6 Movie Plots Made Possible By Ridiculous Understaffing
Movies are filled with military bases and lairs, fully staffed with no-name henchman, janitors and cafeteria workers milling about the background.
But for every U.S.S. Enterprise bursting with disposable red shirts or chocolate factory crawling with indifferent orange pygmies, there are movies where the entire plot seems to happen purely because the facility is operating with a skeleton crew.
#6.
Jurassic Park
You can't criticize InGen for cloning dinosaurs for their park. Let's be honest; if the technology actually became available, we'd start saving up for tickets to the place right now, even if they warned us that rampages were happening every couple of weeks. Hell, that makes us want to go more.
If, you know, they hire some freaking staff first.
The Staff:
Despite the fact that the park seems to be overrun with scientists growing dinosaurs in beakers and one guy who shovels triceratops shit all day, the entire computer technician staff seems to be made up of Samuel L. Jackson and Newman. Well, OK. It's a sophisticated system. Maybe it runs itself. And if both of those guys take a sick day at the same time, uh, maybe you just shut the park down? Because not a whole hell of a lot has to go wrong with the system before the dinosaurs are just running free.
Adware could have caused this.
Of course that brings us to the security team whose job it is to stop that, a team which consists of game warden Robert Muldoon. SPOILER: All of those people we just mentioned are quickly eaten by dinosaurs.
If only I had held onto my butt.
What the hell? Even smaller theme parks like Disneyland tend to have more security, just to keep toddlers from getting mangled by the Country Bears robots.
Why Some Extra Staff Wouldn't Have Hurt:
Instead of breeding more attractive, popular and harmless dinosaurs, John Hammond thought it might be a good idea to breed super-intelligent (and apparently pure evil) velociraptors, despite the fact that they would hardly have been an attraction since before 1993, only paleontologists and guys who regularly read the dictionary knew what they were.
Even stranger, they also don't appear to be part of the park's tour, and are instead quarantined to a Kafkaesque holding pen, where even just a brief sight of them feeding seems to be enough to cause Jeff Goldblum to completely lose his appetite.
And he's not easily sickened.
So when things unexpectedly turn all Westworld, it might make sense to have some guys with guns handy. In fact, the only person on the entire island who seems to have access to a gun is resident mercenary Robert Muldoon.
Of course, the whole thing could probably have been sidestepped if Denis Nedry hadn't spent all of his time eating Butterfingers, installing viruses and downloading fetish porn. Sure, this stuff happens in regular offices every day, but Cracked headquarters aside, workplace laziness and hijinks usually just lead to perfect fodder for an international sitcom phenomenon and not carnage, terror and children with permanent psychological scarring.
All of which could have been avoided if they had just hired enough staff for a regular zoo, with maybe a few extra to account for the fact that no human has ever worked with these animals before and you have no idea what they're going to do.
#5.
The Nostromo (Alien)
No one could have predicted the fate of the doomed spaceship Nostromo, as it drifted through the infinite cosmos like so much molasses in the rain. Well, maybe you could have predicted it if you glanced at the crew roster and noticed it only took up two inches of the page.
We should only need two, maybe three guys, tops.
The Staff:
The Nostromo, a massive spaceship as long as two and a half football fields, with three decks and towing a gigantic ore refinery, is staffed by only six crewmembers, a robot and a cat. And while this sounds similar (but different enough for legal purposes) to the premise of Space Kitty and Robo-Boy, the new animated TV show we're developing (tune into Nickelodeon Fall 2014), it also sounds like there aren't enough crewmembers here to man the average sailboat, not to mention an entire spaceship.
This thing was about the same size as the Titanic, yet there were fewer crewmembers aboard the Nostromo than there were total members of the Ramones.
They'd have a better soundtrack, too.
The Titanic met with disaster even though help was never more than several hours away. In the film, it takes months or years to get out to where they were--they had to be rendered unconscious for the trip.
Of course, this wouldn't be a problem as long as nothing terrible happened.
Why Some Extra Staff Wouldn't Have Hurt:
Something terrible happened. We'll spare the gory details, but give you a gory synopsis: John Hurt gets face raped by a space omelet monster, and gives violent bloody birth out of his chest to a space worm monster baby.
All the rape symbolism happened to this guy.
With calling for backup impossible, the crew's only option seemed to be hoping that the monster baby likes to commit suicide for fun. When it doesn't, things go straight to hell pretty quickly. With a single alien baby on board, everyone but Sigourney Weaver ends up dead, robots get decapitated and Jonesy the cat gets the scaring of his life.
