[Hotspur]
Why, so can I, and so can any man, but do they come when you do call them?
[/Hotspur]
Oh, wow. This is by far my biggest one. Thank you for reminding me of it.
For all the effort you put into writing a series finale of a show, you’d think such a mind-boggling plot hole that’s absolutely essential to both the plot and the theme would be fixed by SOMEBODY. Sad that an otherwise great finale episode hinges on such a lazy error.
This one is easy: all the flights were non-smoking. Plus he’d never have got Sting past the baggage check.
Plus, all they had to do was have the thing be tiny when they first get there, then have Picard tell them to probe it with the Frammitz Beam they were using in the other two timelines, and >poof< winks out of existence. Everybody gets a WTF look on their faces. Commercial.
If there’s a top five list of plot holes, this has to be on it. It was jaw droppingly stupid. Ferret Herder’s post doesn’t come close to describing how ridiculous the whole movie was.
Only when I whistle.
You know how to whistle, don’t you? You just put you lips together and blow
[/spoiler]
[spoiler]Ech…for my liking, that’s uncomfortably too much like a janissary corps than a superteam. Spider-Man 2’s christ-analogy was horrific enough.
And yeah, I know that Rogue’s characterization in the movies wasn’t what everyone would have liked—me included—although it is probably a sound interpretation of the character. Probably how a normal person in her situation would turn out.
'Course, interesting and valid as that may be, we still ended up with"shell-shocked waif" instead of a “sassy.”
And as a whole, from what we’ve seen in the movies (even the first two), it may be that this version of Rogue simply isn’t cut out to be a superhero. She’s scared, her powers aren’t very controllable, aren’t very powerful (it looks like she has to grab onto someone for several seconds to gain their powers, compared to the cartoons, where it’s almost instantanious), not very combat-oriented, and cause horrible side-effects. Think of her as a “deconstruction” of a teenage superheroine, in a way—and her “bowing out” in X3 was a dignified, unusually pragmatic, but logically consistant way of concluding this version of the character’s story.
Granted…I would have liked to have seen your badass “Neo” moment at Alcatraz as much as the next guy. (Though preferably with Meghan Black’s Rogue 
) 'Though if she didn’t get the cure, or at least get some kind of compensation for her trouble (better power control, Genoshan restraint collar, temporary Leech patch…something), it’d leave too much of a bad Panglossian taste in my mouth.
[/spoiler]
Equilibrium:
Near the end of the movie, it’s revealed that Christian Bale’s charter switched guns with his partner before he kills all the cops in The Nethers. However, the scene the cut to shows him handing a gun to his partner after he’s killed the cops in The Nethers. Most likely, they meant to edit it so that it cut to the first time Bale handed his partner a gun, which was indeed before the killings. As it is, it just makes no sense.
As for the Matrix, I’m not sure it’s much of a plot hole…
IIRC, in director’s commentary or something, it was revealed that Cypher was setting up the meeting with Smith in the scene where Neo walks in on him and Cypher hurriedly turns off all the monitors. We also see, from the Animatrix, that it’s possible for someone to block the signal from a program such that the operator has no idea what’s going on. Cypher certainly could have done that and/or set some sort of timer so that he was ‘logged off’ of the Matrix after X minutes of speaking to Smith.
Okay, I not doing spoiler boxes for X-Men 3. It’s been out for a couple years, and it sucked in the first place.
I don’t follow your comparison. Superteams help people because they’re superheroes. With a few notable exceptions they’re not doing it for money, or fame, they’re doing it because they can. Rogue was in a position to help people, and decided she’d rather be normal and to let the people in trouble solve their own problems. That’s not superhero behavior, particularly considering that a lot of the people in question had repeatedly endangered themselves to help her. Also, one of the folks in danger was her boyfriend.
Hey, there’s an ending for you: Rogue goes and get her power removed so she can neck with Iceman. She shows up at the end and finds out that Iceman was killed in the big fight while she was getting her DNA rewired.
Yeah, but I don’t watch superhero movies to see what normal people do.
I very much doubt that this was how Bryan Singer intended to resolve her character when he made the first two movies. Her’s was the growth role: all the other characters start out as bad-asses, her character was supposed to demonstrate how you go from “normal person” to “world saving superhero.”
Yeah, but the person she’s grabbing onto is incapacitated until she lets go. So she can shut down any mutant just by touching them, and then use their powers against anyone who’s still around. Potentially, she’s the most powerful character in the series. And we never see what happens when she doesn’t break contact, which to me is a big, unresolved Chekhov’s Gun in the series.
I think you’re giving Brett Ratner too much credit. The third X-Men movie is pretty clearly the product of someone who simply doesn’t “get” what made the preceding movies (or the comics on which they were based) popular and entertaining. It was hack work, and Rogue wasn’t a “deconstruction,” it was a clumsy attempt to give a happy ending to a character that completely undercuts everything that made that character interesting in the first place.
Shit, there I go with the geek rage again. Good thing I buy these pants in bulk.
My point being that she didn’t choose to become superpowered, and it’s not like she can simply go without using her powers with a minimum of effect on her everyday life—she’s physically ill-suited for anything else. It was an accident of birth that Shanghaied her into the business—morally, comparable to being pressed into military service because of being more physically able that the average person.
