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.

So are the Drej out to exterminate humanity or not?

• So the story kicks off because humans invented the Titan Project, and somehow that pissed off the Drej enough that they decided to destroy Earth over it. Okay, fine — but why didn't they finish the job? After Earth is destroyed, there are still humans scattered throughout the galaxy, whether it's scraping by on the edges of alien societies or huddled in drifter colonies in the middle of nowhere. Why do the Drej ignore them? Heck, why did the Drej eject Akima in a human-friendly space capsule instead of just shooting her or throwing her into space? Conversely, if the Drej were only upset about the Titan Project, why bother to destroy the Earth when they could have used a simpler surgical strike on the Titan itself?
  • Their top priority seems to be to eradicate all knowledge of the Titan Project. Akima and the vast majority of the drifters don't seem to know anything significant about the technology or where the Titan is - at least, in the former case, nothing that Korso and Preed can't pass along already - so the Drej figure they might as well leave them for later clean-up operations. Destroying the whole Earth rather than just the Titan Project HQ was necessary, in Drej opinion, because A) information about the technology was probably stored elsewhere on the planet, and B) taking out Earth also takes out whatever defense forces might've tried to retaliate, afterward. Even if the Drej vastly out-classed humans' space military at the time, they didn't need the headache.

Get your free spaceship, no money down!

• For what is supposed to be a hardscrabble colony barely surviving in the middle of space nowhere, the people of New Bangkok didn't have any problems with giving Cale one of their old spaceships just because. Shouldn't there have been some resistance to this? Wouldn't the colonists want to hang on every piece of tech or material or fuel they have left, to help increase their own odds of survival a little bit more? Sure, it was a broken junkheap and needed a lot of work to get spaceworthy, but it seems like everyone was glad to pitch in on nothing more than Cale's boyish charm. Seriously?
  • Considering the entirety of the Phoenix had apparently served as a residence for one man and his tiny dog, New Bangkok doesn't seem to have been starved for living space. If the homeowner is willing to donate his "house" to the cause, why not? Especially if Cale is the only one around with the skill to restore the engines and make it useful for something other than bunk space. Besides, he and Akima may have promised to return the ship, now fully operational, to New Bangkok once they're done with it.

Do we need Cale or not?

• In the Ice Rings of Tigrin, Korso's crew need to follow Cale in order to find the Titan, as the only way to locate it is to use the map that Professor Tucker gave him. But if the map was that important, why did Korso and Preed simply let him go when he escaped onto New Bangkok? It's not as if the colonists had a dozen working spaceships that he could have used to escape, so why not stick around and hunt down Cale if he was that critical for finding the Titan?

Only two keys for the Titan?

• According to Professor Tucker's message, activating the Titan requires two things: a massive energy source and the ring on Cale's finger. Even assuming Tucker had a spare ring of his own, this means that the only hope humanity has of creating a new planet for itself rests in the hands (literally) of two people... in the entire galaxy. Not only is this incredibly foolhardy gambit a horrible case of Writers Cannot Do Math, but it begs the question of what would have happened if Cale had lost the ring or gotten himself incapacitated in the 15 years after Earth was destroyed. What was Professor Tucker thinking?
  • For all we know, Professor Tucker's project staff who'd worked alongside him on the Titan all had rings like Cale's as well. Unfortunately, none of them were able to finish the job, whether because they died in the evacuation, were hunted down by the Drej later, or simply had no clue where to look for Titan after losing touch with their boss.