I understand the need. The people making the movie want to make a good movie first and logic and reason take a back seat to entertainment. But plot holes in action/adventure movies seem pretty much universal.
I’m defining plot holes as something the characters in the movie should have known not something the audience knows. It can include:
A character not using some power, skill, or information that he had at a time when it would have been useful.
A character not passing on important information to another character when he had the opportunity to do so and no significant reason not to.
Character fail to do something obvious that would achieve his goals.
Character does something stupid that sets back achieving his goals for no good reason.
Character does something that is dangerous or risky when an obvious safer and surer alternative would have accomplished the same thing.
Character makes a plan that unnecessarily depends on some random event or other person he has no control over.
Character says or does something that appears to make sense based on what the audience knows at that point but actually makes no sense based on what it will later be revealed the character knows.
A character just says or does something which makes no sense and/or violates any sense of reality.
So can anyone provide examples of action/adventure movies that don’t exhibit one or more of these? A movie you can watch all the way through and still say it all made sense at the end?
Note: I’ve intentionally limited this to action/adventure movies because I feel they generally have the worst plot hole issues and because I feel genres like comedies, dramas, and musicals operate by different rules. And because it’s my thread.
My all-time favorite thriller is Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, which shows a careful assassin plotting and (attempting to) carry out the killed of Charles de Gaulle in 1963. It shows pretty much how he goes about it (without telling the audience some information until the end), but it’s all plausible. The material and information the Jackal gets are within his capabilities, it doesn’t require superhuman skill or powers, and shows that he has what’s needed. He’s resourceful and improvising. When he decides to continue despite his cover being blown, it’s still in character and plausible. The closest any of your items comes to the book or film is item #6 “Character makes a plan that unnecessarily depends on some random event or other person he has no control over.” – the Jackal still requires to be able to get to de Gaulle on his chosen day – but that is one of the things we see him researching. It’s made clearer in the book why he knows that de Gaulle will come out, even if he knows he’s being stalked by an assassin.
By contrast, something like Clint Eastwood’s film In the Line of Fire, which is also about an assassin and the policeman who’s acting to foil him, is full of the sort of things you describe. They do it because the filmmskers want drama, so we have a completely unneccesxsary scene where Eastwood confronts the killer, before the assassination. It’s ludicrous, and serves no other purpose than to give us that face-to-face moment. I still like the film, but not as much as DotJ. (And don’t get me started on the remake, The Jackal).
The only knock I’d say is it does have a little bit of the “everybody forgets space is three dimensions, so we can write as if it was ships at sea/tanks on land approaching each other”… you can’t really set up much of a blockade between a ship and a planet, I suppose.
When it’s one tiny ship versus an armada and the armada plans to blast the ship out of the sky as soon as they see it you can. The only reason it didn’t work is because the tiny ship was being chased by a bazillion big ships that caused a little chaos.
Kicked up a few leaves on the wind, if you will.
ETA: But the real plot hole in Serenity is the birth of the Reavers/death of Miranda. The Miranda incident was said to have happened only ten years ago, but in the show Reavers were said to be a problem for much longer than that. Plus, tying together a supposed “dead” planet and the Reaver homebase shouldn’t have been as much of a secret as it was.
Were the timelines mentioned? I do remember thinking something similar, but then remembering that it took the Nazis only a few years to become the new norm.
Ships without wings can’t glide if they have no power. Wash never said he got power back, he said he was going to have to deadstick it in. Straight in, that would be.
Character makes a plan that unnecessarily depends on some random event or other person he has no control over.
…pretty much sums up the Joker.
Also, in Serenity: Mr. Universe, the guy whose planet they go to at the end of the film, is an information broker who can access almost any broadcast in inhabited space from his command center on his private world… which is surrounded by an energy field so strong it prevents the Operative from detecting the incoming Reaver fleet until they’re within visual range. :dubious:
When I read the OP’s list my immediate reaction was that probably virtually everyone’s real life is filled with plot holes (violations of these principles)–so why should movies be different?
Riggs’ life was pretty much an ongoing violation of the “Character does something that is dangerous or risky when an obvious safer and surer alternative would have accomplished the same thing” rule.
And there’s the “A character not passing on important information to another character when he had the opportunity to do so and no significant reason not to” rule. We saw early in the movie that Riggs got a message from his old army buddy Hunsaker. Hunsaker’s daughter Amanda is murdered. Riggs keeps investigating the murder (even after it initially appears solved) and Hunsaker eventually reveals he is involved in a drug smuggling operation, was going to tell Riggs, and Amanda was killed as a warning.
So why didn’t Hunsaker tell Riggs all this earlier? He was planning on telling Riggs in the beginning - that’s why his daughter was killed. And he eventually did tell Riggs after his daughter’s murder - so the murder didn’t stop him from talking. So why didn’t he just tell Riggs the whole story the first time they met? The reason, of course, is that the movie would have only been thirty minutes long and it made a better story to have Riggs conducting a full investigation. But that doesn’t make Hunsaker’s inexplicable reluctance to pass on information at the one time it would have done the most good any less of a plot hole.
I got this one from “How It Should Have Ended”. The Predator only killed people who had guns. Dutch knew this because he told Anna she shouldn’t carry a gun because that would make her safe from attack. But Dutch and the others left themselves open to attack by continuing to carry their own guns.
Syndrome’s whole goal was to kill Bob Parr. But he didn’t kill him when he had the opportunity. Heck, the entire movie was a violation of Rules 3, 4, and 5. You want to kill Bob Parr? Just kill him. You don’t encourage him to take all his powers back and tell him what you’re planning first.
And why did Syndrome’s plan fail? Because Mirage betrayed him - after he let her see that he was willing to let her die. If your minions to stay loyal you have to at least pretend to care about them staying alive.
