6 Heroic Movie Deaths That Could Have Been Easily Avoided

6 I Am Legend -- Robert Neville

In I Am Legend, 99 percent of the human population has been turned into zombies because an airborne disease that, ironically enough, was caused by curing cancer. That's how you know this movie is deep: It's got cancer and zombies.

Luckily for mankind, Will Smith is Robert Neville -- a scientist who is part of the one percent who are naturally immune to zombification -- and he's looking to cure the zombie population. He does this by kidnapping and experimenting on said zombies in his basement. But the zombies aren't cool with being experimented on, and they track him down looking for sweet zombie revenge.

Neville's got two useless sidekicks with him, and as they all run into his lab to hide, they discover that he's finally found a cure and can now save the whole world. Awesome. Well, it would be if there weren't a few dozen zombies chasing them looking for the previously mentioned sweet zombie revenge. Fortunately, Neville has a fortified coal chute and some grenades in his lab. So he takes a sample of the cured zombie's blood, gives it to the lead useless female and tells her "the cure's in your blood," then locks the two sidekicks in the coal chute that we're explicitly told can easily fit all three of them. Finally, he blows himself and the zombies up with the grenade.

Wait a second ...

This is ridiculous for two reasons, the main one being that he easily could have pulled the pin, thrown the grenade and also fit into the coal chute and, you know, survived. He says he's staying behind because the zombies "won't stop," but judging from the explosion caused by that one grenade, there's no one left to keep going after them.

Apparently, in 2012 grenade explosions are going to be huge, as the explosion seems to kill everyone in the room who's not in a coal chute. So setting off the grenade and then running would have been the same as setting off the grenade and just standing there.

Some will argue that Neville was sacrificing himself so the zombies would be appeased and the sidekicks could get away with the cure. This leads to problem No. 2, which is that Neville is a supergenius who took months to find a cure. So what are the chances that anyone else among the one percent of survivors will understand anything of what he did to create the cure (and with only one vial of cured blood to work from)?

When the sidekicks arrive at the last human colony on Earth, we see the lead female handing the blood to the first person she meets, but for all we know, that guy's the local plumber and nobody's going to know jack shit about curing the rest of the world without Will Smith, who just killed himself for absolutely no reason. So he basically gave the world a chance at returning to normal and then screwed everyone over immediately afterward. Thanks.

X2 is the shining star among the X-Men movies, full of actual plot and character development and everything. But it unfortunately ends on a low note when Jean Grey sacrifices herself for, really, no reason at all.

At the climax of the movie, we find our heroes stuck in a valley with a dam that's about to break, a ship that won't fly and about a dozen uber-powerful mutants, of which Jean is apparently the only one strong enough to save everyone. So in order to do this, she leaves the ship, fixes it with her mind, lifts it into the air while blocking the water from the breaking dam and then heroically gets swept away when she releases the water after the plane is clear.

But the only reason Jean is able to save them at all is because she senses the water from the burst dam coming a full two minutes before it arrives. She looks back at everyone, teary-eyed, and takes the time to slowly limp off the plane, lock everyone else inside and send some creepy good-bye messages through Professor X then fixes the plane from the outside while she simultaneously blocks the water.

Wait a second ...

Why did she need to leave the plane at all?

Jean's powers are telekinetic -- she thinks about something and it happens. Nothing we know about her powers says the walls of the plane would block them, and even if they did, she could have just stood in the cockpit and knocked out the windows. If she had immediately started fixing the plane and told everyone to shut up while she concentrated, they probably could have been half way to Acapulco before the water even got to them.

We didn't just make up this solution, by the way -- it's the one she actually uses in the Marvel novelization of the movie. The book had a different ending where, lo and behold, Jean fixes the ship from inside and doesn't die needlessly, and they all live happily ever after. But if that had happened, we wouldn't have been able to see Wolverine and Cyclops hug out their differences, and we definitely wouldn't have wanted to miss that.

Star Trek: Nemesis is a film that gets picked on a lot, mostly due to the plot holes, cheesy lines, horrible pacing, total lack of entertainment value and rainbow pleather-wearing Picard clone played by Tom Hardy.

Perhaps the most perplexing part of Nemesis, though, is Data's obvious determination to kill himself. Near the end of the movie, we find Picard stranded on the enemy ship because, after Picard beamed over to try to destroy the villain's doomsday weapon, the transporters conveniently broke. Data does an admittedly awesome jump across space to the other ship and takes a one-man transporter with him. He arrives just in time to save Picard, who for the record has not won a hand-to-hand fight at any point in the Star Trek series, which makes us wonder why he keeps getting sent into these high-stakes situations alone.

Anyway, with the captain successfully rescued from the guy who was already dying, Data sends Picard back to the Enterprise with his portable transporter and then fires a phaser into the enemy ship's huge weapon, blowing it up, killing himself and saving them all.

Wait a second ...

The thing is, the fact that he's an android actually makes this decision more puzzling. He should be able to process every possible avenue of escape in a microsecond, and he has no "go out in a blaze of glory" impulse programmed into his software. Among the things that should have occurred to him:

Why did it come down to this one personal transporter (and frankly we're a little skeptical that there was only one of those things available on an entire ship equipped with matter replicators that can create anything, instantly)? Sure, the regular transporters on the Enterprise were broken, but the Enterprise is full of shuttles that, among their many features, have their own transporters on board. We see them get used all the time in the show. So there's one alternative.

But hell, he's an android -- he could have jumped through a window into space itself and still lived. He totally doesn't need to breathe.

