I was watching the repeat of Independence Day on Fox this weekend. While there were lots of elements in the movie I liked (especially the characters played by Harvey Feirstein and Brent Spiner), the ending ruined it for me in rerun just as it did at the time. (Since I mentioned spoilers in the title and this is an 8 year old movie that’s never likely to be a classic I won’t use a spoiler box, but I’ll skip down a little if you want to leave here.)
Jeff Goldblum’s character, a standard issue computer-nerd, uses a Mac to upload a virus that wipes out the computer system of an alien race while Will Smith blows them away with a nuclear missile. Now, the alien race is so much more technologically evolved than Terrans that they can manage interstellar travel in planet sized ships, and they are so dissimilar from humans that they use bio-mechanical space suits and in 50 years of trying the scientists at Area 51 have never been able to understand their power system, and in 1996 wireless technology wasn’t all that, and yet fortunately their computer system happened to be able to interface with a laptop that was 1/20th the power of computers TODAY even and over which it had to be infinitely more evolved than a fully-loaded video capable cell phone would be over A. G. Bell’s “Mr. Watson come here I need you” unit… yeah, right… as if. (And as for the nuclear missile, the mother ship has “babies” that are capable of destroying NYC in a matter of minutes and that are immune from attack by nukes while their shields are up, but there are no safeguards in the mother ship?)
Then there’s the very end of the movie: all the humans in all the lands are dancing like little Ewoks happy over their victory over the evil aliens, never mind the facts that:
1- thousands and thousands and thousands of alien fighter crafts are still on the loose
2- a trillion ton spacecraft just crashed to Earth
3- a planet sized mothership just got blown to bits between Earth and moon and its enormous ruins are going to be crashing through the atmosphere
Oy. This movie must have a record for plotholes, but it’s far from alone. While it’s one thing for an Ed Wood or a William “One Shot” Beaudine working with a miniscule budget and no special effects to have plotholes you could drive an alien mothership through, for some reason you expect more of major motion pictures.
Another classic: In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Robin and his Muslim friend Azeem arrive at the White Cliffs of Dover (you can tell from the bluebirds) and walk to the north of England in one day. There are still bands of Celtic mercenaries out there somewhere, though why the sheriff of Nottingham uses them is a mystery since they’re quickly dispatched by Robin’s men and it’s the sheriff’s men who destroy his forces. Robin is such a good archer that he can fire two arrows at once without even aiming and hit two moving targets, and yet somehow he got captured in the Holy Land. Azeem speaks nearly perfect English, has the only telescope that will exist for centuries, and manages to wander around Christian countries in the High Middle Ages worshipping Allah without any form of recrimination.
What are some of the most irritating plotholes to you in movies that were major hits?
I assumed they managed to figure out the computer systems of the crashed ship enough to write a virus and some sort of interface widget. And lots of systems have a flaw, which if you study them you may be lucky enough to find, especially if the alien programmer thought "What’s the chance we’ll be subverted from one of our own ships? Hardly likely is it? Eh, I’ll test it later. "
That’s irrelevant. Goldblum had a matter of hours to build a working virus that would infect and interface an OS he didn’t understand and had only a very limited version of. There’s no way it would have worked.
One thing that always annoyed me was the ending to Speed. If you still haven’t seen Speed, then spoilers below…
All the way through the film, they are concerned with getting all the passengers of the bus. I think there are only about eleven or twelve on there. They finally managed to succeed getting everyone off the bus.
Then, the bus crashes onto an airfield, and blows up right next to a plane, blowing the plane up as well.
The bus could have had a maximum of about thirty people on it. The plane could have had about three hundred. So they saved a few lives, and killed ten times as many. It was soooo stupid as the whole plane blowing up thing had obviously been stuck in the film when some executive decided there weren’t enough explosions in the film.
The American Godzilla is another movie where it’s kind of pointless to worry about plot holes, but there’s one I noticed when I saw it that no one ever mentions:
So, IIRC, the Good Guys[sup]TM[/sup] at one point go through a huge underground tunnel that Godzilla has dug and come up in the middle of Madison Square Garden, where Goddy has lain all her eggs, which then promptly begin to hatch. Much pseudo-excitement ensues, the main thrust of which is that they need to escape the Garden and lock all the doors before the mini velociraptors…ERRR…Godzillas get out into the city. Much is made of the fact that they need to get them ALL while they’re still in the building. Well, with the assistance of CGI and 'splosions, they finally manage to do just this, in the nick of time.
HOWEVER, no one ever seems to remember the GIGANTIC UNDERGROUND TUNNEL through which they all arrived on the scene and through which hundreds of babies could easily have escaped. It’s not mentioned once! Idiots. I hope the whole city gets overrun and destroyed.
My wife is always pissed at me for not being able to suspend my disbelief and for constantly picking at the holes in plots. I’m trying to remember some good ones but the only one I’m getting at the moment is from the Sound of Music (God knows why I thought of this).
At the end of the movie the family has to walk over the Alps to escape into Switzerland. If you travel over the Alps from Salzberg you wind up in Germany. Didn’t anyone look at a map?
