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.
In the 5th book of the Harry Potter series they accidentally destroyed all the time turners in the Department of Mysteries, that was the only place you could get one.
ReplyI could completely prove you wrong about the whole Harry Potter thing, but that would include me demonstrating how much of a loser I really am...
ReplyA few of these weren't really plot holes, specifically the Lion King one. That was more done for artistic reasons to show how corrupting Scar's evil infuence was. The Star Wars one isn't exactly a plot hole either, for one thing, it doesn't say "Five hours later," so you really have no idea if it was a few hours, a few days, or even a few months. Even if it was just a few hours, it's not a plot hole unless the movie specifically stated that Yoda's Jedi crash course was longer than that.
ReplyAlso, the reason the wizarding world can't use the time turners in the fight against Voldemort is because in the fifth book, Harry and the gang accidentally destroy every single time turner in the Department of Mysteries.
ReplyIn Harry Potter, you "can't just go back and try again". Any real HP fan would know that. For shame. You can't change what happens. If you go back in time, you were meant to, and things will still play out exactly as they did before.
ReplyPlus there's the whole thing that when you use the time turner you turn it once for every hour you want to go back. Turning it three times you go back three hours. You couldn't just wait till it was 10 years later unless you had a couple of days in a room to just count out the many hours you would need to turn it back to the exact time you were meant to go back to. That's without the chance that you mess up your counting or have to start again.
They cut out the "starvation" part in the Millennium Falcon. Apparently, they were in the Hoth asteroid belt/field for a few days to a week or so. Once they go to leave, Han is checking his charts and says, "Lando." Leia says she never heard of that system and Han says he's not a system, he's a man but he's on Bespin in the Bespin system. That's the Bespin Star System as opposed to the Hot Star System. The Falcon's hyperdrive was broken so they had to go there on the sublight drive. Sublight meaning, "slower than light." So unless the basic laws of physics are different in Star Wars (OK, they are but only with the hyperspace and jedi stuff . . . or with the laser swords or visible laser beams or sound in space . . . hmm, I'm sensing a theme here). The deal is that it even were they to travel at just below the speed of light, a different star system should have been months to years away. Does anyone remember seeing a stasis chamber onboard? Why then, did it take Boba Fett so damn long to call The Empire and tell them wher the Falcon was? And why did they wait until they got to Bespin? And just how long were the Rebel forces sitting at "The Rendezvous Point" anyway? However long Luke's training or Han;s voyage was, they probably would have lost the entire alliance after a week or two. Unless they tapped into The Empire's probe droids? OK, that's enough. My brain is going to explode! Call me a nerd and be done with it!
ReplyNerd.
"The producers pointed out that Mr. Asimov could shut the hell up and kept it the way it was." Should that be keep instead of "kept" or "he kept". In the second case you would be wrong. In the book Asimov has them remove the amoeba filled w. wreckage as well before they expand, because he's awesome like that.
Replyno,
you are
kept is the proper form there,
"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."
ReplyThe second sentence answers the first. Bruce WASN'T carrying on as normal. He only thought he was, just like all the other ghosts. Ghosts do whatever they were "programmed" to do before their deaths. In his case, that was solving mysteries, or whatever he's trying to do in this movie (it's been in a while since I've seen it).
As for Back to the Future, I don't think I would remember a boy that I knew for only one week, 30 years ago, well enough to notice that my now teenage son is the same person, so that never bothered me. They don't even have any pictures of him.
But thanks for pointing out the Empire Strike Back thing. That's always bugged me.
The Star Wars one is easily explained: The Millenium Falcon travels faster than light, so what seems like a few minutes to them would be a much, much longer time for Luke.
ReplyOr force-based precognition.
All of these movies suck, so who cares?
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesThen why did you even read this article? Jerk.
How do you truly live life hating all of these movies? Star Wars I can understand if you're not into sci-fi, and Iove Star Wars, but Lion King? Back to the Future? Really?
Clearly a cry for attention
I like how, while the time-travel plot hole happens all the time in movies, it's often explained away in video games; for example, in LoZ: Majora's Mask (*spoiler alert*), it IS the whole plot, that you (Link) weren't capable of stopping Skull Kid yet, so you can repeat the 3 day cycle literally indefinitely until you awaken all 4 giants, but can't go back any further than that because time stands still in the Clock Tower, so that's a no-go, and you weren't in Termina proper anytime before that.
ReplyVideo games usually have a lot more time to explain this kind of stuff. A short video game is usually around six hours (don't get me started on Metroid speed runs), whereas a four-hour movie is really long. All that extra time means plenty more opportunities to patch holes.
They could have easily got around the Harry Potter one by just saying that the device could only be used once, and that you could only go so far back in time with it. It's believable, since all devices have their limitations.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesHermione had been using the thing every day all school year. That's why she had it in the first place.
BUT, she only used it once a day, to go back and attend her other classes...right? So that's kind of a limitation, if she didn't go too far back in time. :P
hermione gave the time turner back to the ministry at the end of the school year. the ministry also regulates all time travel (she had to get special permission to even have that and there were rules she had to follow), and then all the time travel stuff was destroyed in the order of the phoenix when the kids infiltrated the ministry and were attacked by death eaters.
