When movie plots turn horribly stoopid

Cafe Society
1

This was inspired by the thread (that I’m too lazy to link to) about who is predicted to win the next election. References were made early on to Armageddon, and its ridiculous plot point of having the ship stay on the asteroid by – what, gravity or something?

I hate it when the plot of a movie hinges on bad science or some other idiocy. Call me a fuddy duddy, but things like that ruin the movie for me. It’s no longer entertainment when my intelligence has been insulted like that. However, it’s highly entertaining to make fun of such movies.

So go ahead, poke some fun at stoopid plot points!

My first entry: Space Cowboys. The whole movie was pretty ridiculously dumb, but here’s the clincher for me – One of the characters (played by James Garner, I think) finds out he has cancer. His last wish is to die in space. So his crewmates, on board a standard NASA shuttle, make a quick detour to the Moon (with what fuel?) and jettison him to the Moon’s surface where he – get this – soft lands. The guy doesn’t even sprain an ankle! WTF?

2

Pretty dumb, but not quite as you have it: Tommy Lee Jones’ character discovers he has cancer, but manages to hide it going through astronaut training. While on their mission, it becomes necessary to jettison the missiles in the Russian satelite, and they shoot them at the moon. At the last minute, however, they find that the control systems are damaged, so that someone will have to fire them manually. Jones volunteers for the job, and thus goes along with the missiles to the moon.

OK, to this point it’s a bit contrived, but fair enough. HOWEVER, the last scene is of Jones’ intact body lying on the moon, where it apparently landed softly enough for him to prop himself up on a nearby rock. That was just plain, as you say, dumb.

3

Details, Schmetails. :slight_smile:

It was the soft landing that I had a problem with.

4

Godsend.

Nicely creepy if a bit hard to buy. Then the good guy goes investigating and some old lady tells him everything he needs to know with no persuasion on his part. Then the “bad guy” explains himself for 10 minutes in a burning church after “killing” the good guy.

5

Alien. It’s a pretty good SF film up until they let the alien into the ship. Then, it got dumber, and dumber, and dumber. By the time they went to chase him in the air shaft, it had reached zero on the IQ scale and dropped into negative numbers.

6

Star Trek: Nemesis

It was all downhill from the wedding… It just couldn’t decide what movie it was.

First it was like other ST:TNG movies - Smiley, happy, grumpy, and the rest of the dwarfs are the only ones who can boldly go.
Then “Oh look!” a garbage chute-like place to escape (Star Wars).
Then metal grating obscuring bad guy (Hunt for Red October).
Then fighting bad guy leaning over REALLY big shaft in middle of ship (Empire Strikes Back and since when was there a great big hole in the middle of the Enterprise??).
…blah blah blah - several bad B sci-fi movie plots…
Then finishing it off? Iron Giant aka I’m SuperData.

7

In “Jason and the Golden Fleece,” Jason is unscrewing the plug that keeps Talos the Giant Bronze Man’s sand inside (guess Giant Bronze Peoples’ blood is sand-based). Talos notices him, but ignores him. I’d a stepped on the little fu¢ker, at which point someone else would be left in charge.

8

That ain’t the only plot problem with Space Cowboys. The whole premise was flawed.

They’re supposedly going up there to rescue a Russian communications satellite whose orbit has decayed. That’s pretty ridiculous by itself. Satellites in LOW Earth orbit are subject to orbital decay because of the tiny amount of drag they receive from the outermost fringes of the Earth’s atmosphere. But communications satellites are stationed in geosyhchronous orbit, 22000 miles above the Earth. There isn’t enough outer-atmosphere at that altitude to induce any drag on those satellites whatsoever. If human civilization were to come to an end tomorrow, every comsat we’ve got up there now would continue to orbit for thousands, if not millions of years.

And what’s their reasoning for why this satellite’s orbit is decaying so rapidly? Because it’s heavy. It weighs 90 tons or something. Grrrr – a heavy satellite would be less susceptible to orbital decay, because its drag-to-mass ratio would be lower.

These flaws make it impossible for this movie’s plot to ever happen in real life.

9

What actually got on my nerves most about Space Cowboys is the NASA chick tellig a nunch of school children that all you need to do is get halfway to the moon, then it’s gravity will take you the rest of the way.
Umm…no. First off, you don’t even need to go halfway, cause due to inertia, I could push myself off the space shuttle in the moon’s direction and get there, distance has nothing to do with it. And, even if it did, it would be more than halfway, since the moon is much smaller than the earth.

But, yeah, a horribly flawed movie.

10

In order for them to turn stupid, they’d have to start off doing well, so I nominate Mission: Impossible. Beginning was OK, nice spy-stuff with the elevator and the camera-glasses and the invisible spray and the exploding gum…then we get into the business of the secure lab.

A secure lab in which no data is meant to be removed from the lab, ever, but it has an external floppy drive, and sensitive data is stored in such a way as to fit onto a 1.44MB floppy. A secure lab with sound sensors that aren’t sensitive enough to detect a disk being copied, although I guess if you’re too stupid to remove an external drive from your secure workstation, you’re too stupid to think to have the sound sensors detect a disk being copied.

That whole business with the lasers being redirected over the vent with his mirror contraption. Wouldn’t he have to have been moving at the speed of light for the lasers to get tricked by that? And why was this Pentagon vent system large enough to allow a human to crawl through it? How big are the A/C vents in your house? In your office? (Vents large enough for a person to crawl through is a separate rant). And finally, how about having NO GIANT VENT installed DIRECTLY over the secure workstation in the most secure building in the World?

