awkwardly

Sunday

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?

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