The time turner can only be used to go back around 24 hours. Plus, the laws of time mean that changing the past either creates a paradox or an alternate universe which exists alongside the original one.Of course, by that logic there are 4 or 5 BTTF universes where Marty just disappeared one night and never came back. And they left Jennifer on a bench in the dystopia of BTTF2 where she will most likely be raped and awful stuff... Doc really didn't understand time travel.
i'm pretty sure you can only go back once, though.. in that you can only have 2 versions of yourself running around at a time... or, if that isn't a technical limitation of the time tuner itself, there's probably a law about it.
plus, they DID explain it a lot better in the books... the reason they couldn't use it more is 1, it's illegal (hermione only had it in book 3 for classes and gave it back at the end of the year), and 2, at the end of book 5 harry and his friends destroyed all of the time tuners.
kane's actually on purpose. the reporter we follow is supposed to represent us. much like master chief. you'll notice they both never show their faces. and who was there when he said rosebud, and heard him? us, the audience.
ReplyIn defense of the Harry Potter Time Turner thing, the way it's portrayed in the movie, you can't go back in time and change things. That Harry and Hermione would go back in time, rescue Buckbeak, rescue Sirius, fend off the dementors etc was already predetermined. In other words, if someone dies you can't go back in time and prevent their death, since the fact that you will go back in time to try and rescue them has effectively already happened (it's like the way Oedipus tries to defy his fate, and ends up actualizing it). Of course, that concept leads to its own paradox, the "Predestination Paradox," and it implies that everything is predetermined (which I guess means no free will).
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesGAH! BRAIN CRAMP! DAMN YOU JOHN CALVINNNNNNN!!!!
It also implies that Dumbledore is some kind of omniscient deity. Because it means Buckbeak was never actually killed. So why does Dumbledore tell Hermione to save him when he sends her back in time? He would have known that he wasn't really killed, and he would have no way of knowing how he was saved. So many plot holes.
itchyfriend- dumbledore is a smart guy. one second buckbeak is there, the next he isn't... plus the fact that harry saw himself, dumbledore probably put 2 and 2 together. either that, or maybe he realized that it would make sense for them to take buckbeak and give him to sirius, and then realized that that was probably what happened? i mean, dumbledore IS a genius, after all...
The Millenium Falcon's light speed wasn't working, so their trip to Bespin did take a long time. It very well could have been months. Remember, Vader et al beat them to Cloud City once Boba Fett knew where they were headed.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesStar Wars never mentions any kind of infinite-food-making machine like Star Trek goes out of its way to show off. You're right, but the plot really should do a better job of pointing it out.
True I recall Han Solo, Chewbaca and Leia fixing the damn light speed.
If they don't have warp, it's gonna take years, not months.
Did the all the sand for the time turner get destroyed in the 5th book of Harry Potter? Or did I read that wrong since I read that one only once back when it came out several years ago
ReplyNo, you're right. Or, not the sand for them, but the time turners themselves. Apparently the Ministry only had a limited supply of them (which makes sense since they're probably crazy hard to make.) Of course, that leads to the "For the smartest witch of her age, why didn't Hermione just keep her time turner?!?!" Then again, Hermione was such a responsible, follow-the-rules do gooder, especially when she's still in the third book, that she probably wouldn't think twice about returning the thing to McGonagall.
Also, while the books don't strictly work on the predetermined route, they do go over the horrible horrible consequences of blatantly affecting the time stream without even trying to be careful. In PoA they take serious measures to avoid being seen by anyone, let alone themselves. This means they could only accomplish something if all the circumstances were right. Plus time turners only go back one hour per turn, so you'd have to have a very good attention span to go back more than 10 or so hours.
Do you have trouble counting to 10? I don't, not most days.
Maybe the time-space thing works differently compared with whatever system you're in. Hell, everyone's doin the time warp.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesObviously Luke had extensive training on Dagobah between ESB and ROJ. And learning how to construct a lightsaber. Just sayin.
that makes no sense whatsoever.
In the book : Shadows Of the Empire, it says that the end of ESB until the start of ROTJ is like 3-6 month. Also, Luke finds Obi Wan's journal, with insructions on making a lightsaber.
Luke says right in ROTJ that he's "making good on a promise to an old friend" or something along those lines. That implies he hasn't been to Dagobah since he ran off to get his hand lopped off. The most likely situation is that because Han lost the hyperdrive in the Falcon, he had to go on the sublight drives to Bespin, and let's say this take three months. This would give ample time for Luke to learn the ways of the Jedi and Boba Fett to figure out Han's destination. As for the food problem, Han's got a medium-sized freighter without cargo because he's been with the Alliance for the past three years and they have their own cargo ships. This empty room, combined with the fact that the Falcon is his and Chewie's home, he would be stupid not to have a fairly large food supply. Also of note, in ESB when he figures out he's out a hyperdrive, he's not worried about food or supplies, he's worried about where they're going to go.
read the geeks get shitty.Go forth! address this article instead of getting laid!
ReplyMy wife and I are both okay with me addressing this article, thank you for your concern.
f@#k getting laid. he bashed on empire.
somebody didn't read the Harry Potter books...
Replyalso your point about Minority Report is way wrong. As described many times in the previous comments, the precogs are seeing what IS going to happen in the future, but the future is changed when they intervene and stop the murder from happening. So what the precogs see IS the future. f*****g duh, noob.
He wasn't talking about the books, jackass.
Anyway, don't even TRY to explain Minority Report, because that paradox IS the plot hole he was referring to. Although, it looks like you just rephrased what he was saying anyway. So there, NOOB.
Actually, most ghosts don't KNOW they are dead...
ReplyThank you, I was awaiting the day when you would post and clarify it for me. Back to my grave now that the jig is up.
how many have you interviewed during your research on this topic?