All cop movies have the same problem, the hero is working all hours of the day and night sometimes 24 hours a day. Who is authorizing that much overtime? What he’s doing it for free? What kind of freaky alternate universe is that?
I just want to chime in and say that I, for one, never get tired of PLOTHOLE threads.
So go ahead and post ‘em – I think it’s HILARIOUS that Hollywood can’t be bothered to apply 45 cents’ worth of logic to a multi-million dollar film.
And dopers have more logical minds than most, so this is where I’d rather read about plotholes.
I had this same feeling during Con Air. Not only are there only about 40 people on the plane, all but 3 of them are crazy, violent felons! Shoot that fucker down!
Do you mean to tell me that no one was killed when the plane crashes into Las Vegas?!?
Another plothole in Independance Day was that the alien attack took so long. For some reason, the aliens with their advanced technology needed several hours after blowing up one city to attack another. Us humans, with our old-fashioned can-do spirit, could have blown up every city on Earth in a matter of minutes.
I’d forgotten this one. IIRC, they go from Dover on the south coast of England, to Hadrians Wall, on the Northern Border of England with Scotland, and then back to Nottingham. This must have added at least 500 miles to their journey.
This one really annoys me. It’s not just implausible, it’s clear that no one was paying any attention to logic at all:
The Tyrannosaurus apparently escapes from the hold on board ship, and kills everyone, including those in the pilot house, which is clearly too small for the T. rex to have entered. Despite this, the ship continues exactly on its original course, smashing into the pier where it was supposed to have docked. Meanwhile, the T. rex goes back into the hold and closes the door behind it, where it is found when others board the ship.
Of course, what obviously must have happened instead was that there was also a pack of velociraptors on the ship, and they were the ones that escaped and killed everyone. They then left the ship without anyone seeing them, making their way to Hollywood and devouring the whoever was in charge of seeing that the script had the least vestige of logic or common sense.
In gereral I always say that if you wanted reality, what were you doing at a movie? However, Con Air was the first movie I thought of when I read the OP, for the same reasons as stated by Stonebow.
Uh… For the Speed complaint, there was no one in that plane. It was being towed by a ground vehicle, indicating there wasn’t even a pilot to taxi it. The tower is seen getting away. They didn’t trade 30 casualties for 300. They traded 30 for 0.
Every time this type of thread comes up, I always feel compelled to point out the major, glaring plothole in “E.T.”:
The movie opens with E.T. escaping from the evil government agents and running back to the UFO he disembarked from. Alas, it has taken off. He stares forelornly at it as it hovers above him 15, maybe 20 feet above his head.
Later on in the movie, E.T. uses his mighty alien powers (twice mind you!) to make himself, Elliott, and a whole bunch of bratty teens on their bikes fly effortlessly miles above the ground, over the suburb they live in, over a vast Redwood forest, etc.
WHY THE HELL DIDN’T HE JUST FLY UP TO THE UFO IN THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVIE?
As far as the American Godzilla movie:
Was any reason given (plausible or even implausible) to explain why a giant amphibious lizard that is primarily aquatic and inhabits the relatively warm, unspoiled, and empty waters around the Phillipine islands would swim all the away around two continents up into frigid, polluted northern Atlantic waters, and invade the one of the most densely populated area in the entire planet to lay its’ eggs?
Matthew Broderick’s character uses an over-the-counter pregnancy test kit to determine that Godzilla is pregnant. A pregnancy kit for use on humans that sometimes gives inaccurate results will work on a giant hermaphroditic mutant lizard? Yeah.
Godzilla can grow & shrink better than the Abominable Snowman from the old “Rudolph” stop-motion special. In one scene, Godzilla has torn a hole through the MetLife building, the next it’s small enough to crawl into and through the NYC subway tunnels. Later still, he is way too big to fit through the midtown tunnel. As the ads for the movie made clear: “Size does matter.” or should…
Yeah, yeah… shooting fish in a barrel, and all that. But my favorite plothole is when Goldblum and his father leave Manhattan and drive down to DC, not hitting a bit of traffic the entire way (except for right outside Pop’s house), even though every major city in America is being evacuated. And, even if there were no cars on the road, is it just a 3 hour drive?
If you wanna talk about Speed, how about that cloverleaf exit Sandra Bullock takes at 50mph, crashing through sign posts and other cars, without slowing down at all. Or jumping that 100-foot gap with no ramp AND a curve. Helloooo…laws of inertia, anyone?
I just watched Stand by Me on DVD and it still bugs me when Richard Dreyfuss turns off his computer w/o saving first.
The Matrix was one of the best movies ever made, but…humans as batteries? What-EVER!
Is Memento a blockbuster? It of course has a HUGE plot hole:
The protagonist, Leonard, suffers from a “condition” that renders him incapable of remembering anything for more than about 10-15 minutes, but all through the movie he remembers his “condition” without any prompting.
If these aliens have such sophisticated tech, why can’t they tell the difference between their current ships and one made 50 years ago? Were their ships from 50 years ago so good they’ve felt no need to improve them?
Also, why would they spend time developing systems to interface with our satellites? It would be much easier on their part to bring their own.
