I’ve run across the suggestion there’s a plot hole in “Iron Man II.” Ebert writes:
"The best CGI sequence in the movie comes at midpoint, when Tony Stark decides to drive his own car in the Monaco Grand Prix, and Ivan Vanko stands fearlessly in the middle of the race, dressed like a kinky gladiator and wielding electric whips that can slice a car in two. He nearly destroys Stark, which is so exciting that we forget to wonder how he knew that Tony was driving his own car. " Iron Man 2 movie review & film summary (2010) | Roger Ebert
I saw the movie, and thought it was perfectly clear that Ivan had no idea that Stark was going to drive his own car - he just thought Stark would be watching the race. Ivan’s plan was to disrupt the race to humiliate Stark (by demonstrating that other people could build the armor that Stark had just publicly testified that was a Stark monopoly, and by showing Stark to be a coward, when Stark refused Ivan’s public challenge (which is what Ivan expected Stark to do)). If anything, Stark turning up in a race car when Ivan showed up disrupted Ivan’s plans.
Have I misinterpreted this?
(This thread is also open to other movie/tv plot points which are mistakenly believed to be plot holes…)
One of the classics is Jeff Goldblum’s computer being able to upload a virus into the alien system in Independence Day. But the point is that Goldblum had been studying the alien communications and had programmed that specific computer to translate them.
I would think that Tony Stark’s movement would be pretty well reported, especially directly after his “I AM Ironman” press conference. If he’d entered in the race, or even entered his car in the race, Vanko would know.
Eh…
-we mainly learn much (if not all) of the above from a deleted scene
-if you actually know anything about how viruses are written and how security flaws are found, it’s still a fairly ludicrous oversimplification to think that having access to a terminal connected to an alien mainframe, starting out with zero knowledge of how that computer network works, is enough to create and insert a virus in the kind of time frame shown in the movie. Similarly, the idea that the aliens would decide that the best way to coordinate an attack around the globe was via hijacking earth communication satellites (which is how Goldbum gets on to them in the first place) is patently ridiculous. But I’d say that’s more of a “comic-book-style total exaggeration of what technology can and can not do” than a plot hole, albeit fairly jarring ones because the movie is so dependent on them.
It was public knowledge that Stark’s car (i.e. the car that Stark owned and sponsored) was going to be in the race, and that Stark would be watching the race - the spontaneous surprise decision was that Stark would actually be driving the car.
Not exactly a plot hole, but something interesting I noticed just now.
I’m watching The Karate Kid as I write this, and there’s a scene where Mr. Miyagi and Daniel are walking back to their truck after “learning balance” at the beach. There are a couple of guys drinking beers and resting their empties on Mr. Miyagi’s truck. The main drunk guy appears to be wearing a Washington Nationals hat, which is of course impossible, because the movie was made over 20 years before the Nats existed!
The explanation of course is it’s not a Nationals hat, it’s a Senators hat (the 1960-71 Senators who became the Texas Rangers), who used the same “curly W” logo.
You apparently missed the point. Goldblum’s hadn’t just plugged a terminal into the alien mainframe. He had spent several months working on the communications going between the alien computers and could now understand them. That means he had decoded the alien computer’s operating system. So it was no more unbelievable than having a Windows emulator running on a Mac.
Well, no. He had decrypted the signal that was transmitted between ships via human telecommunication satellites as a countdown. (Why they just couldn’t use their own communications, or in fact just synchronize timing systems is unknown, but whatever.) This in no way would allow him to understand the inner workings of an alien computer system to the extent that he could write and upload a virus in the span of a few hours. This would be like a kid writing a “Hello, World!” program in BASIC and then using his newfound knowledge to bring down the Internet.
As for Iron Man 2, I thought it was pretty clear than Vanko was surprised to find Stark in the car. But then, that film was so rushed and poorly written it was often difficult to figure out what the hell was going on. Like, how Howard Stark would know that his son would need to synthesize a new element in order to replace the palladium (though the building a cyclotron scene in his basement was pure brilliance).
