Headscratchers / Unbreakable

As a Headscratchers subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Elijah chasing the guy with the gun

• Why did Elijah decide it was a good idea to chase after a guy who was armed? And even if he managed to catch up with the guy, what was he gonna do?
  • For the first question; Elijah wanted to test David's flash vision of a gun in the guy's belt. If he had one, then boom: David has a verified superpower, as far as Elijah is concerned anyway. Second question; Elijah isn't one hundred percent sane, is he? It would have been a case of Didn't Think This Through, for all that Elijah is a supervillain, he's only a master planner, he's not great at improvising.

Scars

• Why does David Dunn seem to have chicken pox scars on his face when he has never gotten sick a day in his life?
  • The extent of David's resistance to illness is triggered when Elijah asks him "How many days in your life have you been sick?" He has no recollection of any adult sickness, never took a sick day at his job and his wife can't recall him ever being sick either. Early in the film, the closest he ever commits to never being sick is being 75% sure and later in the film he reveals that, as a kid, he spent a week in the hospital recovering from pneumonia caused by a near-drowning incident. This leads to four possible in-universe answers:
    a) While he was never sick as an adult, as a child his "unbreakable-ness" was still developing and he did catch some childhood diseases like chicken pox but, because of his durability, they never lasted long nor caused him any discomfort thus he had no reason to recall his childhood illnesses.
    b) During his childhood hospital stay while recovering from pneumonia, he may have also contracted chicken pox while his system was weakened and recovering but he wasn't aware of it.
    c) Except for the pneumonia incident which was related to his Kryptonite Factor, he really never was sick in his life and whatever scarring seems to be on his face simply was not caused by chicken pox but maybe something mundane like acne.
    d) He caught the chicken pox from a schoolmate while both were walking to or from school in the rain. Once he came inside and dried off, the illness passed so quickly he didn't remember having it, but not before leaving some marks on his face.
• David's power seems limited to averting significant injuries or illnesses, not trivial stuff like zits or the signs of aging. If he was immune to every possible infection or wound, you'd think he'd have found out years ago from a routine vaccination or pre-marital blood test (still mandatory in Pennsylvania at the time he got hitched) that couldn't pierce his skin.

Other Powers

• Why is David super strong, immune to disease, and can Detect Evil? If Elijah's theory is correct then that means he would have to be sickly, weak, and have some sort of evil version of the other power but we see no evidence of that.
  • Superheroes and their nemeses don't have to be diametric opposites in everything. And Elijah wasn't searching for a superhero who was his exact personal counterpart, he was seeking any person who was immune to physical injury. That he happened to find someone who had additional powers was just luck and/or narrative causality at work.
  • The opposite to David's Detect Evil would be the ability to detect goodness in people. David can find criminals and villains. So his hypothetical diametric opposite would have the ability to find heroes...

There is logic in what he says

• Glass' plan doesn't appear to make much sense. Based on the fact that he's unusually intelligent, and superhero comics evoke a lot of the same symbolism used in ancient stories about demigods and heroes... superheroes are out there somewhere, and the best way to expose one is to crash a train at random and just kind of hope one of the passengers might turn out to be one of them? It would make marginally more sense if he knew other people with explicitly superhuman, rather than merely unusual as in his case, powers, or something, but we don't get any indication of that.
  • That's kind of why he's the bad guy. Because his plans are needlessly destructive and not well thought out.

Taking your son

• Why did David take his Joseph when he first met with Elijah?
  • He's trying to rebuild his relationship with his son, going places together is part of that. It also would have been irresponsible to leave the kid to his own devices, while Audrey was probably at work. Also, possibly they were already out doing something in the vicinity and he decided on the spur of the moment to go to the gallery.

Elijah's Competence

• The airplane and the Amtrak require him to have undisturbed access to high security places and the technical knowledge to sabotage them without anyone realizing it, and the hotel fire required him to meet an old hotel worker who'd casually reveal to a random stranger in a bar how to kill everyone in it easily. It seems less intelligence and more super luck that is Elijah's gift.
  • Or he is super-good at finding people who will let him in places and/or tell him things they shouldn't. He seems fairly well off, if owning an art gallery in downtown Philly is any indicator; he probably has the resources to find or buy the technical knowledge needed to commit his crimes.