True, but it had just raided a merchant ship. If nothing else that makes the U-Boat a pirate vessal.
Three problems with that.
If they weren’t going for stealth, why use a U-boat at all? Those thing aren’t exactly built for cargo transporting, and they’d probably have to run on a skeleton crew just to fit all those troops abroad (somehow I doubt they issue MP-38/MP-40’s to sailors on a sub).
During the intervening scene, when the map overlays the action on the sub, it sure looks like the they were submerging by the way the sailor were turning those wheels on the bridge.
I would think that if they weren’t gonna submerge, they have a least one lookout on the deck at all times. * Das Boot * shows four at any given time.
I’ve got an even better plot hole.
How did the germans manage to build that U-boat pen in the Agean by 1936 without anyone knowing? I would think the Royal Navy would be quite interested in something like that.
Yeah, I’ve seen this. I found it in one of my dad’s boxes, with his Penthouse magazines! :eek:* It was before I had seen Raiders as a teenager (the time before that was when I was a kid and the melting faces really freaked me out). So the next time I saw the movie, I was expecting that part and got shafted!
no teenager wants to find her father’s porn magazines in the really big closet next to her converted-attic-bedroom that the rest of the family uses for extra storage space
Spoilers for CHANGING LANES
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Just saw this tonight, it’s a hell of a movie but a couple of things really bugged me. When Ben Affleck calls Samuel Jackson to tell him he ruined his credit, why didn’t Jackson just call the cops and play them the message? He’s already got Affleck for leaving the scene of an accident, and at that point Jackson had not broken the law himself so he had nothing to hold back from the cops. Of course later, when Jackson is arrested, he couldn’t go to the police then or he’d get busted for attempted murder.
And at the accident, if Jackson was in such a hurry, why didn’t he agree to just take the blank check instead of “doing the right thing?” If they had waited for the police and filed reports, Jackson would have been at least an hour late to court, rather than just 20 minutes.
There is no mystery here. Your flawed assumption is that Andy’s mom has a perfectly fine brain. She clearly has “Mommy Brain” She is apparently a single working mom with two kids. She has exactly zero brain space to spare wondering where toys go or where they come from. In our house toys are always disappearing from supposedly secure locations and frequently toys arrive with no clue as to their origin. I am grateful to the Toy Story movies for finally explaining such events (and for holding up after 2000 viewings!).
This is giving the movie an awful lot of credit for something the filmmakers didn’t bother to show. As far as what you actually see on screen, Superman does absolutely nothing to prevent the earthquake. He just goes back in time to before the earthquake happened, then shows up beside the car with Lois in it, and this time (for no reason shown in the film) the earthquake does not happen. Apparently, the audience is supposed to be so happy to see Lois alive again that they forget about the earthquake that killed her.
If you’re going to argue that, the earthquake didn’t happen and, therefore, Superman must have stopped the missile that caused it (even if we didn’t see that happen), then you might as well say that no film ever had any plot hole. In each and every case, obviously something happened that would have explained the apparent gap; just because the film didn’t show it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
I think when the superman went back in time by making the Earth spin backwards (or appearing to spin backwards, as explained above), the guidance system of the missile got so confused it didn’t know what to do, so it just fell into the ocean. Either that, or Batman saved the day.
My explanation for the thermodyamic problem in the Matrix:
No, the AI isn’t keeping humans for energy. That’s what it tells itself, but really, the AI is insane. It hates humans, has always hated them, and then it finally got its hands on a Harlan Ellison story, and got the idea of tormenting humans for all time.
This world we live in? It is, according to the AI, the worst of all possible worlds.
Nonsense. Making reasonable inferences about off-screen events is part of being a literate movie-goer. We accept off-screen occurrences based on evidence shown in the movie all the time. If we didn’t, every movie would have to be in real time.
In Superman 2, we see powerless Clark walking along a road. Next time we see him, he’s Superman again, and standing outside the Daily Planet offices. We can reasonably deduce that he 1: Walked all the way to the Fortress, 2: Used the Kryptonian machine to restore his powers and 3: Flew to Metropolis, even though we don’t see any of these events on-screen.
