What plot holes could be adequately explained away with a single shot or line of dialogue?
What plot holes could be adequately explained away with a single shot or line of dialogue?
"We've almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!" The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
"Senator Amidala is in a coma. Even if she recovers, she will never be the same and may not live long." But no.... George had to have his god-damned funeral scene, even if it demanded Simone Biles levels of mental gymnastics to save Carrie Fisher's most emotionally resonant moment from ROTJ, as well as one of the more intriguing OT lore dumps.
Bonus points if a scene was scripted or filmed and got cut.
Probably one of the most famous examples, but the robots in The Matrix originally kept humans around as wetware CPUs using their spare brainpower. Studio execs forced the Wachowskis to change it to them using humans as batteries, even though that makes no sense. Agent Smith possessing someone in the real world in the sequels would have made a ton more sense with the original explanation.
Also instead of Neo Jesus, when he kills the squiddies outside of the matrix, that should've been because they were still in there but Zion and co didn't realise there was another layer to go.
Instead we got Revolutions.
Man that does work so much better....
I've seen this posted a few times but I could never find a source. I think this is just what people want to believe!
Here's a source: https://web.archive.org/web/20211007003509/https://www.reddit.com/r/matrix/comments/q2xefs/batteries_not_processors/
Bottom line, original is batteries
I love the explanation. "Human body heat combined with a firm of fusion generates electricity."
So they have Fusion, and yet they're relying on body heat. Yeah, makes a lot of sense everyone knows the human body is several hundred thousand degrees.
That doesn't really work either. Human brains are not great at computing unless you are looking for "good enough," results, and only on some pretty narrow fields, facial/speech recognition, some physics interactions, etc. But worse than that... we're kind of using them. If they wanted us to compute, the whole function of the Matrix is just taking up run cycles. And you can't just coopt them during sleep, we need the rest periods ,or we literally die. Only one answer makes sense to me, it's a nature preserve. They didn't want to be responsible for destroying their creators, and the only other sapient species known to exist. So they build the Matrix to keep us docile. Then, the energy reclamation actually makes some sense. They're never going to be net positive, but assuming they are having difficulty keeping their society powered, they would be incentivesed to reclaim every watt of power they could from us to reduce our burden on their grid.
Humans are great computers, we're just not digital. Our brains are definitely analogue computers, where closer neurons or stronger synapse connections can mean higher voltage signals from one cell to another. This is a very powerful and nuanced form of computing. It's not great for exact calculation of numbers, but it is great for interpreting data, even extremely large data sets. Human brains (many animal brains really) are also really fantastic at image processing in particular.
If it's worthwhile to have a dedicated video card in your pc, then likewise, it would probably be worthwhile to have human brains in your evil robot hivemind. It would make some kids of processing much more efficient.
Human brains are excellent at computing certain things that are almost impossible for a regular computer. Having worked for years on computer vision I can tell you how hard it is to make computers realize simple stuff, heck, you need massive server farms just to do a basic object recognition that any 3 years old can already do. Sure, you can train a simple AI to recognize some objects, but it will never (currently) be as many objects or as precise as a person can instantly recognize.
The truth is human brains are excellent at what they evolved to do, i.e. pattern recognition. So much so that when trying to figure out data it's usually easier to plot the data in many different ways to see if something shows up. In fact usually when you try to do cluster analysis the first machine result is, let's say not great, but you can see that things are wrong and adjust the parameters.
As for your other point your brain does this automatically, they can just put a billboard with the thing they want analyzed and your brain (and millions of others) will give them the answer. Or they could use our dreams, even during sleep our brains are still active, and they could run any scenarios then. There are many other ideas, e.g. people playing videogames inside the matrix are actually controlling robots, or people working in forklifts are actually piloting construction robots in the real world, etc.
The original CPU idea was excellent, but computers weren't so ubiquitous back then, and the producers thought that the audience wouldn't understand it.
Well, they could co-opt our brains in various ways.
That asinine stuff at an office? Maybe it's work the computers weren't good at.
Doing manual labor? Maybe it's controlling some robot doing a real world analog.
Some unskippable ad that you passively thought about? Maybe it represented work being done.
Maybe it is intruding on "spare" brainpower and if the balance glitches in some weird way? Reset you with "just a dream".
