I just recently watched all three movies on TV, so I feel I can answer this one. When alternate 1985 Biff had Marty in the penthouse office he opened the safe and while showing Marty the almanac, when asked how he got it said something like: “Well, there I was mindin’ my own business, and this crazy old codger with a cane calls me over. He says we were distant relatives; I didn’t see a resemblance.”
Dirty Pretty Things, a 2002 British flick about illegal immigrants in London being hounded by the immigration police. Audrey Tautou (“Amelie”) co-stars as an illegal Turkish immigrant who in particular is given hell by the feds. One thing after another happens, but ultimately towards the end Audrey is in a position to get an excellent forged passport from any country she wants, so that she can finally appear to be legal and live in peace. She can’t stay in London anymore, and she’s always dreamed of moving to New York, so what kind of passport does she ask for? An Italian one. The movie ends with Audrey proudly clutching her brand new Italian passport as she gets in line at the airport for her flight to her brand new, peaceful life in New York City.
…And I’m sitting in the movie theater pulling my hair out. Italian citizens are no more entitled to work in the United States than Turkish ones are!!! Why didn’t she ask for an American passport?? The INS is going to be after her as much as the British authorities were!! Are they setting this up for a sequel or something?? Aargh.
All right; fair enough.
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and 2) Doc mentioned that the ripple effect takes time to work. The future doesn’t change instantly, that’s why in the first one, the picture of Marty and his siblings slowly fades away (with the older siblings first, since the time change is going forward from 1955.)
The actual plot hole in BttF II, as I see it, is how older Biff met and talked to younger Biff. Doc said earlier that the two Jennifers, by meeting rach other, could create a space-time rift that destroys the whole universe (or maybe just confined to their galaxy,) or that they would simply pas out from the shock of seeing each other. Well, luckily for the universe it was option 2, so…why didn’t that happen to young Biff?
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Gotta disagree with you, bouv. As soon as Marty and Doc go from the Future back to their Present, it’s been completely changed. It didn’t take any time for that change to take place. The series plays somewhat fast and easy with how “quickly” people respond to changes in the time stream, but I notice that the changes happen “slowly” for someone going through time, which explains the cases you give. When you travel to a future affected by changes in the past, though, there doesn’t seem to be any time required for the changes to be effected. I maintain that Biff should never have been able to get the DeLorean back to Marty and Doc in the first place, even assuming he could or wanted to.
And the whole thing about “not meeting your future/past self” is a non-issue. Throughout, they keep running into their past selves without incident. Doc hands himself tools. Marty sees himself on stage, and sees his future self, as does his girlfriend. Biff interacts with his past self. It’s true that at least one party in each case was unaware of the interaction, but requiring human cognition for a rip in the Time-space continuum seems an extreme case of “Observer Effect”. Doc originally thought you shouldn’t even allow your knowledge of future events to influence your actyions, because it would have dire consequences, but he got over that (without ill effect) before the end of the first movie.
Not exactly a plothole but more of an anachronism. In the George R.R. Martin’s novel Fevre Dream, one of the characters, who is a vampire, is talking to the main character. He reveals he’s a vampire but reassures the man that he’s nothing like Dracula. Except this book is set in 1857. Bram Stoker’s novel was published in 1897. In the 1850’s, Vlad Dracula was an obscure 15th century Wallachian warlord. Even if somebody had heard of him, there’s no reason anyone would have related him to vampirism.
I haven’t read that, but if it’s set in 1857, you’re quite right.
There were vampires in popular fiction, the two most prominent examples being Lord Ruthven (the vampire not only in John Polidori’s story The Vampire, but of at least two stage adaptations and an opera) and the “penny-dreeadful” Varney the Vampire. So there were at least those two well-known examples he could have cited.
Heh. I read that and never thought of looking at the date of the Stoker novel. Good one.
Wasn’t the neighbor killed in the tornado?
And from the other perspective, why would Old Biff suffer a shock? He KNOWS what he’s doing - if he goes back and DOESN’T meet Young Biff, then he might be shocked…
-Joe
(I haven’t seen the movie in question)
Pitchers are almost always pinch-hit for at the end of a close game. An injury could have kept your best player from the field, leaving him as only a pinch-hitter. (e.g. Kirk Gibson-1989)
Yes, you haven’t seen the movie.
Ok, first off, I’m not defending this book. I hated it. And I realize that this is just trying to rationalize a plothole, but…
You have to imagine another universe, a third that it ahead of the one in the book in time. Duplicates of our heroes travel “back” in time to our universe and leave the things there. Thus those are found in the main universe.
Got it?
Oh and what I want to know about Back to the Future is…
How come the time machine was covered with ice when Einstein first jumped forward a minute, but that effect is never seen again?
The new Casino Royale:
Bond opens with a sequence saying they want to capture the man he’s chasing, not kill him. Then he intentionally sets off an alarm (!) so all soldiers in the building will chase him. Why? He holds the man hostage then simply kills him. All this instead of shooting at him in the first place. And why not use him as a shield for the (apparently unplanned) escape.
As was established in the first movie, it takes time for the changes in the past to ripple forward to the future, as we saw with Marty’s siblings slowly disappearing from his photo. And in fact, in a deleted scene from BTTF2, when future Biff returns to the future and leaves the car he fades from existence, foreshadowing the idea that Lorraine was going to shoot him.
You obviously haven’t read the posts between that and your own, or else you’d have seen that bouv already raised these p[oints, and I’ve already rejected the first one above.
I’m not sure how much of it was a dream. I haven’t seen the movie in years, so I can’t remember if, when Dorothy wakes up, the house and grounds looked normal, or if they were in shambles, indicating that there had been a killer storm. But even if there really was a cyclone, and the dream started when she got hit on the head, there’s still no evidence that Miss Gulch was killed. For that matter, no one mentions Toto being in jeopardy at all; it’s just “You’ve had a bad dream” and “I’ll never leave home again!”
The lion still went ahead with the plan, so he had courage. He just needed to learn that he had it.
Middle-aged guys and men that you don’t want your friends to know don’t make good escourts. It’s the weird logic of their social scene.
Okay.
Yeah, and now that you mention it, the record producer was mainly a plot device: his function was to mention that Rick was having a house party.