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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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.
shadowzoid - Tolkien said something about the eagles being a "neutral" tribe that didn't want to interfere with the affairs of man, so that's why they couldn't drop the ring in the volcano...bunch of dicks, really, if they knew countless innocent lives would have been lost if Sauron got what he wanted. Being a bystander during a catastrophe =/= neutral in my book, it = jackass.
Actually, it said in the 6th book when they were talking to Hagrid about taking his class that they couldn't apply for a time turner as they smashed them all the previous year, thus implying that they were the only ones in existence.
HEYbitch: Nowhere was said that those "time-traveler-thingies" located in the Ministry of Magic were all the ones in existence, or that they couldn't make more. Don't try to pass a made-up explanation as an explanation for such a big plothole.
the star wars geeks need to chill! As for the lion king thing, i always assumed it was sort of a mandate of heaven deal you know. Everything went to s**t not because scar was incompetent but because he wasn't the rightful king... and he was incompetent. When Simba became king the throne was returned to the rightful possessor and order was restored to the universe, so everything righted itself. Mandate of Heaven, that's my two cents.
I really have you say that you screwed up the Star Wars point entirely. You didn't mention the actual plot holes the movie has whatsoever, and what you did talk about was really just bullshit.
The fact that Luke wasn't on Degobah for very long is meaningless. It was never implied in Empire that his training was complete, that he was there "long enough", or anything close to it. His teacher, who was 1. Really f*****g old and experienced 2. Considered to be the most wise and powerful of his order, and 3. The greatest living Jedi at that point TOLD HIM HE WASN'T DONE BY A LONG SHOT, and proved it to him by MANIFESTING AN EVIL APPARITION OF LUKE'S FATHER FOR HIM TO DUEL WITH AND SHOW HIS b***h ASS THAT HE WOULD FAIL. Actually, A f*****g GHOST OF HIS MENTOR AND FATHER'S EX-BEST-FRIEND BEGGED HIM NOT TO LEAVE. Did you even watch this movie?
You got the order of events and implications all wrong. Han took the Falcon out of Hoth first before Luke left, but since his ride was falling to s**t, he couldn't outrun Vader, and had his ass chased around a f*****g asteroid belt until he decided to lay low inside a huge worm in an asteroid to fix his s**t. How long did they stay there? Who knows, but it's irrelevant, because even if they stayed in there the equivalent of a few Earth days or even an Earth week (remember, time is relative here) and then took off for Bespin and that took them another week it doesn't matter as far as what Luke accomplished on Degobah at all which leads me to my next point:
Luke never demonstrated any skills on Degobah that he didn't already have, he was just given instruction on sprituality in general. In case you didn't pay attention to the ENTIRE f*****g STORY OF STAR WARS, Yoda knew that training that f*****g Skywalker kid all those years ago was a bad idea. They did it, and guess what happened: he became an insane killing machine, slaughtered hundreds if not thousands of his wizard-like guardian-kind (along with the children) and brought an even more insane, tyrannical dictator into power, who in turn built a machine that can destroy f*****g planets - all in the name of some p***y that he killed in the end anyway. And they even destroyed one peaceful planet already. So he naturally wanted to learn from that mistake, and wanted to teach the kid TO THINK ABOUT s**t FOR A MINUTE, unlike his dumbass father. What does Luke do on Degobah? Well he stands on his hand and lift rocks with his mind... And a robot. And tries to lift a ship out of water too but fails because he's still a whiney p***y that doesn't get it. Oh, and he fights a ghost of his father, which turns out to be allegory for self-conflict, the importance of patience and non-aggression. All while he is really being taught to NOT BE AN a*****e. And you seem to have forgotten that Luke already proved he could grab a f*****g sword with his mind at the beginning of the movie, and bypass Facebook entirely by hooking up with someone through the ghost of a dead friend. Basically in this story he's the son of Jesus, the all-powerful dude who supposedly will fix everyone's s**t, and you think he's gonna be a chump-change off the bat?
Saying that Yoda pointed out in Return of the Jedi that Luke's training was one step away from being complete, which is an entirely different movie by the way so to my knowledge pretty much excludes it from being a plot hole in Empire, is also pointless in the context it was given. So you're saying that a dying old wizard who's like a thousand f*****g years old, telling this kid who literally has no one left to learn from because he knows he will die in a few minutes, that he's finished, meant it was a plothole as it contradicted what he said in another movie? Alright, let me break it down for you: Luke is the last of his kind. There's no one left to preserve their culture or their craft. Learning at this point from another living person is impossible, unless he talks to another one of those ghosts, and they seem to choose when to show themselves. The only hope at this point for everyone in that galaxy to get out of the f*****g hole they're in is this kid to either kill his father and the Emperor, or to convert them. So he should've told him, "Hey, you fucked up, pack up your s**t and go home?" How about this instead: maybe he figured since the kid faced the f*****g "chosen one" already and only had his hand cut off that he might be able to handle s**t on his own. Maybe he figured that the kid had already shown that he might have what it takes, but whether he does or not doesn't matter since it's too late now. What alternative did he have?
You want a real plothole? How about the fact that the Vader and the other Star Destroyers couldn't land on Hoth because the rebels had a shield generator, but they managed to stick a garrison of troops and walking tank behemoths on the planet to get the job done? How about the fact that Vader needed to have Han's crew hostage and torture them for no reasons so that Luke would telepathically cry about it and come there to save them, when taking down Vader was obviously Luke and the rebellion's goal anyway, so all he really needed to do was telepathically tell Luke "Yo, I'm over here"?
with the harry potter thing why didnt they just do what scottie said just go back when voldemort was sitting on the crapper and blast him
I got another one. Lord of the Rings (I love lotr btw). Why didnt gandalf just use the eagles to drop the ring into the volcano. woulda saved alot of lives
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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....