I think there's enough room for a "wetware" computing explanation. However I could see it being more than audiences were really prepared to think through. I think your "we need the humans safely out of the way of harming us, but we don't hate them and we'll keep them alive and engaged in a safe way" probably would have worked well, but they wanted the AIs to be cartoonishly bad in the first movie, and that would have been "too nice".
The best way to have it would be that there was a directive that they couldn't kill humans. Of course you need to deal with the issue of the agents taking bodies over and then getting them killed. But the matrix never made much sense in that regard anyway since neo and co killed so many innocent people it's ridiculous.
I thought this was partially coveref when neo asks for a physics book, and they tell him one doesn't exist.
A little bit more emphasis during Star Wars that Vader wanted the Storm Troopers to aim poorly and let them get away. It would have solved decades of jokes and arguments about Storm Trooper weapon accuracy.
It was right there all along:
Grand Moff Tarkin : Are they away?
Darth Vader : They've just made the jump into hyperspace.
Grand Moff Tarkin : You're sure the homing beacon is secure aboard their ship? I'm taking an awful risk, Vader. This had better work.
Evidently most of the fandom needs to have it beaten over their heads a bit more blatantly than that.
Another thing that would have been helpful is if it was made clearer just how monstrous the Ewoks actually are. There wouldn't be as much shame to the Imperials for losing against them if people had only internalized a bit better that:
- Ewoks are strong enough that they can haul Redwood-sized logs up into the canopy to build deadfalls, using only crude vine ropes and muscles, and do it quietly enough that the nearby Imperial garrison didn't notice.
- They are stealthy enough that an ordinary hunting party can sneak up on an elite Rebel strike force (including a Jedi).
- That hunting party was hunting a 3-meter-tall boar-wolf, by the way. Ewoks hunt these routinely.
- Endor is full of predators like that, and despite that the Ewoks let their children wander the forest on their own. Upon being confronted with an armor-clad alien wielding a blaster weapon and riding a flying machine, one of those lone children thought to himself: "guess I'd better kill him." Leia helped, of course, but the Ewok couldn't have known she would.
- One of their literal gods, personified in the form of a physical avatar before them, ordered the Ewoks not to burn some people alive and devour their flesh. The Ewoks hesitated for half a second and then resumed piling the firewood with a jaunty song. Gods are spiffy and all, but don't get in between Ewoks and their cannibalism.
"Not to mention how many troopers we lost under orders to not shoot to hit."
Actually that raises another point. It is really unclear in the first film what exactly Vader's position of authority is. Because he seems kind of subordinate to Tarkin at points. He even tells Vader to leave that officer alone when he's strangling him, and he obeys the order.
I think Lucas thought he had it covered with Obi-Wan’s, “These blast points are too accurate for Sandpeople. Only Imperial Stormtroopers are that accurate” line. You are correct though, that is one change that was needed.
What? Never heard that. Why?
Because Luke is his son and he still cares about him. He just tries to hide it from the emperor and in the end has to kill him to save Luke.
The problem is the audience only ever finds this out in the final movie so it doesn't make a lot of sense in the first two films. I'm not sure if there was a good way to address this though because the only option would have been to have a scene where Vader basically explains all this to Luke. It seems a bit late in the story for it really to be relevant.
“So, we started using teleportation now.”
- Everyone in Game of Thrones from season 6 onward.
Matt Smith's character in HOTD is actually The Eleventh Doctor, during his several hundred year run off screen. He spends much of GoT working to remember where he left the TARDIS, so that he could ferry the plot along in S6+
I kinda think that if you can imagine a one-line fix to a plot hole, it isn't really a plot hole.
I remember someone insisting to me that there was this huge plot hole in the film of the Fellowship of the Ring, because Merry and Pippin don't get told about what Frodo and Sam are actually doing until the Council of Elrond, but still willingly run around risking life and limb to help them. Now, not only is this not a plot hole in itself (I'm pretty sure I'd help anyone fleeing a demonic horseman, just on principle, never mind if that person was my lifelong friend/cousin), it's also quite obvious that they could have been told everything offscreen. The audience didn't need to hear all that explanation again, five minutes after we first heard it.
A lot of plot holes people like to complain about are basically of this nature. 'Can you imagine a fix?' Yep, easily. 'Did the audience need to hear it?' Nope, because I could easily imagine it. 'Well, there you go, then.'