So…what, she owes her soul to the company store, then? And it’s not like she knew her boyfriend was going on a desperate commando mission when she went to get the cure.
Beggin’ your pardon, but that’s a close-minded approach to entertainment. With no room for exploration of character, of new angles of story, the genre would grow stale. If not for innovation, you’ll eventually end up with stilted archetypes instead of characters.
Frankly, he didn’t do a whole hell of a lot of that in either of his films. Much like he let Cyclops gather dust.
Yeah, there was the potential for that in the series. But you know what? It was never explored, hardly touched upon. She mostly screamed.
And I think you’re giving Singer too much credit. The man’s not Joel Shoemaker, he’s not a hack. He lent a sense of style and respect to a series that could have easily been a two-hour toy commercial. But you know what? He didn’t do a lot else. There was a lot of potential for development in a lot of areas, but he just let it sit there like a pet rock. A very nice, respectable, polished pet rock.
Though, for the record…the “deconstruction” angle I get on Rogue comes mainly from Singer’s movies; Ratner just followed it to a logical conclusion. Well, the conclusion you’d reach without being completely formulaic, or even just mean-spirited.
Well well, look who just paid tribute to Die Hard 2 and a bunch of other plot-holey terrorist plots…
God I love Cracked.
The following quote is from this online chat with the Wachowski brothers:
It’s unclear from the transcript what scene they are referring to, but it seems like they are either covering a plot hole or something got lost in the editing.
In one movie they transplanted a guy’s face from one to the other. No one noticed that their bodies were different, Travolta’s frame being someone differently proportioned.
Or his voice.
The voice is explained, at least in a sci-fi way, by a sticker that goes on his Adam’s apple and morphs it into the villain’s.
(We’re talking about Face/Off, by the way.)
But yeah, everything about that operation was fishy. Being able to swap faces without any scarring, swelling, or downtime? Do they realize that your face gets its shape from your skull and muscles, not the skin? Etc etc.
On the other hand, Face/Off is an awesomely stylish movie, and God forgive them for their crap movies, but Travolta and Cage do a phenomenal job playing each other.
The way I look at Rogue in X-3 was: she was the flip-side of the X-men. What if the powers you get from being a mutant are uncontrollable? What if you just don’t want to help other people with them? With great power comes a lot of pain, and frankly if I can help people more without my powers as opposed to putting my life on the line and throwing away a normal life, then I’m doing it. Self-sacrifice is sometimes pretty stupid. Sometimes mutants get shafted by their genetics, like in the Ultimate X-Men Annual where a kid wakes up on his 18th birthday with the power to disintegrate anyone in a 12 foot-radius. He killed his mother before he woke up, he went to school and accidentally killed most of them. In the end Wolverine went in on behalf of SHIELD and euthanized the kid, with the poor guy’s blessing.
As for Jean, what they did was probably the best thing for her. She would have hated being normal after what she did, and wouldn’t have forgiven them if they “cured” her." And I agree with Ranchoth about Singer: they guy just let people talk and talk, and the “gay” metaphor was kinda annoying. At least Ratner gave Cyclops a little fun.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe they explained thins. The removed face isnt just stuck directly to the other guy; it’s placed on a mould and then that mould is placed on the other guy. If you watch the movie, you’ll see the mould; its a clear plastic looking thing. They distinctly say
“The inside perfectly matches your face, the outside matches the bad dude”
or some such nonsense. So, it makes no sense (no more than anything else in the movie) but at least they tried to cover their asses. Basically, they wanted a movie where two guys swap faces, and LOGIC BE DAMNED.
They also altered the hairline and waistline, so a bigger question would be how did Archer (Travolta) go back to being so fat at the end of the movie? Did they pump fat into his body?
Referring to the lightning bit of Back to the Future: they needed the lightning to power the time machine. The 88 miles was a random added bit on top of that.
I have to agree that X-Men 3 totally screwed up a lot of things. But not Rogue. Her story was completely consistent and the logical endpoint of the story as told. There’s no way around it; it’s what that character would have done. She doesn’t want to be a superhero, doesn’t have any reason to be (really none of the younger peeps do except to emulate the adults), and there is no need for her to be a superhero. There’s no real way for her to use her powers properly in a fight. She’ll get destroyed by almost anyone not being an idiot. Which is why they used the super-Rogue in the comics, but that setup wasn’t something Rogue in the movies would do.
That said, I also think X-Men 3 actually had the msot mature look at what a world with mutants would be like. Yes, there is some bigotry towards them, but also a lot of interest and brotherhood - and even the bigots are not necessarily monsters. The mutants themselves are more clearly shown as a continuum of monsters, giant dicks, and selfish lesser dicks, with corresponding heroes. And rather than try to turn it into a pathetic cypher for racism or homosexuality, it stands as its own issue with unique characteristics. The problem with X3 was not symbolism or story so much as Too Much Plot symdrome. It might have made two very good movies.
Having just seen I am Legend:
Who moved the manikin and set the snare, exactly the same type as Neville himself had set? It looks like they just lopped off a major subplot of the movie, but left in the scene that introduced the subplot.
Oh yeah, and maybe not so much a plot hole as silliness, but – the guy has a machine gun and a powerful sports car, and can’t seem to shoot a deer when he’s driving in the midst of a running herd. And couldn’t hit one with his car either. Around here the trick is avoiding hitting one.