6 Movie Plots That Could Have Been Solved In Minutes

6 Raiders of the Lost Ark

What Happened:

Archaeologist Indiana Jones is briefed by Army intelligence that the Nazis are looking for the fabled Ark of the Covenant because, through some ass-backward logic, they think that the best way to kill the Jews is by invoking the God of the Jews. Sure enough, Indy agrees to "get a hold of the Ark before the Nazis do," and kick as much Nazi ass as he can along the way.

The Nazi's logic seems airtight. In the Bible, the Ark tends to make the armies that carry it invincible. Sure those armies tended to be made up mostly of Jews, God's chosen people and the Nazi's chosen extinction target, but the God of the Old Testament wasn't one to get bent out of shape over a minor technicality. Of course, as we find out in the climactic scene, Indy knows a secret about the Ark the Nazis don't: It has a habit of melting faces right the hell off their skull.

What Would Have Made More Sense:

The most sensible response for the Army to this whole Ark business is coincidentally the easiest: Do absolutely nothing.

The Fuhrer's army, lacking Indy's superior archaeology skills, misunderstood the location of the Ark to begin with. Without Indy's meddling, the Nazis would have blown millions of dollars from their 1936 budget digging in the wrong place.

But lets say the Army doesn't know the Nazis are geographically challenged. All the more reason not to do shit. Instead of stealing and re-stealing the Ark from the Nazis, Indiana Jones and the U.S. Army should have been rooting for them to find it. Their best case scenario is that the Nazis mission goes exactly according to plan: find it, ship it off to Germany and open it in a lavish pageant in Berlin with the whole Nazi high command in attendance. That was what they had planned to do all along. All the top Nazis in Berlin, including Hitler, front and center at the grand opening of a device that has a reputation for melting the faces of anyone in its vicinity.

It'd not only be the end of the movie, but of the whole damned war.

5 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

What Happened:

For the fourth consecutive year at Hogwarts, Harry finds himself caught in the middle of a massive conspiracy that the entire wizarding community is powerless to fight against.

In this case, Harry's name is drawn to become the fourth competitor in the TriWizard Tournament. This seems highly suspect, considering that Harry is too young to enter, too dumb in the ways of magic to possibly survive it and most importantly, it is called the TriWizard Tournament. In the Harry Potter universe, the New York Yankees would be forced to bring a wheelchair-bound cripple on field as their 10th man, if a typo landed his name on the team list.

Even though the wizarding community is willing for some reason to bite the bullet and let Harry compete, there is one important factor afoot: he doesn't want to. Harry confides in Ron Weasley: "I didn't put my name in that cup! I don't want eternal glory!"

Predictably, the obviously-rigged competitor selection fiasco was orchestrated by Voldemort, who needed Harry in the game in order to bring himself back from the dead. And there was absolutely nothing that Harry could do about it, unless...

What would have made more sense:

He could have, you know, just not competed.

If Harry decided to do nothing, nothing, after his name was picked from the Goblet of Fire, there's really no way anyone could have forced him to compete. Even if the judges insisted upon obeying a magic cup and entering Harry into every event, he could have stayed home and watched the whole thing on Pay-Per-View, scoring a solid zero points at each tally. Seriously, what was the cup going to do to him if he didn't participate? Kill him? Apparently not, since he shows up late for one event and the cup wasn't coming after him with a dagger or anything.

Hell, Hogwarts wouldn't even have had to lose their chance at the title, since they would still have had Edward Cullen competing in the game. Who, incidentally, would also not have been killed if Harry had backed out of the tournament.

We can also probably assume that any reprimand that Harry might have received for brazenly defying the orders of magical kitchenware would likely have been revoked after it was revealed that his competing would have led inevitably to the release of a powerful supervillain, and to Snape killing Dumbled-

What Happened:

The Da Vinci Code and I, Robot both revolve around a very complicated suicide note that the main character must decipher before it's too late.

In the former, a gut-shot Frenchman named Jacques Sauniere apparently spends his last moments going on a tour de force through the Louvre hiding a series of complicated clues and ciphers that can only be decrypted by a world-renowned expert in language, religion and history. Luckily, Tom Hanks is that man, by proxy of Dan Brown.

Eventually he solves the puzzles which lead him to a safety deposit box, in which Jacques has stored a map to the location of the holy grail. Just kidding, it actually just contains more puzzles.

Will Smith's 2004 vehicle I, Robot turns out to be basically the same exact movie with more robots and product placement.

The dead scientist in that film uses a holographic projector to issue a series of cryptic clues to Will Smith.

What Would Have Made More Sense:

Both The Da Vinci Code and I, Robot share a common thread in which the most convoluted story-knots could have easily been undone with one gentle pull. Instead of sending the people who you want to reach on a scavenger hunt that could last days if not years, how about using those fancy black-light pens/ digital recorders to leave a message that might actually be useful in the short-term?

"Hey. I was shot in the stomach at 10:46 P.M. by a giant albino monk who I am sure you guys won't have any trouble finding. He wasn't wearing gloves and was actually bleeding a bit at the leg, so I am confident your lab boys will have some DNA and possibly even fingerprints to work with on the shell-casing I circled. Tell my granddaughter I love her, and that I'm sorry about that whole sex-party thing. Take care. Hope you find the guy. P.S. Jesus had kids."

Image by FrogC4

We understand that the idea behind the Europe-wide scavenger hunt is to protect a secret that Jacques supposes could bring down Christianity and create worldwide despair and violence. But the fear is probably groundless when you consider that a bunch of guys already "revealed" this secret to the world a couple of decades earlier, and they're now remembered only as the guys who sued Dan Brown for ripping off their conspiracy theory.

