In the recent thread The Luca Brasi Gambit, started by Dale Sams, some of us thought the idea needed to be expanded to other beloved, esteemed, and critically acclaimed masterpieces that have withstood the test of time – except that they might not have been examined closely enough for logic errors.
Here’s a chance to point to such things and let the world know that even Caesar may have had stinky feet.
In Titanic, the characters don’t really seem to show much discomfiture as they’re splashing around in the cabins, even though the water would have been near freezing. Adrenalin would only go so far.
Speaking of the Godfather: why the hell would the guys watching Frankie allow him to have a visit from Tom, the consigliere of the very guy who wants to kill him?
In King Kong, wouldn’t taking a genuine dinosaur back to New York be more impressive than an ape, no matter how big he is?
This is more of a recurring convention, applying to the good, bad and ugly productions with equal sincerity, and no example I can think of at the moment is any more egregious than the others.
It has to do with treating wounds and boo-boos. Wipe it off, put on a bandage and you’re good to go. If there’s no flowing blood, there’s no damage that can keep you from crossing the desert, climbing a mountain, carrying a wounded comrade or anything else strenuous.
Four or five gunshot wounds, as long as they aren’t visibly bleeding, and aren’t to the head or directly to the heart? Wipe 'em off and carry on.
For that matter, how did they get Kong back to New York? He’s probably as big as the boat itself, and even with every surviving crew member helping, I don’t see how they could have moved Kong. And once they did get him onto the ship, how did they keep him docile on the weeks-long voyage back to New York? They had used up all their ether subduing Kong in the first place.
I noticed that the recent Peter Jackson movie conveniently glossed over all of these glaring logistical problems.
Yeah, once they built a raft and floated him out to the ship, where would they get a crane big enough to haul him aboard? And once aboard, how big are the holds in old tramp steamers? Did they just lash him to the deck and make him sit outside immobilized for the whole journey? No wonder he was pissed!
I want to know why the natives built the giant walls to keep Kong out and then built a Kong-sized gate.
Depends on the dinosaur. I wouldn’t take either. But they’d captured Kong in the (ostensible) process of rescuing Ann Darrow, and given the loss of life involved in doing so, I doubt the captain could have persuaded his men to attempt the capture of a second giant monster.
we’ve addressed this on the Board before. Some people seem to think that they towed Kong back all the way to NY on the raft they built to get him to the boat (Hah!). The Gold Key comic book adaptation shows them simply towing an unconscious Kong behind the boat, without an apparent raft (or else he’s submerging it). A recent audiobook version of Delos W. Lovelace’s novelization shows Kong tied up in a very uncomfortable-looking bundle on the deck of the Venture. The 1976 version is the only movie version to address the problem, saying that Kong was brought back in one of the tanker’s empty holds. I expressed the opinion that this would more likely result in a giant dead ape, since not only are petroleum gases heavy and toxic, but many tankers apparently piped their exhaust through the holds in order to keep down the possibility of explosion in the petroleum vapors. In any event, the 1976 version had by far the largest ship. The Venture in the 1933 version would be hard-pressed to keep Kong on deck. the 2005 Venture would have no room at all.
So now you know why the 1933 and 2005 versions go from Denham shouting “Kong! The Eighth Wonder of the World!” directly to the marquee in Times Square. Not only is it dramatic, it avoids all these nasty practical technical problems.
If you had kids next door, the answer would be obvious: Kong built the wall to keep them out. The gate was just to allow easier access for maintenance.
Well, the 1933 film claims that the wall was built in the distant past by the “higher civilization” that lived there. the (then) present-day natives just kept the wall in repair. Of course, that doesn’t explain why they had to keep opening andclosing the Big Gate every time they wanted to put out a sacrifice. They coulda just cut a human-sized gate in the base of it to let people go in and out. Then they wouldn’t have to keep greasing the giant hinges and replacing the giant Bar across the middle every century or so. Personal experience suggests thatpeople will tend to let something like that go if they can avoid it. In the Real World (a Real World that includes Giant Apes and oversized surviving dinosaurs) that giant gate would’ve rusted into immobility a long time ago.
