History Headscratchers / AtlantisTheLostEmpire

* Why did Rourke bother hiding that page from the journal? It's HandWaved, but it doesn't really make sense. Note that a.) Milo begins the movie by saying that he wants to take the Atlantean power source and put it in a museum; b.) Rourke doesn't even think that it's a power source, just a really big and valuable diamond; and c.) none of them know that the city is full of people who need the Heart to live. Why does he assume that he needs to hide the Heart's existence to get Milo's help at this point?

* A flaw in historical consistency, but remember that whoopee cushion Mole used on Milo? The movie is set in 1914, yet the whoopee cushions we know of today weren't invented until the 1920s/30s.

*** A technology-driven society couldn't function that way. People need to be able to read manuals and instruction books. And the whole point of the Administrivia/JustBugsMe page is that viewers think something pushes the rules too far.

*** A technology-driven society couldn't function that way. People need to be able to read manuals and instruction books. And the whole point of the JustBugsMe page is that viewers think something pushes the rules too far.

* Rourke detonates the bridge to prevent Milo and the others from stopping him. Just one little problem--how the heck did he and his crew manage to wire dynamite to a bridge suspended over ''a boiling river of lava''?! There is no possible way even ''Vinny'' could've wired the bridge without plummeting into the molten magma below! So how did they wire the bridge to the detonator?

** Because she was alive before it was submerged. Probably has a basic memory of what stars are like.

** And even if she wasn't, the Heart can protect an entire damn city from lava and floods and prolongue life for an entire city. It can probably manage a scarf-skirt.

** It's slop, but it's edible, and according to him will 'keep and keep and keep'. He's apparently figured out how to make nasty but very long lasting, evidently nutritious food with ridiculous but simple ingredients, such as [[BreadEggsMilkSquick beans, bacon, whiskey and lard]]. On potentially month-lasting expeditions like that, tell me you wouldn't want a man like that making such useful food. Beans in cans, whiskey barrels... it's all fairly easy to cart around and preserve.
** It's a good point. I subconsciously assumed that Cookie was actually part of Whitmore's earlier teams back in the days when he went on these kinds of expeditions ''himself,'' and was simply the only one whose skill set never needed to be upgraded to 'best in their field'. There's certainly an implication that he's a long-time ActionSurvivor.

** Said deleted scene is the ''only'' one of its kind to be be fully colorized and animated, as it was only after that scene was fully animated that the decision was made to replace it.

* How are the Atlanteans dark-skinned if they're living in a place without any sunlight? Kida has lighter skin than those of the other Atlanteans, but still very tan otherwise. In the sequel, she for some reason has very dark skin.

* How the heck did everyone get back to the surface? They can't use the RopeBridge anymore since Rourke blew it up, with said bridge built over a river of lava, and the tunnels leading to that kingdom are now clogged up by the now-cooled lava left behind when the volcano erupted (they can't use the DrillTank anymore since if you look very closely during the scene when they and the just-rescued-but still crystallized Kida are escaping the erupting volcano, said tunneling drill can be seen falling into the lava when they all finally come out). And even if they do find another away around, they have to account for the bridge above the volcano that crumbled apart under their trucks' wheels when the Pyreflies set their camp on fire, and even if they make it back to the air pocket leading from under the Atlantic Ocean, there's still no way out from there since the Leviathan is still waiting for them at the entrance leading to the air pocket.
** Actually, in that same scene, you can see [[IfItSwimsItFlies a giant narwhal-shaped blimp]] in that background, and that the Atlanteans would use that blimp to fly the explorers over the river of lava and up the volcano's shaft ([[WaterisAir it was opened up by Rourke using several explosions so that he and Helga would escape with Kida on their own blimp]], their geologist even described that volcano as being dormant, implying that its crater was stopped up sometime after Atlantis was sunk, creating that volcano, but before it was discovered), considering the Shepherd's Journal theory for the Vikings was true. And it's pretty obvious that once the explorers get out of that blimp at the volcano's crater, and head toward the beach surrounding whatever island now sits over Atlantis, Whitmore is probably going to send one of his ships to pick them all up and take them back to Washington, DC.

