8 Classic Movies That Got Away With Gaping Plot Holes
People hate plot holes in movies. At least, that's what they'll tell you. But sometimes, if a movie is awesome enough, people will overlook even the most retarded gaps in reason and logic.
At least, until some asshole on the Internet points them out and makes a big list of them. Enjoy:
#8.
Back to the Future
The Plot:
Marty McFly goes back in time, helps his parents get together, invents rock and roll...
The Hole:
...and everyone promptly forgets he was ever there the minute he leaves.
Nobody notices that a famous clothing brand is later named after him, nobody notices that Chuck Berry releases a song that sounds pretty similar to the one he played at the big dance, and most importantly, nobody bats an eyelid when his Mom has a kid who looks exactly like him.
Now we don't claim to know exactly what first enters the mind of a married man when his wife births a child who looks identical to their old high school boyfriend, but we're guessing it's not " time travel conspiracy." Old George was either the most oblivious, forgiving man on earth, or there were some secret resentment beatings in the McFly household.
Even more disturbing, what must his Mom have thought? The only explanation we can see making sense from her point of view is that Marty was Satan (he did invent rock and roll after all) and the whole thing's some kind of demon spawn Rosemary's Baby type deal. And no one should ever be in a position where the most plausible explanation for their situation implies that they fucked Satan.
This was the most sinister looking picture of Michael J Fox we could find.
Plus, think how chilling Marty's final remark on stage becomes given this context: "I guess you're not ready for that yet... but your kids are gonna love it."
#7.
Minority Report
The Plot:
Tom Cruise is convicted of a murder he hasn't committed yet, by a team of psychics called "precogs."
The Hole:
The precogs? They don't work. At all. We're told they predict the future but nothing they predict ever happens. If they actually predicted the future properly, they'd predict the people getting arrested, not committing murders.
In the entire movie, the only precog prediction that actually comes true exactly as they said involves a kid losing a balloon. Chinese fortune cookies have a higher success rate than these guys.
But maybe they're really more telepathic than precognitive, able to see what people's intentions are. Except they can't do that, either. The movie is set in motion by the premeditated murder ball coming out with Tom Cruise's character's name on it. But he hadn't planned the murder at all. The whole point of the movie is that he had no idea who he was going to kill.
The one time they do predict a murder that actually happens, they still manage to fuck it up. The loophole the movie's villain exploits is that if you commit a murder that looks identical to a previous murder, when the precogs' vision comes up they'll just think it was an echo and delete it. But that would only get rid of the image, there'd still be a new ball naming you as the murderer, which would be hard to explain. Seems like a flawed plan right? Well, it would be in any other movie.
Add that to the fact that Tom Cruise was able to continually get past the retina scanners at police headquarters by using the eyes he had when he first became a fugitive (they don't revoke your access when you get accused of murder? What, do they operate on the retina honor system?) and you have to wonder if they weren't just making shit up as they went along.
#6.
The Sixth Sense
The Plot:
Spoiler alert: Bruce Willis is dead. The whole time. We totally didn't see it coming and apparently neither did he. He's only able to figure out he's a ghost when he sees his wife drop his wedding ring.
The Hole:
But shouldn't he have figured it out before that? All the other ghosts in the film seemed to be wandering the earth, mindlessly reliving their deaths, with little awareness of the outside world at all. But ol' Bruce was just carrying on as normal, working and going about his day-to-day routine, completely unfazed by the fact no one but a small child had spoken to him in several months.
What kind of lifestyle was he living before his death that would make him fail to notice that no one could see or hear him? He assumes his wife isn't speaking to him because he's "neglecting their marriage." In the days right after he died, did he think she was mad at him for getting shot in the stomach? And what about everyone else? Does he also assume all waiters are suddenly assholes? That the girl at the supermarket check out finds him too hideous to make eye contact with? That taxis won't stop for him because he's balding?
And how does he get the assignment to treat the kid anyway? Nobody hired him, being a ghost and all. Does he just approach random children in churches and start giving them free psychiatric advice? That's no way to run a business, ghost or not, and we're pretty sure it will get you thrown in jail.
#5.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
The Plot:
At the end of another wondrous wizarding adventure, Harry uses a magical time-travel necklace to go back and save himself and his godfather from the evil dementors.
The Hole:
This is actually a problem in most movies that contain time machines. The movie treats time travel like this urgent thing: "We've made it to the past! Now we've only got a few minutes to go back and stop the dementors!" No you don't, you have as much time as you need. It's fucking time travel. If you mess up, just go back and try again.