3 Saw

What Happened:

In one of this franchise's trademark ridiculously over-elaborate murder plots, the Jigsaw Killer shackles Cary Elwes to a pipe and makes him follow a series of clues to solve a bunch of puzzles so that he can win the ultimate prize of getting killed.

After all the pieces come together and the film hits its climax scene, Elwes's character, Lawrence, is faced with one final decision: cut off his foot with a hacksaw and then murder his cellmate or answer a cell phone.

While we don't want to go into too many spoilers that aren't already obvious from the fact that the movie spawned six sequels, it is worth noting that on the other end of the ringing cell phone is his wife and daughter and the entire city's police force, who are waiting for him to answer so that they can bust in and save everybody.

If he answers the phone, everybody lives, Jigsaw goes to jail and Wesley gets to safely return home to his princess bride. The whole movie, nay, the entire never-ending facepalm that is the Saw franchise, hinges on this one scene. His decision...

What Would Have Made More Sense:

There is one important element to this equation that we have yet to mention: how far away the cell phone is from Lawrence. Or should we say... how close it is.

While we admit we're not MacGyver, you don't need to be any kind of Gyver to think up creative ways to reach something lying only (ahem) one foot away if a body part depends on it. Consider the fact that, because they are chained to the sides of the room, the characters spend the entire movie trying to reach nearby objects through various improvised means.

In fact, one of the opening scenes involves Lawrence's Australian cellmate using his shirt and a bathtub stopper to shimmy over a tape recorder that lies much further away than that phone does now. In the pivotal scene, we nod in approval when Lawrence smartly begins to remove his own shirt... and then sigh heavily when he fashions it into a tourniquet instead of a phone lasso. Meanwhile, the phone keeps ringing.

Hell, we realize Lawrence isn't in the right state of mind. But surely, instead of screaming and crying in abject horror like the great actor he isn't, the cellmate could have lobbed one of the various shards of glass or broken tiles at his disposal just to nudge the damn phone closer to the other guy.

Of course, nothing beats the real kicker: After Lawrence cuts off his foot and frees himself, he still doesn't answer the fucking cell phone.

What Happened:

In the second film of the series, archetypically emo 18-year-old Bella Swan breaks up with her Anne Rice fantasy boyfriend Edward, so he turns into a bat and flies away. With Edward, the money-maker, off-screen for much of the film, the producers overcompensate with half a dozen tanned, muscular werewolves who wax their bodies and wear their jeans low enough that you don't have to use so much of your imagination.

However, once Edward mistakenly thinks that Bella committed suicide, he falls into a suicidal depression of his own. The whole plot of this film then surrounds Bella's frantic attempts to contact Edward and reveal that she is alive, so that he doesn't kill himself in turn. Just in case the homage isn't explicit enough, Bella is seen at one point being deeply engrossed in a copy of Romeo and Juliet.

What Would Have Made More Sense:

Shakespearean allusions aside, the threadbare scrunchie holding this whole goddamn movie together is the idea that Bella and Edward are unable to communicate with each other in the Information Age.

This gaping plot abyss could easily have been avoided had it been explained that there's some kind of ancient curse preventing vampires from using anything more technologically advanced than a wheelbarrow. We could suggest that, if not for the fact that Bella spends half the movie exchanging emails with Edward's sister.

The idea of Edward being led to believe that Bella killed herself when she didn't is a feat virtually impossible to pull off in the 21st century, never mind in the Twilight universe. For one, Edward is freaking telepathic. However, should Edward choose to check Bella's vitals the old fashioned way, here's an idea: Call her on her white Nokia 7360. Yes, a phone, like the one that was used to tell Edward about Bella's apparent suicide in the first place.

Unfortunately, this route has fewer bare-chested teenage boys. Unless, of course, Edward chose to Google them while checking up on Bella in Facebook chat.

1 Return of the Jedi

What Happened:

After retrieving Han Solo from the clutches from the vile pimp Jabba the Hutt, the Rebels send Han on a ridiculous mission to go undercover and blow up the deflector shield on Endor that's protecting a second Death Star. He fails. Fortunately, the entire Rebellion is saved by Ewoks.

What Would Have Made More Sense:

Blowing up the Death Star is supposed to be trickier this time around, on account of the deflector shield guarding the station.

See that little circle on Endor where the energy shield comes from? That the radar dish of the Death Star's SLD-26 planetary shield generator, sticking out of the jungle like a gigantic robotic mushroom.

The second Death Star, and with it the entire Imperial leadership, are protected only by a single radar tower which, according to the movie and our own eyes, is a thousand feet tall and unprotected by air. Ultimately, the Rebels don't need Han, the Ewoks or possibly even the Force to blow up the second Death Star. They just need an air raid. Hey, it's a good thing that their military is made up almost entirely of spaceships with lasers on them!

You know, like the one that later brought down the Super Star Destroyer Executor after, you guessed it, shooting out its unprotected shield generators.

This was a simple hit-and-run job made infinitely easier by the fact that the Emperor chose to park his whole goddamn navy on the "far side" of Endor as part of his brilliant trap that got him and everyone he knew killed. This meant no TIE fighters, Star Destroyers or even probe droids to stand between the Rebels and the Death Star. They could not have bribed their way into better conditions. Hell, the Battle of Endor could probably have happened off-screen.

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For more movies that we've got beef with, check out 8 Classic Movies That Got Away With Gaping Plot Holes. And find out why this stuff keeps happening, in 5 Gaping Plot Holes Hollywood Knows You Won't Notice.

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