Yeah, 90% of the time someone says pothole and I hear "The story didn't spoon feed me the answer and I'm inexplicably mad about it."
In another thread just today I was pointing out that this is the result of the Cinema Sins school of criticism taking over the average person's relationship with media. People seem to genuinely think that how good or bad something is comes down to tallying up "plot holes" to come up with a sin score and calling it a day.
Plot holes are fine. Even legitimate plot holes are fine; if a story actually captures your attention and holds your emotional engagement, you won't be thinking about plot holes because you'll be too busy enjoying the story. This is Hitchcock described as Fridge Logic; problems that only occur to you hours after the movie is over and you're staring into the refrigerator trying to decide what snack to make (yes, that's the actual origin of the term). And he was very much of the opinion that this was absolutely fine; as long as any apparent inconsistency wasn't so egregious as to break suspension of disbelief right there in the moment, it could be safely ignored.
When people fixate on minor plot holes it's either because a) fundamentally the story sucks, so their mind is wandering, or b) they've trained themselves to constantly find or invent logic holes instead of actually trying to engage with what the storytelling is doing.
I'm digging deep in my memory here so I can't provide any details, but there was one episode from a very early season of Grey's Anatomy where I got to the end of the episode and thought, "wait, did they ever solve this episode's medical mystery?" There was a lot of doctor-plot that episode and the patient plot just kinda got dropped. Well I watched the deleted scenes for that episode, and low and behold there's a line where they explain exactly what was going on with the patient. It wasn't the real highlight/purpose of the scene, but I'm still shocked they would cut it because it left an entire plotline (albeit just for that episode) completely dangling.
I haven't watched any Grey's Anatomy to speak of, but I suppose that sounds about right from what I've heard.
I haven't watched the series in over a decade so I have no idea how it's aged (or how my tastes have changed as I've aged) but I remember the early seasons being quite good. Gray's Anatomy was really popular the first few years that it aired, and at least at the time I thought it was deservedly so. I think I dropped the show around season six? It was getting too soapy/ridiculous and the plot was starting to go in circles. They ratchet up the tension really high pretty early on (both on the medical drama and doctor-relationship drama sides) so the writers inevitably set themselves up for failure, because this isn't a shonen power fantasy, you can't just keep driving things up to higher and higher stakes and still remain within the confines of reality.
For instance, in a very early season there's a really bad train crash where a bunch of patients flood into the hospital and I remember it being a huge climatic thing with some fantastic episodes. Then in a later season they have a bad ferry crash plotline that falls flat because they already did the train crash, and the emotional impact of this huge public transportation disaster was significantly diminished by a sense of "didn't we go through this already?"
I cannot believe that the show is still going, mostly because I'm amazed they have any audience left.
While I haven't seen it personally from what I can recall. There apparently exists an episode of Midsomer Murders where the motiv of the killings got cut before airing.
Fun to hear Gray's also managed to do that blunder. Wonder if any other similar shows have do the same. Feels kinda easy to accidentally do in that type of shows, if you do a very character focused episode.
There's an episode in House where they do that. But it turns out that it's all just Houses imagination anyway, and so that makes sense because really everything is about him. So it makes sense that nobody cures the patient if he isn't there.
The Kessel Run being measured in distance rather than time could have been solved with a closeup shot instead of wide angle.
The way it's scripted, Han thinks he's got two local yokels and is feeding them a line. Obi-Wan, of course, is not a yokel, and reacts to that info with a "come on, dude" kind of look. Alec Guinness does do it, but not in a noticeable way. If there was a closeup shot, it would have worked. The wider shot that went into the film makes his reaction barely noticeable.
This leads to decades of treating Han's line as actual truth and trying to figure out what he meant. Legends and Disney canon provided basically the same answer. Kessel is surrounded by black holes, and skimming closer to the event horizon would mean taking a shorter distance. Wasn't supposed to work that way, though.
It mostly always just bothered me that a parsec is a unit of distance that relies on the Earth's specific orbital distance around the sun. The Faraway Galaxy of Star Wars would have no way to measure how far a parsec is.
The Martian when the main airlock blows up.
He ends up taping a plastic sheet over the hole with what I assume is super strong space tape and plastic and then continues to live in the station for 550 more days.