"OK, thirty-seventh attempt..."
They also seem to feel that they have to do it immediately, that there's no time to wait. Of course there's time to wait, you've got a goddamn time machine. Do it tomorrow, do it in ten years. You already know you've succeeded, you were there when it happened. It's actually the only situation you could be in where failure is impossible. It's the least suspenseful thing imaginable, yet they treat it as the nail-biting climax of the movie.
The power to travel through time still wouldn't be worth
the humiliation of owning Harry Potter jewelry.
We're picking on Harry Potter especially for this because after they use the time machine that one time, that was it. For the rest of the saga, the entire wizarding world is under siege from a magical Hitler, and they never again find the time travel useful? Despite all the people who die in the Harry Potter series (and post Azkaban, they start killing them off like it's a Friday the 13th movie) he never goes back and saves any of them?
Selfish prick.
The Minority Report and Harry Potter entries miss a lot of details, invalidating them.
ReplyIn Minority Report, the whole plot does not begin with the precogs' vision, even though it is the first thing that we see. The first cog is Tom Cruise's boss setting him up. He gets a guy and gives him a plan. Any plan involving murder will show up in the precog's vision. So he just had to pay the guy's family off to seriously consider killing someone, and also laid out all of the things necessary for Cruise to end up falling for it. He was the one who freaking built the whole organization, after all. Which also explains the echo murder. He could also easily have paid off the guy who caught the ball, or disabled that part altogether.
And in Harry Potter, you have to understand the method of time travel that they're using. With the Time Turner, every time you go back, you create another copy of yourself. Going back once to change something like what they were is dangerous enough, but if one were to do it more than once, the dangers would increase exponentially each time. Imagine if they screwed up the first time and tried to go back again. There would then be three pairs of time travelers in the same time period, where more than one is already haphazard. They do have more than once chance to succeed. In much the same way that you might get another jump if your parachute doesn't open, and you just happen to land in the middle of the Annual Marshmallow Parade.
I didn't even like the general idea of Minority Report. I'm sure this is one of the subtexts of the entire movie, and that I'm being too nitpicky on it, but I just can't believe that not once did anybody question the possibility that they're arresting truly innocent people (who, in all fairness, were yet to be criminals) and that eventually, someone's going to end up murdering someone BECAUSE they were predicted to murder that person? It's a fairly popular conception in most ALL time travel stories, you seeing the future sets events in place that CAUSE the prediction to come true. They did it in Paycheck. s**t, it was the whole point of Paycheck. Had they just left it alone, they might've avoided an asston of paperwork.
ReplyThe point on Minority Report that you mention is brought up in the very first scene that we are shown. The guy about to kill his wife and her lover whines that he didn't do anything "yet." It doesn't chance the fact that he would have killed them spic-and-spam if the police hadn't stopped him.
I wondered the same thing about Citizen Kane, and just assumed that a maid overheard him and told reporters.
ReplyThe bigger plot hole in Back to the Future is that Marty has an older brother. If the parents thought "Marty? That sounds a good name," why wouldn't they name their first-born son that? Then when Michael J. Fox returns to the present, he'd find out his older brother name is now named Marty and his name is now Hootie McFly.
ReplyI thought Luke left before finishing his training to save his friends?
ReplyProbably gonna get assaulted by fanboys here but : I would say it would certainly take a quite a while for the Falcon to get to Cloud City, it is space after all
ReplyActually, the fan boys would agree with you: according to the expanded universe, that sequence took up months of story time. I also makes the line in the movie where Han said something to the effect that they would just barely be able to make it make a bit more sense; he was talking about how well their supplies would hold up. They were in deep space, and had to get to another star system without the hyperdrive. Even assuming that the sublight drives in Star Wars go as fast as Impulse drives in Star Trek (Read: almost but not quite light speed), that would still take a while.
Considering that the "other" plot hole people point out about empire is that without FTL travel it would have taken Han et al a rediculously long time to get to cloud city, everything actually seems to line up OK.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesAnd when you consider that at the beginning of the movie Han was setting off for an extended period, it's not unreasonable to think that they may have been well stocked for provisions.
Spellcheck... Spell Check... either way, yeah.
dident they have a hyperspace or something drive? also known as the entire explanation of this plot hole?
