As long as 17-year-old Marty makes it back to 1985 successfully, then he will age normally and be there as we see in the movie. The real question is why 47-year-old Marty doesn’t remember that “this is the night Jennifer hid in my laundry room!” and go say hi.
Heck, now that we’re adding Back to the Future to the list, the plot holes will come fast and furious.
Agreed. Certain points in the novel which were (necessarily) obscured in the Bogart movie (I haven’t seen the other version):
[spoiler]1. The mysterious pseudo-bookshop where Marlowe begins his investigation is a front for a pornography shop – one that rents books to customers, like a modern video store.
Arthur Geiger is blackmailing General Sternwood by threatening to release nude pictures of his daughter Carmen.
Carol Lundgren, the young man who attacks Marlowe at the late Geiger’s home, is Geiger’s homosexual lover, out to avenge his death.[/spoiler]
Because on earth, ET gets his powers from the earth’s yellow sun,since it was nighttime and no sun was out,no powers.He was only able to levitate at night after that because he had saved up super power energy from previous days.
I am surprised you, of all people, didn’t know that.
Ahhhhh, but what about Elliot and ET on the bike, eclipsing the moon? Gotcha ya! 
It’s Love-powered.
Remember that time-stream alterations in the Back to the Future universe include a hysteresis effect and a propagation delay. The propagation delay is the reason that Marty’s older siblings disappeared from his photo in order of age–as the change-wave reached their birth dates, they unhappened. The hysteresis effect is why they were restored almost instantly–changes away from the original timeline take longer to propagate than changes back toward it. This would also be why the tombstone in BttF III changed rapidly–it was entirely a deviation from the original timeline, and therefore already in flux. The variations in propagation rates documented suggest that the model controlling these effects is quite complex and not well-understood.
The upshot is that Biff was able to return to his own future because the change-wave had not reached it yet. At some point after Doc and Marty returned to the past, the wave would sweep in and change the world around Biff.
Biff, despite having developed a certain low cunning, is neither very bright nor particularly imaginative. He’d pulled off his scheme, so he went home. It probably didn’t occur to him that Doc and Marty would figure out what he’d done and be able to undo it–and to be fair, they nearly didn’t. If they’d failed, the changed timeline would have soon overtaken him, presumably leaving him in the lap of luxury.
The Marty that aged into that Marty-47 had no idea that Jennifer was in there. Had everything else remained unchanged, then once Jennifer told Marty-17 about it, the changed memory would have propagated forward, and eventually Marty-47 would have known. Subsequent events changed the timeline further, however, and that version of Marty-47 was erased completely. The new Marty-47 would know that Jennifer hid in old Marty-47’s laundry room on that date, but the timeline in which it happened is gone, and he’s never lived in that house. There’s nothing he could do with the knowledge except mention it to Jennifer, assuming they’re still together.
Heh. I almost reported this post to a mod, until I looked again and noticed whom you were being so rude to.
I don’t buy it. Doc and Marty encountered an immediately changed future when they went back to the future – they didn’t have to wait for a “propagation wave” from the past. I think they just wanted Doc and Marty to have a shock of a changed future, and they needed Biff to be able to change the past, but somehow get the deLorean back so that Doc and Marty could get back to the past to change it. They also didn’t want to deal with how time changes “look” in the future.
The bigger hole is at the end. Buffalo Bill has Clarice trapped in a totally dark room and he is going after her while wearing night vision googles. Problem is that NVGs amplify light, they don’t create light. In a totally dark room they would be as useful as your eyes.
That threw me too.
When Doc and Marty went back to 1985, they were 30 years closer to the source of the disturbance than old Biff. Of course 1985 would have changed before 2015 did. Now, the changes did seem to happen in less subjective time than the ones in the first movie over the same timespan, but as I said, the propagation rate obviously varies.
You’re absolutely right about why it was written that way, I’m sure, but it’s certainly not inconsistent enough with the portrayal of time travel in the series to be called a “brutally bad plothole”. Personally, I think the writers stuck to the “rules” pretty well for a time travel story, so I wouldn’t call it a plothole at all.
There’s plenty of restrictions. As I recall the novel (haven’t seen the movie) the evidence is a tape recording made by some unavailabel third party. There’s no way to authenticate the tape; with no authentication foundation, it can’t be admitted.
A friend told me this is because E.T. hadn’t activated the black hole in his heart yet. He needed to be packed in dry ice first. :o
Don’t ask me, it’s my friend’s explanation. 
Yes, I noticed that too forty years ago.
The ejection seat on a transport aircraft was a hoot, too, to go along with the 30-second delayed fuses on the grenades. Oh, yeah, you can never forget the immortal Glock 7. That was a real screamer (hint: there’s no such thing).
I don’t know if this qualifies as a plot hole as such but…
In Ironman (spoilered because it’s still a current movie)
why did Tony Stark spend three months building a bulletproof bodysuit equipped with rockets, machine guns and jet assisted take off, when he could have spent a couple of hours knocking up a makeshift radio & GPS and been out of there by the end of the day?
I mean seriously, what kind of supergenuis wouldn’t figure that one out?
Let me take a stab at this:
The younger sister killed the chauffeur because he turned down her advances (she was pretty wierd and often strung out, this was established early on). Bacall’s character helped cover it up (maybe), maybe with the help of the gambler/gangster guy. This guy then had Bacall’s character by the short hairs, so he was blackmailing her. But for what? It didn’t seem to be for money, she didn’t have that much of her own. Why did the gangster guy pretend to let her win all that money and then pretend to mug it back from her through a henchman? That’s what I can’t figure out, what the gangster guy was hoping to get out of it. Maybe he was hoping to hold onto this blackmail stuff long enough that the general would die and then Bacall would have lots of money to be blackmailed out of. I just dunno.
I get all this confusion from watching the movie several times and trying to pay attention to all these points, but none of it makes sense. Maybe I should read the book?
Roddy
Where is there a scene in “Silence of the Lambs” where Lecter (no H) is up against a roomful of armed police?
If you mean
when he escapes from the makeshift cell, there are only two cops in the room. He escapes by picking the lock of his handcuffs unbeknowst to the cops and quickly handcuffing one of the cops to the cell bars. Before the second cop can react, Lecter smashes the open cell door into 2nd cop’s face, stunning him and giving Lecter enough time to grab the cop’s mace and spraying his face.
They were in the middle of a mountain, hundreds of miles from US lines. A radio transmitter powerful enough to reach American forces would have been picked up by the militants who held them prisoner, who would have executed them as soon as they realized their location had been compromised.
Well, he was in a locked room, deep underground, with armed guards at the door and more at the (distant) entrance to the cave. A GPS or radio wouldn’t work there–no signal. The armor was just to get out of the cave. I don’t know that powered armor is necessarily the best ROI in that situation, though.