But then we would’ve been deprived of that wonderful, climactic moment of Kong bursting through the doors.
In Where Eagles Dare, Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton creep through a German castle, with Burton popping sentries left and right with a silenced pistol. Finally they reach the communications room, and Eastwood tries to sneak up with a knife on the one German in the entire castle sitting right next to an alarm button.
Fine, you think: Burton’s run out of ammunition, so it’s up to Clint to silence the Kraut the old-fashioned way.
Eastwood, of course, steps on a loose board and alerts the guy, who of course jumps out of his chair and slaps the button, alerting the whole castle that something’s wrong …
And as the first Ah-OOOOOOO-ga! Ah-OOOOOOO-ga! sounds, Burton shoots him in the back with the silenced pistol anyway!
WTF?!?
In Gladiator, a wounded Maximus rides a horse from Germany to his home in Spain, apparently bleeding all the way.
The Day the Earth Stood Still- an alien from a peaceful collection of sophisticated planets shows up and tells us they’ve all created an intergalactic police force to regulate them. This democratically created police force suddenly applies to humans whether we like it or not and we’re too violent, if we don’t knock it off he’ll blow us up.
There are a few significant holes in the original Star Wars films (the good ones.)
In “Star Wars,” the 1977 film, the crew escapes from the Death Star with the deliberate allowance of Darth Vader, who has had a tracking device placed on the Millennium Falcon in the hopes that the Falcon will lead the Empire to the Rebel base. Princess Leia - the only person on the Falcon who knows where the hidden base is - is immediately suspicious that the Empire has done just this, and says so.
**And yet she has them fly her directly to the Rebel Base. ** Let’s be clear; Leia KNOWS they’re being tracked, and knows that this will lead the Empire right to their base, and she lets them? That makes no sense at all. They literally come within about ten seconds of the base being vaporized solely because she doesn’t have them just drop her off at a neutral spaceport. What?
Then in Return of the Jedi, the Empire has (as they do in every film; the Empire is always a step ahead of the Rebels and they still lose) come up with another scheme. Here they actually encourage the Rebels to assault the Death Star 2.0, allowing them all the information they need except the rather pertinent point that the Death Star 2.0 is actually totally operational and can blow up a battleship with the push of a button. It is, as the Admiral says, a trap!
So anyway the Rebel strike team, led by all the most important characters in the film shows up in a stolen shuttle to sneak onto the moon around which the allegedly undefended Death Star orbits and when they arrive the entire goddamned Imperial fleet is there. There’s more Star Destroyers than stars. They all see it, and Luke even believes his father is aboard the immense Super Star Destroyer that they all see, and nobody says “Hey, wait a damned minute. This was supposed to be really ill-defended, and there’s enough ships here to blow our fleet out of the sky in no time at all… maybe they’re not as unsuspecting as we thought.” Huh?
Don’t get me wrong. They’re GREAT films. But those are holes.
I like how the alien landing is the biggest thing to ever happen on Earth, and yet as soon as the sun goes down the only people around the saucer are a couple of bored sentries.
It makes even less sense that she has to deliver the Death Star plans in person at all. What, the Rebel Alliance doesn’t have subspace communications she could use to transmit the data, and much faster than she could ever travel the distance in a spaceship?!? :dubious:
There’s the whole Amidala issue. First she’s the Queen of Naboo - okay, we can accept that. But then Lucas suddenly decides he doesn’t want a hereditary monarchy so he declares she was elected queen and has her leaving office when her term is done.
So we’re now supposed to accept that a fourteen year old decided to run for the office of Queen? And the voters of Naboo decided she was the best candidate for the job and elected her? Can you imagine how bad the guy who ran against her must have been?
A guy was running for Queen? There’s a flaw right there. 
It was a more progressive galaxy before the Empire.