Lockout. You'll wish you had been.

I'm trying to remember all the major flubs in Lockout without having to pull it out of my "RESELL THESE DVDS" box and watch it again. There will be spoilers.

The premise is nice. Future hero has to rescue somebody from a prison in orbit above Earth. Not only does he have to break in, avoid getting killed by hundreds of loose prisoners, and get back to Earth with the hostage, but he has to do it before the prison space station falls out of the sky. I thought it might be like Outland. Instead we get Escape From New York in space, heavy on the banter, light on the logic.

My first disappointment was when the warden explained that prisoners are kept in stasis.What kind of punishment is that? Okay, your family and friends grow old or die while you sleep for 30 years. That's a bummer if you have anyone you care about. You'd have some culture shock when you get thawed out 30 years in your future, but if you were asleep for the whole thing, it would seem to pass in an instant. It would feel like time travel. Some people would pay millions for that experience. Or maybe you stay awake for the whole sentence, in which case you would be absolutely psychotic when you come out. Look at what solitary confinement already does to people with a normal, waking life. Tell me that paralyzed, motionless, solitary confinement, locked in your own brain for 30 years could be any less traumatic.

Plus it only makes sense for criminals with a limited sentence. What would a life sentence mean to a person in unconscious stasis? To the criminal, it would seem like they went to sleep and never woke up. Unless you plan to wake them up again, it would mean an execution of consciousness, but keeping the body alive. And how long do you keep these corpsicles in stasis? Hundreds of years? As long as possible? For what purpose, if you never plan to wake them up?

So the President's daughter goes up to tour this prison, planning to grill the warden about whether the stasis process is humane. A prisoner gets loose, releases all 500 other prisoners, starts killing guards. They don't have ships to get off the prison station (why not?) so they have to take hostages and negotiate with people on the ground to get off the station.

So far, so good. Government officials communicate with the leader of the prisoners with the usual cliches. The prisoner keeps issuing ultimatums and then cutting off communication, then coming back a while later.

A ship docks with the station and some guy representing the govt is allowed on board to negotiate further.

Why would the prisoners allow that? Why wouldn't they negotiate everything via radio and only allow the ship to dock when they're ready to be transported to Earth? Because the writers need a diversion while our snarky, reluctant hero Guy Pearce in a space suit sneaks off the bottom of the ship and tries to enter the prison station from some other port.

Eventually they raise the stakes. A ground control guy explains to the President that the prison station is falling out of orbit. It will land somewhere on the Eastern seaboard in six hours. While our hero and the damsel get in space suits and jump down to Earth, a dozen starfighters try to drop a bomb down the Death Star's exhaust port or whatever. They know the station has wicked, computer-guided defensive weapons that will fire at them. For some reason they have to get in close and fly a big circle around the ship to the vulnerable spot, instead of flying directly to the spot where they want to drop their bomb. At least Star Wars had a half-assed reason for that, but no explanation here. Thankfully it's kept to only a minute or two of fighter pilots yelling pointless warnings to each other like "Unit six taking fire! I'm taking fire! Ahhhhh!" or "Weapons at six o'clock!" By the time you could say "six o'clock," your warning to the pilot behind you would be too late. And they're all going too fast to cover for each other.

Luke targets the wamp-rat hole and the prison station explodes. Our hero and his rescued lady somehow manage to not burn up and parachute to the ground. Yay.

What they forget to show are pieces of this massive space station raining down on New York City or Washington or other cities along the East coast six hours later. The prison space station was in a decaying orbit. They blew up the station, but they didn't disintegrate it. Those pieces have to come down somewhere. Maybe the explosion was forceful enough to blast pieces further out into orbit, but some would be blasted down toward the Earth, and others would be blasted to the sides or in directions that wouldn't go into orbit again. They changed it from a slug to a shotgun blast coming down on the East coast.

If they wanted to prevent that, they should have sent a team to board the station, kill or subdue the prisoners, and pilot the station back into orbit. Or maybe build a remote control in your giant prison space station so people on the ground can pilot it or put it on lockdown?

Up From the Shadow Out of Time: A Grand Unified Theory of the Lovecraft-Hendrix Axis

If you haven’t already done so, read “The Shadow Out of Time” by H.P. Lovecraft, then listen to “Up From the Skies” by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Next, read "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Call of Cthulhu," and preferably the complete fiction of Lovecraft. Then listen to the rest of Axis: Bold As Love, and everything else by Hendrix.

As you should be able to deduce, Hendrix’s body was briefly inhabited by a Yithian. “Up From the Skies” is a sincere appeal from a non-human wanting to learn about the 1960s for possible mass mind migration. The song uses slang terms which the Yithian thought would be more clear to humans of that era. You dig?

Jimi probably acted funny for a few months, but not funny enough for friends or handlers or hangers-on to notice. They would have thought he was being a moody rock star, or tripping, or drunk. Not far out of character.

"Up From the Skies"

 

I just want to talk to you. I won't do you no harm.
I just want to know about your different lives
On this is here people farm.
I heard some of you got your families
Living in cages tall and cold
And some just stay there and dust away
Past the age of old.
Is this true?
Please let me talk to you.
I just wanna know about The rooms behind your minds.

Do I see a vacuum there
Or am I going blind? Or is it just remains of vibrations
And echoes long ago?
Things like "Love the world" and
"Let your fancy flow."
Is this true?
Please let me talk to you.
Let me talk to you.
I have lived here before
The days of ice
And of course this is why
I'm so concerned.
And I come back to find
The stars misplaced
And the smell of a world
That has burned.
Yeah well, maybe, hmm... Maybe it's just a... change of climate
Hmm, hmm...
Well I can dig it
I can dig it baby
I just want to see.
So where do I purchase my ticket ?
I'd just like to have a ringside seat
I want to know about the new Mother Earth I want to hear and see everything
I want to hear and see everything
I want to hear and see everything.

The Yithian obviously abandoned Jimi after only a few months, finding the 1960s too freaky. Meanwhile, Jimi's mind was transported into the body of a Yithian 250 million years ago, where he talked with other captive humans from different periods, including an alcoholic with a rocky marriage from 1938, a young Native American, a disabled woman from the future. These stories became vignettes in “Castles Made of Sand.”

Jimi wrote “Little Wing” about an Elder Thing he met (see “At the Mountains of Madness”) who was also captive of the Yithians. An early draft of the lyrics mentions “butterflies and penguins and moonbeams.”

Some of Jimi’s experiences from that period are mentioned in his other songs, especially visions of mountains falling to the sea (“If 6 Was 9”) and the rise of R’lyeh from under the sea. ("Voodoo Child" – “Well I stand up next to a mountain. I chop it down with the edge of my hand. Pick up all the pieces and build you an island, I might even raise a little sand.”)

The Yithians were able to screen the future film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind while Jimi was there, which explains the battlegrounds and insect-riding in “Spanish Castle Magic.” The line about "Just float your little mind" is about the way Yithians can transfer their consciousness between bodies.

“Bold As Love” is just trippy, Dylanesque imagery written before Jimi’s abduction. No connection.