** Possibly that the Heart is sentient, or at least was running off Kida's thoughts for instruction (therefre why it absorbed her temporarily). So she was focusing its energy on important shards of crystal (such as her father's, which was then passed onto Milo- both people she cares about intensely). Possibly Milo's crystal then ecame so charged with energy as he was the one who could prevent them from taking the Heart out of Atlantis, she used it as a beacon, able to energise the other crystals around it so that they could take her and the Heart back into the city so that she could save them.

* When Kida is kidnapped (before she gets crystallized), she has just come from swimming and is only wearing her bikini-style top and briefs. This is [[FanService very]] firmly established [[SheFu when she fights her kidnappers]].Then she is crystallized and the climactic battle happens and ends and the border giants come up and shield Atlantis, etc, and she comes down from the crystal - wearing her scarf-skirt again. Did the crystal fix her costume?
** She wearing it before she was crystalised, wasn't she? I imagine that once Milo agreed to lead them to the Heart, they at least let her put her skirt back on.
** And even if she wasn't, the Heart can protect an entire damn city from lava and floods and prolongue life for an entire city. I think it can manage a scarf-skirt.

* Speaking of the balloon battle, why did he have those planes packed away? When they started out, they had no idea that there would be any space to fly, you know, because of the ''water'', they only found out on the submarine, so does he usually pack fold-able planes with him wherever he goes?

* This might be a stupid question, but...how exactly did they get Crystal Kida into that box? When she came down from the light show, it looks as if she just kept walking in no particular direction. Did Rourke have time to run up to the surface, drag down a giant metal container, and just wait for Kida to walk into it? It's made clear that nobody mortal can touch her without getting crystallized.

** Taking the Heart of Atlantis out of Atlantis will ''definitely'' kill the people there. Taking it to the surface world only ''might'' kill the people up there. The Atlanteans were a more pressing issue.

** He also might be one of those people who needs to see the words written down to properly pronounce them. If I hear a word in a language I don't know, I'll have less trouble pronouncing it if I see it. Kida's full name was long and she only said it once. He also might have felt a bit formal calling her a long name like that.

*** Infamous? I don't ever remembering it being known for being bad. As yo answer your question, the leader thought that there was an actual portal to Atlantis. Like in Treasure Planet or Flint Lockwood's Grocery Deliverator.
** And said deleted scene is the ''only'' one of its kind to be be fully colorized and animated. Why aren't any of the other Disney deleted scenes animated in full detail like the final versions of their films?
*** Because it was only after that scene was fully animated that the decision was made to replace it.

*** The Leviathan has retractable tentacles directly below its eyes. The tentacles come together to fire the beam weapon (a certain amount of energy is channeled through each tentacle, and when all of that energy is combined at one point...), which you can see in the scene where it destroys the ''Ulysses''. The fact that the Viking longship is so small (relative to the Leviathan) is probably why we see the tentacles actually getting used as tentacles (if the thing just smashed the longship with a pincer, the scene would be over in two seconds flat). As for lobsters not having tentacles, the Leviathan is ''based on'' a lobster, but is not meant to be a perfectly accurate 1000x scale model of one (it has two sets of pincers, its head can move without turning the entire cephalothorax, its tail is different from a real lobster's, etc.).
* Did you notice that Rourke (and to a much lesser extent, Helga) is the ''only'' character from the film to actually still appear in the merchandise? Why did Disney still want to market him instead of everyone else from the film? They actually did [[SublimeRhyme the same thing]] with [[Disney/TheBlackCauldron the Horned King.]]

* Here's one that I don't get. The first time the Crystal took someone of Royal Family, we're suppose to assume that she died, but when it uses Kida to do basically the same thing it did with her mother, why did it give Kida back? Why didn't it give back her mother? What's the distinguishing characteristic between the two characters or the two events?
** I assumed the difference had something to do with the 10,000 years of fusion-time difference, and possibly the sheer amount of energy that it originally took to avert the worst effects of the Maebelmok and produce a permanent geological shield to keep the city sustainable.

** The king mentioned that it would "bind" to Kida if they didn't disconect them quick enough when he told them that it was "alive in a way". That was partly why he asked them to save her before it was to late. He didn't want her to be bound to the crystal forever.
* Why are the Atlanteans still tanned if they're living in a place without any sunlight? If you look very closely, you can easily tell that Kida has much lighter skin than those of the other Atlanteans, but still very tan otherwise. In the sequel, she for some reason has very dark skin.