We spend the first half of the movie learning how unforgiving the environment is, and how delicate his ecosystem for life is, but you can also blow half the place up and just tape some plastic over the hole.
They did a much better job of explaining it in the book, but the movie literally went "just tape that bitch up with plastic, then we'll throw a wind storm at it to prove it's good forever"
Another big plot hole in the Martian, also present in the book, is that messages are encoded in hexadecimal. But then why did he have a separate question mark card, when all punctuation can be encoded in ASCII/hex? Also
both him andNASA wrote in all caps. Again they have a full ascii set. Makes no sense.The question card is where he writes. He calls it that because that's where he writes questions.
They also don't encode spaces when they talk to him I always assume that was to save time. They only have about 8 hours a day and they can only send one message every 30 minutes or so. If they take too long to send a message they'll cut into the next message and they need to give him time to go back inside.
I found this post hilarious.
At least they threw the wind storm at it, LOL.
The only explanation for the wind storm and the tape is that the atmosphere had already been teraformed to be much much thicker, to the point that its at a survivable pressure for breathing, the only problem is lack of oxygen and too cold.
Isn't there something like the gravity on Mars is so low that even though there are massive dust storms with fast winds, they feel like a gentle breeze, and would never be able to topple a solid object, let alone a space ship.
Yeah, but it's air pressure, not gravity.
Yeah the author addressed that. He said he needed a way for the main character to be isolated and presumed dead for the story to work and really couldn't come up with anything so he had to kind of abandon reality for a bit.
There was actually a community back on Reddit dedicated to fixing that bit of the story.
They did a much better job of explaining it in the book
How did the book handle it?
So, in the book:
When he's making water out of hydrazine from the MDV, he gets the process a little wrong and accidentally causes an explosion. This slightly stresses the canvas around one of the three airlocks. He prefers to use that airlock to the other two because it's the closest to the rover chargers, so he uses that one the most. Every time he cycles the airlock, it slightly expands and contracts, repeatedly stressing the canvas until it fails.
The resulting explosion hurls the airlock over 100 meters from the HAB, cracks the airlock and in the resulting tumble he bashes in his EVA suit's helmet. So he fixes the crack with duct tape, cuts his space suit's arm off, uses the resin from a patch kit to glue the arm material over the broken helmet (in the movie the helmet is kind of cracked and he tapes over it) so he has to go into the wrecked HAB, get one of the other space suits, change in one of the rovers, then fix the HAB.
It is established that the mission was designed to survive a HAB breach, and was supplied with spare canvas and adhesive resin to make repairs, which he did. He had to reduce the height of the ceiling in that section of the HAB to make it fit, and from then on he alternated use of the other two airlocks.
The book kicked a lot more of the shit out of Watney. The movie doesn't even mention killing Pathfinder, the dust storm enroute to the MAV or rolling the rover over.
“Eagles can’t fly us to Mt. Doom because of a magic curse or some shit”- Gandalf to the council in Lord of the Rings
I think that one's pretty well explained (albeit not explicitly) by the presence of the Nazgul and the eye of Sauron, which were either destroyed or otherwise occupied when the eagles made their rescue. People pretend Mordor had no airborne defenses for the bit, but it doesn't really make sense
The Eye was proven to not be all-seeing or all-knowing. Same with the Ring Wraiths. And Orcs were shown numerous times to be inept guards.
So have an eagle fly Frodo to Mt. Doom on a night with a new moon, above the clouds. There is no way they would be spotted. A curse, while stupid, is the only explanation that really puts this plot hole to rest IMO.
In the books it's explained that the eagles were involved in a war of their own during the first two books and couldn't send help without risking their own destruction. There's actually a part in the books where frodo is like "why didn't the eagles just fly us" lol.
Kinda the inverse of your question (or an example of this being done poorly) but in the latest or (second to latest) star wars, after being accused of recycling the old trilogy plot over again, the writers attempted to deflect away from the obvious similarities to Hoth by having one of the characters taste what appeared to be snow on a frigid planet resembling Hoth by exclaiming "It's salt"
"They fly now" is a similarly atrocious example given that they've been flying for decades, just not in any of the main trilogy movies yet.
They fly now??
As a dedicated TLJ fan, I recuse myself.
