I didn’t see the movie, but I read the novel . The way I understand it, Dürrematt’s point was precisely that: he thought that most detective novels had far too neat plots which have the police figuring out clue after clue, leading up to the criminal. He wanted to show how a mundane event (a car crash) could easily disrupt this chain of events and make the solution unreachable.
Cartman’s mother is his father?
…and luckily for them, the asteroid has near-Earth gravity (I’m judging from appearances in the movie), because otherwise their mad skillzzzz would be useless…
But that one’s just awesome. That isn’t lazy at all, that one took effort to pull off, it wasn’t bought cheaply. Now you can argue about whether it was stupid or not, but cheap and lazy it was not. 
Like I said before, it depends.
I could understand the argument that “drilling is mostly instinct, learned from years and years of experience”. But part of that “instinct” would be rendered useless if you had to practice the same skill in a radically different environment, like, for instance, underwater drilling, or in a frictionless environment, almost devoid of gravity. (Not to speak of the huge difference of materials they were actually drilling, etc.)
Which this asteroid apparently didn’t have…
Actually, I thought it was Superman (and not the entire planet) who went back in time.
To me, the most irritating plot contrivance is “The Monster Who Looks Like He’s Dead… but ISN’T!” Halloween used this contrivance but the movie where I noticed it was used to the point of mockery was Terminator, so much that I coined the phrase “Terminator endings.”
Well, coined it to myself, anyway.
Three pages in and nobody has menitoned the infamous “deflector dish” on the Enterprise-D / Voyager?
“Sir, we are encountering an energy being of unknown origin and composition, and it’s draining all the energy out of the ship.”
“Just re-route something to shoot whatever particles out the deflector dish at it!”
“Aye sir. The being is gone! It worked!”
“It always does. I’ll be in Ten-Forward.”
They’re called deusexmachyons.
The [Bad Guys] are dissolved by Water! or Light!
Not just in The Wizard of Oz (book and movie), but also in the first movie version of Day of the Triffids (not in the book) And one of Jack Chalker’s Well World novels
The baddies get destroyed by light in Invasion of the Saucer Men and its Larry Buchanan remake, Invasion of the the Star Creatures (but not in The Space Frame, the not-so-bad story they’re both really based on). And also in scores of vampire films, beginning with Nosferau and Son of Dracula. Not only isn’t it in the book (Dracula walks around London in broad daylight in Stoker’s book), but there’s no tradition of it in vampire folklore or lit prior to the movies. (Or for a while, after it. In Dreyer’s Vampyr the vampire is exposed in its grave in daylight, and only expires after a metal stake, not a wooden one, is driven through its chest.)
– read to the end before posting :smack:
They contrived something in order to explain away something which could not be rationally explained. That, by definition, is a plot contrivance.
I think that you sir (or madam) have just coined a new SF term.
I heartily approve. 
I didn’t even realize until a few years ago that Michael’s death took place many years after the movie. I assumed that diabetes and grief and lack of will to live made him age greatly in a few months, but Coppola listed his date of death on the DVD extras as 1999. This was probably because he still entertains thoughts of a GODFATHER IV and this would allow him to have a Pacino cameo for continuity. (Agreed though: his death was not only unnecessary but unintentionally funny, what with the fall over and the dog et al- Chris Elliot did a parody of it on the last episode of Get a Life.)
Used egregiously in Alien Nation. Really, how could a lifeform capable of breathing Earth’s air and eating Earth’s food be vulnerable to sea water?!
My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult.
It’s a fairly compelling read, right up until the last few pages, when:
Anna wins the court case, and therefore fulfills her older sister’s wish that Anna keep her kidney rather than give it to her and prolong a life she’s not really interested in continuing. Then, Anna and her lawyer get into a car crash, and Anna is convienently head-injured badly enough to cause brain death. So her sister (Kate) gets her kidneys in the end and lives on.
What is that, the M. Night Shyamalan school of writing? It would have been a better book if it had ended when it seemed it was going to.
I am vulnerable to sea water too! egads! Am I an alien? If so where are the six-breasted babes?
Eroticon Six (taking “triple-breasted” to mean three pairs)
I don’t buy this. There are numerous ways to end the book without a cheezy cop-out. Not every Deus Ex Machina is a contrivance or cop-out, but this one is. There’s no warning, no advance notice, not even a meager hint - and this particular power never appears again.
Harry might have figured how to trip another trap set by the Professors (maybe even the trap Quirrell’s made). He might have tricked Quirrell into making a mistake with the mirror which traps him in the mirror-world or something. He might have found a way to set off the alarm and then played a cat-and-mouse game… with himself as the mouse while an infuriated Quirrell hunts him down, trying to recover the stone. There are a lot of ways it could have happened. Books 2 and 3 were very better in this regard; they did in fact show you ample warnings, nothing was a total surprise, and nothing came totally out of left field.
Harry didn’t have to be a genius or more powerful than Quirrell. He didn’t even have to outsmart Quirrell. Dumbledore could have mentioned, perhaps, a secret defense of the Mirror of Erised; Voldemort certainly would never have bothered with such a pathetic waste of magic (“It shows me what I want? So what - I’m already planning how to get it!”) Voldy knew a great deal about magic but consistently overstimated his knowledge, dismissing anything he couldn’t turn into a weapon or a means of control or personal power. This could have been a great method of demonstrating his weakness.
Sorry, that’s not a plot contrivance, that’s just a throw-away bit. For plot contrivance, you have to go to the Heart of Gold and its Infinite Improbablilty Drive. Adams made the radio pilot thinking that the series would not be picked up and he painted himself into a corner, leaving Ford and Arthur about to be expelled from a Vogon airlock into the vacuum of space.
When he went to write the second show he couldn’t think of any way to save them that that wasn’t massively improbable. Personally, I think that the IID was a genius plot contrivance, but it was a plot contrivance.
Eccentrica Gallumbits and Eriticon Six were a throw-away that became something of a running gag.
Actually, the show was going to be called The Ends of the Earth, with the Earth being destroyed in some horrible manner each week. However, after he put Ford and Arthur in the airlock, he realized that he couldn’t stand not knowing what happened to them and the series HHGTTG was born.