# Biggest Plotholes in Blockbuster Movies (spoilers) **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [February 4, 2004, 6:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggest-plotholes-in-blockbuster-movies-spoilers/227449 "2004-02-04T06:20:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 8
**Author:** ![shijinn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/cc9497/32.png) [@shijinn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shijinn)\ **Post date:** [February 9, 2004, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggest-plotholes-in-blockbuster-movies-spoilers/227449/141 "2004-02-09T19:57:06Z")
IIRC, that standing coconut tree (complete with coconuts and leaves) after everything else is torn apart/burnt. ---
**Author:** ![MaxTheVool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)\ **Post date:** [February 9, 2004, 7:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggest-plotholes-in-blockbuster-movies-spoilers/227449/142 "2004-02-09T19:59:07Z")
I’m not crazy about _Signs_, but I think that those of you looking for plot holes in it are barking up the wrong tree. There are SO MANY “plot holes” that are SO OBVIOUS that I can’t help but think that that was partly the point. I sure don’t think that if you’d gone up to M. Night Shayamalan and said “hey, what would happen if those aliens landed where it was raining” he would slap himself in the forehead and say “dear Lord! I never thought of that! Wow, how did we all miss that one!”. Rather, I thought that he was picking aliens who were deliberately campy beyond belief (ie, you’d expect aliens who were vulnerable to water and used crop signs to communicate in some B-budget movie from the '50s) and tried to make a truly good movie about what would happen to a real family who encountered those hilariously campy aliens. Plus, there’s the whole faith thing. ---
**Author:** ![Baldwin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/baldwin/32/7264_2.png) [@Baldwin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baldwin)\ **Post date:** [February 9, 2004, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggest-plotholes-in-blockbuster-movies-spoilers/227449/143 "2004-02-09T20:13:02Z")
This may be the twentieth time I’ve pointed this out: All this speculation about the “aliens” in _Signs_ is based upon a single unproven assumption – that they were aliens. Given what’s presented in the movie, there could be any number of answers to the question of what they are; why jump to the conclusion that they’re space aliens who have travelled light years to get here? Many of the characters in the movie make the same assumption, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. I do wish I could talk to Shyamalan about that, though. ---
**Author:** ![Duderdude2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/cdc98d/32.png) [@Duderdude2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duderdude2)\ **Post date:** [February 9, 2004, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggest-plotholes-in-blockbuster-movies-spoilers/227449/144 "2004-02-09T20:44:56Z")
> [@Baldwin](#): > > This may be the twentieth time I’ve pointed this out: > > All this speculation about the “aliens” in _Signs_ is based upon a single unproven assumption – that they were aliens. Given what’s presented in the movie, there could be any number of answers to the question of what they are; why jump to the conclusion that they’re space aliens who have travelled light years to get here? Many of the characters in the movie make the same assumption, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. > > I do wish I could talk to Shyamalan about that, though. What else could they be? What about the invisable craft birds were flying into? Or the crop circles? ---
**Author:** ![Morbo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/morbo/32/389_2.png) [@Morbo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Morbo)\ **Post date:** [February 9, 2004, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggest-plotholes-in-blockbuster-movies-spoilers/227449/145 "2004-02-09T21:11:46Z")
> [@Made in Macau](#): > > This may not strictly be a PLOT hole; more a continuity error - but in Pulp Fiction they make repeated references to the fact that Marvin has had his head blown off and that there is a body without a head in the car and then… > we see him with his head in place renderingmuch of the urgency unfounded. > Maybe it’s just me. It was a hollow point bullet - his face was intact at point of entry, but the back of his head was blown apart. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Miskatonic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mr.miskatonic/32/310_2.png) [@Mr.Miskatonic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Miskatonic)\ **Post date:** [February 9, 2004, 9:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggest-plotholes-in-blockbuster-movies-spoilers/227449/146 "2004-02-09T21:44:45Z")
> [@xtisme](#): > > Well, you said it yourself…you didn’t read the book. 🙂 Basically, MI troopers had special powered armor, so they were like your anime robot in fact. Thats why they didn’t use tanks at all. The armor could run at incredible speeds, jump 100’s of meters in the air (fly really), was incredibly strong and tough, etc. The basic weapons were pulse rifles I think, with nuke rocket launchers and an assortment of granades…some of the troopers also had heavy weapons too. If you’ve ever read the John Ringo’s A Hymn Before Battle series, you have the idea of what MI was like. It was nothing like the movie at all (unfortunately). > > They didn’t use tanks at all, because they weren’t as efficient as MI, so the book was comparing them to tanks of the past (like your M1A1 example…and they could destroy them by the boat loads). Each MI trooper was LIKE a tank unto himself basically, and the ability to be inserted from orbit, coupled with its incredible mobility and firepower made it the ultimate infantry system (according to the book). > > -XT The armor was tough stuff indeed. Wepaons included: hand flamer, heavy flamer, rocket launcher, Y-Rack automatic bomb launcher and an assortment of fun belt grenades. Many of these weapons can take out a tank before it can gets its main gun the train on a target. Nothing the tank has would effect the armor besides a direct hit with an AP round (maybe). The tank is lost. The MI did have a group of hovercraft they used for really fast transportation. This was more akin to riding a railcar. The CGI cartoon “Roughnecks” was based slightly on the movie but had a lot more in common with the book. In that , every soldier had an armored suit of some kind, but the bouncing features were not in it. It was more designed to be tough and survive a variety of hostile environments. They also had specialist suits called “Marauders” that were like step-in walking weapons racks. Think the power suit from Aliens with rocket launchers. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [February 9, 2004, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggest-plotholes-in-blockbuster-movies-spoilers/227449/147 "2004-02-09T23:47:15Z")
