I always thought Hitchcock’s The Birds had an amazing plot hole, to wit, the bad guys were, well, birds. Not acid spewing aliens, not 40 ton atomic mutant lizards, just birds. Which means that if the protagonists had been even marginally smarter than the birds, the movie would have been over in about five minutes.
Your average bird weighs about five ounces. (Let’s not get into laden or unladen swallows here.) Even large seagulls probably don’t weigh much more than ten pounds. And they’ve got hollow lightweight bones. So when birds invade, you put on a heavy jacket and some gloves. You go down to the basement and get some safety goggles, a helmet if you’ve got one, and, most importantly, a tennis racket. Then it’s just clobbering time.
Unbreakable:
How can you be a football player and think it’s normal to not get injured? How can you not realize you’ve never been sick?
Independence Day:
Maybe the computers had some alien-to-macintosh translator. Oh, wait, but then the alien computers would still have to use ASCII, right?
I liked Face Off, but there was one thing I didn’t understand. (If this was explained in the movie, I missed it.) When Troy wakes up without his face, he calls his gang, who bring in the doctors to give him Archer’s face. But when Archer, wearing Troy’s face, escapes and then shows up with the gang, why don’t they know it isn’t him? They helped him get Archer’s face; they know what happened. How can they not know that someone who shows up with Troy’s face is Archer?
Can hardly bear to think about this movie, in which two of my favorite actors scored their second strikes towards box office poison for me [for Tommy Lee the first was Double Jeapordy and for Samuel L. it was (shudder) Sphere…
If you were smart enough to skip this stinker, here’s the gist…Sam L is being court-martialed for murder under the premise that he ordered a bunch of Marines to fire into a crowd of unarmed civilians at an embassy in Yemen, leaving 83 dead and more wounded. He says he clearly remembers scores of armed men, women and children blasting away like Rambo, causing him to order the return of fire, and yet this is apparently completely unsupported by any physical evidence or eyewitnesses, including the Marines who shot back!!! We are supposed to wonder if he’s a psychopath or a scapegoat, dramatic tension, blah blah.
SPOILER
And in the end it turns out that he was indeed correct, and practically every moving human in the crowd was armed to the teeth and spraying bullets all over this embassy. Are we then supposed to believe that between the time their comrades were killed and the moment Sam ordered the cease fire they somehow hid ALL OF THEIR WEAPONS so that when he peeks over the wall he doesn’t see the guns? Or that the men under Sam’s command had their eyes closed while shooting? Or that as soon as they jumped in their choppers and left, the uninjured members of the mob crawled all over the facade of the embassy, digging out thousands of rounds from the stone and spackling over the holes??
For Alien, one of the major plot holes that was never touched upon in the movie (but was explaned later in novels and comics, so not everyone knows about it) is how did the aliens send out a distress beacon?
If they were advanced enough to create and operate a ship with a distress signal, why were they baffled by doors in the movie. In the sequel, it`s a big deal when the QUEEN figures out how the elevator works.
The answer to these holes is kinda cool, in my opinion anyway. Predators.
The Predator race (you know Ah-nold in the jungle and ugly alien hunter chasing him) uses aliens to train with. They breed them in these big ships, and let a few loose on a barren planet to later go hunt them down. They think humans are the dangerous hunt, cuz were so wily and the like, so were reserved for expierianced predators.
So the ship in Alien is a Predator ship that went down, and the Aliens went wild.
On a side note, you can see the skull of an Alien in the Predator ship near the end of Predator 2.
On another side note, the movie Species was going to be tied into this theory as a way for Predators to have a Really dangerous prey, but the idea was dropped when the Aliens/Predator movie fell apart in pre-production.
In the animation Picard has Data pull up on the Enterprise, we learn that Malcom plans to blow up the star in order to push the rift towards whatver planet he’s on. In the animation, the star explodes and shoves the rift over, and all the other objects in the system stay stationary. The force resultant from the explosion would send all other objects flying into space. Unless this is some sort of missile that defies all laws of motion. Newton was probably spinning in his grave.