Some would say that Data had to stay behind to fire his phaser into the weapon, but those phasers have a feature that lets you basically use them like time bombs -- many a Star Trek plot point has been resolved by a phaser left behind on "manual overload."

By the way, this ridiculous death was said to be because Brent Spiner didn't feel he could play an ageless character anymore as he got older. Well, that would be fine if not for the fact that everyone knew this was the last TNG movie, so there wouldn't have been much difference between killing Data and giving him the ability to think, Hey, we have more than one transporter, don't we? and letting him live.

This becomes even more stupid when you consider that in this movie, they introduced another android, named B4, that looks just like Data and survives, which means that killing Data off served exactly no purpose other than making him look fatally absentminded.

3 The Iron Giant -- The Giant

The Iron Giant tells the story of a boy named Hogarth (because that's what kids are named, right? Like goblin wizards?) befriending a huge, extremely dangerous yet innocent robot. When government officials find out about the huge robot roaming around the town of Rockwell, Maine, they rightfully get pretty worked up, thinking a Russian or alien invasion is upon them, and try to destroy it.

Hogarth manages to prove that the Giant is friendly as long as he's not attacked, but there's one douche bag who's determined to blow this bitch up, and he orders a nearby submarine to fire a missile at the Giant that's going to incinerate everything in sight. Of course, the problem with this is that at that moment, the Giant is hanging out in the middle of a town full of people, including all the military personnel.

Then, in a moment so sad that it probably doomed the film's box office prospects, the Giant flies up into the air and lets the missile destroy him in order to save the town. Seriously, there's probably a Guinness World Record waiting out there for anyone who can watch this whole movie and not start bawling at least six times.

Wait a second ...

Remember that the reason the military wanted to destroy him was because when the Giant was threatened, he transformed into this:

We're seeing a minimum of five laser cannons on this bad boy, not including that spike on the top, which we can only assume is a top-notch espresso maker. So the Giant's loaded up with enough weapons to destroy a small nation, yet he flies right into the missile later on and lets it blow him up into itty-bitty pieces.

So why not just bust out your laser cannon and blow that missile up while it's still in the air? According to the movie, the Giant can activate his weapons only when he feels that there's a threat, which we're pretty sure a soul-crushing, city-destroying rocket qualifies as. Therefore, he should have been able to blow that thing up long before it got to him without getting himself destroyed in the process, and countless dudes wouldn't have all had to lie to their girlfriends about how it was our allergies acting up that was making our eyes water during the end of the movie.

Enemy at the Gates is about a sniper battle in the middle of World War II between Russian Jude Law and Nazi Ed Harris. That's basically all the awesome you need to know, but there is also a less awesome subplot about friends Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes fighting over the same girl.

During the course of the movie, Fiennes tries to get Law court-martialed and accidentally gets a kid who was helping them spy on the Germans killed. He ends up feeling kind of shitty about both of these things. Near the end of the film he goes for a little redemption, which you can guess he does not survive.

Specifically, when Fiennes and Law go out together looking for the German sniper, Fiennes admits that he's been a pretty terrible friend and he wants to help Law out. As a final act of heroism and friendship, he offers to show Law "where the major is" by standing in front of a window and letting himself get shot to reveal the other sniper's position. And by shot, we mean in the head, right between the eyes.

Wait a second ...

This act totally fulfills its purpose in that Law manages to spot and kill the major. But ... if all he needed was for a head to poke out a window and get shot, then there were about 2 million bodies lying around with perfectly good heads. Why not prop one of those bastards up in front of the window?

It's not quite as heroic, but surely coming up with the awesome "lure him with a corpse" plan will get him some karma points, right?

1 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring -- Gandalf

Gandalf kind of cheats the "dramatic death" thing by coming back in the second film of the series, but he clearly didn't know that when he chose to stay behind to fight the Balrog so the rest of the Fellowship could get away (though the Fellowship just stands there and watches the fight instead of actually getting away).

Actually, the Fellowship seems to have a good 30-second head start on the Balrog, as everyone else is up the stairs and almost out the door before they even notice Gandalf hanging out in the middle of the bridge waiting for the flaming death beast to arrive.

Gandalf's plan seems to consist entirely of "break bridge so YOU SHALL NOT PASS." He starts talking smack to the Balrog about what a badass wizard he is, again probably to give the not-running-away Fellowship time to leave, and when that doesn't make the monster back down, he cracks the bridge as the Balrog is crossing, causing it to fall into the dark chasm below, directly in front of him. The Balrog is so close, in fact, that it's able to grab him as it goes down, and bam, no more wizard protection for the Fellowship.

Wait a second ...

There was no reason Gandalf had to wait that long to break the bridge, or break it from the center like he did.

If he had crossed all the way, broken the bridge and then kept running before the Balrog caught up to them, they all would have been in the clear, and they wouldn't have lost their wizard for the better part of two movies. Or even if he did exactly what he did but then ran away, he would have been fine. Instead, he waited in the very center for as long as humanly possible before cracking that sucker, and then he just hung around as it fell, even though goblins were still shooting arrows at them from across the chasm.

Then again, maybe we can blame the Fellowship for this one. If they had run away like they were supposed to, maybe Gandalf wouldn't have felt the need to drag out this bridge-destroying thing for as long as possible and gotten himself temporarily killed.

For more fictional deaths that were head-scratchers, check out The 5 Most Easily Avoidable Movie Deaths. Or check out some real-life examples, in 6 People Who Died In Order To Prove A (Retarded) Point.

And stop by Linkstorm to see which columnist sacrificed himself for the benefit of all mankind. (Hint: It was none of them.)

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