5 Sequels That Introduce Huge Plotholes To The Originals

5 Rogue One Turns Leia's First Meeting With Darth Vader Into An Awkward Comedy Scene

Rogue One (or Star Wars: Episode III.V) is basically a feature-length attempt to explain why the Death Star was so easy to blow up now that "a Wookie slave got the shits" is no longer the canon explanation. While the film manages to provide a solid enough reason for why an entire moon-sized space station could be brought down by two tiny-ass rockets, it inadvertently turns the beginning of the first Star Wars into a comedy.

See, Rogue One concludes with a massive battle over the planet Scarif, as the Rebels attempt to steal the Death Star plans in order to blow that shit up in another movie. They succeed, and the plans are transferred to Princess Leia's ship using ancient space WiFi.

Polar Express Leia and her blockade runner manage to escape the chaos and jump into hyperspace right before Darth Vader murders the hell out of every living thing. It's an undeniably nerdgasmic ending, but ... let's back up a second here. So this new movie retroactively says Leia was physically present at the battle where the Death Star plans were stolen. So was Darth Vader. He saw Leia's exact ship escape with his own (presumably frowny) eyes.

And yet when Vader catches up and boards her ship at the beginning of Star Wars, Leia tries to pretend that she's on a "diplomatic mission." Again, Vader literally just watched her fly here from a fucking space battle. That's like taking a dump in the middle of a police station, then slowly walking backward out the front door without ever breaking eye contact with the chief of police. Leia may look ridiculous trying to pull that off, but Vader arguably looks even sillier for getting all flustered and even bothering to argue with her sad excuse of an excuse. It's almost like a deleted scene from Spaceballs.

At that point, Leia should have just claimed a womp rat ate the plans, or that she flushed them down the toilet. Anything is better than "Oh no, you must be looking for some other princess who recently came from that off-limits planet where a major theft occurred."

4 According To The Winter Soldier, Tony Stark Is A Godawful Hacker

Being impossibly good with technology is Tony Stark's whole superpower. In The Avengers, for instance, he manages to plant a hacking device into the database of a goddamn superspy agency, S.H.I.E.L.D., allowing his AI butler J.A.R.V.I.S. to learn "everything" about the secretive organization. How did Nick Fury lose his eye? What shampoo does Thor use? Does Bruce Banner's penis grow along with the rest of his body? Tony now knows the answers to all these questions.

This is how Tony learns of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s plan to weaponize a powerful alien artifact ... while somehow missing an even bigger threat. In Captain America's second solo outing, The Winter Soldier, we learn that S.H.I.E.L.D. has been eaten from the inside by a bunch of neo-Nazis named HYDRA. Think if the CIA was secretly run by the staff of Breitbart. The HYDRA infiltration isn't a recent development, either; they've been pulling the levers for 70 freaking years, intentionally creating wars and world chaos like terrible Civilization players.

So, uh, how did Stark and J.A.R.V.I.S. miss something like that? They dug deep enough to discover that S.H.I.E.L.D. was already into building superweapons, but somehow they missed the gigantic helicarriers intended to kill millions of people? You know, the ones that are almost entirely finished just a few months later? Come on, the only thing that could grab Tony Stark's attention faster than "flying airplane carriers that can also murder anyone on Earth" would be some Aunt May nudes. Which are probably there too.

And even if there wasn't a secret Nazi forum where HYDRA employees could complain about Jewish co-workers and share 4chan memes, surely there were some files that would raise suspicion. After all, the Winter Soldier has been assassinating people on behalf of HYDRA for decades -- including Tony's parents. The only reasonable explanation is that J.A.R.V.I.S. is himself a Nazi and was hoping HYDRA's special helicarrier project would eliminate the Avengers before he was found out. There's no way the next movie doesn't end with the Vision murdering everyone and saying "Hail HYDRA."

3 The Machines From The Matrix Turned Out To Be Dumb As Hell

About 80 percent of you have probably seen The Matrix Reloaded, but only five can recall what happened in it (that's five people, not percent). So let's recap: In the first movie, we met the Oracle, a cookie-loving old lady who can see the future. She's the one who tells our heroes about the prophecy of "The One" -- he who will defeat humanity's machine overlords and free all those people trapped inside a next-gen Oculus Rift.

Thanks to key pieces of information given by the Oracle to different characters, Neo (Keanu Reeves) realizes his potential as the One and becomes incredibly powerful. The final shot of the first movie has him shooting off into the sky to fingerblast the machines into submission. The power was within him all along; he just needed to believe!

By the second movie, however, we learn that the Oracle is in truth a machine herself. She tells Neo that all his questions about himself and what he's supposed to do can be answered by "The Architect" at "The Source." After dealing with some stupid bullshit designed to make the movie last more than 20 minutes, Neo finally reaches the Architect and finds out that ... everything he's been told is a lie. Wait, again?