If only there had been more crewmembers. Or at least, some crew members that weren't quite so delicious.
He's surprisingly tender. Also, good in Repo Man.
We know what you're saying. "How could they have known somebody was going to get face-pregnant by an alien?" But that's missing the point. Anything would have left these guys fucked. If there was so much as a chemical spill or minor fire on board that took out a few crew members--or ruined their supplies--the survivors have to hunker down and pray help arrives by next Christmas.
Hell, forget the alien, a really bad outbreak of food poisoning could have completely crippled this operation.
#4.
The Back Entrance of Mordor (The Return of the King)
As far as fire-infested, totalitarian countries go, Mordor is pretty much tops. In addition to being the possible inspiration for hell, Mordor appears to be an entirely impenetrable state, despite the fact that no one in their right mind would want to voluntarily visit.
And while Sauron is able to watch over most of the world as a semi-omnipotent (and strangely literal) giant flaming eye, and guards the front entrance with a gate the size of a hotel and half of his army, he decides for some reason to leave the back door entrance into Mordor guarded by... one big spider.
The Staff:
Shelob's Lair is guarded by the titular giant spider with a sweet tooth for fuzzy Hobbits. Granted, even running across a regular sized spider is probably enough to send the average Cracked reader scrambling back to his warm home in the Shire, so the idea of a monstrous spider, older than time itself, just sitting and waiting to make Hobbit-burgers out of you and your slow-witted gardener is actually pretty terrifying. That is, until you realize how scary the rest of Middle Earth is.
This is a world where killer goblins ride on wolf monsters, ghosts fight in wars and Grim Reapers fly around on razor toothed dragons. Hell, even the nicest Elf in Middle Earth always looks like he's pissed at you.
Twenty-four hours a day he pictures himself kicking your ass.
Giant arachnids seem like the kind of thing you'd run into on the way to Mordor.
Why Some Extra Staff Wouldn't Have Hurt:
When Frodo, Sam and Gollum find the enormous gate into Mordor locked and guarded by people who look like Smurfs as designed by H.R. Geiger, Gollum proves his worth by telling them about the secret back door that Sauron apparently keeps unguarded and unlocked.
The little Hobbit skeleton may have been lying to them, but what he walked them into was less of an ambush and more of a minor inconvenience. Gollum brought them through what ended up being a perfect entrance into Mordor, which means that Gollum's trap was actually more helpful to the Hobbits than most of Gandalf's plans.
"But the bad guys didn't know about the back entrance!" you say. And we say bullshit. After Frodo walks through the very large and roomy cave Gollum shows him, he gets attacked by the spider and wrapped up in web. Who shows up immediately after?
A half dozen orcs, who immediately say, "Looks like old Shelob's been having a bit of fun." So they know about Shelob, they know about the lair. They go there all the time. Somebody put stairs there to make it easier. What would those jackasses up there have done if, instead of a couple of Hobbits, they met 5,000 pissed-off dudes swinging swords?
There's 0 indication any of the orcs knew shelob was in a tunnel that went through to the other side of the mountains, rather than just a cave.
ReplyOh yea, that hobbit just ran through the black gate and got to shelob's lair. Where the hell else would he have come from retard? They would've said "Where did this hobbit come from?" except they already knew he came in through the tunnel. Think please.
as someone who has worked IT for a number of years I can confidently say that JP had about the average number for a place that size. Most large companies hire between 2-5 IT guys, since most issues can just be fixed remotely.
ReplyThis one was reaching a bit.
Reply"During the day, it's like 1970s New York City at night, and at night, it's like Second Age Mordor during the day." What the what?
ReplyMmm, thats good writing right there!
Read Gotham Central, is a comic series about the Major Crimes Unit of Gotham. Then you'll learn some names like Harvey Bullock, Renee Montoya, Maggie Wawyer, Crispus Allen, Marcus Driver, Romy Chandler... You may say they are characters created for this comic series (and, to be fair, some of them are), but some of them come from other Batman series, and even one of them becomes a superhero later.
ReplyWhy the thumbs down?
I actually thought there was tons of people in the GCPD. Except a few (most) of them probably died when Joker blew up some man with a phone in his belly, and then survived.
Here's a better way to keep people out of shelob's lair, build a god damn wall around it so no one can get in.
ReplyThe Gotham City Police Department is actually full of corrupt officers. At the very least, you see this in Frank Miller's great Batman story, Year One.