Funny you should bring that up. We just rented that movie Friday night, having not heard too much about it. Tommy Lee Jones and Samual L. Jackson’s performances were top-notch, but that gaping incongruity totally blew the movie for me. Ferchrissake, who took the pictures of the bodies, and when? What the hell did the marines do when the fire-fight was over, just bug out? You would think they would police the area after the hoo-ha, surely they would have found at least one of the several dozen weapons being fired from the crowd. And they show this flash of a scene where a little girl is firing a powerful looking handgun, with one hand, like it was a squirt gun.
I wish they would have come up with a more plausible situation, because I really enjoyed the courtroom scenes.
In Entrapment, when the truth is revealed at the end, nothing anyone has done makes sense any longer. Granted, it comes as a surprise, just because it is completely inconsistent with the whole rest of the movie.
No, the system they were in was similar to our solar system, as there was a central star like our sun, and planets, which we learned were inhabited. They talked about the destruction of that star killing the millions of people on those planets. If, for example, our Sun were to explode, the planets in our system would not stay within their orbits, but be blown out from the blast.
I just saw Frequency on Encore last night and had problems with this part myself. I think what the filmmakers had in mind is Jack Shepard going after the family in the past and the son in the present are unrelated events. The reason he went after the son is to protect himself from the only one in that timeline who can finger him for the murders. Because only the son is aware of all timelines, the present Jack didn’t know of his actions agaist the family thirty years prior. Also remember that some events in the past have a corollary in the present, such as the falling radio set and the falling baseball. The Jack in the past was distracted by hearing his future self over the radio, enabling the mother to jump him and resulting in his hand being essentially shot off. The Jack in the present had been using that hand to hold down the son. How would you feel if you suddenly lost a part of your body and have no idea how it happened?
In “Generations” someone asks Soren why he can’t just ply a ship into the Nexus. He says you can’t get into it that way. Tell that to Kirk, cause that’s EXACTLY how he got into it.
I’ll leave alone for the moment that they can exit the nexus at any time and place they want, and instead of doing so on ten-forward, where Soren is standing harmlessly among many crew members and guards, they pick five minutes before he blows up the sun.
In Star Trek 6 they find the cloaked Klingon ship using the device they were using to study stellar phenomena at the beginning of the movie. Except they weren’t studying that stellar phenomena, a different ship was.
Regarding the Alien distress beacin, I always assumed it was the “Space Jockey” race that sent the beacon, not the aliens themselves.
-when the agent took over the SWAT guy’s body, he came in somewhat sideways (his face was where the side of SWAT dude’s head was)
-Trinity shot where the side of the agent’s head was (really the front of SWAT dude’s head)
-the agent’s program leaves, and we see that indeed, SWAT dude was shot in the front
It’s been awhile since I’ve seen Blues Brothers, so forgive my inaccuracies, but here goes…
After Jake gets the band back together, they start driving around without really having a gig lined up. They see a sign promoting the “Good Ol’ Boys” at a country bar, go in and introduce themselves as the band, and play until closing.
After closing time, the bar owner wants Jake to pay for the beer. Right about then, the real Good Ol’ Boys drive up.
Jake and the band quickly drive away, and the bar owner and the Good Ol’ Boys chase after them in angry pursuit.
Why did the real Good Ol’ Boys show up after closing time? They seemed totally unaware that they were late. And why were they upset with Jake and his band?
Didn’t they get lost? Then they were further stalled by Jake and finally learned that the Blues Brothers had taken their gig and stiffed Bob for the beer.
But the thing is, Frequency made it quite clear from the beginning that changes to the timeline were retroactive. No one was aware of the different timelines except for the son. So from Jack’s perspective he didn’t suddenly loose a hand. He lost the hand thirty years ago.
