Pinbacker boarding Icarus II

[lessthanfirst]

I was told ages ago that he manages to board Icarus II because he can somehow travel through light or something, watched it last night and no one believed this theory, nor did they have much of an idea themselves as to how it could be that Pinbacker gets from one ship to the other, when you see the crew who make it back over coming over by themselves.

any ideas?

[kagmi]

That's a very good question. Since we know Pinbacker was in manual control of the airlock at one point, I'm guessing he went through the airlock while everyone else was occupied with other areas of the ship--but I don't actually know enough about the ship to know how possible that is. You'd think they'd have a warning system for that, or something, unless Pinbacker was like an amazingly skilled hacker...

[kaliszewski]

The point is, they didn't show any of it. It's just "Hey-presto: he's on board!" They might have shown the airlock monitoring system going dark on the flight deck-- and Cassie and Corazon too busy monitoring the boarding team to notice. They might have shown the video feed from the airlock going dead-- but they didn't. Instead, the airlock coupling falls apart-- just falls apart-- for no reason whatsoever. (Oh, except for the reason that these ships REALLY aren't meant to be hooking up in the first place-- but, hey, I'm just an editor: what do I know about extraordinarily risky maneuvers that people perform with huge, clumsy spaceships seventy million miles from Earth when they should be-- oh, I don't know-- focusing on SAVING THE EFFENHEIMER WORLD? I.e., they had no business stopping at the Icarus I in the first place, but Alex Garland needed desperately to find a whim on which to nearly doom the mission, so he had 'em stop. Oh, the joys of dramatic license.)

Anyway, back to Our Stowaway: He looks blurry because his photons are somehow messed up. (Mm hm. This is from Danny Boyle, in American Cinematographer.) He doesn't "travel in light." What I was wondering was this: Once he got on board the Icarus II, why didn't he just scoot up to the flight deck and kill Cassie and/or Corazon? He knows these ships intimately; he knows how many of the crew have gone over to the Icarus I. If he really wanted to stop the mission, all he had to do was go to the flight deck, go on a killing spree, and take over. Why bother hiding? Talking to God all these years has made him SHY in addition to NUTS? I don't think so. And it would have made for a really fun-- or chilling-- scene, having the guys listening to the screams over their walkie-feeds, running to the airlock, and THEN seeing that the ships were drifting apart.

Anyway, though, we're seeing this more and more in film: the tendency not to explain things. The most dreadful examples of late were in "The Dark Knight": oh, the Joker gets to pack ferries full of explosives, he does the same thing with a hospital, he wraps entire roomfuls of hostages in duct tape, he puts cell-phone bombs in people's bellies.... how, exactly? Explanation doesn't mean you're talking down to your audience; people feel more empowered, far less insulted (at least I do), when they're in on the joke, so to say. Nothing in the world makes me madder at a film these days than this JUST 'SKUZ type of writing: He gets to do whatever he wants JUST SKUZ he's the Joker! He gets to pop up on the other spaceship JUST SKUZ he's crrrrazy, light-refractin' Pinbacker! For a nice contrast, watch the Memphis escape sequence in "Silence of the Lambs": we see exactly how Hannibal Lecter does what he does, and it detracts from the horror and suspense of the scene not at all....

[tanyasunshine]

He Does Creeping Me Out When I Was Watching the Movie