Eight Giant Movie Plot Holes in Eight Images
There’s nothing wrong with suspending disbelief when it comes to enjoying a movie. It’s an almost necessary part of the process in most instances, but sometimes there can be plot holes that are just a little too wide and deep to avoid entirely.
I’ve made a list showcasing some of the more obvious ones in classic and recent movies alike, and employed a tactic known to hook even people with the shortest of attention spans: pretty pictures! Each plot hole is laid out simplistically in image form, and I am taking special requests in the comments if you think of one that’s worth featuring.
Check out the gallery below:
My favorite new one from Drester:
Though I would say the bigger plothole is they cancel the program because of ONE elaborate manipulation of it after there hadn’t been a single murder in years. I’ll take one f*** up if thousands of other deaths were stopped. That wouldn’t fit in a captioned picture though.
A good addendum to the Toy Story one is the fact that he was in a box in a toy store next to dozens of other Buzz Lightyears for a while. It can’t be said that he doesn’t gain consciousness until he is unboxed, because we see in the next film that the Prospector is conscious and boxed.
Batman begins: The goal was to destroy Gotham with toxin released from water vapor. How did no one flip out when they boiled water at home?
I think the The Signs one should also say “…that sometimes falls from the sky,” before “And we’ll do it naked.” But brevity is the soul of wit, I suppose.
In Star Trek, isn’t future Spock on that planet because he knows past Spock will eject past Kirk there? Makes sense to me.
How about The Happening? Or is that just too easy? I mean outrunning a breeze?
Thank you David, because that’s what I always assumed. It makes perfect sense.
Shawshank. When the warden comes into the cell the morning after the escape, the poster covering the hole is fastened down on all four corners – impossible to do after squeezing into that small hole.
@David
What? No. That Spock comes from a totally different reality. Kirk and Spock would have never had that argument because the Romulan ship wouldn’t have been running amock and they wouldn’t have been sent to deal with it. He’s confused why the new Spock is captain and Kirk isn’t.
@david
No no no no no no no no, and no.
Future Spock was on Delta Vega because Nero put him there to watch Vulcan be destroyed the same way he saw Romulus destroyed. He explicitly says so when explaining his situation to Kirk, and they show Spock watching Vulcan get sucked into itself.
Dave and DocDoom:
“Future Spock” is from a different timeline than “Spock” in this movie. He doesn’t even know Kirk isn’t captain of the ship. That said, “Future Spock” is on that planet because it was nearby and Nero put him there to watch Vulcan disappear. Kirk was on there because it was nearby after Spock launched him off the ship due partially to stress from Vulcan disappearing. Not exactly (or at least entirely) random. I never had a problem with this particular plot point.
Now, that Toy Story one is a bit harder to ignore.
Also, I’ve personally had to force myself to ignore the part of Empire Strikes Back where it implies that Luke was fully trained to be a Jedi in no more than a couple of days.
@ david and =DocDoom1=
Spock Prime didn’t know Spock would be there because he entered the black hole the same time as Nero and, as a result, was separated from the universe he knew and entered the alternate universe that was affected by Nero. Therefore, as they state in the movie, the new past for Spock Prime is completely unknown to him.
See what you’ve started david? lol
@Paul
Actually, Spock would know where his past self would be. But this doesn’t matter, as it is clearly stated in the montage that he is deliberately marooned on the planet to allow him to watch Vulcan die.
So neither Kirk nor Spock have any way of altering where they would be.
Oh. Well ok then.
@RBourn
He wouldn’t know because he entered the black hole as Nero did, therefore his past and memory would not be changed. Also, as another theory, you can’t change the past and the people from that past, you can only create alternate universes. A new one was created when Nero slipped through the black hole and destroyed the USS Kelvin. So the other “original” universe would still be there, there is just also another version of it.
Edit: Addition
Spock would still be from that “original” universe, he’s just now existing in an alternate one. The “original” is void of Spock and the alternate has two spocks.
Back to the pictures!
Another one for Back to the Future. Marty wakes his dad up with Van Halen and claims to be Darth Vader. Wouldn’t Marty’s dad be terrified of the Star Wars series and Van Halen when it is actually created?
Minority Report:
Precogs predict the future
Nothing they predicted ever happens
The Blind Side- Testing in the nth% of protective instincts like the movie, hate that line
Nero put Spock on Delta Vega so he would see the destruction of Vulcan. This implies it is the nearest planet to Vulcan and therefore, the most logical (see what I did there) place for Captain Spock to leave Kirk as he approaches Vulcan.
