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.
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.
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.
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. |
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
Digg
Del.icio.us
FarkRecommended for Your Pleasure
-
Star Trek's 6 Most Ridiculous Alien Races
by: Nathan Birch465,077 views -
The 8 Shittiest Transformer Disguises
by: Luke McKinney446,886 views -
The Awful Secrets of 25 Famous Cartoon Characters
by: CRACKED Readers422,173 views -
6 Evil Henchmen Who Sucked at Their Job
902,679 views
I ain't trolling Bobbi.
Lion King is less like Macbeth than it is like Hamlet.
It's actually the Disney-fied version.
Hamlet is the prince of Denmark. His father, King Hamlet is murdered by Hamlet's uncle Claudius. Claudius promptly takes over as King of Denmark.
King Hamlet's ghost appears and tells Hamlet to avenge him, blah, blah.
But of course it's Disney, so they removed the elements of incest, suicide, and insanity. Oh, and the fact that, you know, EVERYONE dies at the end.
Flashpenny. stop trolling. No one cares on here.
Personally I'd say that either The Phantom Menace or Revenge of the Sith is the best Star Wars flick. Empire Strikes Back was pretty good but compared to the other movies it's only better than Return of the Jedi and Attack of the Clones.
Er...that's not how time travel worked in Prisoner of Azkaban. When they went back in time, they *left copies of themselves*. If you screw up once and go back, you'll be *three* people running around. You don't have infinite capacity, if you screw up once (or twice at most, since you're all headed to the same places), you screw up for good.
As for the other...wizards are unwilling to screw with time, and it becomes a moot point when it would actually be useful, since the Time Turners are destroyed.
Ahhh, I love to wake up and sniff the senseless nerd rage of Cracked readers in the morning. Has it occured to any of you that this is a humour based website? Last time I checked, when one talks about poop jokes frequently they arent to be taken seriously.
off the top of my head, you could explain away the plot hole in star wars with einstein's theory of time dilation - time passes at different rates in different parts of the universe, so luke could have done a 6 month training course in the time it took the falcon to reach bespin :)
yes i'm a massive nerd for thinking of that off the top of my head :( x
As for the SW plot hole, something that's not addressed in the movie is that fact that none of the episodes take place one after the other. There is a lot of stuff that happens to take place between each episode, from episode 1 all the way to episode 6. Or another words, most of the training took place between episodes 5 and 6...and that's why it process seems to be rushed.
What about The Matrix? The whole giant sentient machine is fueled by surplus energy from people, fueled by... people, fueled by people, fueled by people and so on until you have to be religious not to see the enormous amount of fail in what is an essential premise for the whole story.
@vtgooner
That's still a s****y explanation. Time travel debate is one of the biggest wastes of time and subject to the author's imagination, but suffice it to say that Rowling could have set up any of the other deaths (would be near-deaths) like she did with Harry saving himself.
As a cracked reader, you're obviously highly educated and a very good critical thinker, so I'm appalled that you could see the plot hole and then blindly accept a justification that doesn't make the plot hole any less obvious.
Who says that they just didnt leave out a large gap of time for the training of Luke? Do we really want to hear the philosophical reasons behind the force that jedi must learn and see him move boulders and stuff for hours? It was right after the escape from hoth that luke met yoda, maybe the time between the arrival of luke on yoda's swamp hole and the time that Leia and Han meet the empire's fleet is a great space in and of itself.
In the Harry Potter books they explain that once you are dead you are dead, there is no magic that can bring you back. Therefore they did have to make haste when using the time turner because they had to physically go back before Sirius Black was killed on the real time line. Other than that good article.
The star wars one really isn't very good. Luke could (and did train) for a pretty long time while the falcon tries to reach cloud city, because the whole point of going to cloud city was repairing their broken hyperdrive.
No Hyperdrive -> slow a** travel -> enough time to train with creepy little green man.
In Citizen Kane the people in the house probably heard the echoes I mean have you ever been in a giant empty Mansion you can whisper in one end and someone else on the opposite side can hear it like you yelling in their ear(maybe not that loud but you get the picture),But anyways that's not the big question it's WHAT THE f**k DOES YOUR CHILDHOOD SLED HAVE TO DO W/...ANYTHING!?