Christopher Reeve Superman. How come he's fast enough to go back in time, but not fast enough to save Lois in the first place?
Scene needed is Jor-El explaining that Clark is as strong as he believes himself to be. He can literally focus the entire power of the Sun if he's strong enough.
Do you think he was flying around the earth for kicks? No, he was using a gravitational slingshot to build speed. Granted, they could have explained it better, so I guess a line like "we need to use the turn of the world to speed up our satilites, and we still can't match his velocity. Imagine how fast he'd be." But less clunky, of course.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist
That's not how gravity assist works. You need relative differences in speed.
Someone once explained it that watching the earth spin backward was not him flying so fast that he literally dragged the Earth in reverse but rather that the Earth spinning backward was a byproduct of our third party view watching time go in reverse because Superman was traveling back in time.
But he would have to literally be stronger than the sun to do that because the only way you can travel backwards in time is to travel faster than the speed of light.
But it's movie magic so what can you say?
Honestly my head canon is that just like how humans on a hell of an adrenaline rush can do superhuman feats like lift a car for someone trapped under it, superman has basically the equivalent, breaking his known limitations through sheer force of adrenaline.
Kind of like how in one of the early seasons of the CW Flash series, Barry accidentally travels back in time while pushing himself to stop a tidal wave from destroying Central City.
I like that idea.
In a similar vein, Supes could be much weaker if he were asleep or distracted. In the current iteration, if Clark Kent gets hit in the head by a ninja the weapon breaks; in the new one, he can be knocked out if he isn't pumped up. Sort of like how Houdini was killed when he told a fan they could hit him as hard as they wanted; he meant after he'd had a moment to prepare.
Kind of like how in one of the early seasons of the CW Flash series, Barry accidentally travels back in time while pushing himself to stop a tidal wave from destroying Central City.
That one really annoyed me because like the next episode they were saying he needed to go mach 3 which was faster than ever! And I was like.... Is time travel less than mach 3? I'm pretty sure have jets that can go Mach 3...
"Oh man, look how far down the track the T-Rex pushed our car!"
Pirates of the Caribbean it was pointed out Bootstap was strapped to a cannon and dropped into the sea but the logical conclusion that by lifting the curse Will had to kill his own father was never a plot point. not exactly a plot hole just a missed opportunity.
By that point he had joined the Flying Dutchman’s crew and thus did not die when the curse was lifted. But Will didn’t know this, so your point stands.
...and it was all a dream.
How did Inigo know the Man in Black was in love with Buttercup? It's an easy one to fix, because there are several points where Grandpa skips parts of the story, but it could have been a single throwaway line.
This is only a plot hole because you forgot part of the movie.
Inigo's quest is to kill the six fingered man. He saves the man in black only to get his help towards this goal. ~~But, there is exactly the kind of explanation line in the movie by Fezzik, who has not been in a drunken stupor for a month and has in fact gotten a job working closely with the castle's security forces, explaining his insight on the topic. Fezzik has this line, interrupting Inigo talking about how he needs the skills of the Man in Black to execute his revenge:
"the rumors are that he was the Princess' true love". ~~
That bit was in the book and the script, but the line as filmed in the movie was paraphrased by Inigo and not uttered by Fezzik. Doesn't really matter to the plot anyway though because Inigo sought the man in black to help plot his revenge because the man in black had defeated Vizzini. A confusing line because we were never explicitly shown how Inigo learned about the man in black's true love of Buttercup, but not exactly a plot hole.
Excuse you, friend, I didn't forget shit. The line is in the script, and the conversation is in the book, but it didn't make it into the movie. Many of Andre's lines were cut or voiceover because he had trouble being understood. It's actually a good example of this, because it clearly was an important line to the plot that was cut because it didn't seem important.
There's a YouTube series called "how it should have ended" and 90% of them are basically answers to this question lol
Totally forgot about HISHE! Gonna have to check them out again.
"The red fabric attracts phaser fire and other dangers"
Okay, yes, well, good, but why the fuck would Starfleet make their uniforms out of danger enhancing materials? That is like some 4D chess fucking eugenics program going on here.
To keep the important people from getting shot. Same reason batman makes robin wear a flashy costume.
