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8 Classic Movies That Got Away With Gaping Plot Holes
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#4.
Citizen Kane
Yeah, even Kane. The greatest film of all time, according to those monocle-wearing types who refuse to even consider Robocop for the title. The Plot: A bunch of reporters try to figure out the meaning of Charles Foster Kane's last words. "Rosebud." The Hole: No one was around to hear them. Now, no one's suggesting that journalists in the 40s weren't good at getting scoops. With the chief breathing down their neck and dames left and right trying to play them for saps, they pretty much had to be good. But unless their source was telepathic or invisible, there's no way they could know what Kane said.
And if they really are just that good, you think they'd also know the twist ending, that Rosebud was his sled (what kind of weirdo names his sled anyway? Does he miss his childhood desk chair too?).
So the next time some film critic is getting all up in your face, picking holes in your favorite movie, hit them with that, and watch them curl up into a ball and weep like a child. Then maybe kick 'em a couple of times. If you think we're being too hard on the critics, remember that they get paid to watch movies and be dicks about them. We on the other hand ... never mind. #3.
Fantastic Voyage
You may not have seen this one if you're the type who refuses to watch movies from before you were born. This is from a better time, when men were men, movie titles told you exactly what to expect (hint: an adventure that is fantastic), and Raquel Welch in a catsuit was the closest thing to pornography a man could get without having to go to a seedy-looking theater with sticky floors and Travis Bickle types making gun fingers at the screen. The Plot: A team of scientists shrink themselves to go inside a patient's body in a tiny little spaceship, in order to fix a blood clot in his brain. They have only an hour, and then they will return to normal size. The Hole: We don't ask that you stay within the bounds of physics, but at least follow the rules you freaking made up. At the end of the movie, the crew's tiny sub gets destroyed, but the team manages to get out of the guy's body just before they grow back to size. Only problem, they leave the wreckage of their miniaturized submarine behind. As clangers go, that's about as bad as you get. Anyone paying attention to the plot of the movie is wondering right up until the end when the giant submarine wreckage will be bursting out of the guys chest.
It's not quite true that no one cared about this plot hole. When one of sci-fi's greatest writers, Issac Asimov, was hired to write the novelization of the movie (something to keep in mind if your son is ever contemplating a career as a sci-fi writer) he pointed out the hole to the producers. The producers pointed out that Mr. Asimov could shut the hell up and kept it the way it was. Asimov went ahead and changed the ending in the book so it made sense. Hollywood, believing revenge is a dish best served cold, waited 40 years and then turned his book I, Robot into a love story between Will Smith and a pair of converse.
#2.
The Lion King
The Plot: Scar murders his brother and usurps the throne, then Simba returns from exile to avenge his father's death. Also, they're lions. The Hole: For someone who wanted to be king so much, Scar was really bad at it. There's being incompetent, and then there's being so incompetent that you cause the rain to stop and all the rivers and lakes to dry up. We know he let the hyenas run the show and eat whatever they wanted, but come on. What, did they drink the lake?
We know what you're going to say. "Why don't you just point out the fact that lions can't really talk, you pedantic dicks!" But think about the environmental message kids get at the ending. The place was basically a desert, the lions were on the brink of starvation and a huge fire couldn't have helped matters. Simba repairs an entire ecosystem and gets everything back to normal in a couple of years. Obviously a slow and difficult reconstruction period during which most of the tribe dies isn't the most uplifting montage to end a kids' movie with, but it's a little late to spare our feelings at that point, isn't it Disney? Where was that concern when you killed Mufasa, you fuckers?
#1.
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
We had to make this number one, not because of the size of the plot hole, but because it's friggin' Star Wars. That's right nerds, the indisputably best one of the series has a pretty gaping hole of its own. The Plot: You know the plot. Don't play that game. The Hole: So there's the famous sequence where Luke gets trained by Yoda on Yoda's shithole of a planet. To break up the sequence, the film cuts to the Millennium Falcon getting chased by the Empire to Lando's cloud city. When they arrive, they get captured, at which point Luke has finished his training. Well, that doesn't work. Were they chased for months? Or was Luke trained in an afternoon? Either we were spared some extended scenes on board the Millennium Falcon featuring starvation and debates about when they'd have to eat Chewbacca, or becoming a Jedi is easier than getting a cub scout merit badge.
