Huge plot holes in movies

He paid people off? I mean he was kind of crazy and loaded but didn't care about money. Plus he had all of the mental patients.

 

That's basically what I say to people when they say the destruction of the World Trade Center towers was a "Controlled Demolition"

 

He had both mental patients and mental patience.... Loading all that stuff in would have taken a long, long time. But I'm glad that didn't make the final cut

 

Regarding movie plots, please note Homer & Jethro's definition of a net:

Many holes tied together with string.

 

You don't need to use your DeLorean time machine to solve problems that haven't even happened yet. (But the hoverboards were cool.)

 

Right, all of Back to the Future II is a plot hole!

 

SPOILER ALERT

In Gone Girl, Amy's "plan". A lot of it, in particular, her plan regarding Desi's cameras, there seems to be too many holes. Like wouldn't there be footage capturing them come in?

 

Despite being one of my favorite Star Trek movies, The Voyage Home has Kirk and company parking that huge cloaked Klingon Bird of Prey in the middle of Golden Gate Park and leaving it there trusting that not a single pedestrian is going to walk or jog into it.

 

Gremlins. Don't feed them after midnight. It's always after midnight. At 11:59 PM, it's after midnight.

 

So you probably can't feed them a lot because of the different time zones.

 

To be fair, so is the first one. If Marty prevents his parents from meeting and falling in love in 1955, he won't be born. If he isn't born, he won't travel back in time to prevent his parents from meeting. If he doesn't prevent his parents from meeting and falling in love, he will be born to travel back in time to prevent his parents from meeting and falling love. And so on and so forth. Plot holes are inherent in time travel stories.

 

Spielberg's A.I. was just one plot hole after another. I think you could make a great comedy about the plotting/screenwriting sessions.

 

Daphne is rich.

 

Technically speaking, the original "King Kong" has a major chunk left un-explained: how the big fellow gets transported to N.Y. We dissolve from Denham on the island :"We're rich, boys...." to opening night at the theater.
Of course, given the excitement of the film, no one is too bothered with this. One can imagine the ol' "Venture" sailing low in the water with the gigantic simian on-board, but that's only if you stop to think about it
C.

 

An old pal of mine was the editor on <a major TV show>, and he made the mistake of arguing with the executive producer/writer about a plot detail: the climax hinged on somebody tossing a match and blowing up a diesel truck, because fuel was leaking out from the bottom of the truck. My friend the editor insisted that a match would not cause an explosion like that, and in fact diesel fuel requires higher temperatures for igniting. He was right... but they did not ask him back once that season was done. So there are times when the producers don't want to know about the plot holes in their shows.

Here's how I would do it: "But Denham! How are we gonna take the big ape to New York?" "You leave that to me, Charlie." Cut to... a shot of him sneaking through the jungle up to a sleeping Kong, and the camera dollies up to a giant hypodermic needle he's holding, labeled "Ape Tranquilizer," with about 5 gallons of fluid in the container. Denham moves out of frame, we hear a distant roar... fade to black. Next shot... Madison Square Garden.

 

I'll tell you why else the Gremlins one is a big plot hole; the concept of 12:00 is a human invention. You mean to tell me that these creatures biologically know when the clock says 12:00?

 

The never get them wet rule doesn't work either. Moisture is virtually everywhere.

 

Trust fund hippies.

 

Think of it as midnight in a supernatural, witching hour kind of sense.

 

It would be one heck of a boring movie if that plot hole wasn't there! How did Bruce Wayne build all these things in his bat cave? How did the Joker prepare his pencil-trick?

 

Back To The Future part 2. Biff goes back to 1955 and gives the sports book to his younger self, then returns to the same time period he came from.

1. How did Biff know how to use the Delorean to go back in time?
2. Doc Brown informs Marty once they arrive at an alternative 1985 that if they go back into the future, it would not be the same future they had just came from. Biff on the other hand manages to do it with no problem. In theory, Biff would not have gone back to the same future he came from, and yet he still does.

In addition, why did Marty need to go to the future to help his unborn son? Couldn't Doc Brown just tell Marty what was going to happen so he could change it naturally through the course of time? It would have saved even more trouble just to tell Marty about the car crash to begin with since Marty was going to change that anyway.

I have seen those films too many times.

 

That's true, but I'm sure it's frequently done. One of my favorite films.

 

See also:
Grandfather paradox - Wikipedia
[There's a whole bunch of articles about time-travel paradox problems on Wikipedia, and it's a fascinating area on which you can waste far too much time researching.]

Writer/producer Bob Gale has talked about working out all the time travel paradox problems with the Back to the Future movies, and if anything, I think all three stories are very clever and interesting. If you can buy into the idea that there's a little "fudge factor" in terms of how quickly the events of the future become altered, then the "George McFly must fall in love with Lorraine" condition must eventually happen within a certain number of days in 1955 or else Marty will cease to exist. What would not happen is what was shown graphically in the film: the photograph of Marty's family where his brother and sister start fading away. That's a hole.

There are some bigger plot holes in the film, including some I didn't know of: for example, a bullet-proof vest (even kevlar) will not stop high-powered bullets from an automatic weapon at a relatively close range. And there's always a chance the Libyan terrorists would shoot Doc Brown in a body area not covered by the vest (like his head). So again, some dramatic fudge factor.

I think given how very complex the story is, they actually did a pretty good job at sewing up as many of the plot holes as possible, even to the extent of the characters discussing the potential of time-travel paradoxes in Back to the Future II. Gale has said he wrote himself into a huge corner by having Marty's girlfriend in the Delorean at the end of the film when they went forward to 2015, and the only way he could solve it was by having her knocked out about 90% of the time. The whole plot element with "old Biff" and "middle-aged Biff" is also pretty messy, but it makes just enough sense to work for the film (at least to me).

There are bigger plot holes in other sci-fi films. One I always wanted to know is, if Darth Vader had the force, why didn't he immediately realize in the first 10 minutes that Princess Leia was his daughter and that she also had the force? Well, the real answer is that George Lucas hadn't thought of that until a year later, roughly in 1978, when the screenplay for Empire was finished. But it's a major hole. (I was too chicken**** to ask Lucas stuff like this when I worked at ILM.)

 

What's really amazing about the Leia as Vader's daughter angle is that it all came about due to one very brief throw away exchange between Obi-Wan and Yoda in Empire.
Obi-Wan: "That boy is our last hope."
Yoda: "No, there is another."
That exchange was intended to add some tension to the film, the reasoning being that if the audience believed that there was another "hope," it might lead them to believe that Luke could die. My understanding is that Lucas had intended to extend the series to between 9 and 12 episodes and planned to reveal the other "hope" at some point later on. That other may have been his sister but not Leia. When Lucas decided to wrap up the trilogy after Jedi, he had to account for that very brief exchange. Hence, the Leia is Vader's daughter angle. I've argued that the other should have been Anakin himself. Anakin redeems himself by coming back to the light and destroying the Emperor. It would have made perfect sense, in my opinion.

 

Plot holes can affect the greatest movies. The 'letters of transit' in Casablanca come to mind.