MovieChat Forums > mobocracy > Replies
mobocracy's Replies
It feels like the usual streamer strategy, drag out the narrative unnecessarily so you can get more seasons out of it.
It's been too long since I read the books, but it feels like season 2 could have been largely condensed. A lot of dramatic filler and narrative elements with little advancement that became entire episodes.
I think part of the reason things like True Detective were so good is that they finish a coherent narrative in a single season. TD S1 could have easily been stretched into two seasons if they had bulked it out with bullshit.
I think Silo isn't a single season show, but it's also not really a 4 season show.
This is one of those movies where the director/writer really wants to tell a story different than the background setting they use, so the narrative logic of the "civil war" often doesn't really make sense.
Probably the small town is trying to keep life as normal as possible, including doing whatever commerce they can considering the chaotic economics that you'd expect in a civil war. The rooftop guards are there to keep a lid on troublemakers.
As for the SUV coming into town, it was marked "Press", so maybe it resulted in the rooftop guards being a little bit subdued in their posture. Plus one vehicle with two women and an old guy really isn't much of a threat if you've got a half-dozen guys with assault rifles on rooftops.
I don't remember seeing any children (besides the alien in a child's body). The typical death rate takes away something like 0.8 to 1% of the population every year. After 10 years, I'd think the population loss without replacement would start to become problematic.
But I can see children being problematic for the aliens -- they can reprogram adults, but reprogramming children seems more difficult, especially if you get into switching around children and parents. It'd be "easier" in some ways if the aliens simply had magic cures for illnesses and could resurrect people if they died in ways that didn't destroy their body (heart attack vs. getting run over by a bus).
But without replacement or some other fix, they'd eventually run out of people.
I'm sure that the CIA and military have intelligence, mostly gathered from DEA/CBP/Homeland Security, about cartel operations and various intervention scenarios developed.
But its an absolute mine field of risk to intervene without total deniability.
Trump is weighing them, sure, but his casual attitude is probably meeting real world issues, like 100k refugees flooding the border, large scale civilian deaths and the diplomatic nightmare of the US waging war on Mexico.
It’s “colorblind casting” and it’s idiotic. Why not have costuming or props that ignore the time period, too? A flat screen would look good in the police office. Rose should drive a Tesla. Maybe the cops should wear Roman military outfits.
You can’t do that in a period piece. Every element of it is designed to create the period verisimilitude. Making the cast up with cast members whose racial makeup doesn’t align with history completely disrupts the period realism.
You wouldn’t cast white people in a film about the ancient Chinese or as African slaves.
Of course in some cases it can work, but these are rare and very specific and sometimes requires the story adapted to make sense.
It could have been an off the books black project. Only a few back at the home office knew about it and when they found out they lost control of the xenomorph and the ship was compromised, they scrubbed everything. Maybe even directed the ship remotely into its collision course with the ring planet.
Arguably Parks could have entered without using the secret passage and gained his "sneak attack" advantage because Sir William was poisoned and already dead or at least incapacitated. Parks may have also wanted Sir William to know he was being killed for retribution by his own abandoned son and not cared about sneaking up on him.
I had the same question on my 4th(!) watching of this.
There was some scene where Isobel seems to be talking (very indirectly) something about "her consequences" relative to pregnancy. It was a brief exchange with others around, but I don't think that had added up to me in previous watchings.
What I'm surprised about is how Isobel was able to get an abortion (then quite illegal in the UK) without the aid of someone older/richer/more power/connected. I don't doubt that Isobel *could* get an abortion, but that it would cost a tidy sum and require a doctor with some level of moral flexibility and a certain loyalty or at least fear of the family's influence. Doctors generally were much more likely to be on a more level social playing field with aristocrats than almost any other profession (I'd wager it was a common profession for 2nd or 3rd sons who could at best expect an allowance and not an inheritance).
So how Isobel was able to get an abortion without her mom or dad finding out. It's probably a not unreasonable bet mom faced a similar situation given her willingness to risk the scandal of crossing the boundaries of class and marital status to shag a "servant". Dad is of course dialed into the servant gossip pipeline and it seems unlikely Isobel and Freddy would get away with a sexual affair without the servants chattering about it. Even missing a period in that era was something a maid might have spotted.
Totally unrealistic. You couldn’t beat the shit out of someone younger with a weapon and get away with it. Someone for sure would get hurt and if that person’s parents were rich, influential, vengeful, prone to violence or any combination of that there would be hell to pay.
But there’s a bunch of stuff in this movie that’s unrealistically exaggerated. The cars, the general lack of cops, the sheer volume of pot smoking and constant drinking.
IMHO there is a longer term trend of science fiction settings being used for emotionally driven and relationship focused narratives which are not directly related to the science fiction premise or setting.
I think it’s partially a grift so writers and directors who want to be “serious” can get a movie made in an era where audiences are less interested in artsy drama and more into starships and space aliens.
I think it’s also partly also people who make science fiction movies think they have auteur skills too and believe they’re making intelligent films about emotions and people.
I agree it’s kind of annoying because a lot of interesting premises get wasted on drama rather than the Air Force carpet bombing Queens.
Plus studios and streamers are in on it, pushing these kinds of titles even though they’re not really what they say they are.
It might explain in part why they didn't show the family immediately lawyering up. If the family had an attorney present the cops would have been stuck more or less proving it was some kind of accidental drowning.
But a moneyed family not lawyering up was almost so disconnected from reality that it was jarring.
If this had been Succession, I would have expected a lawyer to have shown up and explained to the cops that they had no evidence as the family climbed into helicopters.