It is, however, ridiculous that Kirk happens to land at the exact spot on the planet where Spock Prime is.
Drester, that’s an issue that the movie itself explicitly raises and questions.
re: signs
how do you think they know that water would kill them?
The really ridiculous part of the Star Trek bit is that Scotty is also there. Scotty was exiled to the same planet that Orig Spock was sent to watch Vulcan die which was also the nearest planet to maroon Kirk (itself a weird action to take – what happened to the Brig?) – and they were all within a few hundred yards of each other.
I enjoyed the movie, but still find this part a little bit hard to swallow.
What about when Cyclops has to enter Cerebro to save Jean, but the only way in is to pass a retinal scan. MOOVY ROONED!!!!!
Confused on the Minority Report one. What did they see that didn’t happen?
*SPOILER*
Their prediction on Tom Cruise was bang on. He didn’t have a minority report and he killed that guy in exactly the way they predicted, even in spite of knowing what they’d seen.
*END OF SPOILER*
Citizen Kane:
Kane utters the word “rosebud” with his dying breath.
The entire movie revolves around that word. The narrative follows a reporter trying to find out what the word meant.
The problem: No one was in the room when he said it. No one heard it.
Well shucks.
This is either going to sound ignorant or blasphemous, but there are a ton of hang ups in the Lord of the Rings and the forging of the rings and their relationships to each other. If it’s one ring to rule them all, then why is Sauron so eager to recapture them in the second age? I know the Elf and Dwarf rings didn’t quite work as planned, but then why does he need them back so bad?
And more importantly, why haven’t the Ring Wraiths caught either Gollum or Bilbo when they wore the ring? Disclaimer: haven’t read The Hobbit, but it’s clear by the time we meet them in LOTR they’ve been pretty corrupted by the ring’s power indicating they’ve worn it on multiple occasions if not more, but when Frodo throws it on for the first time, the Wraiths are on Frodo’s ass instantly…
@fatpie42
They predict that someone is murdered in the future. This however never happens because the suspected murderer get’s arrested before the murder can be committed.
It’s kind of a paradox. If the Precogs really saw the future then they should have seen the arrest and not the murder. But if they only saw the arrest they wouldn’t have seen the murder and wouldn’t have sent the arrest team. This however would cause the murder to exist and them sending the arrest team. But is they saw the future they would only see the arrest and not the murder….
My head is starting to spin, just enjoy the movie
@fatpie42
It’s called the Predestination Paradox and the example in your spoilers is exactly what it means.
The back to the future one isnt that big of a deal. Marty looks like his dad. His mom likes his at the end. It just shows that she has a type in the guys she likes thats all.
Actually the short story was much…MUCH better (Shocking I know, a PK Dick book ruined by movie studios).
Spoiler I guess…
In the book, the precogs, the three of them, for the first time disagree and predict that the Tom Cruise character will both kill him, and not kill him (the minority report). Just like the book, its a random dude, that the police agent doesn’t know. No one knows what to do because up to that point, the precogs have never disagreed. So now the police guy is dealing with potentially getting kicked off the planet and the massive guilt for all the people he put away (wondering if there were other minority reports that came up before). So sort of like the movie so far…
BIG BOOK SPOILER
Turns out that the precogs all predict the future at different times which no one had known prior to this. Usually they predict the same exact future because even with the sampling time difference, there was to large variables. So naturally everyone thought the precogs were witnessing the same exact thing. Because the cop is the head of precog police, this results in a problem. First report says he kills the random dude. Second (minority report) says he doesn’t and its the result of him being told he is predicted to kill someone, the third one says he does which is sampled from a time frame even later. If he doesn’t murder this innocent guy as predicted, society collapses because everything is based on this system of precognition. Recognizing this, the cop ends up murdering a completely innocent person to prevent total social implosion. It ends up being a dark tale about the nature of social control, the concept of reality and perception, the question of free will, and its an awesome mind bender. The greater good literally required a brutal killing, and then when you think about, you still are left wondering if the precogs are actually predicting the future independently or they are causing the future because the remaining question is still why did the first precog predict this murder to begin with.
The movie is not even close to the book.
in defense of jurassic park;
there was no weekend security because the park wasn’t up and running at that time. it was still in the testing phase so no security would be necessary becuase no public visitors were there. the only people on the island were dino handlers and scientists and computer programmers. none of which would be a perceived threat.
