Leonard is able to remember that he has a problem with his memory because he has conditioned himself to look at his “Remember Sammy Jankis” tattoo. Similarly he has conditioned himself to check his pockets for Polaroids to remind himself of other essential day-to-day facts. Alternatively, it could be because Leonard has Korsakov’s syndrome, sometimes caused by acute trauma. In some cases the patient knows that they have the disorder. Arguments have been presented both for and against this but, in the end, it’s the reality that the movie presents us with and so, for 113 minutes at least, it’s true.
Matrix. Every single page of the script contained a plot hole, but the “we’re keeping all the humans alive so we can use their brains for something-something-mumble or whatever” has to be a heavyweight contender.
And no one has mentioned that in every single spy movie ever made the villain a) feels compelled to explain his plot for world domination to the hero and/or b) leaves the hero unguarded long enough to escape.
I have no doubt that the first time a home computer can talk to a strange alien computer, it’ll be a Mac, but ID4 was the first thing that came to mind when I saw the thread title.
And I’ll back up Earl of the CC- the plane was empty.
Mel Gibson in The Patriot, a farmer who hasn’t seen military service in 20 years, not only wipes out an entire platoon of trained and well armed British regulars using only single shot rifles, but he does so by hiding behind a granite outcropping near Charleston. THERE ARE NO GRANITE OUTCROPPINGS NEAR CHARLESTON- IT’S A SWAMPY COASTAL PLAIN! Plus regardless of conventional wisdom, redcoats didn’t stand in a row and fire while we picked them off from the trees- they’d been fighting wars in America for the entire 18th century and knew geurilla tactics quite well. Gibson would have been smoked as soon as he got two shots off.
(Hijack, but that movie is directed by Roland Emmerich; I wonder if he’s related to Catherine Emmerich, a German nun that Gibson so reveres he keeps a piece of her habit as his personal relic.)
ISTM that the Hunsman would not have had an attack of the consciences had the queen ordered him to carve up Snow White’s face a bit, instead of kill her.
She still would have been pretty champion of the kingdom.
Well, of course – Windows PCs have enough problems communicating with each other.
And related to The Lost World plot hole, as a computer software developer, I roll my eyes at the notion from the first Jurassic Park that the island’s entire software system was written by one overweight geek. You do not get one guy to write three million lines of code – not unless you want really crappy software, anyway. That’s like saying two contractors can build the Great Wall of China in a month.
I just watched Stand by Me on DVD and it still bugs me when Richard Dreyfuss turns off his computer w/o saving first.
QUOTE]
Oh my god!! When he didnt press save!! That ALWAYS killed me!!! Thats so funny!!
Something that always bugged me was in Pulp Fiction (and alot of people arue with me on this- so feel free)… when Pip (Samuel L Jackson) is in the apartment testing the young kid (Brett) he asks for a bite of his tasty burger. Well, when its sitting on the table, its a burger, but when Jackson picks it up and takes a bite- its a breakfast sandwich!!
“I cannot not get this system back online without Dennis Nedry.” Yikes! Sounds like he should have been paid more.
Speaking of that system, you also don’t hook up your incredibly harmful and illegal “system shutdown” routine to CTRL+CMD+OPT+SHIFT+F2. Nor do you waste memory creating an alert with an animated picture of yourself saying “Ah! Ah! Ah! You didn’t say the magic word!” (If he’s the only Dev, who was supposed to see that alert anyway?)
Computers in major Hollywood movies have always amused me. One of my favorites was this exchange between Tom Cruise and the his search engine in Mission: Impossible:
Tom Cruise: Search “Job”
Internet: “Job” not found.
(Huh. I get 94,500,000 hits).
Speaking of Mission: Impossible, don’t you think the microphones in that secure room should have been sensitive enough to detect the sound of a diskette being copied, since that’s the only thing in that entire room it should have been desinged to protect against?
