Headscratchers / The Ruins

• Okay, they can't burn the plant with fire using alcohol as an accellerant, but salting the earth somehow works against it? And how has the plant remained so isolated for this long, considering its super-fast growth and sentience!?
  • Salting the earth prevents other plants from growing up there and getting eaten by the vines and probably prevents it from taking root outside the pyramid. You could ask the last sentence for a lot of horror premises.
    • most plants won't grow in salty soil. That's where the phrase "salting the earth" comes from, where when you really want to screw your enemies in war, you salt the earth so that they can never grow crops there again. And considering what happens when you burn poison ivy, setting fire to that thing might lead to a Return of the Living Dead ending.
  • Burning plants can also cause the seeds or spores that it reproduces through to float over long distances allowing the plant to spread
    • Interesting how by themselves the plant spores apparently can't go airborne anyways. Which would render moot all attempts to quarantine it on the ground.
  • What was keeping these plants in check long before humans showed up? They don't seem to have any predators, and probably no parasites or diseases either.
    • No explanation is ever given for what exactly the Plant is, which means that it could be a supernatural creature, which would explain a LOT of this.
    • Nothing? The Mayan tribe was there longer than the plant was. I mean, since the temple was there before the plant, it stands to reason.
  • In the book, at least, it's suggested that the Mayans have a truce with the plant. They don't try to kill it, and it's happy to stay on its hill, with the salted dirt surrounding it to make sure that it keeps up its end of the bargain. In the movie, there's a possibility that they could worship the plant, since they've apparently built a pyramid up around it, so that would explain why they haven't tried to kill it.
  • If the natives know how dangerous the plant is why would they take those kids to the ruins in the first place?!
    • They didn't. The yuppies (carrying that Idiot Ball proudly) stumble upon the pyramid by accident. The natives run out of the jungle, screaming at them to get away from there. They naturally run up the pyramid, rather than staying put like they're told.
    • The cab driver tried to warn them away, but gave in when they insisted. And to be fair, they couldn't understand the guardians, who were speaking some native language other than Spanish.
  • So, why exactly did they immediately quarantine the stupid tourists? None of them were carrying the plant, yet. Besides, what do they care? So a few stupid Americans take a man-eating plant home. Serves them right. Let the American government take care of that. Better than holding them hostage in the death pyramid.
    • They may not be total Jerkass tribesmen or whatever they are, perhaps? Also, consider the above ideas that The natives may either worship the vine as some sort of supernatural being or have some sort of truce with it. If they worship it, they may see it as a sort of offering in that - once it touches the pyramid, it belongs to the plant. This may also be one of the terms assumed to be part of the 'truce.' Really, there just isn't enough information to tell, but it COULD have an explanation. That may be, in fact, a point.
    • The feeling I got from the book was that the native people were more interested in keeping the plant where it was. They definitely did not worship it. The spores were also said to be very sticky, such that anything it touched (especially clothing) could not be cleaned enough to get the spores off. So once Amy (in the book) was touched by the plant, she had spores on her. The native people knew the others would try to get her out, so they were all forced into quarantine. No idea how it was in the movie.
    • Look how fast it spreads! Ever hear of a movie called The Thing (1982)? You have to do what it takes to keep an infection like that contained. Sucks to be them.
    • Initially the Mayans didn't seem to be trying to quarantine the tourists. Watch the scene again. They begin to calm down at first, at least until the girl makes physical contact with the plant. That was when they REALLY freaked out!
• At several times in the film, parts of the background ripple and move independent of the camera's movement. Is it bad CGI? Flimsy prop walls? An indication that the plants weren't actually moving and the whole thing was caused by some sort of hallucinogen produced by the plant? Who knows...
• Why not build a wall or a gate around the temple? It might help keep people out!
  • If the natives do have some sort of truce with it, it could be that walling it in and not allowing it at least a few sacrifices a year would be a breach. Heaven help whoever makes a true enemy of the plant, especially if it decided to mobilize before they were done. Alternatively, a giant wall might attract too much attention, more people coming in to see what the fuss is about, leading to more trouble. In the book at least the town seems to be barely getting by, and constructing a massive wall or substantial gate would be expensive.
  • Though the wall doesn't have to be really thick or massive or made of heavy material if salt was enough to keep the plant in (not even going into how it can't seem to spread spores in the air—or allow any flying pollinators like birds or insects to spread it farther). It could even be made of organic material itself, like trees or bamboos planted thickly together, so long as it's well out of reach of the plant; just needs to be tall enough to hide the hill/pyramid. Of course, if flimsy enough to break through, that might not be enough to deter curious-to-death tourists either. (Anyways the path leading to it was already hidden from the main trail by a fake plant made from propped-up big leaves, and that certainly didn't stop them.)
• Why didn't the Mayans get a quick translator that could translate any warning they give to the inevitable stupid tourists who wanders to the temple? For that matter, the main cast were going into a MAYAN ruin, why wouldn't they have someone that could speak the native language? Or even a Mayan to whatever language they may speak as a dictionary?
  • Or even better yet, just get anyone to draw any warning symbols— odd the natives hadn't thought of this yet, considering these Mayans' ancestors were known for pictographic writing! Any halfway-decent artist might at least be able to draw the plant claiming or killing a human who wandered into it, and one doesn't need Michelangelo to convey what essentially amounts to a traffic warning label. Most importantly, any such signage would have to be out of reach of the plant, because in the book, it's always the trapped humans who try to put up warnings, but this fails because the Plant's smart enough to take them down; Jeff wrote one on paper, found it had been burned through the next day, snooped around and found other, much older signs that had been torn down (and only survived for being written on inorganic material), and that's when the true horror dawns on him- just how long this has been going on?! Of course, effective warning signs might invalidate the whole survival plot, but hey, more people lived that way.