In Frequency was implied that the unusually high level of sunspot activity allowed the radio to transmit back in time.
Speaking of Frequency, the ending was riddled with plot holes. I expect to have to suspend my disbelief in a movie that deals with changing the past, but the scriptwriters could have at least stayed consistent with their own rules. I’ll try not to spoil it too much for those who haven’t seen it, but the movie showed again and again that when history changed no one but the main character was aware of it. Then the movie ends with the villain being distracted at a crucial moment by a sudden change in the timeline! What’s more, the changes to the timeline are such that once they have taken place there is no longer any sane reason for the villain to be coming after the hero.
I’m glad I’m not the only one. Maybe it’s the whole “Fighting Ignorance” thing, but I have a real problem with movies where it’s presented as natural, even desirable, for everyone to act like a sappy dope!
Highlander 3. At one point in the movie, Mario Van Peebles and his henchmen are released from a cave in Japan, in which they’ve been trapped for who knows how many centuries. Mario turns to one of his henchmen and says “Find the Highlander.”
And the henchman finds him. In a laundry room in the basement of a mental hospital in New York City! At most a week or two later! What the hell??? How did he know where to look? How did he get across the Pacific? How does a sword-wielding barbarian with manners a thousand years old cross North America and get into the basement of a psychiatric hospital in a major city, without anyone raising an eyebrow? And all in a matter of weeks instead of months or years?
Never mind asking how the Highlander is capable of making a katana despite the fact that he clearly lacks the skill to make a simple broadsword…what an awful, awful movie.
[RANT: ON]
Oh man… there’s something I always had a problem with.
“Highlander” was a story with a beginning, a middle, and (most importantly) an end. It was great. I loved it.
I heard about the atrocity of 2, I saw the atrocity that was 3 (rented for cheap, and figured if 2 was worse, then ignorance is bliss), I’m somewhat amused but uninterested entirely in 4.
It was a good movie. The story was done. Let it go…
And this stuff about creating a brother for the sake of making a series (as good as it was) is just TurtlePucks. They could’ve wisely made a series out of a collection of stories of various immortals through time… but NO, they have to use the money-making “highlander” name. Same place, same clan, same last name…
Alien is filled with stupidities and plot holes. Never mind no one thinks of the obvious solution to their problem or tries to figure out which direction the alien is coming from when he attack or won’t bother to fire a weapon at him. Maybe they are just dumb as rocks.
But the Nostromo is owned by a big corporation. It’s obvious that corporation’s owners aren’t going to care about about the crew. But why in hell did they put those billions of tons of ore aboard in jeopardy? It had to be fairly valuable stuff or they wouldn’t have mined it in the first place.
And why in God’s name do they smoke aboard a spaceship? It’s not like oxygen is a plentiful substance the space.
BTW, I don’t consider any version of time paradox to be a plot hole. There is no way of knowing what might happen with a time machine, so you can’t say what was logical and what isn’t. If time travel exists, anything goes, and cause and effect goes right out the window.
Feh. It may not be a plothole, really, but it’s not a nitpick.
It’s not like saying “oh apes couldn’t take over the world”. I’m not questioning the basic premise, I’m asking that once you esablish a premise the rest of the movie live up to it.
Given that premise, the satire in the rest of the Truman Show should have been a whole lot darker. I know it’s “just a movie”, but movies (to be any good) have to have an internal integrity.
Here’s the thing - I didn’t really like The Truman Show all that much, but how much “living up” do you want? Do you want to see how Truman deals with the life he has been forced into, or do you want to see flashbacks to congessional hearings regarding whether or not the show’s producers should be able to get away with it?
I just thought that for that particular movie’s premise, they explained all they needed to to start examining the inherent human tragedies of the fictional show’s actions. See what I mean?
If I were to make a movie set in an alternate universe, I would want to tell a story, not explain it’s existance.
I agree about “Alien”. That movie bothered me enormously – the biggest cliche of monster flicks is used repeatedly – “There’s a monster loose on this ship. All of us are going over here. YOU go over there, where it’s dark.” They used it three times! They build a “monster detector” to locate the beast. They find it, then they can’t tell the captain which way to go to avoid it! Then they never use the thing again!And surprise, one crew member turns out to be a robot! That came totally out of left field – they never even TOLD us they had robots in this future.
To fans of sf film, “Alien” seems to owe a LOT to an almost-forgotten Jerome Bixby film of the 1950s entitled “It! The Terror from Beyond Space”. Rent it. “It” doesn’t have the rich Ridley Scott atmosphere, but it’s an intelligent film, and unjustly neglected. (Bixby also gave us “Fantastic Voyage” and the “It’s a GOOD Life” episode of Twilight Zone, not to mention “Atomic Missile” and “Curse of the Faceless Man”. Worth seeing.)