* Others have said it, but it still needs saying: Atlanteans from the time of the Mebelmok are still alive today, but they don't know how to read their own language. Even granted that Kida was a toddler and the king was blinded (assuming that Atlantean has no equivalent to braille), ''even if'' you [[guess WildMassGuess]] that only the royal family lives for thousands of years (with the commoners living mere hundreds) this is impossible. There must have been at least ''one'' literate adult among the survivors, and teaching Kida would have been one of their first priorities. By all rights, Atlantean as a written language should be alive and well, with Kida ''teaching'' people how to read the walls, not asking to be taught. But no, they had to give the MightyWhitey something to do.

*** This seems plausible to me. Consider what happened in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyX'': Sin destroys the cities that rely heavily on machina, and not only do people abandon them, but the damn ''church'' starts teaching that machina are inherently evil. The situations aren't that different, apart from the lack of religious authority in Atlantis. Unless the king did in fact outlaw the machines, with this as his justification.

** Atlanteans, at least the royal family, age much, ''much'' slower than surface humans due to their connection to the Heart of Atlantis. This was part of what made it so urgent that Rourke be stopped from removing it: the Atlanteans weren't just losing their power source - it was entirely possible that losing the Heart would kill them all.

*** No, English and French DO share a root language. The PIE language is the obvious example here. English and French could have split as little as 3500 years ago.

** And even if you assume that all Indo-European languages (which both English and French are) are descended from Atlantean, how would that help with communication? Old ''English'' is completely unintelligible to modern English speakers, with a completely different grammar system and three genders. Speaking a certain language is far from a guarantee that you'll be able to understand its descendants. And anyway: Atlantean and English are ''different languages.'' Except for a few cases of mutual intelligibility, you can't magically speak another language fluently with no studying whatsoever, even if they are related.
** Dude, that whole thing was just a handwave to get over the communication problem; else everybody would have to speak through Milo and there would be a lot more subtitles. It makes absolutely no sense if taken seriously.
** You could always go with the excuse that [[AWizardDidIt the crystals helped break down the language barrier.]]

** this becomes horrifying when you realize that thoes planes must have been stored in the escape pod's and that many people died because there was not enough room.

* One thing I never could understand. When Rourke and others finally reached the Heart of Atlantis, it looked like they have no idea how to take the giant sphere flying high above. And the next move of that thing? It packed itself in compact Kida!box, thus simplifying the task of stealing it. Why? How could this help to protect Atlantis?
** The heart of Atlantis only seems to have a few measures of protecting itself. These are A: protect the entire of Atlantis with a force field, but this would be useless in this case. B: Transport the heart into a person and hope they will not be destroyed. Besides, although it might be alive, it seems to be a kind of HiveMind, it might not be that smart.

** This troper was under the impression that there was something still wonky going on with the Heart at that point. The impression she got was that there was supposed to be some machine-like reaction, like 1.) Crisis strikes, 2.) the Heart takes the nearest member of the Royal Family to power it 3.) the Heart stops the crisis, 4.) and the member of the royal family is returned. Given that the Heart didn't work properly after the king abused its power (it didn't return Kida's mother, and was only able to shield part of Atlantis), it seemed that the vague abuse of it somehow corrupted it into not working properly as a defense mechanism. That would explain why it possessed Kida at such an inopportune moment. It saw the invasion of Rourke and the others as a danger, but was unable to function properly to get to actually fixing it. As to what fixed it by the end...well, not entirely certain. It could have been some result of Kida, one of the few Atlantians desperate to actually solve the problems of her society, being the one at the wheel, so to speak.

* Second bother: Rourke was crystallized when Milo sliced his arm with the glass. Okay, great. But then...why does he turn into a wailing ice demon? I know it adds a bit more horror to the climax, but...why? Nothing was mentioned about the crystal turning people into monsters.
** I always interpreted it as a direct poisoning of the body with the crystal tainted glass (and that he turned into a crystal demon, not ice), rather than simply absorbing the rays of the giant crystal. Remember Milo told everyone to not touch [=CrystalKida=], and her being confined in the box almost instantaneously affected the glass.

