Thread by @AlexandraErin

Night at the Museum 2 is a movie about how horrible it is for your beloved friends to be shoved into a box in a basement where you don't get to see them, and it makes its point more effectively, directly, and literally than most films.

Like if a Godzilla movie gave you cancer.

Also I feel like movies that have a good romantic pairing don't have to tell you so many times that they do.

Fantasy doesn't need to explain magic, but in a well-designed fantasy series, taking the magical phlebotinum outside its original context should reveal more about the intricacies of its workings. I feel like the Night at the Museum series made a mistake in broadening its horizons

The first movie had some moderate amounts of baling wire and papier-mâché logic, but I left it feeling like I understood what the tablet did.

The second movie stretches the premise very thin and then punches several holes in it.

The first movie left us with the implication that the I think unnamed in the film but presumably American Museum of Natural History, being one building in this universe, was affected by the tablet because it was all in the same building. One tablet, one spell, one building.

The second movie relocates the tablet to the Smithsonian, and all the buildings in the Smithsonian complex are now affected by the spell. So it affects one museum, regardless of number of buildings? Or possibly the tunnels were enough to make them count as one building.

And then at the conclusion of the film, the tablet is relocated back to the museum in New York, during the magic hours between sunset and sunrise, and its spell now affects the New York museum.

Animated beings outside the affected building when the sun comes up are turned to dust... does that mean everything in the Smithsonian museums and archives got Thanos-snapped for not being in the New York museum?

You can tell me that I'm overthinking this but it's what I was thinking about during the film's denouement because while the first film was surprisingly charming and engaging, the second one... left all the likeable characters behind or stuffed them in a box in the basement.

Huh. I hadn't considered that Abe wasn't already awake. I guess if most of the things weren't waking up until Larry and the tablet drew near them, that does answer a lot of questions about the first night at the Smithsonian.

https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/1362586759721226241

And why the rockets hadn't already launched. I feel like this could have been better conveyed by showing things animating, but I don't want to ding this movie for *not* hitting us over the head with something for once.

But if the first night, the only things that woke up were things down in the archives around where the New York shipment was, that does answer some questions about how the first night didn't result in widespread destruction.

I still have questions about the exact proscription about being outside after sunrise. What's "inside"? Is any building the tablet was in during its active period "inside"? Or is it literally any building?

I just... this movie took so much trouble to explain exactly what it was doing in so many ways, but again, I feel like it really clouded up its own lore regarding the magic at the center of its premise.

Like, oh, let's have multiple characters reference that Larry can't put his cellphone down and then he misses advice from the wisest waxwork in New York because of it. Not subtle! Multiple characters tell us he's great with Amelia, just in case we didn't see what they were doing.

We get five interminable minutes of Ben Stiller and Jonah Hill Ben Stillering and Jonah Hilling at each other to explain how Larry gets a keycard, but not one throwaway line to explain how he knew he wasn't sending all his friends to their death by taking them back to New York?

I mean, it's an easy enough fix. If they stayed in DC when he took the tablet back, they are dead anyway, so might as well take the risk that *this* ridiculous way is how the ridiculous magic happens to work.

But just one exchange to acknowledge that it's a gamble.

"How do you know this is going to work?"

"Because it has to."

Cliche, but this movie was not above a cliche.

See, you're explaining how the movie ended up this way, which is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the way it ended up.

https://twitter.com/borland/status/1362590996379230208

The first movie was also a Ben Stiller movie, but the internal lore was reasonably coherent within itself and the parameters of the world seemed clear enough.