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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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
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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.