* Milo and other characters harp on about how taking the crystal out of Atlantis will kill the Atlanteans, but only a couple of mentions are made of the potential danger to the surface world if it got into the wrong hands. So, if I'm following Milo's logic, the death of an already dying civilization is somehow a greater evil than the use of the crystal as a WMD. ValuesDissonance, much?

*** It's been an absurdly long time since I saw the sequel, but do we actually know that the epilogue of the original movie takes place before the sequel, and that Atlanteans don't just have multiple, sometimes distant parts of the funerary/cornoation process for the once and present rulers? If it does definitely happen that way, maybe Kida's "tattoos" are just ceremonial paint that use the same pigment as her tattoos, and she won't collect the full range of royal tattoos until she has been in the throne for a while, or [[DoubleStandard spontaneously and retroactively becomes male]].

* Others have said it, but I just can't get over it: Atlanteans from the time of the Mebelmok are still alive today, but they don't know how to read their own language. Even granted that Kida was a toddler and the king was blinded (assuming that Atlantean has no equivalent to braille), ''even if'' you make the WildMassGuess that only the royal family lives for thousands of years (with the commoners living mere hundreds) this is impossible. There must have been at least ''one'' literate adult among the survivors, and teaching Kida would have been one of their first priorities. By all rights, Atlantean as a written language should be alive and well, with Kida ''teaching'' people how to read the walls, not asking to be taught. But no, they had to give the MightyWhitey something to do.

*** Atlantis wasn't an orally-driven society before it sank - they've got writing all over the damn ''walls'', after all. And you'd think that one of the most important things they could do for their survival was to make sure everyone was still able to use their technology (which, after all, was still undamaged and functional in 1914). Your linguistic explanation would work just fine for us surface humans, but it ignores Atlanteans' extended lifespans. Remember, Kida herself was alive at the time of the Mebelmok, and she's only aged from a toddler to - at the oldest - her early twenties since then. All it would have taken was someone taking the time to teach her - just ''her'', never mind everybody else - how to read back in the day, and written Atlantean would never have been lost.

*** Hmm. Not impossible, but it would require two major assumptions: 1) that the Atlanteans wouldn't decide that the king had gone mad and depose him, and 2) that Atlantean commoners were much less long-lived than the royal family, so there were no literate adults left when the ability to read became necessary to save the city from invaders.
** Also, Atlantis could have been set up parallel to ancient Christianity, where only those in power (nobility/clergy) could read, and the "poor" didn't. If that was the case here, with a lot of history, I could see them losing their written language to being the case. Also, RuleOfDrama.
*** A technology-driven society couldn't function that way. People need to be able to read manuals and instruction books. And the whole point of the JustBugsMe page is that we think something pushes the rules too far.
** The writing on the walls could have been an official style. Something similar occurred in ancient Egypt, where you had hieratic writing for everyday use and hieroglyphic writing for religious/formal functions. Only priests could read hieroglyphic writing, as it was considered a mark of their position. If the Atlanteans who weren't priests use a different type of writing and all the priests are dead, then that explains why Milo is the only one able to read. After all, if a modern-day Egyptologist were to travel back in time, his skills would be markedly different from those of the common people. And hieratic writing wasn't carved into the walls or onto the Rosetta Stone.

** I thought only the royal family lived that long. The only ones left from that period would then be the king and Kida, and the king could have refused to help rebuild his civilization beyond keeping his people content because he has seen what power-hunger and arrogance leads to.