ReplyI'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this, but even if you ignore the fact that it would be impossible to get an army up the stairs and through Shelob's cave, and even if you ignore the fact that Minas Morgul was just on the other side of it, you still have to contend with the fact that, after passing Minas Morgul, it's a three or four day march through a barren wasteland which also happens to be the enemy's home turf before you even reach any sort of civilization. While they don't say how large it is in the movie, that's only because it would have been incredibly boring to show Frodo and Sam walk across rocks for days with nothing happening at all.
ReplyNot to mention that Elrond, with his whole "the minds of men were ever easily swayed" schtick, complaining that Isildur walked out with the ring instead of chucking it into Mount Doom ....
Replywhy the heck didn't ELROND just pick up Isildur and throw *him* into the bowels of Mount Doom, ring and all, instead of whining about humans la la la - I mean, it's not as if Elrond was going to chuck away his OWN ring of of power. He's an elf, stronger than a human. Heck, he could have slipped up behind Isildur and pushed him in, once Isildur made his regrettable decision.
Then it would have been period, end of sentence, no worries about the Big Bad. It's possible Saruman wouldn't have slipped his cog if he hadn't tried to mind-wrestle with the Dark Lord, starting him on his whole "I must rule the world *myself*!" enterprise.
Elrond lost a perfectly good chance to save a LOT of lives by chucking Isildur over the edge.
Thats the point, man. Humans are faulty because of greed, Elves because of compassion and mecy
yeah but that point is a bit lost when the guy playing Elrond LOOKS like he really, really wants to chuck Isildur into the lava. Or at least punch everybody, all the time.
The ship on Alien might have been large, but most of it was just the cargo container for the ore they were transporting. When they originally go down to the planet, they actually detach from it and land in the much smaller ship.
ReplyAlso, any more people and the pay would have to have been split up even more. The two mechanics, (the only ones who did the actual work of keeping the engines and life support systems running) only got half shares and they were acting like this was barely going to keep them from starving until they went out again.
The comment underneath the photograph of the X-Men school makes little to no grammatical sense, and has at least one spelling mistake. I'm confused.
ReplyYeah, the Mordor one is bogus. They have a well staffed fortress in the pass just below Shelob's lair. You know, the one that glows green, and lets loose the Witch King and a massive army that takes up the next hour and a half trying to invade Minas Tirith? The whole point was that Mordor did not expect it could be taken down by two and a half hobbits on foot. A "real threat" would be a massive army on horses, that would have to march through the pass and successfully siege a gated fortress of nightmares before even setting foot in Mordor.
ReplyAs Boromir says in the meme quote, you cant just walk into mordor... "not even with ten thousand men could you do this." Sauron would have agreed. Because horses don't mix well with rock climbing.
Also after Frodo is captured outside Shelob's lair, the orcs take him back to another fortress not far from there (it cant be far, as Sam literally runs all the way there and sneaks in behind them, and let's face it, he can't run that far). This is not the big witch-king fortress (minas morgul), its a different small outpost. There were probably many of these.
Sauron probably definitely had more than enough troops there by any military expectation. Frodo and Sam got by them because of a magic ring of invisibility, sam having his crowning moments of awesome, and most importantly the confusion caused by infighting between different orc factions.
In the book it was pointed out that Sauron could not even imagine some one trying to destroy the ring at all. He (it?) expected the finder to use it to conquer the world. As for Shelob's cave, it was much too narrow to move an army through efficiently, so leaving Shelob to guard it (rather than use potentially valuable troops) made sense. ..
Plus both the fortresses have this nifty little peice of magic (the Watchers) that basically stops anyone the fortresses don't want from getting in (and if they somehow can, immediately sets off an alarm) Sam was only able to get in through two pieces of incredible luck 1. He happened to have taken Frodo's star glass (his gift from Galadriel) which happened to be able to break the watchers barrier. and 2. the orcs happened to see Frodo's mithril mail get greedy and end up slaugthering each other, so Sam didn't have to fight any of them (and also meant the alarm the watchers made both ways was basically wasted.
Actually, Shelob in lord of the rings feasts on just about everything (from crows to orcs to uruk-hai), so it's not as if the guards of Mordor built the stairs, go into Shelob's lair, wave at her, and collect her scraps, they PHYSICALLY cannot go further because it's extremely hard to kill her-and this is coming from a place that manufactures henchmen like China! :/ As a sidenote,I screamed so hard when they showed her in the movie, and I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing that she has children all over freakn Mirkwood forest.