Anyone stupid enough to wear the uniform deserves to get shot. They obviously fixed the problem by TNG so command were able to flex a little bit.
In Frozen 2, the elemental spirits have trapped a kingdom in a magical barrier for many years as punishment for building a dam to stop a river. The day is "saved" by an earth spirit incidentally destroying the dam and freeing the river. There was this whole thing about the spirits calling out to Elsa to come and save them, but apparently the spirits had the ability the whole time to break the dam. The whole plot was basically pointless. Maybe instead they needed Elsa to break the dam, or needed to combine their powers.
Not going to pretend that Frozen 2 is my favorite movie, but having seen it dozens of times with my kids...
The dam wasn't the problem. It was a symbol of the problem, which was the rift between the 2 peoples living in such close proximity. Nature is indifferent, people are not. Nature doesn't care if there's a dam, it just becomes a different habitat. People should have cared about impacting each other's way of life.
Nature removed the dam, and the barrier to the people coming together, when the responsible parties decided to right their wrongs and consider each other, regardless of the high cost. Even if that's not the case, the story remains that nature's power has to be harnessed to a purpose by people. But I think they were going for the former.
Anyway, not a great movie, but also not a plot hole.
I don't think the spirits are trapped in that scenario though are they? I mean they're not trying to escape. It's more like a restitution thing. Like they want you to come clean up the mess.
“We’ve almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!” The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
It was explained in a deleted scene. In Independence Day, our computers are based on reverse engineering their crashed ship. That and why would a hivemind alien race ever even need cyber security? Up to that point, they probably never encountered a scenario where a planet they were harvesting had an intelligent race on it, said intelligent race recovered a crashed ship of theirs, and said race was advanced enough reverse engineer it.
Same with Jurassic park 3 and the T-Rex that somehow managed to kill everyone while at the same time being still confined in the cargo bay.
The original script made perfect sense and then for some baffling reason they deleted important scenes for the theatrical release. In the original script the raptors were also in there, they got out through the small hole the T-Rex made, and then they killed everyone and jumped into the sea and swim to shore. Then for some totally bonkers reason they edited it and decided that the raptors had already been transported earlier and had nothing to do with this bit.
Which would have been fine but then they should have reshot the entire boat sequence. The problem is then they would have needed the T-Rex to have escaped. Not really sure why they didn't do that as it didn't really change the plot all that much and at least then it would have made sense.
I think the problem was that they decided late on in production that they didn't actually want to deal with the CGI of having the raptor swim in water since water is hard to do. But again they should have reshot it.
I might humbly suggest that whatever pacing issues the scene introduced would have been worth it in this case.
Roland Emmerich is a very dumb man with a very low opinion of his audience.
even if it demanded Simone Biles levels of mental gymnastics to save Carrie Fisher's most emotionally resonant moment from ROTJ
I don't think it's "gymnastics" to imagine that an orphan toddler might end up with some false memories of what she imagines her mother was like.
What I'd rather have had as a tiny change to "improve" the situation would be to confirm that Palpatine used some kind of Dark Side alchemy to drain Padme's life to keep Vader alive, I really like that notion. Wouldn't need to be with dialogue, even, just have some kind of scene showing Palpatine meditating and channeling something.
And also, I personally think that vaders redemption at the end of episode 6 was false.
Vader killed billions of people. He destroyed an entire planet for the lulz.
And he was a whiny little shit his entire life before becoming Vader.
One tiny little moment of redemption is not enough to undo all the shit he did.
It is my opinion that the force ghosts shown at the end of episode 6 are being created by Luke Skywalker to assuage his own mental trauma of the series of events that had let him to that point.
He did that so he can tell himself that he is a hero, that he is not a failed Jedi, that all of the pain and suffering he had been through was worth it.
The only reason why Leia could sort of see them was because she was tuned into his force power
That “little moment of redemption” was him fulfilling his destiny and bringing balance to the Force. He doesn’t become a Force ghost because he’s been like, forgiven of his sins or something. He becomes a Force ghost because he dies at peace in the Force.
You can have your headcanon about the Force ghosts and Luke being insane if you’d like, I’m not trying to like, fight you on it or anything. But it sort of misses the point, in my opinion.
And he was a whiny little shit his entire life before becoming Vader.
Nah, he was cool as fuck as a pod racing eight year old or whatever.
