Eh? You don’t remember this guy? Here’s a whole slew of images with which to jog your memory.
Unless I’m being whooshed here…
8 mm has plot holes you could drive a Mac truck through. My personal fav is how Nick Cage murders the bad guy outside the bad guy’s mom’s house, where she finds him and yet somehow nobody ever finds out and there’s no investigation.
Perhaps if the guy had no family this might be a bit believable, but he lives with his MOM. Are we supposed to believe that she never phones the cops when she finds him dead?
Right.
In regards to the Aliens and their sizes, IIRC there was a scene in Alien 3 where the alien burst out of a dog, only to extend itself to a size that was much larger than the dog it came out of. :rolleyes:
Did they actually lose the ability to speak, or did they merely lose the art of language? In the novel the narrator manages to teach his human girlfriend to say and understand some words, although I don’t recall if this is in the movie or not.
The Mir-Shuttle Docking Module was built and attached to Mir in 1995, and used several times. It’s perfectly plausible that the new shuttle has a docking system compatible with that of the current Shuttle.
I don’t know how plausible it is, but it doesn’t violate any laws of physics. An airplane’s terminal velocity, even with the engine running, would be slower than that of a human body.
ID4: I know it seems silly to worry about plot holes, if you don’t balk at aliens who have psychic abilities coming to wipe us out, but here goes:
–The computer virus worked because the aliens’ computers could interact with the satellites. Jeff Goldblum knew more about those satellites than anyone. Doesn’t explain it all, but at least it suggests the possibility that the computers could interact. (How is that for an ad campaign for Norton Antivirus: the scene in the Mother Ship, with a virus notice showing up on the alien’s computer.)
–The aliens didn’t recognize an old ship because that was all they had. It wasn’t like they were able to go back to the home planet to get the newest model, and still make it to earth. It it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Image a VW bug (old style)–that design lasted a long time.
–The atomic attack was before the aliens’ main attacks. After the attacks, either the nukes were gone, or they couldn’t communicate with their locations.
–As to why they didn’t bring their own satellites, who knows? If you can use the existing satellites, well, conserve your own materials. It could be that they didn’t generally encounter civilizations that had such forms of instant communication, and therefore didn’t need to synchronize so much.
My biggest plot complaint was Will Smith’s girlfriend finding the First Lady.
In Some Like It Hot, Tony comes in while Jack and Marilyn are waiting in the room–we see later that he uses the window a lot. It is not that he doesn’t have time to remove his suit, so much that he has to hide it, and under the bubbles is the best place.
As for the Alien movies, the real wonder is why they didn’t decide to keep Weaver in her underwear all the time…
I hate it when people nitpick technologys that don’t exist, or technology that is from a diffrent planet.
who knows how things work? maybe the aliens in ID4 have computers so advanced they have a very simple language that a fool could learn in 10 minutes looking at the old ship. maybe the aliens lacked transistors and the ship is so huge because its full of vaccum tubes, maybe their computers are on the scale of the apple IIGS and not ultra advanced.
maybe the ships in starship troopers can’t carry tons of weight, so tanks are out. and nukes, maybe they are just as paranoid of nukes in space as we are. maybe they just had a giant disaster and nukes are politically frowned apon.
I’m of course makeing stuff up, but I do hate when people say “that wouldn’t work like that” on some technology. I mean the limitations of technologys are not always obvious.
imagin a 1910 person watched a movie about your life, there is a good chance they would go “wtf!? (s)he spent 40 seconds makeing his lunch yesterday in the microwave but thanksgiving (s)he cooks for 5 hours!? PLOT HOLE!”
Sorry, it was years back and I dn’t know where I saw it anymore. Its also possibly that the author was simply wrong, too.
True: they used various tricks to film it, but that’s not what I said. I just said I’d seen a site that said you could make it, not one that said that their depiction was perfectly accurate.
Well, simply havign that blood is a horrible, horrible hole in science. WHile I cannot conclusively prove that its impossible to do, sucha creature would have massive problems, and it’d be really hard to grow or reproduce. I have a hard time imagining what their skin could possibly be made of that it isn’t eaten through. God knows wat their innards must be like since they can appparently survive the Ultimate Acid.
Aliens do appear to be about twice the size of a man. Even at 8 feet, they’re bodies are long and have a freaking huge tail.
