Headscratchers / Titan A.E.

What the Hell did Korso think he was going to get out of his deal with the Drej Queen?

• Honestly, Captain, what could the Drej possibly offer you that would be worth selling out your entire species to their mortal enemy? If things go pear-shaped (as they indeed did), you've pretty much burned ALL your bridges; no-one in their right mind would want anything to do with you, outside of maybe hunting you down and terminating you with extreme prejudice. And what makes you think the Drej will honor their end of the bargain? They clearly view humans as vermin to be exterminated, and probably you doubly so for being a dirty traitor.
  • "The human race is outta gas. It's circling the drain. It's finished! The only thing that matters is grabbing whatcha can before somebody else beats ya to it." Korso flat-out admits that he's given up hope on the human race, and he'd rather live out the rest of his life in comfort than on the run. The only people that care about the extinction of the human race are the Drej and the humans; Korso believes that the former will decide he isn't worth going after once the Titan is destroyed, and that the latter will be too focused on trying to survive to bother chasing after him. Yes, there's prejudice against humans in this universe, but this is most likely because they have a reputation of being uppity, dirt-poor refugees. With enough money, most aliens wouldn't really care that he's human or that he betrayed his own race.
    • And that's assuming anyone else would even know he'd done so. It's not like he didn't show a willingness to dispose of his own crew members if it served his purpose; probably he had no intention of leaving any witnesses to his schemes.
  • Another possibility is he sees it as a win-win. Either he gets paid and gets to live the rest of his life in relative comfort (which is good), or the Drej just up and kill him for being a human and traitor (in which case he's dead so no biggie).

Tau 14's Sign

• If Tau 14 is a place that discriminates so much against humans, why does the station have it's name spelled on the side in the English Alphabet?
  • Maybe the station was built before Earth was destroyed and humans became a despised minority, and the sign is a relic of that time.

Why do the non-human characters refer to themselves as "aliens"?

• In several scenes, for example the lunch-queue scene near the beginning of the movie, non-human characters refer to themselves as aliens. Sure they are from a human point of view, but surely not their own?
  • Maybe they count themselves as "aliens" in whatever place they're in. Since it's not their homeworld, they're still "alien" to that particular planet, and saying "alien" is easier than having to outright identify their species.

How did the humans know to evacuate Earth when the Drej came?

• Cale's dad specifically mentions that "they came without warning and without mercy." Going by that, the humans should have had no idea the Drej were coming with the intent to wipe them out, let alone be ready to be launching evacuation ships. (And I'm just going by what's told to us in the movie in this case.) One could say that the Drej have already had hostile encounters with the humans, but that's never clarified. There's no mention of them having destroyed planets before so again, no reason humans would think they were here to destroy Earth. There is mention of them breaching the planetary defense systems, but it looks like it's only the fighters breaching the atmosphere while the mothership stays in high orbit and prepares its death ray. The humans should have been caught completely unawares if the Drej were attacking "without warning." Instead, it looks like they were at least somewhat prepared for this scenario, even if most humans were still probably killed when the Earth blew up.
  • Maybe the experimentation leading up to the Titan's development was dangerous enough, in itself, that Earth's inhabitants had constructed evacuation ships just in case the breakthrough had Gone Horribly Wrong. Alternately, it could be that the Drej weren't the first aliens to threaten Earth, but merely the first to succeed. So, unused escape ships were left over from some previous crisis.
  • Earth in 3028 seems to be a dying world even before it's destruction, hence the reason for the Titan Project to be launched in the first place. The skies are filled with smog or dust, and even from space, the planet is predominantly brown. The escape ships may have been built in advance to support the mass exodus from Earth once the Titan project was completed, and when the Drej arrived, the arks are used as escape vehicles.

Why the deception?

• So Korso plans on delivering the Titan to the Drej, largely because "The human race is outta gas, it's circling the drain, it's finished!" It's a traitorous, nihilistic view that Cal naturally opposes at that point in the film. Thing is, Cal actually had a similar outlook at the beginning of the movie, which he told Korso about. Had Korso just laid out his true intentions from the start, the more cynical, nihilistic Cal of the first act likely would've been on board with the plan.
  • In the first act, Kale might be jaded and apathetic, but he's not interested in helping the Drej accomplish their goals. He just wants to stay out of the way. Plus, even if Korso and Cale were on the same page, Akima is not, and Korso probably didn't trust Cale to betray the girl he has the hots for to finish the plan.