He was a particularly angsty* teen, I'll give you that, but he was also kinda being constantly left in the dark by his weird religious magi cult who wanted him to be their chosen one, so like, I can understand why his rebellious streak would be so big.
I do ultimately agree though, no amount of "redemption" can bring someone back from nuking an entire fucking planet.
Then back to the Future part 2, Marty McFly should have arrived in the future where he disappeared 30 years ago and his children were never born.
Even if he did arrive history should have begun reverting itself, as his disappearance from the past should have altered the present until he returns.
As long as he experienced no ghosting effects, that would have meant that he was functionally immortal until he returned back to the present.
That entire scenario could have been avoided if doc Brown had said we've got a few hours until the universe begins to rectify the fact that you are not in the past with the temporal causality of the present future
I saw some criticism of Netflix's 'Ripley' adaption, based on the fact that Andrew Scott is in his late 40s, so his character (and all associated characters) had to be maybe in their late 30s but not much younger. They said that a father wouldn't be as interested in him returning the USA in the same way that he would be if his son was in his early 20s (as in the 'Talented Mr. Ripley' film). I thought they could just add a line from the father, saying he'd tolerated his son galivanting around Europe until now, but now needed him home because his father was starting to consider retirement and wanted him to take over the business.
"We've almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!" The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
Wasn't the in-movie explanation for that that all modern tech was secretly based on reverse engineered alien tech?
There’s a deleted scene where they explain that he figured it out by analyzing the crashed ship’s programming and also the signal that they were sending through the satellites at the beginning of the movie.
Where did it say that in the movie? Otherwise that would have been another great one liner for this thread.
It was explained in a deleted scene: https://www.cracked.com/article_18720_7-famous-movie-flaws-that-were-explained-in-deleted-scenes.html
DBZ fan. Lots of things:
- SSJ4 could be canon. It just requires a full moon and a tail. When all the Saiyans in-universe don't have them, it's kinda impossible...
- Becoming SSJ easily (Goten and Trunks) is easily explained by saying that because their fathers already were SSJ by the time of conception, it had become a natural reflex to them, rather than a barrier that needed to be broken.
- They've been able to blow up planets since the days of 9000 power levels, probably even with 1000, yet with power levels of 1B the fights are largely the same. Explain this as some sort of ki concentration, where your energy has...more energy per energy, or something?
- Goku's "telepathy" was always just him feeling someone's energy, and feeling how flustered and overwhelmed they are. He does a similar thing to Future Trunks, but it wasn't called telepathy, it was "searching his emotions" - another BS way of saying "shit, you don't look good, what's up!".
- The Dragon Balls take a year to charge, but are often usable pretty much right away - the RR army get them 8 months after they were used, and despite being used to revive Goku the Earth balls are used basically a month later because Kami is revived. Maybe just explain it as Kami needing time to revive them as they're intrinsically linked? It Kami goes on bed rest, you'll have Dragon Balls in a few weeks...
- Launch didn't disappear. She married Tien, they have kids, and she stays at home to raise them.
I could probably write a book to "fix" the show, but these fixes just tend to annoy fans because they want a "canon" answer to a show that is hilariously broken.
They’ve been able to blow up planets since the days of 9000 power levels, probably even with 1000, yet with power levels of 1B the fights are largely the same. Explain this as some sort of ki concentration, where your energy has…more energy per energy, or something?
To be a planet killer, you need a power level of around 2500. So 1000 is not sufficient, 9000 is overkill.
It's stupid if you think about it. Instead of fighting and potentially losing, you could just blow up the planet and killing every strong fighter on it because being able to breathe in space is not a learnable technique. It's kinda like the "why use any spell other than Avada Kedavra?" in Harry Potter and the answer is, there isn't really a point.
The Dragon Balls take a year to charge, but are often usable pretty much right away - the RR army get them 8 months after they were used, and despite being used to revive Goku the Earth balls are used basically a month later because Kami is revived. Maybe just explain it as Kami needing time to revive them as they’re intrinsically linked? It Kami goes on bed rest, you’ll have Dragon Balls in a few weeks…
The Dragon Balls source their power from the guardian that governs them. So, each set has different rules set by their guardian and the guardian can also arbitrarily change those rules. When Kami was revived, he apparently changed the 1-year recharge (if I remember right this is also said by him but I might be wrong, been I while since I've watched the early arcs). A definite change occurred when Dende took over guardianship over Earth and restored the Dragon Balls and made them about as powerful as the Namekian ones.
