Top Five Brutally Bad Plotholes in Quality Movies: Let's Compile a List

Cafe Society
81

[QUOTE=Engineer Dude]
Back to the Future 2. 17-year-old Marty and Jennifer from 1985 go forward to 2015 to stop Marty’s son from being arrested. They succeed in that mission. Then Jennifer ends up at their future home, hidden in the closet, watching 47-year-old Marty mingle with the family.

That’s fine, except…there should be no 47-year-old Marty. He should arrive there only as a 17-year-old, with the rest of his family wondering where he’s been for the last 30 years.
[/QUOTE]

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.

82

[QUOTE=Radegast]
You When the two film versions were made, they would have been practically x-rated if they followed Raymond Chandler’s book closely.
[/QUOTE]

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.

  1. Arthur Geiger is blackmailing General Sternwood by threatening to release nude pictures of his daughter Carmen.

  2. 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]

83

[QUOTE=The New and Improved Superman]
My favorite gigantic plot-hole is in the movie E.T. - the Extra-Terrestrial:

The movie opens with several E.T.'s exploring the California woodlands, and the protagonist E.T. being left behind. We see from his P.O.V. the spaceship pulling away, hovering ten feet above him - so close, yet just out of his reach.

Later on in the movie, E.T. manages to levitate himself, Elliot & Elliot’s bike. They take a magical bike ride miles above the woods. Elliot looks down and sees that the ground is miles below them. Later still, E.T. is similarly able to levitate himself, Elliot, Elliot’s brother & half the kids in the neighborhood (& their bikes) in a similar manner.

So..E.T. can makes himself (and others) fly, WHY THE HELL DIDN"T HE JUST FLY TO UP TO DEPARTING UFO IN THE FIRST PLACE? The damn thing was only ten feet above him f’rcrissake!
[/QUOTE]

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.

84

[QUOTE=MadTheSwine]
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.
[/QUOTE]

Ahhhhh, but what about Elliot and ET on the bike, eclipsing the moon? Gotcha ya! :wink:

85

[QUOTE=JohnT]
Ahhhhh, but what about Elliot and ET on the bike, eclipsing the moon? Gotcha ya! :wink:
[/QUOTE]
It’s Love-powered.

86

[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
A more serious one from Back to the Future 2 is – after he’s stolen the deLorean and taken the Sports Guide back to his 1955 self, how can Biff return to the future where he stole the car? The future’s been changed! He shouldn’t be able to get to the one that Doc and Marty are in.
[/quote]

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.

87

[QUOTE=Baldwin]
Don’t be a schmuck; that clearly doesn’t meet the OP’s requirement of a plot hole that makes it impossible to enjoy an otherwise good movie. Just shut up.

ETA: However, it is, in fact, a plot hole.
[/QUOTE]
Heh. I almost reported this post to a mod, until I looked again and noticed whom you were being so rude to.

:smiley:

88

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.

89

[QUOTE=Annie-Xmas]
In Silence of the Lambs, a roomful of armed police could not stop one unarmed person? That is utterly ridiculous.

The real case scenario: Lechter attacks first cop and ends up with 12 bullet holes in his body.
[/QUOTE]

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.

90

[QUOTE=kaylasdad99]
Heh. I almost reported this post to a mod, until I looked again and noticed whom you were being so rude to.

:smiley:
[/QUOTE]

That threw me too.

91

[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
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.
[/QUOTE]

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.

92

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
I haven’t actually seen The Bonfire of the Vanities (or read the book) but my understanding is that there’s a major plot point in which Sherman McCoy is being accused of a crime and has evidence which would exonerate him but the evidence is not legally admissable. Which makes no sense because there’s virtually no restrictions on evidence for a defendant.
[/QUOTE]

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.

93

[QUOTE=The New and Improved Superman]
My favorite gigantic plot-hole is in the movie E.T. - the Extra-Terrestrial:

The movie opens with several E.T.'s exploring the California woodlands, and the protagonist E.T. being left behind. We see from his P.O.V. the spaceship pulling away, hovering ten feet above him - so close, yet just out of his reach.

Later on in the movie, E.T. manages to levitate himself, Elliot & Elliot’s bike. They take a magical bike ride miles above the woods. Elliot looks down and sees that the ground is miles below them. Later still, E.T. is similarly able to levitate himself, Elliot, Elliot’s brother & half the kids in the neighborhood (& their bikes) in a similar manner.

So..E.T. can makes himself (and others) fly, WHY THE HELL DIDN"T HE JUST FLY TO UP TO DEPARTING UFO IN THE FIRST PLACE? The damn thing was only ten feet above him f’rcrissake!
[/QUOTE]

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. :stuck_out_tongue:

94

[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
That one has bothered me for years. Actually, in the original, it’s not even clear that there’s a pod – Kevin McCarthy goes away, and when he comes back, his girlfriend has fallen asleep and it’s as if her human body has been “taken over” without the necessity of a pod. It just makes no sense.

I don’t actuallt recall anything like this in the 1978 remake, but that had its own inconsistency – at first, the plant seeds/spores/whateve are tiny and not noticeable and just drift down to earth. At the end, the plants need big pods that have to be shipped by truck everywhrere. Why the change?

By the way, I don’t see a problem with The Matrix – Joe Pantaliano’s character could have contacted Agent Smith during some regular mission, although we don’t get to see the rest of it on camera. There is, I agree, no way he could’ve done this if he had to go in by himself, but it would’ve been possible to do it if your team broke up and you were all on separate little missions.

Here’s another thing that’s buggeed me for years. It’s not a plot hole, but it still annoys me. The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad – 1959 Harryhausen film. Sinbad gets captured by the Cyclops and Sokourah the magician won;t help. He sewars the other men to silence and pulls out the shrunken Princess Parisa, who’s only 6 inches tall. He puts atop the cage, and she undoes the latch.

“It is done!” she shouts

Sinbad immediately throws open the lid from inside.

There’s a good chance that Parisa is still standing on the lid. Sinbad flips it up, and she goes sailing off for ten feet or so, the falls to her death. Sinbad and his men leave Sokourah on the island, go back to their ship, and, as they can’t return to Baghdad (How did they get their ship all the way up the river to Baghdad? ) , they take up pirating or being seagoing mercenaries.
[/QUOTE]

Yes, I noticed that too forty years ago.
:stuck_out_tongue:

95

[QUOTE=Robot Arm]
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.
[/QUOTE]

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).

96

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?

97

[QUOTE=Baldwin]
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.
[/QUOTE]
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

98

[QUOTE=Annie-Xmas]
In Silence of the Lambs, a roomful of armed police could not stop one unarmed person? That is utterly ridiculous.

The real case scenario: Lechter attacks first cop and ends up with 12 bullet holes in his body.
[/QUOTE]

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.

99

[QUOTE=George Kaplin]
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?
[/QUOTE]

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.

100

[QUOTE=George Kaplin]
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?
[/QUOTE]

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.