So glad to see the Signs one in here.
That shit frustrated me no end.
Even mild humidity would be harmful to them.
I don’t know, would someone even be able to retain the memory of someone that wasn’t supposed to be in that particular period in time?
go to number 4, for explanation of spock.
I’ll choose to believe toys in the Toy Story universe are instinctually wired to freeze when in the presence of people. Like a fainting goat when hearing a loud noise, it’s just something that happens.
@andrew
Have you seen Citizen Kane? His butler was there and explicitly recounts the moment when he gets interviewed.
What about that one porno where the chick orders a pizza but doesn’t have any cash? If she knows she doesn’t have any cash, why did she order the pizza? And why does the guy always jizz on the pizza?
Have you seen Citizen Kane? His butler was there and explicitly recounts the moment when he gets interviewed.
Watch it again. He’s in the room alone. No one is there when he says it. The next person to enter the room is the nurse. The butler is clearly not there when Kane dies.
If she knows she doesn’t have any cash, why did she order the pizza? And why does the guy always jizz on the pizza?
Ha! Nice.
I loved Wall-E, but… B-N-L designed and built their starliners for a five year mission… yet 700 years later they’re still happily plugging along, an army of robots feeding and nurturing generations of mindless occupants using some kind of wonderful, limitless power source.
Yet this same society, with the same technology, was so completely wasteful as to destroy the entire planet, to the point of having to evacuate.
Very confused about that.
Also, what happened to the people who couldn’t afford a trip on the Axiom and her sister ships?
The Limitless thing isn’t a plot hole, unless I’m missing something. Eddie needs money fast, can’t raise it himself or get it through legitimate avenues with any speed, so he turns to Gennady, figuring he’d be able to pay him off quickly and be done with it. He has no previous experience with loan sharks (experience being an important component of his sudden encompassing knowledge, as the movie establishes thoroughly), and the character’s definitely a bit naive, so he doesn’t realize how insidious Gennady will end up being, so using him seems like a reasonable risk for the payoff he knows he can achieve. No plot hole with that.
How about this? Apollo 18 doesn’t make it back…luckily, all the film cameras did.
I anticipated the outcome but it still sucked (moon) rocks. And don’t talk to me about TV images from the moon. Did you notice all the camera angles? Multiple cameras. Good low budget movie if you can forget he killer flaw.
The Back to the Future plothole isn’t. Once Marty goes back in time, he creates a tangential timeline. Therefore the Lorraine at the end of the film might think he looks oddly like Calvin Klein from high school if she thinks about it, but the Lorraine at the beginning of the film (and Marty’s actual Mom who had raised him until he time traveled) had never met Calvin Klein. She and Calvin are from different timelines. End-of-movie Lorraine still might not notice just because of how she perceives her son. Marty probably won’t look or sound like Calvin Klein until he hits his teens and by then his mother might not make the association.
Jurassic Park doesn’t have security guards, etc. because the park isn’t fully staffed or operational yet.
In Star Trek the huge plothole is that he runs into Spock on the ice planet at all. Seriously its a planet or moon or whatever. You’re telling me that two guys that get stranded at random locations on the same planet will be within a few minutes walking distance of each other?
Plothole number two is that the ice planet survives the destruction of Vulcan without major repercussions. Seriously, you can see Vulcan from there with the naked eye. It’s practically in Vulcan’s back yard astronomically. Like a lunar orbit away. If Vulcan is destroyed, that planet will probably have it’s own related apocalypse in short order. Spock would realize this and probably stop to yank all the federation citizens off the planet instead of marooning Kirk on it.
Inception:
As the team enters Fischer’s first dream level and is attacked, Eames (the Austrailian(?) guy), says “dont be afriad to dream big” as he whips out a grenade launcher. This is considered ok since 1) Fischer’s mind is already on high alert and 2) he’s drugged and can’t wake up anyway. Despite this MASSIVE plot device, it is never used again in the movie.
Also kinda bugging me,
Shutter Island:
How did Andrew get on the damn Ferry in the first place??
junker23, But Woody and the other gang was moving around and acting about in front of that naughty boy! Conspiracy!!
The Back to the future one, would you really remember what someone that you knew for a week when you were 17 looked like 30 years later? I had a crush on a guy at summer camp 12 years ago and I don’t remember what he looked like.
