Bruce Almighty/Headscratchers

• Early in the movie, Bruce gets overwhelmed by the huge number of prayers he receives (in the millions). As it later turns out, he's only given control of one city. So where did all those prayers come from?
  • Hearing the prayers of one city, not having control over one city. His powers could still affect what was outside the city. For example, the moon and the stars.
  • One city does have millions of inhabitants, and people are shown praying before their meals, so you can roughly multiply that by three. Then there's the lots of lottery related prayers, many made probably at the lottery itself. It's not hard to get a number that high.
    • Not to mention if you consider any time someone wishes internally for something, it may qualify as a prayer, since they're associating it to a higher power and in this world, God is well, God. So every time someone is like "Please let me make enough to pay rent this week" or "God someone make this annoying kid go away" may count as a prayer.
      • Wow, that's some grade-A Nightmare Fuel when you really think about it. Just imagine some of the "prayers" people make without realizing it. "God, I hope that asshole gets cancer!" "God, somebody kill that bastard who plays loud music in the middle of the night!"
• If Bruce has all the powers of God, why doesn't he just make a program on his prayer computer that answers prayers according to God's wisdom? Bam! He does God's job and gets to have fun as well.
  • Because he wasn't smart enough to think of it.
    • Which ironically, God knew.
  • Thank you! With the power of God he could assign a part of his own brain to do it constantly. Presumeably that's how the big G does it.
  • The scene may have been meant as a subtle Aesop explaining or rationalizing the reason why God doesn't answer everyone's prayers. This would have been negated if he'd come up with such a program. It might have worked better if he had made the special program and the writers had come up with a good reason why such a thing either couldn't work or would cause more problems than it solves. (And, of course, the aforementioned Aesop comes in to play anyway when everyone wins the lottery.)
    • Actually, "yes" isn't the only answer to a prayer. The teaching is that all prayers are answered; the answer is just sometimes "not yet," or "no".
• How does, for instance, manipulating someone's body like a puppet to make a fool of him on television not fall under the umbrella of "interfering with free will"?
  • Bruce's powers aren't limited in interfering with people's lives. If they were then we wouldn't have much of a movie. Bruce wasn't altering the anchorman's mind or personality, Bruce was simply mucking around with his vocal chords --- a purely physical act, like the difference between telekinesis and mind-control. The anchorman was still free to feel however he wanted about the situation, and everyone else viewing was free to judge him however they wanted. Bruce couldn't just make everyone viewing hate the anchorman, but he could work towards it. On a darker note, there are plenty of alternatives that Bruce could have taken to get Jennifer Aniston's character to love him. He could have erased her memory of what he did to displease her (maybe this counts as a violation, I don't know.) and she would still retain her free-will. Bruce couldn't make Jennifer Aniston's character love him, but he could probably make her into a puppet, or stimulate certain glands to make her react to him, but it wouldn't be love obviously, and Bruce would be a rapist for doing so. She would still have her free-will in any case, as her mind wouldn't be controlled but her body would be. He could have erased everyone else in existence, leaving only himself and her in the world. He could have also created a complete copy of her, perfect in every respect, and still the original would have retained her free-will. I doubt the copy would count as someone whose free-will was being violated.
  • If the copy retained free will, it'd hate him as well.
• Full-scale riots because of meager lottery winnings. What the hell? First of all, most lottery players usually win nothing at all, and somehow it doesn't incite riots. Why the hell here? People couldn't even lose money on it, since, obviously, their winnings amounted to the price of the ticket (if I understand the concept of lottery right). Sure, they'd think it was bizzare, but riots? Is lottery such a Serious Business?
  • There's a big difference between, "Oh, I didn't win." and "Holy shit! I WON! I WON! I GET TO QUIT THIS JOB AND LIVE OFF MY MILLIONS OF--...Fifteen bucks? Are you shitting me?"
    • Aren't there more prizes besides a single jackpot?