And guess what, the hyperspace is never explained how it works, so maybe its exactly like halo's hyperspace (its named something else entirely, i got a mindblank) which basicly puts the ship in a field (the name of the field requires knowing name of halo's hyperspace) which then allows anything inside to be transported inside this field to another place, which would also explain this whole plothole, as it says in halo: first strike (might be in the other books, i only read first strike tho) that this hyperspace often takes weeks, and getting across galexies take a bloody massive time. (well, like a few months, but still a whole lot slower then star wars)
So if you hate this plot hole, just pretend that during the hyperspace scenes in star wars, they cut out a part where they get in cryo-sleep chambers to wait a few days/weeks/months and then proceded to walk back to the bridge and continued to freak out like usual (to them it would feel like the hyperspace was a few minutes, and they know their still being chased, so they have the same adreniline as if hyperspace was 3 seconds)
so there, plothole solved, now to leave before you people find the plotholes in halo's hyperspace
I noticed other flaws with this article but the only one I don't see others addressing is that in Minority Report the Precogs are being manipulated. Of course their premonitions were wrong. Collin Farrell's character was making them come out wrong. I didn't really like that movie and even I remember that.
ReplyAs someone who actually sat through the entire movie "Citizen Kane", (shocking, I know), I would hazard to guess that he didn't ACTUALLY name the sled, but it was the company name that produced the sled. Like how we called tissues "Kleenex" and bandages "Band-Aids", those aren't what they're called, those are brand names. Also, he wasn't completely alone in the house when he died... there were nurses, theoretically we could surmise that he'd said "Rosebud" more than once in his delirious state of dying towards the end. I don't consider this a plot hole.
Replyyeah, the nurses left just before he explained the entire reason why he was saying rosebud, then he died and the nurses just assumed his last words were rosebud.
The reason Bruce Willis approaches the psychic kid in 6th sense is because the dead people who haven't come to terms with their death seek out the kid so that he can help them, it is instinctive to them (like the girl who got murdered and told the kid to tell her parents) and they don't necessarily need to know they are dead.
ReplyThat's what I thought. I was also under the impression that Bruce Willis's character was living like he was in some sort of a dream, where some things don't really cross your mind. But that was just my opinion anyway, and I watched The Sixth Sense when I was just a kid.
Reading these comments reminds me how much I hate harry potter. I refuse to watch the rest of the movies or read the rest of the books. As soon as the books turned into dictionary sized tomes I began to get the feeling they were trying to get me to read more.
Replyf**k you, they are a f****n epic adventure (also regarding them using the time turners for to destroy voldy, im sure someones already mentioned it- but they were all destroyed in the Ministry of Magic.
A book trying to get you to read? YOU DON'T SAY!
My biggest issue with time travel is with Back to the Future 2. Marty and Doc Brown get their time machine stolen by old jackass Biff who uses it to go back to 1955 and give it to his teenage self, thus creating the alternate 1985 that Marty and Doc Brown travel to when they leave the future...unless there's some sort of weird alternate time period changing delay OR the space time continuum is only affected in backwards time travel (which we know isn't true from the first movie) old jackass Biff should have gone to an alternate future that changed with alternate 1985 since his action supposedly changed everything. So how to Marty and Doc Brown get the car back? Either the future instantaneously changed around them in the future and they just didn't happen to notice that they weren't in the same house with the same people or they should have been stuck in the original future with no time machine and the movies end right there.
Reply Hide All See All 3 Repliesthat hurt my brain
You've got a point actually...
We've been shown in the movies that changes to the timeline occur slowly and subtly, so as not to rip the universe apart. I can't remember everything exactly, but I think that after Biff returned from giving himself the almanac, Doc and Marty returned to the present shortly afterwards. If they had stayed, then things would have begun to change.
Now, since they go back to the present many years after Biff did his thing, the present is already different from what they remember, because the anomaly occurred decades in the past, giving Time enough time to change things so by 1985, everything was technically "normal" in the Biff-altered timeline.
I thought Return of The Jedi took place a couple years after Empire Strikes back. Maybe Luke did some training then went and saved Han, then came back?
ReplyThe Empire Strikes back one is bogus. Han's hyperdrive malfunctions, so they have to go at slower-than-light speeds and head for Cloud City on Bespin. Traveling very fast, but slower than light, means that Han and friends only experience a fraction of the time the journey takes. Bespin may be three light-months away, but traveling at 99.9% light speed, they arrive in a little over three months (plenty of time for Luke to learn the basics) but experience only a week of shiptime.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesAnd I'm not even a diehard fan, just a physicist who saw the movie again a few days ago.