That itself is a plot hole to me. I have a real hard time imagining humans somehow losing speech, no mater what the circumstances. Its built into us biochemically on some level, and we naturally take the rest.
But mostly, I don’t blieve that humans could have survived in appreciable numbers but somehow forget how to use tools and talk.
I have to chime in here too. Sampiro specifily mentions REDCOATS, British regulars, as being familiar with guerilla tactics. Nope, they were trained in line and volley tactics that were used in Europe, and in much of America for that matter.
For guerilla tactics the British would have relied on Native Americans, or light infantry such as ranger units. Tarleton's Dragoons, who Marion fought, were not red coated regulars as in the move, but green coated loyalists.
Redcoats were often brought over from the contenent to serve in America. As such they would not have been familiar with the sort of tactics used by Marion and his ilk.
Sweetums
Re-enactor, Butler’s Rangers
God knows there’s not a lot of logic in the Planet of the Apes movies; they’re really more like parables. But it should be noted that the arrival of Zera, Cornelius and Dr. Milo in Escape From the Planet of the Apes takes place after the launch of Taylor’s mission. So, during the time the movie takes place, Taylor is out in space somewhere, using the best 1970 technology to achieve relativistic speeds (I said it wasn’t logical).
In The Matrix, the problem isn’t that the machines use humans instead of cows for batteries; it’s that they use animals at all. True, a human or other mammal will produce both thermal and electrical energy – but to keep them alive, you have to keep them warm, which takes energy, and produce food for them, which takes energy, and the energy you get is produced by an inefficient chemical processing of that food. I don’t know if anybody has crunched the numbers, but surely you’d have to put more energy into the system than you’d get out. Was there actually a mention of fusion plants? If they have those, they don’t need any other power source.
When I heard Morphius explaining why the machines kept humans alive, I thought “They’ve got to be kidding. This must be a red herring, and later we’ll find out the real explanation.” Then when they brought up the “prophecy”, I thought the same thing. I never saw the third movie – did it ever make sense?
Seems unfair to keep driving trucks through the plot holes in the classic * Planet of the Apes* movies without bashing the remake. Repeatedly. I’m sure everyone here saw that “20 Things I Learned from Watching ID4” email that was circulating around the Internet a few years ago.
Here’s one devoted to the remake of * Planet of the Apes*
21 Things I Learned From “Planet of the Apes”
In the future…
- …humans will take animals into space to train them as pilots. This will include chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and horses.
- Or horses will be native to a lot of otherwise uninhabited planets. (Perhaps they will swim there from wrecked Spanish galleons.)
- Genetic engineering will give chimpanzees advanced capabilities, such as being able to give the thumbs-up sign.
- But genetically engineered apes cannot speak.
- However, their offspring can.
- Genetic engineering won’t do much to advance the status of horses.
- Generations after achieving domination of the planet, apes will still be incensed that humans once treated them as animals. This will not prevent them from putting the spurs to a horse.
- When a small scout ship goes missing from a humongous mother ship, the mother ship will be nimble and maneuverable enough to go looking for it.
- Humongous spaceships will be nuclear-powered.
- The nuclear plant will not use the near-absolute-value temperatures of outer space to dissipate excess heat. Instead, the plant will use expensive and inefficient media cooling systems to handle the heat.
- The cooling system of a nuclear plant will be able to survive uncontrolled re-entry and a crash landing.
- And will require no maintenance or tuning for thousands of years.
- Structural members of spaceships in the future will apparently be built of iron.
- Unlike comparatively small objects like Skylab, Mir, etc., humongous mother ships will not break up on re-entry.
- Small scout ships in the future will be able to withstand the heat of re-entry with no apparent scorching or burning.
- Small scout ships will be able to crash through entire forests, or smash into concrete steps, without turning their occupants to jelly.
- Space suit/helmet combinations that allow you to withstand the vacuum of space will not allow you to go EVA underwater.
- The pilots of small scout ships-- human or ape-- will be issued antique gunpowder-fired pistols. (Very helpful when dealing with those pesky nebulae.)
- Seeding an entire planet from a relatively small ship’s population will allow blonde hair, blue eyes, melanin, and epicanthic folds to persist over thousands of years of miscegenation.
- Dead apes don’t float.
- Slave traders can be nice guys, too.
