We all tried to come up with the most memorable plot holes in movies that aren’t science fiction or horror nerdfests and failed miserably, appropriately after jawing about Unknown for 47 minutes (the obvious conclusion being that nerds love plot holes in their movie fare). To wit:
Dingus:
3. Return of the King - Why didn’t Gandalf just have his pet Eagles just air-drop the Ring down into Mount Doom 3 movies earlier?
Raiders of the Lost Ark - How’d Indy survive the sub ride to the island via presumably submerged conning tower?
District 9 - How do the aliens still have exactly enough of the precious fluid accumulated over 20 years to power their ship home even after Wikus sprays a bunch in his face (and why did the supposedly smartest alien in charge of monitoring its safety have his dumb friend stash something so valuable in a single poorly concealed lunch-box)?
Tom:
Die Hard - Why does Reggie the cop react to rooftop gunfire he couldn’t hear?
Aliens - Where does Bishop abruptly show up from after we see he wasn’t aboard the APC or the dropship?
28 Weeks Later - Why does Robert Carlyle once infected repeatedly not behave at all like the infected?
Kellywand:
Terminators 2 and 3 - If liquid metal Terminators can turn into floor-tiles and fiancees, why do they usually look only like one person in particular (Robert Patrick or Kristanna Loken) instead of changing their appearance constantly depending on the situation?
[I]The Time Machine /I - If Guy Pearce can’t save his betrothed at the beginning because he “can’t change the past”, even though he does, how is he able to effortlessly change “the past” at the end after traveling ahead to briefly witness a potential Morlock apocalypse?
No no, the cop doesn’t react to the gunfire in Die Hard. He’s clearly close enough to hear it, and we know from the editing that terrorists are currently chasing John McClane around on the rooftop, shooting guns at him. But when we cut to Reginald looking up at the Nakatomi Plaza, there’s no sound of gunfire.
As for 28 Weeks Later, it not that Robert Carlyle doesn’t behave infected. It’s just that he breaks some of the rules of how the infection works.
But you duly noted my Aliens plot hole. Which I’m curious to know if anyone can answer. Basically, it seems like the movie assumes Bishop stayed behind on the Sulaco until he’s needed planetside.
I’m fairly sure the issue with the Ring and the eagles is that there’s a good chance the ring will corrupt them before they get there, or otherwise arrange to be lost again. Most characters who come into actual contact with it don’t last more than a few hours. Smaegol killed his friend minutes after picking it up. The remarkable thing isn’t that Gandalf doesn’t airdrop the ring, it’s that both Bilbo and Frodo are so resistant to it.
Yes, Gandalf says right at the start of the first movie, when Bilbo tries to give him the ring, that he doesn’t dare keep it. An eagle by itself obviously would have trouble holding on to a ring and then dropping it in the right place, and nobody powerful enough to ride an eagle could be trusted to carry it.
Good point about the Aliens plot hole, though. I never consciously noticed Bishop’s absence until he pops up in the laboratory. Not a terribly big problem, though, since at that point the aliens haven’t shown up yet and Bishop could easily get transported to the colony as needed.
And as far as the LotR ones…there’s a reason Gandalf didn’t want to touch the ring. Giving it to a giant eagle would not have ended well. Also, presumably Sauron might have noticed a GIANT EAGLE flying towards Mount Doom.
Edit: Wow. I swear those posts were not there when I started writing.
Good find, krok! I got confused with the second APC trip when they had already set up the lab and were looking for the “town council”.
Another point regarding the One Ring: the White Council was trying to reach a unanimous decision, and Boromir at least would never have accepted sending the ring right off to Mordor via eagle since he hoped to divert the party towards Minas Tirith. Admittedly, it’s a rather subtle and awkward point, and Tolkien himself avoids giving a decent explanation in the books.
Any movie plot that concerns “time travel”. I’ll let this tidbit I found specific to the Harry Potter movie series turn serve as it speaks to it better than I ever could:
The Plot:
At the end of another wondrous wizarding adventure, Harry uses a magical time-travel necklace to go back and save himself and his godfather from the evil dementors.