      • Not for the same numbers.
• Bruce IS a rapist. He gets attacked by those punks. And with his huge new set of powers...what does he do? Rape a man with a monkey.
  • He's (temporarily) God. Omniscient Morality License applies.
• So did he keep his powers at the end? He's shown not using them anymore, but he didn't come into a situation where he would (with his new aesop wisdom). And there was no official renouncing of powers onscreen. So, does he have them or not?
  • There is official renouncing of powers onscreen. When Bruce is walking in the rain, falls to his knees, and says, "I don't want to be God. I want you to decide what's right for me!" Immediately after, he is hit by the truck and when he wakes up in hospital, he no longer has God's powers.
• How exactly did everyone win the lottery? Sure, everyone prayed for it, but it's practically impossible that everyone bet on the same numbers, and the winning numbers are openly announced. Was the huge amount of reality altering needed to make this work -- either retroactively changing the number that was bet for everyone, or somehow changing the numbers on-the-fly each time someone came to get the prize -- actually performed?
  • Maybe everyone entered a different lottery, or the powers RetConned history so everyone chose the same numbers.
    • I think the numbers were all different, but everyone sees the different numbers as the winning number, no matter who it is or who says it. The numbers really aren't the same, just everyone's perceptions about the lottery winnings are altered. You have a different number, you hear the announcer say the winning number and you hear it as your own. You bring it in and the announcer sees your different number as the winning number (whatever it is), and he says the winning number is such and such, and you hear that it is the number you put in. If the winning number is 986544, and your number is 888145, you hear that the winning number as 888145. The announcer sees the 888145 as 986544, vice versa.
    • That wouldn't work at all, because the lottery companies are paying out to everyone. If there was only one actual winning number, everyone else who "won" would just have their claim dismissed the second it became clear that the number on their ticket was different from the number actually chosen.
      • What doesn't work about that? There is one true winning lottery number, everyone has a different number, but they are all seeing and hearing one number, the one that person thinks is the winning number. One person says "Did you hear? The winning number is 986544." Another person hears the first person say "Did you hear? The winning number is 888145." The second person says "OMG I won." The first person says "Really, your winning number is 986544." The second person hears "Really, your winning number is 888145?" The second person says "Yeah, my number is 888145." The first person hears the second person say "Yeah, my number is 986544." He holds out his lottery ticket and the first person reads the 888145 printed on it as 986544. "Wow, you won." the first person says. There's one real number, but every person is perceiving it as the number that they think is the winning number. This is mind-twisting and possibly a form of mind altering en masse, but hey Bruce had the powers of God.
    • Except that doesn't get passed the lottery runners, is tons more complicated when it comes to working things out legally, and requires messing a lot more with peoples' minds than simply changing their lottery tickets does. Occam's razor, dude.
    • Why complicatte stuff? Assume he either retcons an error in the computer in charge making it print the same number over and over, or if it is a "Scratch and Win" lottery, simply edit in a million or two on each.
    • There are lotteries where you choose a few out of many numbers, and the more of them match with the ones randomly selected later, the more you win, with the main prize being given for having all numbers correct. In such a lottery, it would be pretty simple for Bruce's power to retcon chosen numbers of any player he chose to help.
    • It couldn't possibly be a "Scratch and Win" type lottery. The way those games work is the gaming organization figures out how much money they want to give away and they only print enough winning tickets to equal that amount. So if the maximum win is $1 million and the gaming organization wants to give away $5 million, they'll only print 5 winning tickets. If more than five winning tickets show up they would immediately suspect counterfeiting.
  • It's not clear how long he has his powers for; if he set up the program before anyone who prayed for a win had chosen their numbers, its perfectly possible that they all picked the same.
  • Have you people forgotten that this is the power of GOD we're talking about?
    • Right. The winning numbers might have been "Bruce roxxorz your boxxorz" and no one would have found anything odd about the fact that was the winning number or that they picked that.