Planet of the apes-Right. I think they even mention at the begining that the ship recovered was that belonging to Col. Taylor.
Matrix-Again, I mentioned before the theory that it wasn’t so much about power generation, but keeping the humans confined so they couldn’t attack the machines anymore. For whatever reason, they didn’t want to kill them, but for obvious reasons(See “The 2nd renissance”) didn’t want the humans running around.
For the matrix: IIRC Morpheus described the humans-for-energy thing. But I don’t think we heard it from anyone we’ve a reason to trust (who told M? someone with a cite? I think not.) It certainly is a very stupid idea.
OTOH, I don’t think it’s a plot hole. The plot could proceed equally well if they’d used non-stupid technobabble on that one line. (Eg. “we tap human minds to make a massively parallel computer that’s the only thing that can control a fusion reaction”)
The power generation thing is probably all morpheus knows about. We’ve had two machines mention the “We created a perfect world for you” thing, and coupled with the animatrix “2nd Reniassance”, I feel that the creators were trying to suggest other reasons then just power generation.
Just discovered this thread. I don’t usually hang out much in Cafe Society. I didn’t see anyone mention it, but by far the all time winner for biggest and most pervasive plot holes goes to: Signs, with Mel Gibson.
God this movie sucked. Here are aliens who can travel interstellar distances. However, they need to use crop circles to coordinate their all out attack on the Earth (and it takes them literally years to get everything in place to attack us dreaded humans). They HAVE radio communications of some kind, but you can only pick them up on a baby monitor thats broken (I guess the aliens didn’t have a vast stock of broken baby monitors, so thats why then needed crop circles).
After studying humans and the Earth for years and getting everything in place, they forget a critical thing…to them, water is deadly on contact (its like acid to them, though god knows why). However, they can breathe air, so its a bit unusual that water would harm them the way it does (I assume if they breathe oxygen/nitrogen ‘air’ , and that there was hydrogen SOMEWHERE on their home world, that its not unreasonable that they encountered water at some point in their history). But never mind that. Here are interstellar aliens who have been observing earth for years, and they can plainly see that there is tons of water on earth, yet when they launch their super secret attack the fail to bring along space suits to protect themselves from something they obviously know is harmful to them. And to cap it all off…after creating space ships that can travel from another planet, they can’t open a door. They literally can’t figure out how to open a common house door, and appearently have no death rays or light sabers or other devices to break the door down. So, our hero’s are able to hide out in the basement (where the aliens KNOW they are) safely because they were able to close the door.
It just doesn’t get more full of holes than this. Independance day? Armageddon? The Matrix? These guys are pikers compared to this stuff. EVERYTHING in this movie was a hole. I was literally laughing my ass off from the first 5 min. in until the end, much to the annoyance of my wife who claims I live to pick movies appart.
Reguards,
XT
There have been pages and pages devoted to the alleged plot holes of Signs. In short, the movie doesn’t actually tell us anything concrete about the aliens. Everything we “know” about their motives, technology, physical makeup, etc. is given to us as conjecture from humans who have no idea what they’re talking about.
We can know these things by extrapolating from current technology. For example, it seems very, very unlikely that a species could develop interstellar space flight and a practical ship-mounted laser gun, yet not figure out the rather simply principles behind a transistor. Generally speaking, as things become more advanced, they become more complex, not less, so a superadvanced computer ought to be harder to understand, not easier, and ought to have better (or even “some”) virus protection in general. And while a computer that only has the processing power of an Apple II would probably be insuffcient for the needs of a species bent on planetary conquest, the real problem is that the code to run the computer is going to be written in space-alien, which nobody on Earth knows how to speak. True, these are space aliens, and who knows what sort of weird quirks of invention have happened during their history, but the fact that the alien technology consistently behaves in ways that run counter to human expectation, and none of the humans in the movie ever comments on any of it, indicates that these inconsistencies arise not from futuristic alien technology, but from filmmakers who don’t understand current human technology.
Spaceships work in a gravity-less vaccuum. Weight is meaningless in that context, and we can see from the scenes that take place inside the ships that there’s plenty of room for tanks etc. A ship that never has to operate in an atmosphere or a gravity well is freed from all sorts of limitations in size and design that atmospheric craft are subject to, and we already have airplanes that can carry and deploy light tanks. Since technology seems to have progressed in every other respect, it makes no sense for it to have regressed in this one particular area. As for the nukes, okay, maybe the entire human race is now nuclear phobic. How about dropping meteors onto the bug planet, just like the bugs did to us in the movie?