The Toy Story one makes sense to me. Buzz believed he was on an alien planet whose locals followed strange customs. The first time one of them said, “Andy’s Coming!” and they all froze, he would naturally go along with it. In addition, I’d assume all toys have, if not a reflexive response, at least an instinct not to reveal their true nature to humans. Only extreme conditions and desperation led them to reveal themselves to Sid.
As for the Precogs, it seems that what they’re detecting is not so much the cosmological event of a murder, but the momentary psychic tension experienced by a person about to commit murder/be murdered. That still occurs, even if the Police are able to stop them from going through with it. That’s also why they can tell an act of passion from something premeditated. After all, you automatically preconceive an action you’re about to take. For instance, the guy at the beginning who’s about to stab his wife and her lover with scissors: he can already “see” the scissors going in, even if he’s prevented from doing it, so that’s what the precogs see as well. This is also, as it is revealed, the flaw in basing law enforcement on people’s intentions, as demonstrated by SPOILERS Max Von Sydow turning the gun on himself at the last moment, even though the precogs sensed that he intended to kill Tom Cruise. That’s also why they dismantle the program at the end, despite its success: you can’t punish people for what they might do, no matter how tempting that notion is (i.e. racial profiling, pinning a crime on someone because “they have a history,” bringing up an alleged rape victim’s prior promiscuity as evidence against their testimony, etc.). That’s the crux of Minority Report’s social commentary, not a plot hole at all.
I thought the toy story one is simple, Buzz Lightyear believes he’s crashed onto a different planet. With his “spaceship” broken and his “laser” not functioning, he does the logical thing when you see a huge alien walking around, which is “play dead” and be undetected.
How about in Avatar letting an expensive prototype go on a planet with no tracking device? They actually look for him visually from a helicopter.
If the matrix is a wholly virtual environment how come they can only contact tank via a virtual hardwire telephone surely you’d hack something easier
Re: Jurassic Park
Wasn’t there a major storm which forced an evacuation from the island, and presumably the few guards that were around were already boarding the last ships out of the place?
The thing with Signs is that it’s War of The Worlds, basically. It’s just done in a stupid way, but if you just think of it as War of The Worlds then it’s not such a stupid film.
…star trek
Okay I’m not sure but I believe in the star trek universe there is a baisc rule that things happen for a reason and certen things in time are fixed and will happen no matter what, I mean the whole crew is there how did that happen?
@Jeff the Baptist
I don’t think the alternate universe theory works here. Otherwise Marty’s photo would go unchanged as his reality would still exist. It appears it is presented as if the past events do alter his future and not an alternative one. Otherwise when they go back to the future the events would be unchanged and the whole movie would not make sense. So by going back and meeting his mother he is inputting himself into her past directly. Same thing goes with the sport almanac.
How can Princess Leia be rich? Her whole planet just blew up!
Okay.. here’s one from a movie that is just one GIANT plot hole.. the HORRIBLE 1998 remake of Godzilla. Godzilla changes size THROUGHOUT the film. At one point, Godzilla is big enough to put a 20 story sized hole in the Met Life building.. yet SOMEHOW can enter Madison Square Garden without making any sort of exterior hole anywhere AND lay eggs inside a team locker room there.
According to the writer and director of Signs, the “aliens” are really demons. See . The movie becomes much clearer when you see the water that harms the demons is not just water, but holy water. The end of the movie mentions a method has been devised to defeat the “aliens” by people in the Middle East.
The link for the above is http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/wrestling-twister-an.php
I wondered about the toy Story one as well but it is possible Buzz just wants to follow their custom. Someone mentioned wall-E, it seems that although they told people publicly it would be a 5 year mission, they had planned all along for the possibility of an indefinite one, hence why Auto has the override code. Here’s one, in Indiana ones 4 I could assume that the fridge is lead coated and reinforced but the moment he steps out he should get massive radiation poisoning, I mean we even see the mushroom cloud in the background.
that first back to the future one wasn’t that bad……but what about this one…….and this ALWAYS bothered me, does anyone remember in Back To The Future Part II how the plot in general was retarded. the plot was for doc brown to come get marty to save his kids from danger in the future. This is SO STUPID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Even if they do save them, it’s pointless because the future has NO EFFECT on the present. All Doc Brown had to do was alert Marty of what his future kids would encounter, so that Marty could prevent it in the present when the time came. But not only did he jeopardize Marty and the girl getting married and having kids, but the ENTIRE movie was pointless because they did all of that work to save Marty’s kids and it wouldn’t have any effect on the present.