The plot hole (or very serious plot contrivance) in the film is how Vanko got from Russia to Monaco carrying his equipment in the first place. Even assuming that there was a direct flight from Russia to Monaco (there isn’t) and assuming that customs inspectors in France are completely incompetent, how did he get through at the airport in Moscow? And from there through the security at whatever airport he landed at in France to get to Monaco?
The “plot hole” which is not (although there were many others in the film) is why the Xenomorphs in Aliens didn’t simply do what they did in the end in the first place: Which was to climb through roof and the floor to attack the command center. It isn’t a “plot hole” because it was the result of James Cameron having to trim several scenes involving robotic sentry guns killing the Xenomorphs before they could attack.
When those scenes are shown in the “Director’s Cut” of the film, it becomes clear that the Xenomorphs had to regroup before their final attack. This apparently took the many hours of time which elapsed during the film from when Ripley & Co. sealed themselves in the Command Center until they were preparing for Bishop to return with the other drop ship to attempt their escape.
Same with Signs. But also, the water used on the aliens isn’t pure water. As for the door handle…just yesterday, my wife’s Prius had a flat tire. I couldn’t get the tire off after taking the lug nuts off. I assumed there was some dumbass anti-theft technology involved, so the wife is looking at the handbook…and a cop pulls up to help, so he gets in a Prius chat room and comes back and says…"The people in the chat room say to ‘kick it’.
Yup. Came right off.
So, I’m sure the alien stuck in the stockroom or whatever it was spent the first day trying to verbally get the door to open, then he tried to plug some sort of power source into the door…then he spent a day talking to the Mothership getting ideas from them. “Have you tried kicking it ?”
Really? Months? Admittedly, I didn’t pay that close attention to the movie, but I thought that from the moment of first contact to the time Cousin Eddie drove a nuclear-armed fighter jet into the docking bay of the mother ship was like about a week.
Or even less, he said upon discovering that he’d been ninja’d by Fubaya. :o
The Cracked article linked in the OP includes one that’s always bothered me - “Who put the poster back on the wall in Shawshank Redemption after Andy crawled through it?” I never thought that was an issue - he probably had nails / tacks on the top in place, then refastened the ones on the bottom from the other side. It didn’t even seem to me like it would be all that hard to do.
Except that he goes into the tunnel head first! Delicately pulling the poster back up might not be out of the realm of possibility, but doing so with his feet? :dubious:
Maybe he got to the end, then turned around and came back to fix the poster.
Actually, I see no reason to believe it was attached at the bottom in the morning-after-the-escape scene. The warden throws a rock through it, then sticks his hand through the poster and tears it down. It’s not impossible that the bottom was just hanging loose.
I see this in lots of movies which seem to be living back in the 80’s, and everybody assumes that nobody’s x-raying checked luggage. However, if the luggage was checked by bomb dogs, I doubt they’d trigger on an arc reactor.
Not only that, but he had to put the poster back like that every night while he was working on his tunnel in case some guard shone a flashlight into the cell. So he probably had the bottom weighted or some such.
As for the virus in Independence Day, that never really bothered me. The whole point was that the aliens were unbelievably arrogant and never had dealt with effective resistance. So it’s not hard to believe in a culture that never developed any kind of computer security. So if we’d been studying their technology in Area 51, it’s not too hard to believe that scientists had developed a primer on their operating systems. It’s a bit time-compressed, yes, but not wholly unrealistic. A couple of seconds of dialog could have sold it better, I admit.
If someone gave the Goldblum character the virus, maybe. But it was clear that he came up with it himself. Though my memory of the movie is that he had been studying the communications before the events of the movie, he certainly wasn’t cleared for Area 51.
Now having them figure it out from the Area 51 craft makes more sense (but destroys Goldblum’s role as hero) but this assumes the OS of the fighter is close to that of the mother ship. Unlikely. And that they haven’t patched the mother ship OS in the time since the fighter was captured.
It would have been more plausible for them to have said that Jobs was actually an alien and an enemy of the invaders, and he build the virus into the Mac operating system just in case.
I just always hated the way the screw looked into DuFresne’s cell. I know it was meant to make us think he’d committed suicide but his facial expression makes no sense in the context of what he’s seeing.