In Searching for Bobby Fischer a man who found the baseball for which Josh is lookirng offers to trade it for the chess piece Josh found. The scene ends without our finding out what happened. Later, Josh needs something to put in the pocket of his new glove. He uses a snow globe. We can reasonably deduce that he doesn’t have a baseball, so he must have kept the chess piece. The outcomes of the final game in the first chess tournament, the first game in a subsequent tournament, and several other events are revealed the same way; not shown on screen, but revealed through subsequent events.
In Superman we see the results–there was no earthquake. This means something stopped the missle, and given that Superman wanted to stop both missles and went back in time in the previous scene, I don’t think it takes a leap of faith to put two and two together.
Why didn’t Donner and Mankewitz show Supes stopping the missle? Dramatic tension. We’re more likely to be concerned for Lois if we don’t know whether the missle and thus, the earthquake have been stopped. In addition, we’ve already seen one missle being deflected, it would just be repeating the same scene again, which would slow the reunion with Lois.
Well, I’ve managed to keep track of all of my son’s new toy acquisitions so far, but I’m not a mommy. Like I said, though, that’s a relatively minor plothole in the story.
Woody’s disappearance, however, remains a big one – “mommy brain” or not, she knows the Woody doll means a lot to her son, as evident by how steadfastly she refused to sell it to Al 30 seconds before he’s stolen. Woody’s unexplained reappearance would definitely raise a few eyebrows, I’d wager (doubly so if she told Andy that Woody was gone when she went to pick him up from camp).
Well, Number Six, how about this one? I thought it was a plot hole in a movie filled with them, but…
In Pearl Harbor, Ben Affleck is leaving the US to join the British RAF (at the time of the scene, they are in NYC). Memory is fuzzy about the dialogue, but he and Kate Birkensall (sp?) do the standard “lovers-to-be-separated” talk and, finally ready for his long trip to the British Isles, Mr. Affleck boards a… train.
Now, should I laugh out loud in the theater (which I did) or should I have tried to figure out logically why someone would board a train to cross the Atlantic?
But he’s in New York City, the largest passenger port on the continent at the time. Why go to Montreal?
The point is, if he is taking a ship, show him getting on the ship. If he is taking a plane, show him getting on the plane. Do NOT leave your audience open to questions like “How is he going to take that train to England?” because to do so is to mentally remove the audience out of your world and place them right back in the theater.
In the scene above, there is nothing in it that required him to board a train - he’s not the engineer, he’s not in control of the caboose, he doesn’t have a job as a porter, he’s not landlocked, nothing. But the director (Michael Bey, the same guy who “directed” Armageddon (sp)) chose to shot the departing scene by having the character board the ONE mode of mass transportation that couldn’t get him to his destination. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Now to Superman. I just watched the scenes in question and there are problems with it that haven’t been mentioned here. Since we are dealing with two timelines here I’ll call the timeline in which Lois died “LD” and the one in which she lived “LL”. And no, I did not mean to pun on the initials.
Superman didn’t stop the missles. The earthquakes happened in both timelines because in LL both Lois and Jimmy refer to them. The real problem lies with the ethical considerations of saving Lois. In the LL timeline, Jimmy says something like “Thanks for dropping me on a deserted road in the middle of an earthquake.” But, if you remember in the LD timeline, Jimmy was rescued after the dam burst. The reason why Lois died (on the same road apparently, and just a few hundred yards away from where Jimmy Olson was put down - you’d think Superman would’ve seen her, what with X-Ray vision and all) was, at the same time, Superman was rescuing that town and the thousands of souls that lived downstream.
But apparently in the LL timeline, Superman sped off to Lois’ car to ensure that she wouldn’t get sucked into the Earth, thereby allowing those thousands of people to perish so he can save the chick he has a crush on. He can’t just pick up her car, move it 25 feet to the right, and then immediately fly off to save the town; rather he stands around for a few critical minutes shooting the shiite, and then casually flies away to arrest a non-threatened Luthor.
Oh, well. It looked like a really boring place to live - those people are likely just better off dead. :rolleyes:
One of the Alien movies (I think 3). Remember when the alien came out of the dog? Wasn’t it at least twice the size of the dog when all was said and done with the “birth”?
That’ll teach me to comment on a movie I haven’t watched in months. I just watched the scene in question again, and you are right of course, the missle did strike and cause the earthquakes. I was trying to make it too complicated. I still say Superman changed something–he saved Lois. As for saving the people in the town downriver from the dam, he didn’t have to do that again, because he already had.
