Inferred Holocaust: Difference between revisions

* ''[[It's a Wonderful Life|Its a Wonderful Life]]'': The tropes of [[Straw Man Has a Point]] and [[Inferred Holocaust]] overlap.

** Pottersville has more excitement and a superior economic infrastructure. Bedford Falls only has a moderate manufacturing economy and no obvious places to find excitement. Once the factory closes down Bedford Falls will suffer depression and unemployment. Pottersville has backup industries, such as the nightclubs, that can encourage outside investment.

* ''[[Soylent Green]]'': Okay, so maybe for sake of argument, the secret does successfully get out, and the Soylent Corporation is shut down. But what are the common masses going to do? The Earth, for the most part is screwed ecologically, the only way to get a [[Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap|decent meal]] without paying for it is to steal or kill for it. The world is headed for anarchy, if it isn't already. Most likely though, the company's influence will keep the secret suppressed, only allowing it to survive in small rumors and urban legends amongst the people.

* In the [[Steven Spielberg]] film ''[[A.I.: Artificial Intelligence]]'', David is finally reunited with his adopted mother in a simulation of their home. However, humanity has been extinct for hundreds or thousands of years, David was only given one day with his mother before she died, and David's batteries probably ran down for good in the closing shot. However, depending on your point of view, this may actually have been a happy ending..

* In ''[[I Am Legend]]'', a cure is found and delivered to a walled city housing some survivors. But considering the infectees' physical capabilities, how is that city wall going to stop them? And what good will the cure be if it requires that the infectees be captured alive, restrained, and packed in ice while it's administered?

** It goes without saying that significant logistical and psychological factors remain even if the creator of the cure was still alive as in the original ending. As noted above, the infected need to be restrained for hours or days before it works. The opening narration says that [[The Virus]] killed 90% of humanity, with almost every survivor instead becoming a Dark Seeker (only 12 million of 600 million not killed by the virus were straight up immune). The infected outnumber humans 50 to 1. "Curing" them is logistically impossible. Also, what's the point? I don't see the surviving pockets of humanity wanting to mount a planet-wide kidnapping war just to end up with half a billion bed-ridden invalids. After years of being a monster, what kind of lives can the cured have? They'll certainly have terrible PTSD, but with the tendency of the infected to open doors by slamming their heads into them, it's pretty likely that being infected comes with a healthy dose of brain damage.

* In ''[[Independence Day]]'', the [[Easily-Thwarted Alien Invasion|unmitigated and total victory over the aliens]] is wonderfully uplifting, until you realize that the aliens blew up all the major nations' capitals and several dozen of its primary cities in the days they went unopposed. Did we mention that, thanks to industrialization, around 90% of the developed world's population now live in cities? Also, the effects of a ship 1/4 the size of the moon blowing up (due to a ''nuclear explosion'', no less) cannot be good. Especially not if the [http://web.archive.org/web/20060728101642/http://intuitor.com/moviephysics/independ.html theory] that the alien weapons were powered by antimatter is correct. They also point out that a ship one quarter of the moon's size in geostationary orbit would cause massive tidal waves and earthquakes just by being there. Still, on the glass half full side, we also see that there is a city still standing: Sydney. As in Australia. A very civilized and quite technological city. They concentrated on the US as well, with only a few ships elsewhere, so large parts of Europe and Asia would be still bustling and they could help the human race get back on it's feet.

** Unless, of course, the individual aliens survive their city destroying ships crashing to the ground, in which case we're either facing a years long ground war against the millions of alien survivors, or a situation similar to ''District 9'', only with us in the camps.

* In ''[[Logan's Run]]'', all the people are forced to evacuate their city of [[Crystal Spires and Togas]], when the [[AI Is a Crapshoot|Evil AI]] that ran it is defeated. Despite the evil, it was a beautiful and decadent [[Utopia]] where no one had wants or needed to know a valuable skill or trade. [[Utopia Justifies the Means|The downside]] was it killed them at 30. To put it plainly, these humans are entirely dependent on machines to provide and don't even know what the Sun is. The Sun! Saying 90% of the thousands of refugees died in the winter would be optimistic, as they knew nothing about wilderness survival and had only one senile elder human to teach them how to survive.

* In ''[[The Matrix]] Revolutions'', as pointed out in [http://www.cracked.com/article_16570_p2.html this] Cracked article. Neo wins! All people can be free from the Matrix if they want to leave! Yay!...Oh wait that means billions of people finding out their life is a total lie and they can choose to keep living knowing it's a lie. Or they can go die in a post apocalyptic wasteland

*** Expanded on pretty blatantly for a series so engrossed in symbolism, actually; after the movies, there is simply no more war in the real world. Freed humans who would or previously would have lived in Zion before moving permanently to their hovercraft may choose to work for the Merovingian or the Machines themselves; the insinuation is that the real world is meaningless with the Machines' willingness to kill all the humans now gone, because the humans can't populate the surface, and the Machines still need live humans for <s> power</s> the processing power of their brains. In the end, nobody can ''use'' the real world, but everyone ''needs'' the Matrix to keep running as usual.

**** Over the course of The Matrix Online's storyline not only do large numbers of humans in the real world take up permanent residence in large hover barges, some choose to work for the Machines. As the storyline progressed Zion and the Machines were embroiled in a cold war where the Machines worked to suppress Zion's recruitment efforts in secret and Zion was preparing for another war. It's very likely had the game not been shutdown that future story arcs would have explored a second war between the Machines in Zion, one where Zion now has a way of causing real harm to the Matrix and the Machines who are dependant on it for survival.

* In ''[[Aliens in the Attic]]'', Spark returns home after [[Heel Face Turn|helping the kids]] prevent the invasion. But his two compatriots also return to their home planet. One would think that it wouldn't take long for the alien leaders to find out about Spark's betrayal, so that probably wasn't a happy reunion with his family.

* The source of much controversy surrounding the end of ''[[Apocalypse Now]]'' was, appropriately, the apparent apocalyptic fate of Kurtz's compound. Although Coppola explicitly said that he didn't mean that {{spoiler|Kilgore called in an airstrike}}, the {{spoiler|opening of the movie}} has been [[Epileptic Trees|taken]] to be exactly that.

* ''[[True Grit]]'' (the 2010 version) in regards to Matt Damon's character LaBoeuf. His last appearance consists of him being left behind as Rooster rides off to get Mattie's snake bite treated. But the problem is that just a few moments ago he had suffered a horrible whack over the back of the head with a large rock, bad enough to knock him out cold, and at this point he is visibly bleeding from the mouth and his speech is slightly slurred. That, added with the length of time it takes for Rooster to get help for Mattie (it's night when they reach a doctor) it's entirely possible that LaBoeuf died of his head injuries before Rooster could get back. That's supported by Mattie's comment 25 years later that she never heard from Laboeuf again after the shootout, and the fact that this head injury ''did'' kill LaBoeuf in the original 1969 movie.

* ''[[Supergirl (film)|Supergirl]]''- [[Supergirl]] flies a spaceship through a wormhole to Earth in order to look for a [[MacGuffin]] that will save Argo City. Earth's yellow sun gives her superpowers and Argo's red sun takes them away. At the end of the movie we see Supergirl flying through the wormhole with the [[MacGuffin]] and then the film ends. As soon as the radiation from the red sun hits her she's going to lose her powers and die in the vacuum of space and everyone in Argo will die.