing that the tatoo is real and "P . M" are the initials of her children.
My impression is that we are mislead to believe that the main characters (Jesse / Ray) are hearing the same voices, while they aren't. The voices Ray is hearing are from the Devil, telling him to sacrifice children for him. On the other hand, what Jesse is hearing would be the voice of God, trying to help him to save both his daughter and the souls of the innocent children that Ray killed.
At the end he finds the remains of the children murdered by Ray, put into suitcases and buried nearby the house. The light changes there and he seems to be under a white light that comes from the sky, like a God's signal. He was successful in his mission: he saved his daughter and he saved the children's souls from the Devil by finding their remainings.
[quote]I also feel like that fire extinguisher would have been more effective at breaking a window.[/quote]
F = ma (Newton's second law of motion)
m(pack on wheels) > m(fire extinguisher)
a(pack on wheels) > a(fire extinguisher)
Hence
m(pack on wheels) x a(pack on wheels) > m(fire extinguisher) x a(fire extinguisher)
It's a nerdy movie, so I guessed a nerdy answer was appropriate.
[quote]with a doctor talking French and saying weird stuff anyway.[/quote]
Doctor: "Live with a question"
Man: "Question?"
Doctor: "O saisons, ô châteaux,
Quelle âme est sans défauts?"
It's a fragment from Arthur Rimbaud's poem "Bonheur" (Happiness): "O seasons, O castles / What soul is without flaws?"
[i]Maybe he's god. Or the devil. Or, the story just doesn't make a lot of sense.[/i]
At the end, when the kid is in the bus and he browses through some of his books you can see two particularly interesting titles: "El incidente", which would imply that Ignacio caused the events of Isaac Ezban's previous movie of the same title, and "Masacre en la plaza" which is a clear reference to The Tlatelolco massacre that took place in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in 1968 (the movie takes place in that year). His mother stated that she wanted to take him to a doctor in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City.
The other books, "El desastre del terremoto" and "La gran ola" might be references to the 1985 Mexico City earthquake and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, implying that Ignacio is causing those natural disasters in the same way he caused the events of "El incidente" and this movie.
Whether he's a god or a devil would be another debate. In this movie he is just a kid playing a game without really understanding the consequences.
EDIT: I did like the movie but I felt it was more of a very slow and long Twilight Zone episode. The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and other similar TV series were incredibly smart at telling great stories in a short amount of time.