OK, what I’m looking for here are such egregious holes that we can’t enjoy the movie anymore, and I mean a quality movie. Not obvious crap from crap. Having just watched Die Hard 2 I was inspired to start this thread. And include it as my example, as it explains my point here:
Die Hard 2 relies on the fact that all the circling airplane passengers become hostages b/c they’re going to run out of fuel. This is absurd of course. There are several airports those flights could have been diverted to near DC based on the fuel they had, and I say that as someone who knows nothing about East Coast Geography.
Then he lights a Zippo against the fuel trail and it flows through the air and blows up the plane, but I was more upset with the other hole. That’s what I’m looking for - those examples.
Like my next example. The Ashley Judd movie Double Jeopardy. Where the whole plot revolves around the fact that Ashley Judd can legally kill her husband b/c he jailed her for killing him - you know - Double Jeopardy" - She can kill him now. (I’ll let that softball hanging for an attorney).
Or, the fact that the boat in Jaws was too small, BUT they had a bigger one…(Points to who can identify the Doper that pioneered that one. Extra points if he catches this himself)
Haven’t seen the movie in a while, but I’m not getting this one.
A rather famous plot hole is in both the 1956 and 1978 versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (not sure about the third and fourth versions): near the end, when the couple are hiding, there’s no logical reason why there would have been a pod there.
I haven’t seen the French thriller High Tension, but Ebert’s review said “It creates a plot hole big enough to drive a truck through – and then literally drives a truck through it.” That’s why it’s on my Netflix queue.
I’ll have to nominate the recent hellhole of a movie “Awake.”
It centers on the idea that someone could be awake and paralyzed through a heart transplant operation. Not a bad concept for a movie, had it been thought out.
(Spoilers alert!!!)
But … the whole first transplant operation is carried out with only four doctors and nurses in the room! I know that that point is essential for the plot to work out (you couldn’t have a conspiracy to do what they did with as many people around as they’d actually need to do the operation) but it’s completely unbelievable that they do that kind of operation with only four people!
And then to compound the problem at the end of the movie, the real doctor comes in and does a heart removal from one patient and a transplant into another all in the space of about ten minutes!
As I think I said before about this movie, you know you’ve got a stinker when you spend more time pausing the DVD to point out plot holes than you do actually watching the movie.
For as great of a movie as Batman Begins was it still had that awful plothole of having a device than can vaporize water than runs underground and through pipes instantly yet has no effect on vaporizing the water inside humans.
The ending of Twelve Monkeys. Some guy, all nice and smiling, comes through airport security carrying what he calls “air samples”. Aside from the fact that no security agent in his right mind would ever allow an unknown gaseous substance onto a plane, then another guy comes charging up from behind, claiming that Nice Smiling Guy is carrying something dangerous, and starts waving a gun and then shooting. And not a single security guard, once they take down Willis, decides to go get NSG and tell him, “Hey bud you’re part of this too, let’s see what’s really in those bottles.”
Up to that point I could buy all the time traveling plot machinations, but this just seemed gratuitously tacked on so that Gilliam could just wrap up his circular plot in a nice tidy way. Idiot Plot rather. I refuse to ever watch the movie again because of this.
He has by this point already opened one of the vials and waved it under the security guard’s nose. That’s after declaring them biological samples and producing permits for them.
Abou Jaws: this is less a Plot Hole than a case of It’s In The Script. Yes, Clint is a codgery ole fisherman. There’s no rational reason that Brody and Marcus would agree to go out on the rickety wooden boat when a faster, larger, and better-equipped one was available (Brody’s ship). They already know this great white has gone out and smashed other people’s conveyances to peices in order to get at the tasty human morsels; they would never be stupid enough to go out in Clint’s tiny and very old schooner.
But, they have to, because otherwise the end would have been very boring. Jaws wouldn’t be ripping holes in it, and Clint wouldn’t have died.
Watching “The Great Escape,” it occurred to me that Steve McQueen might have reached Switzerland if he’d just gotten off the motorcycle and climbed over the barricades.
I don’t think this qualifies as a major plot hole for me. Remember, they really didn’t have a real idea of how big a shark they were going after (re: their amazement at the length of the shark when they first get a full view of it.) Plus, their initial goal was to go out and catch the shark, for which they would need a boat rigged for fishing. IIRC, Brody’s boat wasn’t a fishing boat; it was a boat rigged for scientific exploration which would have made his boat, although bigger, completely useless for what they were initially using it for.
The idea that once they did see the shark and knew they needed a bigger boat isn’t a plot hole, but can be chalked up to Quint’s cantankerousness that once he was in the fight, he wasn’t leaving it until it was done.
and we wouldn’t have one of the best, most paraphrased lines in movie history, “we’re going to need a bigger boat.”
I can buy this alleged plothole because Quint, purports to be an expert in shark killing. Hooper just wants to see it and study it, he doesn’t really want to kill it and like many scientists he doesn’t consider that his subject may eat him. Brody has never handled anything like this and takes a back seat to the other two supposed experts who aren’t thinking rationally. I think he regrets it the entire time, especially after he sees the shark and asks for a bigger boat - repeatedly.
Also, I don’t think The Orca was all that small or rickety, it was just too small and rickety to stand up to the gigantic shark.
When I first saw Jaws I thought it was okay but as someone who liked to go to the beach I wasn’t really crazy about it and the idea of huge sharks out there waiting to eat me. But it really grows on you with repeated watchings. I still get chills when Quint talks about the Indianapolis and I keep hoping that this time they will decide to go back for a bigger boat.
“Clint” means Quint, right, and “Marcus” means “Hooper”? Then I think you’re talking about Hooper’s boat (Chief Brody was afraid of the ocean; not likely to have a boat). Bigger, definitely, but a) it’s probably not specifically rigged for catching sharks, as Quint’s boat is; b) Quint probably wouldn’t have agreed to go out on somebody else’s boat; and c) they needed Quint for his shark-related experience, sea stories and touching rendition of “Spanish Ladies”.
Also, although the characters know they’re after a big shark, they don’t know it’s a movie shark, with some kind of personal vendetta that makes it more aggressive than any real shark in the ocean.
There’s no scene like that in the movie; I think you’re referencing a scene with exactly two officers. I’ll rewatch it tonight, but as I recall it was a plausible scene, given the antogonist’s combination of detailed planning, precise timing, and utter ruthlessness.
ETA: Even if the scene were implausible, it wouldn’t be a plot hole, just hard to swallow.
I guess my favorite plot hole is in The Big Sleep. If I recall, there’s really no explanation for the murder of the chauffeur. Actually, I never completely followed who-all was doing what in that movie, but I watch it for Bogart and Bacall.
There’s a huge plot hole in Die Hard 2, but that’s not it. The pilots that are in the holding patterns over Dulles don’t know that they should divert. The last message they get from the real tower is to hold over the outer marker. When they’ve able to contact some of the planes over the air phones, they divert to alternate airports. Plus, there’s a reference to National Airport shutting down for bad weather, implying that some of the planes might not have the fuel to reach an open alternate. (A lucky break for Col. Stewart, certainly.)
The bigger problem is the whole transmitter issue. The controllers are all fretting about not being able to contact the planes after the bad guys disable their communications. They even walk into an ambush trying to get to the radio at the “annex skywalk”. Here’s the problem:
Every plane on the ground at that airport has a transmitter in it.
They could just walk out to gate C12, walk onto the flight deck of a 737, hit the master switch, tune to the right frequency, and talk to every plane in the air.
On the subject of Die Hard 2, there’s a different problem. The first movie kicked ass; lone hero trapped alone with some exceptional, bad-ass thieves. The second movie tried to recreate the whole lone-hero angle by having all the other good guys be complete morons. McClain catches the “luggage thieves”, McClain realizes there’s going to be trouble, McClain predicts the ambush, McClain tries to wave off the doomed airliner, McClain finds the bad guys hideout; butting heads with the airport police and staff at every turn. It hurts a movie to rely on smart people doing so many stupid things.
That’s not a hole. Hell, that’s one of the things that makes it a great movie.
In real life, how often would you get all the suspects in one room and explain to them in a Belgian accent how you figured out their nefarious scheme? Real life is messy, and you almost never know who did what, and why. If you can just make fifty dollars a day, plus expenses, and wait out a rainstorm with a seriously hot clerk in a bookstore, you’re way ahead of the game.
The Ocean’s Eleven remake with George Clooney was kinda like that. Just watching them is so much fun that by the end of the movie who cares if they steal the money or not.
But, Die Hard 2 is obvious crap from crap.