The latter explanation seems more plausible, as it just reveals Luke to be an even whinier bitch than he seemed. Talk about ungrateful, he's getting taught God-like abilities in about six hours, and he complains through literally every single one of them. It also means Yoda's insistence that Jedis start their training as young children isn't because the training's such a long arduous process, but because he's amused by the idea of children knowing how to choke each other with their minds.
Now it's true that when Luke tries to leave, Yoda insists the training isn't over. But when Luke returns to Planet Shithole in Return of the Jedi to finish it, Yoda waves him off and tells him there's nothing else to learn. Then it turns out the final test Luke has to pass to become a Jedi is to defeat Darth Vader, the most powerful Jedi in the universe which kind of seems like a huge leap in difficulty after his one-day training session. That'd be like if the final stage of your driving test was to win the Indy 500. So to answer the question, at what point did George Lucas stop paying attention? It looks like it was part way through the second movie. For more movies that are way more disturbing when you actually think about them, check out The 6 Most Depressing Happy Endings in Movie History. Or for movies that you already know suck, but just don't know why, check out 5 Awesome Movies Ruined By Last-Minute Changes. |
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Problem with the Harry Potter one. Every you go back in time, all the other you's that went back in time before are now running around, so you would have to go more and more Metal Gear Solid every time you went back in time...duh!
possible future - ok, but what about name? the murderer was named - so they would know the second time its ANOTHER NAME!=echo?
Hermione returned her Time Turner to the ministry at the end of the school year. While it wasn't shown in the movie version, all of the Time Turners were destroyed during the fight between The Order and the Death Eaters at the ministry the night Sirius died. Just saying.
Here's my review: Some of them don't follow the premise of the article (first paragraph)for example Lion King is not supposed to be "awesome", it's a disney movie made for kids it's obvious it has a simple and dumb plot with shallow and retarded explanations there's no point in being a b***h because it's not realistic. The same goes for harry potter, it's a childish corky story about teenage wizards a woman came up with to make his son go to sleep, I think it's kinda lame to have to recur to those kinda movies in order to make a plot hole observation.
About the first part on Minority report, I don't think you really got the movie: They couldn't see the certain future, they just saw an hypothetic future and then altered it by warning the police. The whole point of the movie is the moment when, as a result of predicting the consequences of the prediction itself, you start causing alternative (and often negative)random timelines.
All the other plot holes about minority report and the one about time in star wars are well explained, though they are not very import.
I didn't pay attention when I watched the movie so I'm just going to complain about the second part.
Wouldn't going back in time to alter something that directly affects you, you wouldn't be able to change it? So they can't technically kill Voldy.
(e.g. You go back in time to kill yourself, therefore, you don't grow up and you won't go back in time to kill yourself.)
For the Star Wars one, the training was actually somewhere between a couple weeks to a month or so, if I'm not mistaken. George Lucas just fails as a director and can't show the passing of time. I swear, he made one of the greatest series ever, but he fucks up more as time goes along (see the prequel trilogy). Still not exactly long for training, but Luke had been studying basic training stuff that Obi-wan had left to him. Thus his actually having some force powers before Dagobah.
As for the second part, it's just like GlassMoon said. There's a year long time-skip between Empire strikes back and Jedi. Luke actually did go back to yoda for some serious training, and he trained on his own and built his own lightsaber. Once again, Lucas just fails at showing the passage of time...
For the sixth sense the book explains why all the happens. He passes out. A lot. As for the little kid thing it explains it as the ghosts are naturally drawn to him and they don't know why. Other then the fact hes the only one who makes eye contact. If he starts to figure out that hes dead on his own he passes out. (Which might as well be a plot hole, why can't he reach rapture alone without some stupid kid?)
The reason why he goes on life like is normal is because the way he died. He was shot by someone who he failed to help. His regret is that he didn't help him. So he is living his unlife trying to make up for that. By helping the little kid. Whom is supposed to be his next case. The woman who committed suicide regrets killing herself. It explains she just wanted attention. Screaming at the little kid is her way of getting attention (roll with me) the little boy who blew his brains out wants Cole to stop him. So on and so on.
The movie has a number of flaws they tried to patch with the book(which i read first being to poor to rent the bloody film) sooo yeah....