Not alway, no, and I agree with you when this sort of argument is applied to things like FTL drives or transporters or whatever. But when the advanced technology being shown is less effective than technology we already have, that’s a plot hole.
The reason they don’t use tanks in Starship Troopers comes from the book of course. Its like the director took some of the plot and elements of the book then mixed it all up into the gloop that becomes the movie. They didn’t use tanks (in the book) because each trooper in the MI was the equivalent of a tank division in their armor and weapons (it was all about the special armor MI troopers wore in the book…they even specifically mention tanks, and laugh at anyone stupid enough to attempt to put them up against the MI in the book). Of course, they DID us nukes in the book, but they were smaller ones, because it was against the Federation rules to use large scale nukes on inhabited planets. The movie, watched without reading the book makes no sense. Watch WITH reading the book it doesn’t really make a whole hell of a lot of sense either, except to explain some of these holes.
As for signs…well, sure, I suppose you could pooh pooh ANYTHING away based on some wierd alien logic. Aliens find water deadly to them but choose not to use environmental or space suits? No problem the aliens have their reasons. Can’t open a simple wooden door? Maybe the worship wood on their planet and its sacrilage to destroy a door. Use crop circles to coordinate attack instead of radio or fold space hyper com or whatever? Well, its how grandpa alien always did it. You could use this same logic to cover the holes in most movies.
Personally, I think the explaination is the director was completely clueless.
-XT
Well, the real explanation is that the movie isn’t about an alien invasion, it’s about losing and regaining faith and holding a family together in the face of overwhelming tragedy. The aliens actions are supposed to be incomprehensible, because they’re supposed to mirror the apparently random and senseless acts of God, which would actually make sense if we had perfect, God-like knowledge. Besides, Shyamalan created such a creepy and effective mood that I don’t really care what the story was about. The movie is so fantastic on a technical level that I don’t mind bending over backwards to patch the plot. Viz:
My take on the movie was that the aliens that we actually see are not the aliens who built the spaceships, made the crop circles, or decided to invade Earth in the first place. The aliens we see are a slave race to some other species that stay on the ship. The slave aliens don’t have any laser guns or death rays or anything because their masters don’t want to give their slaves powerful weapons they could turn on their masters. Plus, humans could capture the weapons from fallen aliens and perhaps learn new technological breakthroughs that could make us dangerous to the slave masters somewhere down the road. As slaves, the aliens we see in the movie would be kept generally ignorant and uneducated, and they may not even be fully sentient as a species, hence the ease in which they are tricked or imprisoned. Their suseptibility to water is precisely why they’re valuable for this sort of mission: given the choice between returning to their masters or staying on a world that’s two-thirds covered in a deadly acid, they’re likely to return to the ships. And since they’re slaves, it doesn’t matter that humans are eventually going to figure out their weakness and kill a bunch of them, because by that point, the slave masters have what they came for: thousands of captured humans that can serve as breeding stock for a new slave race.
Almost none of that is directly supported by anything in the movie (although to my knowledge none of it is directly contradicted, either.) But that’s the point: we’re seeing this entire invasion not from the POV of the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but from a family in an isolated farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. The more the characters (and, by extension, the audience) know about the monster, the less frightening the monster becomes. By not explaining anything about the aliens, Shyamalan makes them scarier, at the risk of alienating (ha!) viewers who expect higher standards before they can suspend their disbelief. As far as I’m concerned, it was the right trade-off to make, but I know an awful lot of people who disagree.
Hell, even that doesn’t work, because we’ve already seen they have small nukes that are fired from rocket launchers, and they aren’t afraid to use them.
No, that was what the kid assumed (or what the book said, I can’t recall which). It’s not unreasonable to assume that the real reason was to instill fear in the local populace.
Yep, the whole water thing was the biggest flaw–I guess it didn’t bother me because it explained the girl’s thing about water in the end.
A barricaded door. And we don’t know if the group attacking Gibson’s family is representative of the rest. They could very well have been intending to toy with them.
This is one of the few movies I’ve seen with big plot holes which didn’t bother me.