That’s not an error. Dreyfuss’s character deliberately erases the story he’s just written, because it was a private experience between him and his friends, and he doesn’t want to cheapen it by sharing it with people who weren’t there. This echoes the resolution of their journey to find the body. When they set out, they thought that finding it would make them “cool” in the eyes of their peers, but upon being confronted by it in real life, they realize that using the death of a human being to make themselves look important would be wrong, that a man’s death is a solemn, tragic occasion, not an excuse for social climbing. So when they go back, they don’t talk about what happened to anybody, and, IIRC, don’t collect a reward that had been offered to anyone who could find the corpse.
Why Dreyfuss wrote the story in the first place if he had no intention of saving it is unclear. I see two possible reasons: The first is that Dreyfuss intended to try and sell the story, but upon finishing it, realized that he still felt the way he did when he was a child, and decided not to keep it. The second, which I prefer, is that he wrote the story just for himself, as a way to relive the experience and cement the fading recollection of events in his mind. Once he had finished, the story no longer served a purpose. Indeed, it never served a purpose: he wrote it because something about the process of writing it was necessary for him, not because he wanted to have a hardcopy of his memories.
In a lot of ways, the end of Lost in Translation reminded me of the end to Stand by Me. I think it’s the sense of seeing something intensely private, something so intangibly important that it can never be shared with anyone who wasn’t there. I’m not sure which approach I like better: Stand By Me’s, in which the audience is an invisible witness to the private moment, or Translation, where the moment is so private, not even the audience is allowed to interfere.
I’m not sure if this is a plothole, but when I saw the Matrix on TV (spoiler here),
the idea that true love brought back Keannu in a story about weird, high tech, alternate reality completely ruined the entire movie for me. However, I may be wrong on this, since I only sat through it once long ago and it was edited for TV. Am I correct on this? Or is there something in the plot that I completely missed?
Since we’ve got JPI and JPII, let’s complete the triad with JPIII:
The entire plot hinges on Spinosaurus being “the baddest mofo on the block”. Unfortunately for said plot, Spinosaurus was primarily a fish-eater. Spinosaurus was less heavily built than Tyrannosaurus, had smaller (unserrated) teeth, and had a big, vulnerable sail which would not have exactly enhaced its maneuverability or durability.
That, and Grant really probably should have actually tried depositing the check he got from the Kirbys before galavanting off to Monster Island wth them. He would then have realized they had no money, and the whole adventure would have never even had to happen.
But then, the writers probably would have just made him a sucker for sob stories, especially ones involving kids potentially getting eaten by mutant dinosaurs. The Spinosaurus thing is still lame, though.
It’s not exactly like finding holes in Armageddon is a difficult exercise, but The one that always annoyed me was the fact that none of them had any understanding of what they were doing drilling the hole in the first place.
It’s not like theres a magic “destroy comet” button located at exactly 800 feet. But they try to build suspense that they have only dug to 794 feet. And the guy trying to detonate it on the surface. They had a 200 foot hole, it’s better than on the surface you idiots. Plus they’re 25 miles off course, did any of the NASA guys bother to figure out if the hole should be changed. And plus the idea of the zero barrier. At one second the halves crush into the planet and destroy it, but one second earlier they will pass harmlessly past the earth without even ripping htrough the atmoshpere or causing any gravity problems.
Here are some of my favorite plot holes of all time:
Armageddon -
Bruce Willis fires Ben Affleck from his oil drilling company a few minutes before NASA flies him to Mission Control. In the space of 24 hours or so, Affleck has started his own drilling company with his name on the sign and everything!
The Rock -
Why did Sean Connery have to remember the timing of the crushing flaming things when he escaped since apparently, the door unlocks from the INSIDE?
Starship Troopers -
When they received the distress call from the outpost, why didn’t the ships land them in the compound instead of making them hum miles through bug-infested ravines?
Point Break -
Why does diving out of a plane with no parachute seem more survivable than attempting to land the plane?
Not to worry. That’s an IBM XT with a green-screen monitor. The power switch is in the back but Dreyfuss is only shown using a front-mounted switch and only the monitor would have a switch there.
That might be what Rob Reiner was going for but from what we were shown, it couldn’t have happened. Trust me, I was in the computer retail industry at around the time the movie came out.