** According to the [[http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Kida Disney Wiki]], the king was afraid that other Atlantians would attempt to use the crystal as he did (which was, you know, what ultimately led to the place being sunk) and passed laws forbidding the people from learning the language to keep that from happening. If we assume that most of the adult population was either killed in the sinking or died of old age or other causes (malnutrition, health issues, etc),
** Perhaps Kida didn't know her own written language because she has dyslexia. That's how I always Handwaved to myself.
*** That was my guess too. I also thought that maybe the Great Crystal was rewriting minds (either hers or all of Atlantis) to think in its terms. Since it's from a distant planet, maybe that planet's writing system (or heiroglyphs, or runes, or whatever) was being written into their minds. There was no example of that writing anywhere, so they couldn't read it, but it had replaced all their knowledge of their OWN writing system in the years of direct, inescapable exposure to it. It may have affected Kida more than anyone else because it was preparing her to be its Vessel/Avatar/Host.
** One possible concept is the complexity of the Atlantean language. Take this, for example: What wasn't destroyed during the Mebelmok? The royal palace, some civilian housing, and religious structures and foundations which merely sank. Now imagine that in one day everything but your neighborhood was wiped out in an instant, including Libraries, Schools, etc. etc. In Ancient times, literature was a luxury, and when the flood occured, that luxury was nearly entirely wiped out. Now, even if you were the most literate adult in Atlantis after thousands of years away from contact from your language due to most of it being sunk, most of it being criminalized and so on, after thousands of years would you really recognize complex writings required to operate machinery? You can communicate just fine, but it's been so long since you've seen it that you can only pick up on so much, which is why Kida was still able to read the instructions, but she couldn't make out more complex symbols due to a lack of resources. It seems logical when you account what all was destroyed as opposed to what all was preserved, and when you think of it, the only reason people nowadays have an easier time reading is because we've integrated it into our everyday lives. We depend on it. Most likely not the case way back then.
** I always thought it had something to do with the crystals, if its has the power to give extended life to Atlanteans, then there is a possibility that it has also the power to take away knowledge as well, perhaps in someway its alive since weve seen at begining in the film ,kida´s mother become one with the crystal. So in oder to prevent the crystal from being used as a weapon again it took the ability to read which was essential in order to use those flying machines
** It is entirely possible that Atlantians have lost the ability to read, and by extension, write. It happened to the Acient Greeks in the late Bronze Age and resulted in a period that lasted roughly four hundred years called the Dark Ages. The Greeks only accquired the knowledge to read and write because they adopted the alphabet of a trading people known as the Phoenicians (the same ones that are in Homer's Odysessy). It's acctually a case of FridgeBrilliance because the Atlantians have had little to no contact with any civilisation after the sinking of Atlantis so therefore they couldn't have gotten the knowledge of how to read and write.

*** A surprising number of Americans today are barely literate enough to text 'lol' to their friends and learn which celebrities are getting divorced this week. A surprising number are incapable of programming or maintaining their various gadgets, using the instructions written in their manuals. An absolutely astounding number vote on complex political issues without reading the plentiful information provided to help them decide. Now imagine a large percentage of the engineers and educators die in a great flood and there's a 6000-year period in which the celebrities don't divorce, the gadgets don't need maintenance or repair, and the King has the only vote.
** This premise actually isn't too farfetched.For a real-life example, Linda Schele is a renowned archaeologist who is known for teaching the modern Mayan people their indigenous language. There have been similar cases in Egypt (hieroglyphics) and Greek (Mycenaean Linear A). There weren't any immortals around in those cases, of course, but both time gaps were ''much'' smaller.
** There's also a line from Kida where she says the people are only content because they do not know better. Or something to that extent. It sort of implies that Kida and her father and possibly a select few others are the only ones to have been alive when the island sank. So if there's only two plus people alive from olden times, it's not surprising the written language has died out. Hell I know people who have all but forgotten how to write with a pen since leaving school.

* Help me with the timeline. It's established that the movie is set in 1914 (for the humans, at least). Yet dialogue suggests Atlantis sunk hundreds if not thousands of years prior. Kida tells Milo she remembers the day Atlantis sunk and Milo calculates that she has to be a hundred years old. Um, what? Did Atlantis sink in 1814 instead? Or maybe I missed the point and Atlantiens just age slower than humans?

** Yes, you did miss the point. Atlanteans, at least the royal family, age much, ''much'' slower than surface humans due to their connection to the Heart of Atlantis. This was part of what made it so urgent that Rourke be stopped from removing it: the Atlanteans weren't just losing their power source - it was entirely possible that losing the Heart would kill them all.
* Supposedly, the Atlantians can understand the explorers because they speak a root language from which English (and French) descended. I'm willing to buy that Atlantian language contains the words (or at least words similar enough) for them to tell what the explorers are saying, but how on Earth do they know how to ''only'' use "English" words when speaking to them?

