[turbomelon]

Originally Posted by dna82

some things that didn't make sense.

Spoiler!

well....
the plot holes i saw were
1) you have 1million aliens on a huge floating spaceship that serves as the perfect place to hold them because they can't get off, and no humans without consent from the government can reach them. but nooo.. you stick them in the middle of a populated city seperated by... chain fences?

2) you take the aliens off the ship, but let them smuggle out huge mechs and 1meter long guns?

3) you have this supposedly multi billion dollar corporation managing this shantytown, and you let some crippled Nigerian stockpile huge caches of alien technology?

4) small arms technology is more important then interstellar space travel technology? wtf aren't there teams of researchers on the ship tearing it to pieces.

5) so, humans can understand prawn, and prawns can understand human and read. but none of them have asked each other. 'so.. where ya from? how's it going?' who flies your ship?

Addressing your plotholes

Spoiler!

1) The ship was floating above the city for 3 months before anyone decided to do anything. While it may have seemed illogical for them to take them off the ship, ultimately the people in charge ultimately decided to. Part of their rationale to do this was due to the fact that we didn't know what they were doing or planning up there and the movie touches on humanity's intrinsic curiosity. This could be exemplified by people who received mysterious envelopes and opened them up only to receive an anthrax surprise a few years back.

Also perhaps the people in charge figured there would be some advantage to getting inside the mothership. Some would say instating the HST by Gordon Campbell is a bad decision but that doesn't change the fact that the decision was made by his govt. Likewise the decision to take them off the ship was motivated by a series of factors.

2) It was said in the movie that portions of the ship were falling off constantly throughout the 20 year timespan starting with the command ship. Its entirely possible that the armory section or some other cargo bay fell off the ship.

3) Like most slums and sketchy places around the world, when organized crime takes a footing usually the governing body gives them a wide berth. Just because a govt. has lots of money doesn't mean they know how to keep things under control effectively. The same slums exist in africa and while the warlords and organized crime there do not stock pile alien energy weapons, they definitely have access to many forms of weaponry currently available.

4) Its assumed that within the 20 years at some point the researchers were on the ship to attempt to obtain some of the technological secrets held by the aliens. However since all their tech was genetically encoded and it was believed that most of the "prawns" were of a worker class and not completely intelligent, all their research would have amounted to them realizing they cant do anything with whats on that ship or the weapons. Further still, since the aliens arrived decades earlier it would be assumed that most researching bodies have lost interest in the larger more complex issues, and were primarily focused on how to get the alien tech to work with humans. Namely genetic/bio research hence the vivisection/unit23-esque MNU labs.

5) The humans attempted communication with prawns hence how they learned their language, but over time the humans determined that the prawns were unintelligent and like mentioned before the worker caste of their species. Also in the newscasts and documentary sections the people who were interacting with the prawns believed that the leaders of their race or the primary controllers had somehow died off or abandoned the 1.7 million prawns. The alien christopher johnson was probably not a leader but was more intelligent and obviously chose to hide this fact for the most part from the humans.