The Hole:
This is actually a problem in most movies that contain time machines. The movie treats time travel like this urgent thing: “We’ve made it to the past! Now we’ve only got a few minutes to go back and stop the dementors!” No you don’t, you have as much time as you need. It’s fucking time travel. If you mess up, just go back and try again.
They also seem to feel that they have to do it immediately, that there’s no time to wait. Of course there’s time to wait, you’ve got a goddamn time machine. Do it tomorrow, do it in ten years. You already know you’ve succeeded, you were there when it happened. It’s actually the only situation you could be in where failure is impossible. It’s the least suspenseful thing imaginable, yet they treat it as the nail-biting climax of the movie.
We’re picking on Harry Potter especially for this because after they use the time machine that one time, that was it. For the rest of the saga, the entire wizarding world is under siege from a magical Hitler, and they never again find the time travel useful? Despite all the people who die in the Harry Potter series (and post Azkaban, they start killing them off like it’s a Friday the 13th movie) he never goes back and saves any of them?
I’m going to have to go with the black hole in The Black Hole. Although that’s just a massive hole that’s central to the plot, so I may be missing the point here…
Also, in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Austin clearly has Dr. Evil dead to rights at the end of the night club scene, near the beginning of the film. But he only starts shooting at him after the cryopod doors close. If he’d simply opened fire as soon as he walked into the corridor, we would have been spared 80 minutes of Mike Myers saying “Yeah, baby,” to everything that moves.
For the rest of the saga, the entire wizarding world is under siege from a magical Hitler, and they never again find the time travel useful?
This.
Hell, at least once Star Trek figured it out, the cat was out of the bag and you couldn’t get away from time travel plots. It’s tiresome to the audience of a series, but at least it makes human sense. Time travel would get abused!
I don’t think anybody even mentions the Time Turner after Azkaban.
At the end of another wondrous wizarding adventure, Harry uses a magical time-travel necklace to go back and save himself and his godfather from the evil dementors.
The Hole:
This is actually a problem in most movies that contain time machines. The movie treats time travel like this urgent thing: “We’ve made it to the past! Now we’ve only got a few minutes to go back and stop the dementors!” No you don’t, you have as much time as you need. It’s fucking time travel. If you mess up, just go back and try again.
The problem with this is that circular causation does leave the actions rather fixed. It’s perfectly plausible that the characters might be panicked enough not to know that, but what they’ve already seen happen is exactly what they’re about to cause to happen. So it isn’t really plausible that they could have more than one chance at it, although I’m sure there are some complicated & overly obtuse situations in which it would work, but who wants to see a story about one of those?
Re: District 9, that’s been thoroughly (and then some) discussed in the thread of the same name. Long story short, the alien had been saving up to a reasonable surplus, Wikus wasted the surplus, and the alien later addresses this as having to change his travel method because of Wikus’s waste.
Gandalf couldn’t send the eagles because of the enormous updrafts caused by Mount Doom’s volcanic nature. They were, however, able to pick up Sam and Frodo after the volcano exploded, as the lava was more dispersed and the updrafts not as strong.
How come in Minority Report Tom Cruise is tagged for pre-meditated murder but he only meets the guy 15 seconds before the incident?
I know that he is meeting the guy who killed his child (or supposedly, I can’t recall for sure) and so he’s been thinking for however many years “man, I really wish some dude hadn’t killed my kid. Boy would I like to give that guy one right to the kisser! And then after maybe drive a rail road spike through his crotch”. But it doesn’t sit right with me that those thoughts = pre-meditated murder just fails. I assumed it was because the screen writers needed a “we need to know way in advance so Cruise can go on the run” murder, and that was the only way they could think of to explain it (I can’t speak to how much the movie resembles the PKD story).
On the Time Machine one, that’s easy: you can’t go back to before you turned on the time machine for the first time, unless you live in Dr Whoverse. Everybody knows this.
Now the rationalization starts becoming harder. Oh, I don’t know, worries that the Nagul might perform an air interception? The eagles would be awful visible. It might have worked, but if it didn’t, Sauron has the ring again.
The eagles only fly over to Mt. Doom after Sauron has been defeated and the war is over. If they had flown over with the ring, or with Frodo clutching the ring, Sauron would have seen/felt it immediately and had them shot out of the sky. Big birds flying in the air aren’t exactly subtle.
