10 unanswered questions in geek movies

Geek-friendly movies are bigger than ever these days. From the seemingly unending growth of popularity in live-action comic book adaptations to the fact that new life is still being breathed into the 36-year-old Star Wars movie franchise, geeks everywhere have more of a reason than ever to buy oversized tubs of popcorn and kick back for a couple hours.
As this insurgence of geeky movies continues, though, there remain some fundamental questions about the films that have already made their mark in the nerd and geek communities. Can these years-old or even decades-old questions be answered? To help us out we enlisted one of our “geekiest” geeks, Kevin Witt to answer these excellent questions put together in this classic Wired post. His responses are below, though we’ve taken the liberty of adding to them where we felt it appropriate.

10. Independence Day: Could the computer virus actually work?

Kevin: Aliens that were dumb enough to get beat by a drunk guy flying a crop duster clearly would’ve standardized on Apple to power their enterprise. It actually DOES make sense.
Kidding aside, it would have been incredibly difficult to pull this off. Writing a virus for a computer system that you have almost no exposure to is essentially impossible, even if you have some idea of how the alien operating system worked. Maybe the aliens had no security protocols from internal inputs and their computer infrastructure was incredibly fragile because they had never encountered any computer-based security threats? Even so, you’d think they would have some redundancies in place and some basic failsafes.

9. Raiders of the Lost Ark: How did Indy survive the U-boat trip?

Kevin: in WWII the submarines were diesel not nuclear. That means they needed to keep their air intakes above water when going for long distances–they only submerged and ran on batteries when they were on recon or in battle. If they were making a straight bee-line for the hidden base and they wanted to go at maximum speed, it is reasonable that the sub would have never submerged.
You nailed it Kevin. This would have been difficult and, let’s face it, unlikely, but it’s possible the sub never submerged and Indy secured himself to it with his whip.

8. Back to the Future: How could Marty’s parents’ spend a week with him in 1955 and totally forget about it?

Kevin: They had no pictures of him and he wasn’t conceived until almost 15 years later. That’s plenty of time for memories to fade.
This one is incredibly hard to swallow, but think about it — Marty’s parents would have never expected to see him in the future. If they had moments of deja vu when seeing him as a teenager they surely would have just written them off given the implausibility of time travel.

7. Star Trek (2009): Why didn’t Old Spock go to the station and warn Starfleet about the impending destruction of Vulcan?

Kevin: Spock was depressed and found the situation pointless in an alternate timeline that he didn’t have a connection to. He was content to ride out his fate until the arrival of Kirk made him realize he had a purpose in the alternate timeline.
Kevin may have hit on the truth here, but also let’s remember that Spock at this point was old, fragile, and possibility disillusioned. He might have been driven into a hermit-like isolationism and not want to go to Starfleet, regardless of the importance of his message.

6. Spider-Man 2: Doctor Octavius’s arms were worth billions, why did he need Harry Osborn’s money?

Kevin: He wanted the arm technology for himself — he didn’t want to share.
Why would you want to make this incredibly potent technology available to everyone else? At that point you wouldn’t be a super villain, you’d be just another bad guy. Better to keep the tech for yourself, build on it, and then take over the world. He likely knew he’d never need to pay back Harry for his support.

5. Star Trek IV: If time travel is so easy, why not do it all the time?

Kevin: It was highly dangerous and they almost died. Who knows how many times it has been unsuccessfully tried?
Exactly right. Time travel is not only dangerous but by doing it you could upset the entire chain of events that created the universe you know and are supposedly trying to protect. This is pretty basic “butterfly effect” type stuff.

4. Star Wars: A New Hope: Why does Death Star take to long to travel around the moon of Yavin?

Kevin: As in most sci-fi explanations of supra-light travel (warp, hyperspace, etc…) you can’t warp right upon a large gravity well like a planet. You can do that safely for interstellar travel – but have to use more conventional propulsion for more densely populated areas of space. (This convention was even followed recently in the Battlestar Galactica TV series.)
Regardless, the Imperial Navy did not know the rebels were already aware of the tracking beacon on the Millenium Falcon and wanted to preserve the element of surprise (the risk was that they would flee — because the Empire did not actually fear a counter-attack). To preserve the element of surprise, they had to avoid coming out of hyperspace too close to the rebel base and being easily spotted by the resulting burst of their Cronau radiation signature (a mistake that Admiral Ozzel later made on the Star Destroyer Executor in the Battle of Hoth). Ozzel was immediately executed by Darth Vader for the mistake — confirming that it is common knowledge even among space thugs!
Basically, super-light speed travel is unsafe and difficult to predict, so you’d want to get close enough to the Rebel moon and then go the rest of the way at a safe speed. Additionally, you’d think that travel at this speed would have to be more or less in some sort of straight line, so putting the Death Star on one side of a planet could be doable while the other side might be impossible.

3. Gremlins: Why exactly can’t gremlins eat after midnight? When is it not “after midnight”?

Kevin: The mogwai could be fitted with RF receivers that support NTP and synchronize with the atomic clock… it would hardly be the most amazing thing they can do!
No idea here. This was just convenient story telling. Maybe, just maybe, the rise of the sun resets things?

2. The Empire Strikes Back: How long is Luke training with Yoda? How come so little happens then?

Kevin: It was never clear how long Leia and Han were on Cloud City before the trouble started. I don’t think there was a big gap at all.
Leia and Han could have been chilling out in the Cloud City for months! Just look how nice it is up there.

1. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Was anything Indy did even necessary?

Kevin: Everyone was tempted by possession of the grail — including Indy. He almost died reaching for it himself — right after he watched Elsa plunge to her death. Plus, you can’t blame them for not acting on information they didn’t have.
By the end of the movie the Grail was safe and the Nazis were defeated. This way Indy secured the Grail for the future. If he had just left it there, the Nazis would have found it eventually and, over time, could have defeated the traps. They might have lost any number of soldiers to the traps within, but eventually someone would have solved them… or they could have just blown up half the mountain side and excavated for the grail. That’s a lot of work, but eventually they would have done it — this is the key to world domination we’re talking about here.
As Disney’s upcoming Star Wars sequels and Marvel’s continued push to associate every one of its characters with a Hollywood hotshot steams ahead, there will undoubtedly be a stream of never ending “Why?”/”What if?”/”How?”/”Seriously?” questions that crop up. Luckily, there will always be a strong following of geeks and nerds who will not shy away from providing logical answers.