Here’s another plothole from a movie I’ve seen in the time since the OP. Spoilers for the ending of Velvet Goldmine follow…
Arthur realizes that long-vanished rock star Brian Slade is the same person as current rock star Tommy Stone when he sees that Stone has the same personal assistant that Slade had years before.
Problem #1: The assistant had previously appeared only in the flashbacks of other characters. There was no indication that Arthur had ever met or even seen a photo of her before, so how could he recognize her?
Problem #2: Why should Arthur assume that Stone and Slade are the same person because they have the same assistant rather than thinking that the assistant just got a new job once her former employer’s career went down the tubes?
There were other gaps in the movie, but this was the one that was most frustrating for me.
I think the reason she got this assignment was because of her relationship with the Scott Glenn character. IIRC, he was her “mentor” and was giving her a shot based on the abilities he observed in her. I think this was explained in more detail in the book.
While Face Off did have some plot holes, this part they at least tried to explain. (It’s been a while since I saw the movie, so forgive me for not remembering more characters’ names.)
Archer (Travolta->Cage->Travolta) is approached to impersonate Troy in secret. Only one other official, and the doctors, know about the impersonation; even Archer’s team does NOT know. When Troy (Cage->Travolta->Dead) wakes up, and makes the doctors fix him up with the “Travolta” face (sorry for the mental image there), he then kills everyone who knows the difference - the doctors and the official that knows. Archer’s team never knows this, so they accept Troy as Archer.
Some things that are still plot holes to me here:
Why was the official (whose name I forget) there at the facility when Troy wakes up? [I could probably let this go as just chance]
To complete the disguises, it isn’t just the face - it’s also a voice synthesizer (or something to change the voice). They put a lot of effort into creating this for Travolta to sound like Cage. They had NO REASON they would have made this already for Cage to sound like Travolta, and nothing in the movie indicates they could have tossed that together.
They gloss over (for my taste) the investigation of the crime of killing the doctors and destroying the medical facility.
There were some other things that seemed wrong at the time, but I don’t remember them now.
Hey, as long as someone’s mentioned Mission Impossible 2, I’ll just rag on the original.
The whole CIA headquarters sequence makes no sense at all. So they fake a fire alarm and send in their people disguised as firefighters. Shouldn’t the real firefighters show up eventually? But the single dumbest moment in the whole movie, and one of the dumbest moments I’ve ever seen in American cinema, comes when the disguised MI team jog down a crowded hallway, following a CIA guard carrying an uzi. Emanuelle Béart slips to the rear of the group, looks around slyly and ducks into a ridiculously convenient unlocked closet and no-one notices! I actually said “yeah, right!” out loud in the theatre because it was so preposterous. If a guy with an uzi and a bunch of firemen ran down a hallway at my workplace, you can bet that every single bystander would be watching them, for their novelty value if nothing else.
Die Hard II was a nightmare of plot holes. One of the biggest is the “let’s shoot blanks at each other so we’ll look convincing” bit. Convincing to who? Willis? Dennis Franz? if the army guys really wanted to look convincing, why not just kill Willis and Franz and claim the terrorists did it? Why the charade? During the scene when the terrorists are changing from red-stripe magazines to blue, I thought “Uh-oh, this is going to be nasty because armor-piercing rounds usually have a blue label.” Then nothing! Yeesh! And when Willis tries to prove his point by emptying a magazine of blanks in the airport police station, why didn’t one of the other cops shoot him dead on the spot?
And I dont care how unbreakable you are, if you fall off the wing of a 747 onto a concrete runway as the jet approaches takeoff speed, you’re not walking away. Period. Maybe the thin layer of snow cushioned his fall. And I’m pretty jet fuel does not behave like Yosemite Sam’s gunpowder in that you coud leave a trail, light one end, and have flames shoot to the other end.
And of course, the whole plan hinges on the bad guys getting away in a 747. A large, easily trackable 747? You could dust off a rusty Phantom F-4 and shoot that lumbering beast out of the sky, no sweat!