The biggest plot device in Dragon Ball are the zenkai boosts and how inconsistent they are in both power and occurrence. The one Goku got on Namek just prior to the Frieza fight was astronomical because they made Frieza way too strong even for SSJ Goku to defeat without an asinine boost. At the end of the regular Dragon Ball, Goku had all his limbs broken and a huge hole in his chest just above the heart, certainly a terminal condition, but he received no zenkai boost at all. When Radditz showed up, Goku was just as strong as in the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai which makes absolutely zero sense. You cannot even pull the "it was just a showmatch"-card on that one because the finals were not a showmatch and Piccolo Jr fully intended to eradicate Goku to avenge his father.
Plus it did work when Vegeta had Krillin beat him to near death and Dende healed him, which wasn't even a fight.
The Usual Suspects
Spoilers below:
At one point a character (I think it was Giancarlo Esposito, but not certain) mentions an English lawyer, to which another (Chazz Palminteri, I think) says >!"Kobayashi?"!<
!GE nods. But since Kobayashi is not Pete Postlethwaite's character's real name, just the name on the bottom of a coffee cup, this makes no sense.!<
!Could have been fixed by GE saying, "Probably" or "Yeah, maybe" or whatever.!<
I'm not sure this counts as a single shot, but I've always felt that I could fix "Raya and the last dragon" with one flashback right after Sisu shows Raya her petrified brothers and sisters.
Context: Sisu's plans up until this point have always revolved around 'give the bad guy a present' which never works, while Raya is 'action girl' and all her plans are fighting or running. The last shard of the dragon crystal to 'save the world' is in the hands of 'evil girl' who caused the 'magic apocalypse'. After this scene, Sisu convinces Raya to go with the give 'evil girl' a gift plan, which get Sisu killed, then later after Raya and 'evil girl' fight, she does a 180 and gives up all the dragon shards to her and 'evil girl' saves the day. So the gift thing has no resolution, and the 180 is weird. How do you fix it?
Flashback: Sisu loves giving gifts to humans. One time she gives a gift and humans fight over it. This causes the evil greed clouds to attack for the first time. Other dragons make gem, entrust Sisu with it "because the one who caused it should be the one to fix it". Flashback over, Sisu says "and I will, even if I die trying." Bam, death foreshadowing, 'evil girl' saves the day foreshadowing, reason WHY Raya does a 180 at the end, and also lore on evil greed cloud things.
I always thought Raya and the Last Dragon would best have been fixed by being a series. They clearly put a lot of care and detail into the world building, and a post-apocalyptic riff on ATLA with Disney money could have been really, really good. Instead, we got a movie that was just kind of okay.
the griffins in LOTR. "Oh it's mating season right now" or whatever, some excuse why they're too busy to just take them up from the get go
You... You mean the eagles? I always say "They had their own shit going on."
The black liquid was never a bioweapon it was made as an insecticide. Why, what did you people do with it?
Honestly that entire movie was a plothole given the origins of the xenomorphs is already established.
I hate it when storytelling pulls me out of the story, and back into the theater.
It's a balancing act though, isn't it?
Sure, you can't have it be too clunky, but you also have to lay some foundation for the characters' actions to make sense. Screwing it up either way will pull a percentage of the audience out of the story.
Perhaps some sort of establishing shot in the lab with OS9 or whatever they had in Independence Day would work better than dialogue, but the specificity of the solution called for something. Handwavium is best when a bit higher level, IMHO.
I hate it when storytelling pulls me out of the story, and back into the theater.
It’s a balancing act though, isn’t it?
Don't mean to be argumentative, but generally speaking? No, it's not.
Either you're in the story, and enjoying it, or you're in the theater, noticing the seat you're sitting in, and not paying so much attention to the movie being shown you.
A good Storyteller keeps you in the story, and doesn't let you escape until the end credits.
What you want is "show" without the "tell". Always works better.
What you want is “show” without the “tell”. Always works better.
Actually I was speaking more about the plot holes and non sequiturs, but you also have a valid point.
wtf did you link to