> [@Duderdude2](#): > > What else could they be? What about the invisable craft birds were flying into? Or the crop circles? The most obvious answer would be “They were demons.” Since the central point of the movie is finding proof of the exsistence of an interventionist God, it seems not at all unlikely that the opposition would put in an appearance, too. The entire water weakness thing is meant to be a miracle: God intervenes in a demonic invasion by consecrating all water on Earth. Thus, even a simple glass of water becomes fatal to the unholy host. Not sure how the invisible “spacecraft” fit inot this theory: I’d need to see the movie again, but the crop circles become occult symbols. Possibly the very gates to Hell through which the demons gained entry to our world. I admit I like my explanation better, but I think this one is reasonably airtight, too. ---
**Author:** ![Kaitlyn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/73ab20/32.png) [@Kaitlyn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kaitlyn)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2004, 2:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggest-plotholes-in-blockbuster-movies-spoilers/227449/148 "2004-02-10T02:53:12Z")
I’ve always thought of plot holes as being inconsistencies with the internal plot and logic of a movie. Physics mistakes or anachronisms are when something occurs in a movie that is inconsistent with our world. They can be annoying, sure, but I’m usually willing to let them go so long as the movie is _internally_ consistent. Science fiction needs this especially more than most other genres. FTL speed, time travel, anti-gravity, sound in space, etc. We know or at least have evidence that these things are impossible, but we’d lose too many potentially interesting plots if we didn’t accept that these things were possible for the sake of the movie. Thus, I’m usually willing to grant a movie its premise, no matter how far-fetched, even when the laws of physics, or the details of geography, or other changes from the real world are made. I assume that the movie’s reality is different from ours in that the laws of physics or the particular geography of this universe are partiicular to it. Plot holes, on the other hand, do bother me. No matter how far-fetched the premise, a movie should be internally consistent; it should play by the rules it establishes for itself. Mrs. Six and I saw _The Butterfly Effect_ yesterday (spoilers to come). Ashton Kutcher is a gifted college student who has had blackouts since early childhood. At the advice of a psychiatrist, he has been keeping journals since childhood. He discovers that he can go back in time and relive the time of these blackouts by concentrating on the journal entries related to them. He tries to use this ability to go back to these pivotal moments in his past to recover the memories and fix the messed up lives of a girl he cared for, her brother, and his best friend. The rules are established fairly clearly. He can only return to the specific times of the blackouts, and only if he has the relevant journal entry to read. He can make changes to what happened, and these changes have effects, both good and bad, on the present. He can revisit the same incident more than once. Nobody remembers the old version of reality except him. All of this, I can accept. But then they throw out the rules, or invent new ones, to fit the plot. While in prison, Kutcher goes back to kindergarten and impales his hands on spikes. His Christian zealot bunkmate sees the miraculous appearance of scars on his palms, and cocludes that he has stigmata, and thus decides to help him. But in the new reality, he couldn’t have seen the scars appear, because they would already have been there when Kutcher arrived in the prison. Two incidents in the original reality–a picture he draws of himself killing a bunch of men with a knife, and him picking up a butcher knife in the kitchen–are result of changes made later, ie, after reality has been altered from it’s original state. His second-to-last trip changes reality is such a way that he’s sent to the loony bin before having made any of the blackout journal entries, thus creating a reality in which he cannot go back. He then asks his mother to bring him a home movie, which he uses to travel back in time to an incident during which he hadn’t had a blackout, and he is able to fix things for everyone but him. This trip violates two of the rules established earlier–using the journals, and only returning to blackouts–and creates a new problem. After he fixes things for the final time, he has access to all of his journals again, which he’s seen burning, presumedly to prevent his further tampering with time. This makes sense if they are the conduit through which he travels, but he’s now changed time to eliminate all of the significant blackout incidents, and the final time travel journey shows us that he doesn’t even need the journals. Finally, one of the changes he makes is to prevent a woman and her baby being killed in by a bomb put in a mailbox. He rescues the woman, but gets caught in the explosion. This fixes his friends lives, but he becomes a quadriplegic, and his mother chain smokes and develops lung cancer. Since he can return to the same incident multiple times, all he has to do is go back, save the woman, but stand farther away from the bomb, and he’ s accomplished everything he wants; fixing his friends lives without sacrificing his and his mother’s, and being able to get the girl as well. I hate it when a movie changes the rules like that. ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2004, 8:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggest-plotholes-in-blockbuster-movies-spoilers/227449/149 "2004-02-10T08:29:25Z")
> [@smiling bandit](#): > > I didn’t say it was a bad movie, I just said it was ludicrous. Without assuming a _lot_ of continuous circumstances to stop the propogation of language - and I cannnot see how any of those could exist, its quite silly. But I didn’t say I wouldn’t watch it or I am deeply offended at the the plot hole. But what I’m saying is, it’s not a plot hole. It may be a ludicrous premise, but it isn’t a plot hole. ---
**Author:** ![scr4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2004, 10:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggest-plotholes-in-blockbuster-movies-spoilers/227449/150 "2004-02-10T10:54:13Z")
> [@Darkhold](#): > > Sheesh by now I was hoping someone would have commented on my **Mission to Mars** idea. I think that whole sequence of the movie is so bad that there’s no way to fix it. The writers don’t have any understanding of orbital mechanics. But the other Mars movie of the year, _Red Planet_, had a huge plot hole. The whole premise of the movie is that they are trying to terraform Mars but after some initial success, oxygen level started to drop unexpectedly and a team is sent out to investigate. Then they find out later that there’s _plenty_ of oxygen after all? They don’t even ask themselves or explain why they didn’t know this in advance. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/biggest-plotholes-in-blockbuster-movies-spoilers/227449.md?page=7)