The entire concept of "The One" is just a tall tale. It was invented by the machines so the human resistance would seek out the randomly generated human with the ability to reboot the Matrix by entering the Source. Like your work computer that still runs on Windows XP, the Matrix needs to be periodically rebooted before it crashes and kills everyone. So the entire story so far has been a scam designed to lead Neo into the Source and serve his purpose as a global "restart" button.

But, as with every time a movie does a "THE VILLAIN PLANNED IT ALL ALONG!" plot twist, this doesn't make any sense. If the machines' one and only goal was to get Neo to the Source, why help him gain ass-kicking superpowers? He had the potential all along, but they gave him the motivation to turn him into a cross between Superman, Professor X, and Bruce Lee. Here's a better idea: Just shove his pre-hero ass into the Source, reboot, and spare us the 129 minutes of hamfisted Jesus imagery and sweaty cave orgies.

2 Karate Kid 2 Turns Mr. Miyagi Into A Bullshit Artist

Mr. Miyagi from Karate Kid is the second-most-beloved short, wise, broken-English-speaking fighting master to come out of the '80s, which is saying a lot. Thanks to Karate Kid 2, however, he's probably also a pathetic con man.

The first Karate Kid strongly implies that Miyagi was born to Japanese parents in America. We're told he attended UCLA, was forced into an internment camp during World War II, and then fought in the 442nd Division -- a unit almost entirely made out of Japanese-American soldiers. Miyagi in particular crane-kicked so many Nazis that he was awarded a Medal of Honor.

In the second film, however, the entire plot revolves around a completely different backstory: It turns out Miyagi is actually a native-born Japanese man who was forced to leave when he let his boner do the talking instead of his fists. He had upset his hometown by proposing marriage to an already-betrothed girl, and had to flee to America.

Except no Japanese people were allowed to immigrate to the United States after 1924. Even if Miyagi left in 1923, he would have to be incredibly young to be allowed to fight in World War II 20 years later. If he proposed when he was 18, that means he would have attended UCLA and joined the army when he was almost in his 40s, making him roughly a million years old in the 1980s. (Pat Morita was 52 on the first Karate Kid, incidentally.) So either the government made an exception, Miyagi proposed and ran away as a toddler ... or he's a big fat liar.

Miyagi doesn't speak very highly of his Medal of Honor, but that's probably because he bought the thing at a pawn shop. (How many of the 464 WWII recipients do you think ended up as anonymous maintenance workers?) He likely never fought in the army, and never stepped inside UCLA, except perhaps as a janitor. He must have come to America after the war and simply decided to lie about his past to avoid the whole "violent, widespread racism against Japanese people" thing. Then he kept going, ultimately even coming up with the perfect con: tricking young, bullied kids into waxing cars for him.

1 Harry Potter's Parents Died Because Of A Dumb Oversight

The Harry Potter books and movies are full of silly, fantastic plot devices, but we expect some consistency in our silly, fantastic plot devices, dammit.

Case in point: There's a special type of spell in the Potter-verse whereby a location can be hidden forever as long as the secret of its existence is kept by a designated "Secret Keeper." While hiding from the murderous Voldemort, Harry Potter's parents made their old pal Peter Pettigrew their Secret Keeper. Unfortunately, Pettigrew betrayed the Potters and shared their whereabouts with Voldemort, before shapeshifting into a rat and spending more than a decade hiding inside a young boy's pants. If you've never read/watched Harry Potter, we want to stress that no part of the last sentence is a joke.

Anyway, Voldemort uses the information to find and kill the Potters in front of their surprisingly resilient baby, thus kicking off this entire franchise. But here's the thing: It turns out that the Potters didn't have to take the risk of entrusting someone else (voyeuristic rats or otherwise) with their secret. In Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, as the characters are hiding from Wizard Hitler's second coming, we learn that some of them are Secret Keepers for their own hideouts. Specifically, Arthur and Bill Weasley are:

So not only can you totally make someone living in your own house the Secret Keeper, but it can be yourself. If this is allowed under the magical laws of this universe, why didn't the Potters just make themselves their own Secret Keepers? Hell, they could make each the other's Secret Keeper for double protection. Why put their lives in the hands of a man who looks like he absolutely owns a troll-themed sex dungeon?

Note that they could still inform friends of their location (if only so they could bring over toiletries), but those friends would be magically forbidden from mouthing off to anyone else. It's such an incredibly ridiculous oversight that it threatens to bring down the entire series. Literally nothing in the series would have happened if the Potters had just read the fine print on the Secret Keeper spell book they'd purchased on Magic Amazon.

Jordan Breeding also writes officially for Paste Magazine, unofficially on Twitter and his blog, and with a dirty, dirty spray can in various back alleys.

For more follow-up films that messed with the first, check out 5 Sequels That Ruined The Original Movie's Point and 5 Little-Known Sequels That Ruined Iconic Stories.

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