** And for some reason, the Leviathan in this scene has tentacles. Why does the Leviathan have tentacles? It's supposed to be a giant mechanical lobster, and [[YouFailBiologyForever lobsters don't have tentacles!]]

* How does Kida know what stars look like, if Atlantis has been submerged for 9000 years?

** It's a good point. I subconsciously assumed that Cookie was actually part of Whitmore's earlier teams back in the days when he went on these kinds of expeditions ''himself,'' and was simply the only one whose skill set never needed to be upgraded to 'best in their field'. There's certainly an implication that he's a long-time ActionSurvivor.

** This premise actually isn't too farfetched.For a real-life example, Linda Schele is a renowned archaeologist who is known for teaching the modern Mayan people their indigenous language.

** A surprising number of Americans today are barely literate enough to text 'lol' to their friends and learn which celebrities are getting divorced this week. A surprising number are incapable of programming or maintaining their various gadgets, using the instructions written in their manuals. An absolutely astounding number vote on complex political issues without reading the plentiful information provided to help them decide. Now imagine a large percentage (including engineers and educators) die and there's a 6000-year period in which the celebrities don't divorce, the gadgets don't need maintenance or repair, and the King has the only vote.

** A surprising number of Americans today are barely literate enough to text 'lol' to their friends and learn which celebrities are getting divorced this week. A surprising number are incapable of programming or maintaining their various gadgets, using the instructions written in their manuals. An absolutely astounding number vote on complex political issues without reading the plentiful information provided to help them decide. Now imagine a large percentage (including engineers and educators) die and there's a 6000-year period in which the celebrities don't do much, the gadgets don't need maintenance or repair, and the King doesn't ask for any opinions.

** A surprising number of Americans today are barely literate enough to text 'lol' to their friends and learn which celebrities are getting divorced this week. A surprising number are incapable of programming or maintaining their various gadgets, using the instructions written in their manuals. An absolutely astounding number vote on complex political issues without reading the plentiful information provided to help them decide. Now imagine a 6000-year period in which the celebrities don't do much, the gadgets don't need maintenance or repair, and the King doesn't ask for any opinions.

** i always thought it had something to do with the crystals, if its has the power to give extended life to Atlanteans, then there is a possibility that it has also the power to take away knowledge as well, perhaps in someway its alive since weve seen at begining in the film ,kida´s mother become one with the crystal. So in oder to prevent the crystal from being used as a weapon again it took the ability to read which was essential in order to use those flying machines

** A surprising number of Americans today are barely literate enough to text 'lol' to their friends and learn which celebrities are getting divorced this week. A surprising number are incapable of programming or maintaining their various gadgets, using the instructions written in their manuals. An absolutely astounding number vote on complex political issues without reading the plentiful information provided to help them decide.

** There's also a line from Kida where she says the people are only content because they do not know better. Or something to that extent. It sort of implies that Kida and her father and possibly a select few others are the only ones to have been alive when the island sank. So if there's only two plus people alive from olden times, it's not surprising the written language has died out. Hell I know people who have all but forgotten how to write with a pen since leaving school.

* Ever notice that Kida is the ''only'' Princess created by Disney to become [[TheHighQueen a Queen]] at the end of her film?

** [[Disney/{{Frozen}} Not anymore.]]

* Cookie, the Chef who act's like it's 1870, makes absolutely no sense. Think about it, these are highly specialized, highly paid and highly trained Mercenaries that are hunting for "myths" and trying to make a buck while doing it. But Cookie is not specialized in any regard; he's not smart, he's not specialized, hell, he can't even Cook (His food is all gloop and slop and unhealthy)! Unlike the rest of the team that has specialized equipment or standard buggies for the time, he uses a freakin' wagon as his mode of transportation and a Civil War era '''Musket''' as his weapon of choice! Why have this guy on your mercenary team at all? He doesn't do anything that would help the Mercenaries at all!
** It's slop, but it's edible, and according to him will 'keep and keep and keep'. He's apparently figured out how to make nasty but very long lasting, evidently nutritious food with ridiculous but simple ingredients, such as [[BreadEggsMilkSquick beans, bacon, whiskey and lard]]. On potentially month-lasting expeditions like that, tell me you wouldn't want a man like that making such useful food. Beans in cans, whiskey barrels... it's all fairly easy to cart around and preserve.