All right, the Star Wars one I can't explain the first part, being trained in a couple days, but I CAN explain the second part. There's a book (Shadows of the Empire) in between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. About a year happens in between Luke losing his hand and the gang rescuing Han, in which they pretty much break up a huge underworld organization, Black Sun. During that time, Luke had the time to go back to Dagobah and train for awhile. And no, he didn't ask Yoda if Vader was his father, because, let's face it, he was afraid of the answer. Once he realized Yoda was dying--in Return of the Jedi--and this was his last chance to learn the truth, he asked because he had to know. There, I fixed a hole.
I'm a Star Wars fan but star wars fans complaining about this really need to STFU. no one cares about your pissed off opinion of this article and you're just making yourselves look like a bunch of idiot fanboys.
no offence but with the minority report a lot of the "plot holes" arn't there. firstly you have the wrong definition of precognition, normally id say that a mistake anyone could make, but they explain it in the movie . Tom Cruise rolls a murder ball across a table towards the government guy, he catches it as it goes off the edge and Tom Cruise asks "why did you catch that" government guy says "because it was going to fall" then Tom Cruise says "but it didnt fall you caught it" thats precognition. secondly the murderballs are made after the vision is marked as a echo or not. and thirdly it was less than a few hours after he was labeled a murderer and they had no reason to belive he would walk into the police headquarters once they thought he was a murderer so they probably wernt that worried about deleting him from the scanners
I don't care if your comment was positive or negative about Harry Potter, the mere fact that there are so many more comments about HP than Star Wars (which I also love, at least IV-VI) shows, regardless of any discrepancies, how influential and far reaching the stories have been.
It does always kind of bother me when they do the part mentioned in regards to Harry Potter. Not the time travel part, but the leaving something incredibly useful completely unused when there's no established reason why you couldn't. Another example is in season 2 of 24, with the software that they used to make the Cyprus recordings. CTU had their hands on software that could create, more or less on the fly, replications of other people's voices that were incredibly convincing. As in, convincing to the point where whichever government agencies analyzing it thought it was real. Why didn't we ever see them use that again? There were tons of occasions throughout the rest of the show where it would have come in handy.
I do understand that sort of thing from a dramatic standpoint. It would kind of take the excitement out if every time it was, "Oh my god, the terrorists are calling right now, but the only man they'll talk to just died! What in the hell do we d- oh, wait, we can just make his voice with our computers." That'd be lame. But at least have that Harry Potter medallion break, or the software get deleted or something.
Really?
Come on these are not huge plot holes. Do you wanna be spoonfed all your life? Do you really need everything explaned to you?
I mean in a stageplay there can be a guy and a box. And the audience will just imagine the rest. Cant you just imagine just a little bit with these movies. No one can be that perfect.
You can make up holes like this for every movie. This is just sad.
Enjoyed the article!
As for the little argument below about Empire, I always thought this, I don't care! It's a great movie, which is kinda the point of the article.
As for the comment about how luke got there quicker than the falcon, the Falcon's hyperdrive wasn't working, Luke's was.
Right! I'm off to don my yoda outfit for some crazy leia slave fun!
wow you guys are smart.
i watched the majority of these movies without seeing those huge plot holes...
great article!
And Cedric is not useful at all.
I'm sure this was mentioned in the 500-odd comments that were left, but there are a LOT of plot holes in the third HP movie. Not just things that were left out from the book, but there's the whole situation with the Marauder's Map. Lupin gets the map from Snape (who confiscated it from Harry), and knows how to use it. Doesn't explain anything about the history between Harry's parents, Pettigrew, Sirius and Lupin. It may have been left out to save time, or it could have been left out because Guillermo del Toro cares nothing for character development/emotional attachment.
tan_tayum, I see no reason to bring Cedric back. He wouldn't have been useful for anything.
And bringing back Lily and James would completely screw up fate. It had been prophicised, or how ever the hell you spell it. And he'd just try again if he failed.
@hjordis
well what about the 4th book - bring back cedric? why did they think to bring back lily and james while they're at it?
also, this couldve stopped voldemort from resurrecting too.
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@Machovict:
that's true, but doesn't he just travel through time independently? if you think about it, he goes back in time and dissapears from that timeframe apparantly, it's not like he stays in the past, he travels back to the future (:D) and dissapears from THAT timestream. so really, he wouldn't make an ass load of clones, he would just screw up the future with any misstep and possibly not exist, but then he could still go back in time and fail until he succeeds.