And three months of training, seven days a week, sixteen hours a day is plenty to become competent (though maybe not world class) in a discipline.
Excellent explanation. Now if we could just explain to George Lucas that spacecraft flying through space don't make any engine noise whatsoever, we'd be good.
@flightrisk: Just because a sound made in space is not heard by anyone doesn't mean that no sound was made.
@cosmicgalactus: Yes it does, actually
in space, no one can hear you rev?
as an infant I mean.
ReplyGO BACK IN TIME KILL VOLDEMORT PROBLEM SOLVED.
ReplyAnother gaping plot hole in Harry Potter is having Sirius Black trapped in a house because he doesn't want anyone to recognize him in the fifth book, when the entire plot of the fourth book revolved around another wizard who escaped from Azkaban and successfully imitated another wizard for a whole year using that potion. Why not snatch some hairs from a random stranger half-way around the world and then go have some fun as him or her?
ReplyBecause transforming is really unpleasant and only lasts for, what an hour? Barty crouch jr put up with it because he was a fanatic supporter of Voldemort. usually, its just not worth it.
True, he could have a portable supply of the polyjuice like crouch to get around the time limit, but there's still the MAJOR problem of needing a continuous supply of genetic material from the host person, which would require either abducting that person or continuously going back to visit the person for more.
And don't say, "oh they could apparate." No. Not "half-way around the world" as you suggested. there's a limit 2 how far you can do it. it says so in the 7th book.
derp?
I never understood why the wizards and witches who disarmed each other when fighting didn't just break the wands. Why leave them to be scooped back up by their opponent and used again? It would be much more of a pain in their asses to have to stop fighting and go get a new wand. And, why couldn't they do magic without a stick, anyway? I never understood that one.
ReplyAnd why didn't Sirius Black just use polyjuice potion to get out of the house sometimes in that fifth book? I mean, the entire fourth book involved an evil wizard doing just that and fooling everyone for a year.
Because POlyjuice potion is extremely difficult to make, as explained in the second book when Hermione is only able to find the recipe in the Restricted Section of the library (and before you say "then how did she make it" remember this is Hermione f*****g Granger we're talking about, who aced every exam she's ever been given). Sirius isn't exactly a genius, he was an average student that spent more time goofing around than paying attention. And why should he go through the effort of spending months making a polyjuice potion when he can just transform into a dog and skip around like that?
Also, the wand thing, I always wondered why they didn't break the wands of the disarmed opponents. But they need the wand to channel their magic, as each wand's core is a part of an extremely magical animal (phoenix feather, unicorn hair, dragon heartstring). just sayin'
Luke's training on Dagohbah is not a plot hole. The jedi traditionally began training as small children, which meant in addition to jedi training, they also required regular schooling. Not to mention that at its height most jedi received training in the basics of many different fields (diplomacy, piloting, engineering, military tactics, etc). Luke received only the bare minimum.
ReplyAlso, who said that the crew of the Millennium Falcon had to be starving? I don't think its unreasonable to assume that the Falcon has several weeks of supplies at least.
He'd also already learned a bunch of stuff from Old Ben.
actually the time turners all got destroyed in the big fight scene at the end of the fifth book, and hermione sent hers back to the ministry at the end of the third so the whole "time turners can fix all the problems!" is kinda useless in any of the books past the fifth, and practically after the third seeing as the ministry limited distribution.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesTHANK you! I wanted to write something like that. Read the books, people!
They're all f*****g wizards. Someone made the things. Why didn't anyone, like the ultimately powerful end-boss Hitler wizard, make another? Seems like whoever created one first would win.
The fact that something like that did exist and could exist again creates plot holes.
I think there's a logical contradiction in the author of the article's argument about using time turners. He assumes both that "if you screw up, you can go back and do it again," but also that you know you can do it because you've already seen it happen. Together, the assumptions make you invincible, but they are inherently contradictory, as one assumes that the time line can happen differently every time, while the other assumes it must be the same way at each time.
More importantly, if you were to just screw up the time line, you can't just go back in time again and redo it. The past you is dead and can't go back in time to do what you were trying to do. Thus, the series of events that led to you going back in time in the first place doesn't exist, and you will disappear like Marty started to when he almost stopped himself from being born in Back to the Future.
Someone made the goddamn things, was it such a chore for the ministry to simply make another one in the sixth book?
Yeah, but how does a time turner exist in the first place?