Sam Hurley
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Michael Garowee
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Quinn Knobbe
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Ed Stevens
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Saikat Bhowmik
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Jordan Breeding
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Michael Battaglino
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Certain groups, whose names we shall not mention (*cough*), have made careers out of pointing out the ridiculous shit pulled by Hollywood screenwriters who don't want to put in the time or effort to produce a credible scene. But once again, and to the surprise of absolutely no one, it turns out that we might be the assholes here. Some of the most butt-stupid scenes in movie history make a whole lot of sense if you simply look at them a bit closer. For example ...
In the climactic scene of 1978's Superman, Supes is far too busy saving the entire West Coast from a nuclear missile attack to notice the ground swallowing up Lois Lane's candy red Ford Custom. What follows is one of the most lambasted movie scenes in superhero history.
After briefly grieving over the dead yet remarkably unsquished Lois, Superman blasts off into the atmosphere and does laps around the world until he reverses the planet's rotation. Rather than causing every last living human to take simultaneous pratfalls, this somehow manages to rewind time itself. And if you can watch that scene without making a wanking gesture so hard it sprains your wrist, you should be rewarded for your fortitude.
But Actually ...
Superman didn't reverse time by causing the world to spin backward, but by flying faster than light -- a power he's canonically had ever since he was a wee Superboy, when he sent Ma and Pa Kent back in time to do some 18th-century swashbuckling.
DC Comics
And swinging ...
Audiences have been misinterpreting the scene. The Earth spinning backward isn't the cause of time moving in reverse; it's just another effect, like the falling rocks flying back upward and the crumbling dam sucking its water back in.
Now, is it still dumb that Superman can basically yank a brand-new superpower out of his super-shorts whenever the plot demands it? Well, you can take that up with nearly a century's worth of comic book writers, not us.
The Last Samurai has to be one of the most oblivious pieces of cultural insensitivity Hollywood ever produced. If assigning the role of the titular last samurai to a diminutive Scientologist was somehow making a statement, we're fairly certain we don't want to hear what exactly the filmmakers were stating.
But Actually ...
Whoever said Tom Cruise was the last samurai? It may have been his rugged visage next to the title on the movie posters ...
Warner Bros. Pictures
... but the true last samurai (plural) were the group of warriors with whom his character trained and fought. He may have learned from them and even taught them a thing or two about Americans (read: guns), but he could never truly hope to be one of them, if only because of the height requirement.
The last samurai (singular) was the final survivor of that group, Katsumoto. Based upon Saigo Takamori, who is considered to be the bona fide last samurai, Katsumoto meets his end the same way his real-world counterpart did: by following the samurai code and committing ritual seppuku. Unlike his real-world counterpart, he does so with assistance from Cruise's character -- who, in true American fashion, completely fucks it all up.
Warner Bros. Pictures
To be clear, Cruise's real role here would have been to behead Katsumoto to end his suffering.
The ending narration even makes a point of explicitly differentiating between the two -- the "American captain" who lives to fade into obscurity, and the samurai, whose days had come to an end. Really, the film is another victim of our tendency to associate the lead character with the title. Like how Die Hard is the harrowing tale of Mr. Jonathan Diehard.
Indy and friends' arrive at Pankot Palace in India, where they're invited to come slurp on a variety of dishes, each more horrifying than the last. Like live snakes which slither out of another, bigger snake ...
Lucasfilm
... chilled monkey brains served straight from the cranium ...
Lucasfilm
... and soup that wishes it only had flies in it:
Lucasfilm
"Can I get a bowl that doesn't have pinkeye?"
Obviously, this is all nothing more than a throwaway bit of gross-out humor. Let's all laugh at the backwards savages, with their brown skin and repulsive eating habits! And how 'bout them funny hats, huh? Huh?
But Actually ...
The whole scene was a stomach-turning hint that something was amiss in Pankot Palace. See, the people putting on this feast were purportedly Hindus. And as Indy remarks to Captain Blumburtt in the original script, "Even if they were trying to scare us away, a devout Hindu would never touch meat. Makes you wonder what these people are ..."
As we find out a few minutes later, that's because they are in truth members of the heart-yanking Thuggee cult. Of course, we could've known that right away, if only we'd been paying attention to how the vegetarian palace's inhabitants retained fucking Clive Barker as their personal chef.
Listen, Star Wars is great, but continuity has never been its strong suit. Take this scene, for instance.
One minute, Princess Leia is speaking to Grand Moff Tarkin as if the two are about to have tea, the next she's berating Chewie in an accent best described as "cabbie."
But Actually ...
By her own admission, Carrie Fisher was approximately 78 percent cocaine while filming Star Wars. But Claudia Grey, author of Star Wars: Bloodline, has an official canonical explanation for the linguistic slip-up: Leia was merely being her usual, wisecracking self: "[Leia is] actually making fun of Tarkin. She's mocking his accent in that moment."
That's believable, considering the very first words out of her mouth are informing Tarkin that he smells like the polite equivalent of a Taco Bell dumpster.
Quick refresher for those of you who have rage-repressed the memory: At the climax of Independence Day, Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith fly into an invading alien mother ship, where Goldblum whips out his trusty MacBook (circa 1996) and hacks the script into letting the good guys win. Of course, as everybody knows, Apple and the aliens' operating systems would not be compatible.
20th Century Fox
Apple is barely compatible with itself.
But Actually ...
According to the film, humanity has had an alien fighter collecting dust in Area 51 since 1947. That's plenty of time for the world's brightest minds to reverse-engineer some alien tech. In fact, since the discovery of the ship predates modern computers, our own technology might even be derived from the ship's system. So connecting a MacBook to the ship isn't so far-fetched, seeing as how we had decades to design an interface, and it might have even been developed from the same starting point in the first place. If we're calling bullshit on anything, it should be that the aliens made it to Earth at all, since they're essentially using Apple Maps.
Saikat Bhowmik is a kid who has grown a beard to look like a grown-up. You can follow him at Twitter, and visit his channels Amuzic and Amuzic II. Quinn "Yes, It's Pronounced 'Kenobi'" Knobbe is a child who never grew up. For more of his idiotic musings, follow his Facebook here. Mike Garowee works a dairy farm in New Hampshire. Jordan Breeding has a blog, a Twitter, and is the world's premier Gerard Butler apologist.
All dogs look great in a Superman costume, it's scientifically proven! Not to mention Batman and Wonder Woman.
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