Reply''Semi-omnipotent''?
ReplyI agree on #6. But the rest?
Reply Hide All See All 3 Replies#5, Alien:
Actually, this movie was kindof realistic regarding space travel. They had such a small crew because more crew members means you'll need more air to breathe and food to eat. And, as mentioned, there was no hyperdrive, travel takes weeks, sometimes months (it took Ripley's escape shuttle DECADES to reach earth). So, IF something goes wrong so that you have to wake up the entire crew,you'll doom yourself if you end up with too many mouths to feed. It's not like you can go to Walmart or grow your own stuff up there.
#4, LotR: What do you mean with "unguarded" exept for Shelob!? There was a fortress on either side of the tunnel, one of them being Minas Morgul, the counterpart of Minas Tirith! And the stairs that lead up to the tunnels were so small, precipitous and generally unpassable that an army would never be able to pass it, not to speak of pass it unnoticed. Sam and Frodo were small and had their elven cloaks. And the author can't even pull the excuse that he didn't read the book: Minas Morgul, the watch on the other side and the "stairs" were in the movie as well.
#3, Star Wars. I am sure it has already been said but the answer was in the movie as well: All of the Death Star's defence was designed to fend off grand scale attacks, like the one on the second death star. That were big-ass cruisers being ripped apart there. Something as small as X-Wings were deemed no threat to the death star and they would be right if it wasn't for this one exception, an exception both sides were not aware of until they got the blueprints. Without R2-D2s stolen data from an escaped rag-tag bunch of protagonists, the rebels would have attacked the death star with their entire fleet, as expected, and the death star would have blown it to pieces.
And that's when I stopped reading, I haven't seen the movies of #1&2 anyway.
The human spaceships in the Alien universe do have FTL capabilities. Even if you ignore the expanded universe, if it takes them weeks (or even months) to go around in the movies, then they HAVE to be flying faster than light since the nearest star system is 4.37 light years from earth.
You haven't seen the Dark Knight but you are a Cracked Reader. Blasphemy.
I've seen the Dark Knight but the pictures are from earlier movies, right? Haven't seen those others because superheroes have never been my cup of tea.
#2 - to be fair, thats just once precinct. And for reasons currently unknown, crime seems to drop off sharply within a good couple mile radius of Wayne Manor. So the police nearby are likely poorly funded.
ReplyA half dozen orcs, who immediately say, "Looks like old Shelob's been having a bit of fun." So they know about Shelob, they know about the lair. They go there all the time.
ReplyIf the bad guy's soldiers go there all the time, isn't that called "guarding the place"?
Uh, yes and, uh, NO.
So they know about Shelob, the know about the lair. They never go anywhere near it if they can help it!
They very carefully patrol an area near, but not too near.
Well, in the same way that you guard the grocery store by virtue of going there once a week or two.
To get to Shelob's lair you had to climb a narrow (even for a hobbit) near vertical staircase that went up for 1,000 feet or so and was in view of the Tower they trying to skip past. It was only the fact it was two hobbits with predator-lite elf cloaks scrambling up that thing that they were unnoticed. 5,000 pissed off guys with swords wouldn't have even made it to the turn off where they have to start climbing without every orc between the tower and the border jumping onto their asses because it's had to be stealthy when you bring a damn army with you.
ReplyTo all those defending Jurassic Park, the average zoo staffs more people during a hurricane.
ReplyIf the single point of failure for the security is a power outage, you don't just abandon the island during a hurricane and pray that 30 ton beasts aren't freely roaming when you come back.
They should at least have staffed extra power workers and have security on high alert to quickly fix and contain any problems that occur. Maybe some veterinarians to make sure that your million dollar animals don't die on you either. Any concrete building can withstand a hurricane so it is not like the people would be in immediate danger from the storm.
John Hammond thought the dinosaurs were too expensive, so there were next to know weapons on the island (the movie actually added them).
They had a working back up generator that kicked on automatically as long as the computer system was running. The people manually shut down the system, which screwed things over.
Nedry hacked the system to cause as much chaos as possible so he could get off the island and make himself a s**t ton of money by participating in industrial espionage.
Computer took care of the animals dietary and medicinal needs under the supervision of their full time vet. The staff live on the island, so they can't "call in sick at the same time."
So in short, they had every redundancy available, people were just their normal retarded selves and screwed things up.
Wait... there was a fortress filled with nasty orcy dudes after Shelobs lair. So the back entrance wasn't really left unguarded.
Reply