In Citizen Kane the people in the house probably heard the echoes I mean have you ever been in a giant empty Mansion you can whisper in one end and someone else on the opposite side can hear it like you yelling in their ear(maybe not that loud but you get the picture),But anyways that's not the big question it's WHAT THE f**k DOES YOUR CHILDHOOD SLED HAVE TO DO W/...ANYTHING!?
Why is it that whenever someone mentions SW: ESB they assume everyone thinks it's the best one in the entire series? I sure as hell don't think it's the best one. Return of the Jedi is the best one, IMHO. Yes, the Ewoks suck, but the huge space battle that takes up the second half of the movie is amazing. I would love to have an edited version of just the space battle and nothing else...other the Leia in her slave outfit, which is another reason ROTJ is the best one.
s**t, my second paragraph is messed up. I meant to say that there was no connection between Marty and Calvin Klein in 1985-A because he hadn't been to the past yet. And at the end of that paragraph I meant to say that 1985-A exist because Marty wasn't in the original version of 1955.
I also realize that doing this doesn't help my "I need to get a life" clause, but you know what? f**k you guys, say anything about it and I'll travel back in time to when you were 5 and poop in your cereal.
So, the Back to the Future thing is actually pretty easy to explain. Marty traveled back to 1955, from 1985-A. He meets his parents, creates rock, and then travels back to 1985-B, which he created.
Doc brown and Marty’s folks don’t recognize him in 1985-A, because they actually haven’t met him before. The same applies to the Calvin Klein and Chuck Barry thing, there was not connection. The reason 1985-A exists is because Marty hadn’t been there originally.
In 1985-B we don’t here anything about Calvin Klein or Chuck Berry, so its possible that they don’t even exist in this time-line.
Marty was what, 16, 17, when he went back in time? So his parents probably wouldn’t recognize him until he was around that age, if they recognized him at all, which they obviously hadn’t yet. Which is surprising, because they are supposed to be smarter or some s**t in 1985-B.
Also Marty may have resembled his Mom’s ex-boyfriend from high school, but he also resembles his father, because he actually is his father’s son, so when Marty was a baby, they probably just thought he looked like his Dad, and accepted that notion, not expecting him to grow up as Calvin Klein.
So, when I said it was pretty easy, I actually meant to say it was complicated as f**k and it makes your brain explode just trying to grasp it, but it kind of makes sense…..f**k, I need to get a life…
the reason they don't use time travel in the rest of the movies is because all of the time turners were broken in the 5th book
More on Movies & TV
-
6 Famous Characters You Didn't Know Were Shameless Rip Offs
1,028,826 views -
7 Completely Unrealistic Movie Plots (That Came True)
939,945 views -
6 Movies Based on a True Story (That Are Also Full of Shit)
674,746 views -
5 Reasons The Terminator Franchise Makes No Goddamn Sense
553,554 views
- Zombies
- Celebrity Baby Names
- Boobs - New
- Japan
- Bacon - New
- Star Trek - New
- Christopher Walken
- Beer - New
- David Caruso
- Vampires
-
: This mugshot of the year candidate is brought to you by Torrington, CT,...
[link] [15 comments] -
: A downside of having all your bills paid by direct debit is that when you die...
[link] [29 comments] -
: Today's hittable teacher banging an underage male and getting away with it is...
[link] [41 comments]
-
Stuff Talks: The Most Terrifying Comedy Premise Ever
by: Genius Camp20,666 views -
A Series of Poor Decisions: The Twitter Song
by: Cody Johnston23,314 views
-
Articles
-
Videos
-
Columnists
-
More Cracked
-
About
Copyright © 2005 - 2009 Cracked Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. CRACKED, CRACKED.COM and the "CRACKED" logo are trademarks owned by Cracked Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved.
Haha, the next time my film class starts picking apart plot holes in some of my favorite movies, I'm totally going to hit them with the Citizen Kane one.