#midrp1

There was a line [in the airport bomb scene] when we originally shot it, when the bomb asks Benji a personal question - it’s in the moment when the bomb is trying to… it’s a psychometric test thing. And the question that the bomb asked didn’t go down well with the test crowds. […] The bomb asked Benji if he has ever thought about hurting himself or others. It’s like a classic question you ask people in a psychiatric exam. And Benji says “no”, and the bomb tells him that he’s lied. And so Benji has to admit that he’s kind of self-harmed. And the audience fucking hated that idea. They hated the idea that Benji… So we changed the question to “Are you afraid of death?” Which actually came up with a great moment when he says, “Who isn’t?!” But… yeah, […] it was too dark. My character’s score went up, like, 10% after they took that question out. […] We were getting into this idea of PTSD, and Benji had been almost killed in Fallout, Ilsa saved his life, and we were talking about how this weighs on him, you know, and how he was kind of close to the edge in a few earlier iterations of the script. Benji was having moments of doubt and, you know. In the end, that stuff kind of felt like it wasn’t really necessary, and we wanted to concentrate on the team dynamic and have the audience infer certain things about where they are emotionally. So that felt a little too on the nose, and we moved on from that. — Simon Pegg on Episode 573 of The Empire Film Podcast

#Kittridge, don't you fucking dare.

The bomb scene. The Entity asks Benji who or what is the most important thing to him, and he admits that it's his friends. We later see very explicitly that Ethan would have given the exact same answer. That's what the Entity bases its entire ploy on. Benji even quotes the question at one moment - explicitly in relation to Ethan.

With Ethan getting on the train, it was Benji who came up with a crazy plan, and Ethan got all fussy about it before going along with it. Kind of a role reversal between them.