8 Classic movie plotholes

[JackFetch]

From Cracked

#8.

Back to the Future

The Plot:

Marty McFly goes back in time, helps his parents get together, invents rock and roll...

The Hole:

...and everyone promptly forgets he was ever there the minute he leaves.

Nobody notices that a famous clothing brand is later named after him, nobody notices that Chuck Berry releases a song that sounds pretty similar to the one he played at the big dance, and most importantly, nobody bats an eyelid when his Mom has a kid who looks exactly like him.

#7.

Minority Report

The Plot:

Tom Cruise is convicted of a murder he hasn't committed yet, by a team of psychics called "precogs."

The Hole:

The precogs? They don't work. At all. We're told they predict the future but nothing they predict ever happens. If they actually predicted the future properly, they'd predict the people getting arrested, not committing murders.

In the entire movie, the only precog prediction that actually comes true exactly as they said involves a kid losing a balloon. Chinese fortune cookies have a higher success rate than these guys.

#6.

The Sixth Sense

The Plot:

Spoiler alert: Bruce Willis is dead. The whole time. We totally didn't see it coming and apparently neither did he. He's only able to figure out he's a ghost when he sees his wife drop his wedding ring.

The Hole:

But shouldn't he have figured it out before that? All the other ghosts in the film seemed to be wandering the earth, mindlessly reliving their deaths, with little awareness of the outside world at all. But ol' Bruce was just carrying on as normal, working and going about his day-to-day routine, completely unfazed by the fact no one but a small child had spoken to him in several months.

#5.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

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.

#4.

Citizen Kane

Yeah, even Kane. The greatest film of all time, according to those monocle-wearing types who refuse to even consider Robocop for the title.

The Plot:

A bunch of reporters try to figure out the meaning of Charles Foster Kane's last words. "Rosebud."

The Hole:

No one was around to hear them.

Now, no one's suggesting that journalists in the 40s weren't good at getting scoops. With the chief breathing down their neck and dames left and right trying to play them for saps, they pretty much had to be good. But unless their source was telepathic or invisible, there's no way they could know what Kane said.

#3.

Fantastic Voyage

You may not have seen this one if you're the type who refuses to watch movies from before you were born. This is from a better time, when men were men, movie titles told you exactly what to expect (hint: an adventure that is fantastic), and Raquel Welch in a catsuit was the closest thing to pornography a man could get without having to go to a seedy-looking theater with sticky floors and Travis Bickle types making gun fingers at the screen.

The Plot:

A team of scientists shrink themselves to go inside a patient's body in a tiny little spaceship, in order to fix a blood clot in his brain. They have only an hour, and then they will return to normal size.

The Hole:

We don't ask that you stay within the bounds of physics, but at least follow the rules you freaking made up. At the end of the movie, the crew's tiny sub gets destroyed, but the team manages to get out of the guy's body just before they grow back to size. Only problem, they leave the wreckage of their miniaturized submarine behind. As clangers go, that's about as bad as you get. Anyone paying attention to the plot of the movie is wondering right up until the end when the giant submarine wreckage will be bursting out of the guys chest.

#2.

The Lion King

The Plot:

Scar murders his brother and usurps the throne, then Simba returns from exile to avenge his father's death. Also, they're lions.

The Hole:

For someone who wanted to be king so much, Scar was really bad at it. There's being incompetent, and then there's being so incompetent that you cause the rain to stop and all the rivers and lakes to dry up. We know he let the hyenas run the show and eat whatever they wanted, but come on. What, did they drink the lake?

#1.

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

We had to make this number one, not because of the size of the plot hole, but because it's friggin' Star Wars. That's right nerds, the indisputably best one of the series has a pretty gaping hole of its own.

The Plot:

You know the plot. Don't play that game.

The Hole:

So there's the famous sequence where Luke gets trained by Yoda on Yoda's shithole of a planet. To break up the sequence, the film cuts to the Millennium Falcon getting chased by the Empire to Lando's cloud city. When they arrive, they get captured, at which point Luke has finished his training.

Well, that doesn't work. Were they chased for months? Or was Luke trained in an afternoon? Either we were spared some extended scenes on board the Millennium Falcon featuring starvation and debates about when they'd have to eat Chewbacca, or becoming a Jedi is easier than getting a cub scout merit badge.

[Missy]

...and everyone promptly forgets he was ever there the minute he leaves.

Not true. After Marty leaves the dance, Lorraine comments that Marty is a nice name, thus suggesting that Marty was named after himself.

Nobody notices that a famous clothing brand is later named after him,

Only Lorraine would know this, and it seems like an odd thing to remember.

nobody notices that Chuck Berry releases a song that sounds pretty similar to the one he played at the big dance,

That's not fair. We don't know who remembered the song upon its proper release, because we never saw 1958 in the Back to the Future movies.

and most importantly, nobody bats an eyelid when his Mom has a kid who looks exactly like him.

Lorraine and George got together in 1955, and (if Wiki is to be believed) had Marty in 1968. Marty wouldn't look like the 1955 Marty until 1985, so it's been 30 years since Lorraine and George last saw him. They might remember meeting someone in high school with that name, but recalling that he looked exactly like their son is a bit of a stretch.

[Dread]

Fetch just got McFly'd

[Guest]

Any movie with time travel is a plot hole in and of itself. The whole concept of linear time (which most movies of the type use) is heavily flawed on any sort of scientific level.

[JackFetch]

Fetch just got McFly'd

I didn't write it

[drqshadow]

The Plot: A bunch of reporters try to figure out the meaning of Charles Foster Kane's last words. "Rosebud."

The Hole: No one was around to hear them.

I'm fairly sure the housekeeper heard the words, and then fed them to the media.

[Dan]

The Plot: A bunch of reporters try to figure out the meaning of Charles Foster Kane's last words. "Rosebud."

The Hole: No one was around to hear them.

I'm fairly sure the housekeeper heard the words, and then fed them to the media.

That's what's assumed and what makes the most sense, but there's nothing actually onscreen to support it.

[Stavros]

Dark Knight- They search the bridges for explosives with everything at their disposal but they can't spare one guy to check out the ferries and find the entire deck of explosives present on each boat? Likewise they are trying to find out which major Gotham hospital has been rigged to explode but they can't spare a sniffer dog to actually find out which one is loaded with enough munitions to invade Iraq.

Conclusion- John McClane would have been a more effective opponent The Joker. Seriously the NYPD can find one bomb in 700 schools but the GCPD can't find 11,000 bombs amongst like 5 hospitals? I call BS.

[Dread]

I love classic cinema but Citizen Kane is an overrated pile of boring.

[Stavros]

The 6th sense one is BS. None of the ghosts know they are dead and thier actions are related to their failings or desires at the point of their death.

The Minority Report one is also BS, they guy doesn't understand the concept. The Precogs predict a probable future which is uninterrupted by their own actions. AFTER they have has this vision the information is what changes it. If the Precogs just see some guy getting arrested then there is no reason for them to arrest the guy other than they were destined to. The function as it works prevents the legal complications that always accompany a predestination paradox.

OK and finally, the BTTF one is giant BS. Back in the day songs were co-oped by different people and so Chuck Berry singing the same song is unremarkable. The clothing name is a coincidence. Finally, why would his mother remark on how he looks? Lots of people look like that. About 95% of that family looks like that. Lorraine would forget Marty when George swept her off her feet.

[Dan]

I love classic cinema but Citizen Kane is an overrated pile of boring.

:grumble: