In probably the funniest moment in the bible (which isn’t saying much, I know), the Philistines capture the Ark of the Covenant, and are afflicted with a plague of hemorrhoids. That’s an alternate Raiders ending that needs to be made.
I’ve been getting crappy sf movies from Netflix, ones I wisely didn’t want to see in theaters, so here are a few.
In War of the Worlds we have the classic plot hole, that the aliens wouldn’t bother considering the possibility of infection. In the original there was at least the excuse that germ theory was relatively new. Today - no way. I can almost buy that the aliens would be susceptible based on some hints in the movie, but not that they wouldn’t have considered infection. Even worse, though is the war machines being buried. Cute, and different from the typical landing, but wouldn’t someone in the thousands of years since they were buried either dig one up or detect something odd while exploring for minerals or oil?
I saw I, Robot the other night, and now understand why Harlan Ellison is so mad. I don’t know if it is possible to spoil something that is already a rancid pile of putrid offal, but I’ll put my question in a spoiler box anyway.
How did USR convince everyone to exchange their robots at the same time. Will’s Ma or Grandma supposedly won a lottery, sure, but did every poor person? Given how long it takes to upgrade operating systems, would everyone really upgrade? Who paid for it? Is USR so privately owned that no one questioned a massive outlay for no reason? (It does seem the place has the CEO, Susan Calvin, and a bunch of guards, that’s about it.)
Also, I can see Viki’s motivation, but what was the CEO’s? Not for the plot, but for the upgrade.
Not to mention Susan being a pistol-packin’ momma with perfect aim after firing a gun once. I just saw Lost in Space also, and based on these two movies, not only should Akiva Goldman be banned from writing scripts, he should be banned from writing anything, including his own name.
I love the image this has conjured up of a pen injunction.
“Mr Avika you are to remain at least ten feet away from a pen or pencil at any one time.”
Also a plague of mice.
And to lift the plague, they had to make five golden mice and five golde n hemmorhoids and give them back with the Ark.
Indy could’ve stolen those from a temple, substituting a bag of sand for them.
The next time I hear The Twelve Days of Christmas, someone is going to ask me why I’m laughing.
“Germ theory was relatively new” to HUMANITY, not necessary to an alien species whose technological level was way beyond ours, even comparing today’s tech and the original film. Once you get to that level of tech, shouldn’t you know something about basic biology? I think it’s either a plot hole for both movies or neither.
Leaper, the book was written by a HUMAN BEING, not an ALIEN.
-FrL-
So, it’s page seven. Did we come up with the top five yet?
Its a while since I read the original book, but I thought there was a comment in the book that the Martians had “long ago eradicated all disease-causing bacterium on their planet”. Allowing for the time the book was written, if they had eradicated them several centuries/millenia ago it is possible the Martians had simply lost the technology to deal with them or shelved it as unneccessary (how do they research micro-organisms if they’ve wiped out all their test specimens?). Meanwhile earth’s bacteria continued to evolve past the point where any bacterial sciences they had could deal with them.
If that wasn’t in the film, then that is more of a plothole.
Of course this does depend on the idea that you can wipe out micro-organisms without causing a massive calamity to your entire environment - acceptable when the book was written, but not so much now.
Nitpick: “Goldsman.”
Goldsman’s career is interesting, in that he started it off by writing a big-budget, big-star film (The Client) and has written approximately one big budget film a year since. None of his scripts show any real talent beyond a good fundamental understanding of how to write a standard movie script in more or less the right number of pages. That’s a legitimately skill, and it’s not as easy as it sounds, but I don’t see why Akiva Goldsman, in particular, got chosen as the guy to write them, as opposed to a hundred other people who could churn out such scripts. Even the movie he won an Oscar for, “A Beautiful Mind,” isn’t very many steps past a very standard Hollywood biopic.
He pretty much came out of absolutely nowhere to write big-dollar scripts. His Wikipedia and IMDB entries are pretty sparse and don’t really explain HOW he came to be noticed, or what he did that got him tagged as The Guy Who Writes Big Budget Movies.
And I disagree with the notion that the machines “buried” under the earth are a plot hole - the point is, we don’t know. It could be that the lightning strikes were placing (and powering) superfast builder nanobots that were capable of creating the tripods in the 15-30 minutes between the first strike (there were 29 of them, of which one was needed to transplant the alien driver) and when they arose from the ground.
To me, a bigger plot hole in WotW is the kids staying at home. We clearly see the lightning strikes from Ray’s backyard/window (they’re at most a mile away), the area is quite visible from his house, the machine is taller than all surrounding buildings, but the kids are completely clueless as to what happened to Ray. What, you didn’t bother to look out the window, son?
He also gets the proper plot twists on the proper page of the script, as far as I can tell. And don’t get me started on “A Beautiful Mind.” I have some personal knowledge of the people involved, and read the book, of course, and the script is a total travesty. It’s not even as uplifting as real life. The acting was good (except for Princeton standing in as MIT) but there are some things that could have been mentioned in very short scenes which would have improved things a lot.
But my big objection to him, in both** I, Robot ** and Lost in Space was the lapses of logic. I can just hear him at his computer saying “No one will notice!” I find it the epitome of the “it’s just sci-fi, no one will care” attitude.
One character (the news people?) mentions them being buried a long time ago, so I assume that’s the true story.
I’ll buy that. I also had a small problem with his ex-wife’s house being untouched and unaffected, though there were war machines close by. The chronology at the end of the movie is a bit muddled, but it is clearly news to him that the aliens were dying. Not a major hole, though.
Yes, it was for the first (superior) George Pal/ Gene Barry version. But not for the Wells version from 1898 or so. I didn’t remember the explanation (I read the book 40 years ago) but I’d buy it, even though I believe Wells was a student of Huxley and understood evolution just about as well as anyone did back then. Evolution would make it very unlikely for anyone to be able to wipe out bacteria. But, like I said, I do give Wells a pass, but not Spielberg. But perhaps the message of humility excuses the microbe ex machina ending.
Not everything a character says is true or correct, even in the context of the story. The newswoman whom Cruise’s character met thought the machines must have been buried long before, but there’s no reason why she couldn’t have been mistaken. She was just taking a guess.
To that tune…
*On the fifth day of repentence
The phillistines gave to God
Five golden mice,
Five golden hemeroids
And an Ark of the Covenaaaaant!*
Also, wasn’t Wells using “War of the Worlds” to make a bigger point about European colonialism? The Martians traveling to Earth to grab its resources and enslave or wipe out its lesser-developed inhabitants were not much different than what the English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgians, and Germans had been doing to native populations of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australia for the previous 400 years. And the plot twist about the Martians ultimately being felled by microbes certainly didn’t come out nowhere since that’s unfortunately what happened to many of the native populations (especially in the Americas) after contact with the Europeans. (Although it wasn’t a totally one-sided trade-off disease-wise since the Europeans supposedly got syphilis in return.)
And, it could be argued, AIDS.
I was thinking more of the scriptwriter than the character. Why have a character give false information if there is no plot point involved? Plus, the aliens certainly did not appear to have this kind of technology, which might have been used to convert human structures into something more to their liking.
The lightning in fact, though not a plothole, seemed more for visual effect then reasonable. How did they get under the earth this way? If it was some weird kind of teleporter, why didn’t they use it other places?
Agreed, but I think the point of the germs (which in the analogy should have killed the colonizers, not the natives) was that big, important man not only got easily conquered by the Martians but saved by the humblest of God’s creatures. So it fits very well with the colonizing theme.