Then he searches the Internet for his contact, “Job.” The result: “Job not found.” I realize this isn’t 1996, but when I search for “Job” I get 135 million hits.

And don’t get me started on the whole “Helicopter in the Chunnel” thing. I had shut down by that point anyway.

And finally, I find it ironic how willing all of these spies are to believe they’re talking to who they think they’re talking to, since at any time any one of them could be wearing an indetectable rubber mask. I’d greet people be scratching them across the cheek if I were in that business.

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From Dusk 'Till Dawn.

Just shut the movie off after the Salma Hayek snake dance. You will miss nothing.

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Waddya want? It WAS an odd-numbered Star Trek film, after all…

13

Nope. It was a double even. Tenth overall and fourth featuring the TNG cast.

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Watch the movie again – it’s not sand that comes pouring out, but steaming-hot liquid. Evidently something like the divine ichor.

But I do agree that Talos shoulda stomped on him. After all, you see him turn aroun and look back there (“Hey! What’s going on with my heel?”), but he never even lifts his foot. I had to wonder why he didn’t shake off Jason like an ant. But of course, if he had, there’d be no more movie.
For what it’s worth, Talos isn’t portrayed as a giant in the myths, just as a metal man. In one version he heats himself in a fire and sears Jason’s men. But in one version, his ankle does open up and the ichor pours out, killing him. But it’s his own clumsiness that does it – he skinned his foot picking up a rock to heave at the Argo.

My faorite moment of stupidity from a Harryhausen flick comes from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Sinbad and the sailors have been trapped in a cage by he Cyclops, and can’t reach the peg holding he top shut. Sinbad takes the miniaturized Princess Parisa from her carrying case and puts her atop the cage, where she heroically pushes out the peg. Sinbad then suddenly and impetuously flings the lid open.

The Princes is still u there! Proabably right on that trap door! I have a mental image of a six-inch-high Princess suddenly sailing through the air because Sinbad didn’t look before he pushed up the trap. Try explaining that to her father the Sultan! “Grab what you can from the Cyclops’ cave, boys, we’re going pirating for the rest of our lives!”

15

Fight Club wins the prize for this, especially since much of the movie was very smart. The ending was stupid AND cliched. I will not allude to what it is in case there’s someone who is watching it on DVD tonight, of course, but it was so very stupid it actually undid the brilliance of the movie’s first hour.

16

Yes, but it was evenly divisible by five, which makes it extra bad.

17

I didn’t notice that, but now I feel stupid.

Personally, I thoughit it was very strange that a nuclear missle platform was mistaken for a comm satillite. If it was supposed to be a comm sat, it would be over Russia, but that would make it kind of hard to hit the US from there. If it was over the US, where it could hit it’s targets, the comm sat cover goes out the window, wouldn’t you think?

18

Recently I saw Jack the Bear, and I swear to God, this film must have been made up of two completely unrelated screenplays, which had their pages shuffled together by accident, and nobody at the studio noticed. What’s worse, neither story was any good. (Spoilers for the whole movie follow.)

It starts out with Danny DeVito as a widowed single father, trying to raise two young boys while battling a drinking problem. We’ve seen this movie before, right? Well, it’s not that bad of a story, if not a very engaging one. (One problem is that Miko Hughes plays the younger boy. I’ve always found Miko Hughes to be incredibly creepy. But that’s just me…)

Then there’s the creepy next-door neighbor, played by Gary Sinise. Normally, in this type of movie, the creepy neighbor turns out to be not creepy at all. But, not this guy. He turns out to be REALLY creepy. We’re talking Nazi Pedophile Terrorist creepy. And I’m not exaggerating!

He shows up on DeVito’s doorstep, collecting votes for some racist political candidate who will “get rid of the Jews and niggers.” (This is where the second movie begins.) DeVito tells him to go to hell. Sinise responds in a completely sane manner by poisoning their dog. Then, he kidnaps the youngest boy, beats him up, and dumps him in a park. (He survives, but is rendered catatonic.) Charming family drama, huh? :rolleyes:

Then we’re back to the first movie. DeVito loses his job, and his dead wife’s parents decide his luck’s not bad enough, so they take his kids away. The older kid somehow travels all the way across the country to get back home, and who does he meet but…wait for it…THE NAZI PEDOPHILE TERRORIST! Who must be psychic, as well as insane! No matter, the N.P.T. dies a gruesome and wholly predictable death.

Of course, that’s followed up by a happy-sappy ending, where DeVito quits drinking, gets his job back, and gets his kids back. Never mind that we never see how any of this gets resolved. It must have made sense in the missing pages.

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I got you all beat. By a factor of ten. The movie: Fatal Conflict. In it, we see that they have interstellar colonies. There’s a screen which shows a picture of one of them. It reads: “2030 A.D.: Argos Women’s Prison Colony.”

The film was made in 1999. Apparently, the director thought than in 30 years’ time, we’d not only have FTL spacecraft, we’d have colonies on other planets. And the first thing we’d build there: women’s prison colonies.

I rest my case.

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One more thing about Fatal Conflict:

I won’t even go into the secret jewelry processing center that’s staffed entirely by sexy female slaves wearing only T-shirts, chastity belts, collars and branks (metal gags) to keep them from secreting the jewels in their secret places. So don’t even think I mentioned it.