Salt/Headscratchers

• Unless I understood it wrong, the villain's big plan was: A) nuke the Mecca, B) piss off the whole Arab world, and C) they will destroy the US in retaliation.... Sorry, what? How? Shit would obviously hit the fan and it certainly wouldn't be pretty, but the US ceasing to exist?
  • The destruction of the US is not necessarily genocide. Best case scenario: the entire UN slaps the US with economic sanctions that cripple the country and knock it out of superpower status. Worst case scenario: NATO looks the other way, or actively participates, as any number of Muslims begin covert and overt warfare against the US. Either way, the American era is done for.

• The ending of the theatrical version doesn't make any sense, as the US president survives being shot by Winters. Salt running away still, even though the evidence along with the president's testimony about Winters probably being enough to prove her innocent, just makes her look stupid. The Director's Cut has Winters actually killing the president, and then even throws in a sequel hook about the new President that seems to imply that he might be one of Orlov's sleeper agents as well. It just makes so much more sense, I don't know why they changed it.
  • Noyce called the Director's Cut his "own personal take on the material, free from the politics and restrictions of producers, studio or censorship ratings." Thus implying that some or all of those things vetoed the ending that wound up in the Director's Cut in favour of the theatrical one.
• Why was Salt placed in a police car without any sort of barrier between the front and rear seats?
  • That car wasn't designed to really hold any passengers that they thought would pose a threat like that. Some police SUV's do not have the barrier in between, especially K9 units, which that SUV happened to be I believe.
  • Okay, so why would they place a sleeper agent who'd just assassinated the Russian president in a K9 car?
  • Some Real Life police cruisers don't have cages or barriers. More than a few officers have been killed because of this.

What about NATO uniform?

• NATO Uniform?
• This is probably just my small but alive sense of patriotism/nationalism here, but is anyone else bugged by how utterly ineffectual and impotent this movie makes the american government to be compared to the unstoppable Xanatos Roulette master russians? The action and acting is all fine, yes, but it just comes off as a propoganda film for a war that ended twenty years ago.
  • To be fair, it wasn't really the Russian government being Xanatos Roulette masters, just one ex-government Russian who was still carrying out a plan from the Cold War that everyone else still in Russia had forgotten about.
• Why would the United States and Russia immediately go to war with each other? On the news reports that we see in the movie, Salt is identified as a terrorist, as in not working for the American government. So why would they go after the government? Knowing the world of current international relations, this Troper believes that the more likely solution would be that the two governments work together to hunt down the terrorist organisation responsible for the assassination attempts on the American and Russian presidents.
  • The CIA was trying to cover up her "allegiance", so for everyone outside she would just be an American terrorist, seemingly freelance.
  • At one point in the movie, the news reports on TV are identifying Salt as an American intelligence agent. Whatever the government says, it's not gonna shake that niggling feeling in the back of the Russians' minds that the Americans assassinated their President.
  • Not to mention that there were probably Soviet agents stirring up the unrest in Russia.
• Am I the only one who felt pained by the Hollywood Acceptable Targets? They attacked N. Korea, Russia, suggested all Communists are infaltrating American Government to kill the President and took a pot shot at the Middle East and Muslims. The only group they missed out were the Nazis (probally because they are completely incompatible with Communists) but still...
  • The North Korea thing is realistic. The Russian government was not working with the Soviets. They never suggested that all Communists were out to kill the president, it's just that this one extremist group is the only one we see. As for the "pot shot" at the Middle East and Muslims... what was it? American nukes were going to destroy Mecca - all Winter said was that the Muslims would be pissed that their holy city had been destroyed, which is plausible.
    • Her German husband was pretty awesome. The man singlehandedly forced America to get his girl out of North Korea. Hell, in a way it portrays North Korea in a positive light. They managed to catch a spy that literally broke into the presidential bunker WHILE being wanted for killing the Russian President and embarrassed every branch of American counter intelligence including the Secret Service.
    • North Korea as Properly Paranoid? Uh oh.
    • "Plausible"?? It's the holy city! "Definitely" would be like it.
  • North Korea is in no ways communist just evil they put on a veneer of communism for propaganda to say to their citizens "we really do have your best interests at heart" while basically using them as surfs I think its entirely justified to show them as bad guys.
• The twist reveal, such as it is, is fairly moronic. If you want to cripple the United States and you have unfettered access to America's own nuclear arsenal, how does targeting Mecca and Tehran make any sense? A few dozen--even a few hundred--terrorist attacks is not going to bring down a global superpower. If the Russian extremists wanted to cripple the United States, it would have made more sense to target America's biggest cities with its own nukes.
  • But wouldn't that potentially martyr the U.S.? It would weaken it, sure, but there are still other superpowers that could support it. On the other hand, an unprovoked nuclear attack on another country would have massive political ramifications, potentially turning former allies against the U.S..