That little “AKSHUALLY” voice in your head is the nitpicker in all of us: annoying as he may be, he serves the important role of inspiring the fan theorist in all of us to come up with “AKSHUALLY” statements of his own to counter the nitpicker’s natter (if you enjoyed the story anyway). In this case (if I were to find the movie enjoyable as you evidently did) the fan theorist in me would probably reply:

“AKSHUALLY, maybe like Tattooine in Star Wars, the planet’s not in its original orbit, and wasn’t always like this. Maybe it used to be a much more habitable world before it suffered some ancient calamity that knocked it out of its original orbit and into this hellish new situation.”

“AKSHUALLY, maybe the planet is in fact dying, and these predators have only survived as long as they have because they can somehow go into hibernation for such ridiculously long periods of time. (Cicadas do something like that here on Earth, you know.) As for what they’re eating when no prey conveniently crashes on their planet? They’re all basically cannibals now, and yes, they probably won’t last too many more of these 22-year cycles before they follow all the other species that used to live on this planet into extinction.”

“AKSHUALLY, the planet used to have plants too, but they (and the herbivores that used to eat them) were among the first species to go extinct during the calamity. Also, that one remaining predator species probably would end up using up the oxygen and suffocating in all the carbon dioxide it’s producing, were it not already doomed to go extinct from cannibalizing itself first.”

“AKSHUALLY, those predators were already genetically programmed to hibernate during the day long before the planet suffered its orbit-changing calamity. In fact, that they could hibernate for so long is pretty much the only reason natural selection hasn’t already eliminated them the way it already did all the planet’s other former inhabitants; and even that useful trait has only served to delay their inevitable extinction. It’s not as if natural selection has any mandate to produce and preserve life, you know.”

Fan theorist’s bottom line: those monsters menacing the protagonist(s) are nothing more than nocturnal cannibals on a dying planet.

I’m sure I will eventually. 🙂

Funnily enough, me and mine said exactly the same things about the scientific impossibilities–the orbit, the monsters, the lack of monster-food, and on and on and on. It didn’t remove our enjoyment of the movie, though. It’s been a long time since I saw a movie that remotely tried to not bastardize Sci-Fi. (2001…the movie, not the timeframe since.)

I used to enjoy Paul Gross when he was in that “fish out of water” Mountie TV show stationed in the US, that TV show. It was pretty good that first year, but the 2nd was abysmal. The Husky (dog) was cool!

Anyway, glad you (mostly) enjoyed PB. The two sequels are…interesting. The next one is…odd, with all sorts of unanswered questions, etc. The third one irked me, because it used a plot element, a ploy, designed to tear-jerk and I don’t care for that sort of thing. But, you should see them anyway.

Hitch