I was watching Karate Kid Part II tonight for the umpteenth time, and I finally noticed how truly ridiculous the leadup to the end really is, the part with the storm.
On the night that Miyagi was to fight Sato, the town is destroyed (more or less) by what to all appearances is a typhoon. When a typhoon, cyclone, or hurricane is expected, is it normal to plan to catch a flight out of town that day, or make tea in an abandoned cannery, or even plan to have a fight? For that matter, typhoons/hurricanes/cyclones can be seen coming for hundreds of miles, and locations to be hit generally plan accordingly. But not this town. Oh, no. Life goes on as usual, all the way to the end when the storm hits. There’s no mention of it, and they all seem taken by surprise. In 1986. :rolleyes:
Nope. I’m not buying it. This plot hole is large enough to put the Empire State Building through. I know it’s “just a movie”, but suspension of disbelief requires at least a little plausibility, and it is impossible for me to believe that an entire village, constructed of nothing but wood and paper, would be so completely oblivious to a storm of such magnitude.
I can’t think of anything quite that preposterous appearing in any other movies, but then again I’m not the big movie watcher that some of you guys are. So go ahead, drop your bombs in here. I want the most insulting scenes ever put on film, stuff so unbelievable, so implausible, so incredibly preposterous that nobody could ever believe it.
I could say the whole Armageddon (1998) movie was a plot hole! But suffice to say that a rock with ice is really a comet and with all that debris around it was unlikely that it was not leaving a trail or tail. Of course, if a tail was visible it would have been detected with more time to spare, and having the drill operators moving around with a gravity equal to a sound stage does not help to suspend any disbelief.
I think the largest single plot hole is in Die Hard 2. The entire premise of the movie requires that the good guys on the ground not be able to communicate with the airplanes in the air to tell them “the control tower has been taken over by bad guys, don’t believe them”. A frickin’ CHILD could come up with flaws in this idea.
Which is a shame, because it would be a pretty good movie aside from that.
Which airport was it supposed to be? LAX? How many airports are there in the Los Angeles region which can handle passenger jets?
Rather than just circle around waiting to run out of fuel and die, wouldn’t the pilots redirect towards a nearby airport that hasn’t lost radio contact?
It was Dulles, and all of the divert airports were socked in because of a blizzard. The remaining planes didn’t have enough fuel to go anywhere else, so they had to land at Dulles. Even though they had enough fuel to circle for a few hours. :rolleyes:
Unfortunately I’ll have to resort to the unsatisfying “it depends.”
I grew up in the tropical Australian city of Darwin. The city is rather prone to cyclones, and there was a totally devastating one on Christmas Day in 1974 (Cyclone Tracy). A couple of weeks earlier there was another cyclone bearing down on us and we were under full cyclone warning (basically, no unnecessary movements and batten down the hatches).
Fortunately that cyclone veered away in time and all we got was a bad storm. Unfortunately it may have led people to think “here we go again” when the Tracy warnings were issued.
The thing about cyclones (or typhoons or hurricanes) is that while you can see the build up from low pressure system to tropical depression to tropical cyclone, the progress from one stage to the next and back again is not entirely predictable. Even more of an issue is that they can change course literally without warning. You simply can’t afford to stop flights/fights/parties/etc. every time there is a danger.
I haven’t seen the movie, and if they really were carrying on as normal until it hit then that’s unrealistic. But if it was an hour or two before it hit? That I can believe. If you keep updated on the storm’s progress it’s not hard to time it right to get home and take cover. My mother is one of the most risk-averse people I know, and she was out on the night that the cyclone-that-veered-away was threatening Darwin.
Exactly. With that much fuel, they could have reached any number of airports(but apparently Dulles is the only airport on the eastern seaboard that isn’t snowed in).
Hell, there’s probably a number of airbases that could have allowed emergency landings, including andrews.
I was going to comment that Baltimore has an international airport very close to Dulles. I decided to see how long a flight took from Dulles to Baltimore. So I punched up a theoretical flight on Travelocity.
Their figure? Six hours and twenty four minutes. Departing at 8:15 am and arriving at 2:39 pm. After changing planes twice in Norfolk, Virginia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
And you pay $544 for the ticket.
Washington and Baltimore are 34 miles apart. That’s 54 kilometers for our metric friends.
That has got to be the worst flight plan ever made.
The airport to airport shuttle is faster and cheaper.
And yea, there are a lot of airports around here. Friendship (BWI), National(Regan), Andrews AFB and Bolling AFB all spring right to mind, none of them is more than 5 minutes flying time from Dullas. I think there’s a strip at ZFort Meade too. Also, what bothered me was-they can’t communicate with the circling planes from the tower, right? Why didn;t they just go out to one of the planes on the tarmac and use it’s radio???
Plot hole? You mean like in Citizen Kane how everyone knows his last word was Rosebud even though there was absolutely no way anyone else could have heard him say it?
In Rudy, we’re supposed to believe that some short clumsy kid from Smokestack Indiana, who nearly flunked out of high school, managed to wait four years and then pursue his dream, after his best friend died, of getting into Notre Dame University, securing a position on their football team as a walk-on test dummy, and then being put into a game at the insistence of his teammates, where he got an actual quarterback sack in the last seconds of the last game of the season against one of the best offensive teams in the country.