Nah, Amelia's lust for Shooter is shown developing in the flashback sequence where Benji is delayed and they go to the Nantucket house ahead of him. Beach walks, underwear skinny dipping and eating canned canapes in front of the fire is what kicks off the lust. This explains the earlier "cold feet" conversation she has with Merritt and the abortive sex hookup with Benji not long after.
The kissing was the kind of catharsis of all that and probably further motivated by the revelation that her best friend was pregnant with her father-in-law's bastard child.
Plus she even admits that getting caught with Shooter by Benji reduces her moral standing to that of the rest of the Winbury family.
The confounding detail is in one of the "police interview" scenes where one of the characters says that all the Winbury money is tied up in a trust and that Greer is the one bankrolling their lifestyle. Yet Will, the youngest son, tells Merritt at the beach that he's about to come into his share of the Winbury money.
Most trusts have a clause restricting access to money based on age, though often with wealth the age for getting full control of it is like 30, with the trust handing out disbursements for living expenses, school, etc, as overseen by the executor of the trust. It strikes me as unlikely Will's getting into "support young socialite and her baby with someone not Will" levels of money at age 18. It's probably more like enough money to support a cushy, entry-level-tech-bro/luxe Harvard student existence, with the bulk of the funds held back.
But even then a lot of family trusts at high levels of wealth are structured first and foremost to preserve the nest egg and hand out periodic checks based on investment performance, and nobody gets control of the whole kit and caboodle or even the ability to loophole it through influencing investment decisions. Since they said the Winbury's have owned that property for like 6 generations, my guess is the family trust is oriented towards intergenerational wealth and not some big payoff.
The trust could have shrunk enough, though, that Tag and live a very sumptuary life and the Nantucket house expenses are covered, it's not fabulous, 5th Avenue Penthouse money, either. Thomas doesn't have the cash for whatever luxe apartment his wife wants and Tag is probably cash-poor enough that he won't front the money Thomas wants for it (under the guise of an options-play investment bailout).
TL;DR -- the Winbury money isn't Rockefeller-scale, but it supports a tailored-linen-shirt wardrobe and Nantucket summer house lifestyle. Greer has to crank out bestsellers in order to live the fantasy Winbury lifestyle.
I'd wager the plans are pretty broad and wrapped up in general civilian disaster response and disease mitigation. Even if there's no CBRN threat and its just a generic disaster, you still have real diseases like cholera and dysentery to worry about and contain.
But the specifics of the response to a CBRN event are going to be highly dependent on the specifics of the event. I could definitely see a highly infectious disease or toxin resulting in an enforced quarantine, though I think the military would do a lot more to mitigate civilian needs, even it was dropping off pallets of bottled water and MREs vs. just fencing people in, threatening to shoot them if they try to escape and hoping the threat burns itself out through attrition.
It was probably just a plot gimmick where they needed an insider to help them escape and it provides a "redemption" story for an insider willing to switch sides.
The only thing I could make sense was that it was a for-profit operation. They seized assets and cars for the money. They kept people locked up on bogus charges for the maximum time as a form of intimidation and inhibiting their ability to seek redress in the courts. I think the court clerk mentioned they had no public defender, too, which would definitely enable this as any defense attorney would demand they be arraigned and charged or let go.
I can't see it being too profitable, though, as your potential pool of victims has to exclude anyone with even the minimum resources to hire a defense attorney. It's not like there's a steady pool of homeless black people on bikes with $30k in cash coming through town.
Numbers is one of the oldest organized crime rackets. It’s like the lottery, you pick a few numbers and hope they match. The thing that made it seem honest is that the winning numbers were meant to come from a public source that couldn’t be rigged. Needless to say, it was frequently rigged in some way or other.
Very popular among poor and blue collar because it could be played with very small bets. It also employed, in a manner of speaking, a lot of freelancers who collected bets to organized crime.
It was a major revenue source for organized crime. Much of the rationale behind public lotteries was targeted at eliminating this income stream for the mob.
Keitel has long been rumored to be a heavy coke user.
Keitel's a great actor and you have to ask why Scorsese never gave him a major lead role in any film, despite a history with him that goes back to Scorsese's first film in 1967. He's notoriously absent from Goodfellas and Casino and several other Scorsese films where he could have had significant supporting roles. His only other major leading role that got a huge amount of positive press was Jane Campion's the Piano, though he has appeared regularly as a supporting player, but too often in "pay the rent" kind of pictures.
Whether he actually got coked up in Bad Lieutenant or not is debatable. My guess is probably not, because his career was finally hitting on all cylinders after nearly a decade in the wilderness (and Italy).
It's kind of up to the viewer, though, to connect the dots between those actions and the underlying cause of the civil war. Sure, airstrikes on civilians, unconstitutional third terms, and dismantling Federal law enforcement are likely to validate a civil war, but they're also more or less predictable actions during a civil war.
And its not like a normal President just woke up one day and decided to carpet bomb Pittsburgh or disband the FBI and a civil war resulted. It happened because of some other underlying political conflict which was never discussed or revealed in the film.
I'd argue that the order of events was more like disbanding the FBI, claiming a third term, and then bombing civilian populations as part of civil war. But the kickoff is some kind of political conflict the film doesn't reveal.
I did the math, and Henry II took the throne at about 28, which would have made Madame du Poitiers 56. He held the throne until he was 40, which meant du Poitiers would have been 68.
IIRC, the line was "almost double his age" but that's a bit of an exaggeration. Wikipedia says she was 35 when they got involved in 1534. He ascended the throne in 1547, which would have made her 48, and 60 when he died in 1559.
Henry I banished her from court at least for a time in the mid-1540s but the show seems to gloss over this, and she wasn't really put out to pasture until Henry II died in 1559.