(I have to add that I loved “Aliens” Cameron is a hell of a film maker (if you ignore Titanic). “Aliens” is intelligent and well made.)
Speaking of Alien, as I’ve mentioned before on another thread, why in the hell didn’t Ripley in Aliens think to bring extra clips when she made her final assault to rescue little Newt? She took the time to tape the flame thrower to the assault rifle and fill her pockets with grenades. If she had just brought one extra clip, she could have wasted the alien mama. Pretty stupid.
And then there’s SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. At the end of the movie, there is a small group of paratroopers without heavy anti-armor weapons. They are at a bridge which is evidently Rommel’s last chance to bring in armored forces to threaten the Allied beach head. They have tons of explosives, but their orders are to hold the bridge. No way. Blow that sucker up. It wouldn’t have even been a second thought. The Allies had the superior engineering forces to rebuild the bridge if they needed it, and there’s no way the Germans could have rebuilt it with Allied airpower, especially with paratroopers on the other side shooting at them. Really, really stupid.
…By way of John Carpenter’s Dark Star, which was co-written by (and features as an actor) Dan O’Bannon, who would later co-write Alien. Carpenter and O’Bannon were clearly referencing It! (among other things), so makes sense that the same co-writer would revisit similar territory.
Starship Troopers…I know, it’s that ‘kickboxing wit a first grader’ thing again, but I really question the idea of invading a bunch of obviously crap planets with infantry. No armor, no air support (Except one bombing run), no heavy weapontry.
The thing is, the bugs were launching asteroids at Earth from their home system, right? So, when our ships got to their system, <b>why didn’t we launch their asteroids right back at them? They were right there in orbit!!! Why not carpet nuke the planet and be done with it?</b>
I know the ST the movie was a parody of WW2 propaganda, but the complete idiocy of the battle tactics were a little to much.
Why create a world at all? Keep them in simple unconsciousness, in constant REM. Let the humans provide their own world.
For all you Trekkers . . .
In Star Trek: Insurrection, at one pint Cmdr. Riker is racing the Enterprise from two Son’a ships. It is explicity stated that they will be in firing range in 18 minutes. Thirty seconds later, the Enterprise is hit with a photon torpedo.
Can’t believe no one’s mentioned Godzilla. That thing was the godfather of all plot holes. The plot was Swiss-cheese like. Brutal.
I know most people have seen lists of problems in the movie, but there’s one thing that was glaring to me that I’ve never seen mentioned. Recall, if you can after the months of therapy seeing this movie required, the scene in the Madison Square Garden. Our “heroes” enter the MSG through a giant, gaping hole in the floor that was dug by mommy Godzilla. They then decide they need to trap all the baby Godzillas in the building, which they do by blocking all the doors, with apporpriate drama and special effects. Surprise, surprise, they manage to get the building secure and escape at the last second. Not once does anyone consider that maybe one of the hundreds of babies managed to crawl out that huge gaping hole in the ground. You know, the one through which you entered? The one around which all the eggs were carefully arranged? The one that was much bigger than any door in the building??
Oh, that reminds me of another one. In Star Trek: Generations, the Malcolm McDowell character fires a missile from the surface of the planet toward the sun. The planet, we note, is fully hospitable to human life, i.e. in Trek parlance “class M.” It takes, IIRC, eleven seconds for the missile to make the trip from planet to sun.
So, in other words: Either the planet is about two million miles from the sun, which is less than a twentieth of the orbital distance of our own Mercury (which is clearly inhospitable to human life), or the missile is flying at a considerable multiple of the speed of light, which is ridiculous. (It isn’t flying at warp; the Enterprise crew watches it go.)
There is a third alternative: The system’s sun is miniscule, perhaps a brown dwarf, and its energy output is so low that the extremely close planet gets about the same amount of heat/light as would Earth, a hundred times farther away. This also accounts for how quickly the sun’s explosion reaches the planet… :rolleyes:
As an addendum to this: it’s stated in the Area 51 area that the scientists (for 50 years, mind you) couldn’t get the crashed alien ship working because they “couldn’t replicate the kind of power they use”. Christ, if even their electricity isn’t like ours, how can a computer of any kind be plugged into their system?
You know, the title of this movie is a plot hole in itself. Shouldn’t it be I Still Know What You Did Two Summers Ago? Or I Know Something Else That You Did Last Summer, since there’s a two year gap between the murder and sequel?
The missle that McDowell fired did not change the mass of the star. If that’s the case, then the rift wouldn’t change course from a change in the galaxy’s gravity.
The collapse of the star sounds strangely familiar to the ability of the Tox Ootat (which I am horribly misspelling). That was the thing that Picard was searching for on Risa in one of the episodes of the series. It was stolen 29th century technology.