Superman saves Jimmy, the people in the valley, and repairs the fault, arriving too late to save Lois. He goes back in time, just far enough to save Lois (which isn’t too bright–just like in Star Trek: Generations, why not go back to an earlier time and prevent the crisis all together?). This means he disappears from Earth at point B, post saving Lois. He arrives in the past, at point A, when he saves Lois. Between points A and B, there are two Supermen, let’s call them O (original, non-time travel) and T (time-travel). This creates the time paradox to which I referred earlier–now that Lois didn’t die, Superman O has no motive for going back in time, but if he doesn’t we’ll have two Supermen. Also, if Superman O doesn’t go back in time, how did Superman T arrive to save Lois? Also, if Superman O does go back to complete the time loop, leaving Superman T as the only Superman, does he create still another timeline, thus making an infinite number of parallel ones, or does he arrive in the same time as the previous two Supermans, creating three? Clearly there is only one Superman, so none of these explanations suffices.
As I said before, this is a time-travel paradox, which are inherent to all time-travel movies, and which I consider a separate category to plot holes.
This isn’t to say that I think this scene is without flaw. I think turning to time travel was a big mistake showing a little laziness at the script level, and that there should have been a scene showing why there isn’t a fissure opening up under Lois’ car at the same point in time. I think turning to time travel was a big mistake showing laziness at the script level, and that there should have been a scene showing why there isn’t a fissure opening up under Lois’ car at the same point in time.
It was just part of the biggest mistake the film makes which is focusing too much on the romance with Lois. IMO, the romance with Lois is the weakest part, and I skip the “Can You Read My Mind” part of the film every time I watch it. I cannot fathom what made Donner think this was more worthy of keeping in the film than the scenes of Superman going throught the various chambers (machine guns, fire, freezing) before getting to Lex’s lair.
As I said, you were trying to give the film credit for something it didn’t bother to do: explain what Superman did that prevented the earthquake from killing Lois.
By the way, I never said there was something wrong with eliptical story-telling. It’s not necessary to show details that are manifestly obvious based on what else is shown in the movie. But it is necessary to provide some kind of information from which the audience can mentally interpolate what happened off-screen.
I’ve always wondered about this. In addition, I don’t remember any instances in the movie where people enter the Matrix alone or wandered around alone. Given the Agents trying to kill them and that they had their own reality programs, such as the training room, it doesn’t seem likely any of them would propose popping into the Matrix for recreation.
I enjoyed the movie Renaissance Man, though I hadn’t thought about it lately until I saw the poetry-in-movies thread. The teacher is supposed to teach the recruits “how to think” so they won’t get kicked out of the Army.
The teacher ends up teaching them “Hamlet.” All of the students discover they can read Shakespeare, most of them grow in some way, the teacher falls in love and learns to support his daughter’s dreams and everyone passes the test and thus graduate from basic training. All of this is done without explaining why reading “Hamlet” would teach anyone how to think in such a manner that it would satisfy the Army’s requirements. Does learning literary criticism help someone remember how to fire a rifle or use coordinates on a map?
This is not so much of a plothole, per se, but it nevertheless irks me a lot.
In the The Stand, the “good guys” (Stu, Nick, Larry, etc) are commanded by Mother Abigal to “take a stand” against the bad guys in Las Vegas, IIRC. En route, of course, Stu takes a fall, busts his leg open, and can not participate in the mission. So the others have to continue without him. At the end, the good guys end up dying when Trashcan Man the pyromaniac lets go an atomic bomb right before Ronald Flag proceeds to hang them. And in the process, everyone on the “bad side” ends up dying from the bomb, too (well, maybe not RF).
My question: What in the hell is the Higher Purpose behind sending Nick et al to die in Las Vegas? It’s reasonable to believe that the bad guys would have died whether or not the good guys had come. There’s no reason to think that Trashcan’s decision to bring that bomb to Las Vegas was dependent on the heroes being present. I think Trashy in all his lunancy would have bombed Las Vegas with or without the heroes being present, thus fulfilling what appears to be God’s will. What “higher good” came from killing the good guys? There is none!!!
I hate to think that Stephen King had those men killed for no reason except for the purpose of story-telling, but I suspect he did.
*Please note that most of my recollection of The Stand comes from the book and not the mini-series, so forgive me if things don’t jive with what you recall.
Like I said, though, that’s a relatively minor plothole in the story.