7 Movies With Huge Plot Holes Nobody Noticed
The chilling realization that Verbal Kint was Keyser Soze, the slow reveal that Bruce Willis was a ghost in The Sixth Sense, the realization that Bruce Willis was a ghost in every movie he's ever been in -- these are just some of Hollywood's great movie twists. But as we've discussed before, pretzel-like narratives like these can fall apart under the barest modicum of consideration. In fact, a bunch of movies you just saw (SPOILERS A-COMING) secretly didn't make a lick of sense, such as...
Rogue One -- The Big Death Star Reveal Turns The Empire Into Morons (And The Rebels Into Dicks)
As with any prequel, Rogue One was in a precarious position. Any mistakes or story wrinkles it left behind could have had serious consequences to the larger Star Wars universe as we know it. Wisely, the movie decided to go full Hamlet at the end, killing off all of those loveable new characters, sparing us a Rogue One Holiday Special in which Sassy Droid 9000 and NBA All-Star Kyrie Irving teach gangster slug Jabba The Hutt the true meaning of Christmas.
But the movie couldn't hold back from adding at least one major twist to the Star Wars mythology, when it revealed that the Death Star's explosive weakness wasn't just some giant engineering cock-up; it was intentionally put there as a trap by Jyn's dad, Darth Hannibal Lecter.
Sadly, this means the previous "a Wookie got diarrhea" explanation is no longer canon.
The Problem is ...
On one hand, this addition to the franchise makes a tremendous amount of sense, explaining away something that's bugged both nerds and exhaust engineers for decades. But solving that little mystery creates a lot of other issues. For one thing, it makes the Empire look like a bunch of dum dums.
Think about it. Rogue One ends like 20 minutes before Episode IV, and the Empire spends almost the entire movie trying to puzzle out if their engineer is a traitor or not. By the end, it's pretty damn clear that Erso did compromise the Death Star, so why the hell do they keep using it? Especially baffling is their complete lack of concern when the Rebels attack. This scene originally played as an example of Tarkin's hubris -- but factoring in the events of Rogue One, it feels like he's either willfully ignorant, or has been huffing some galactic paint thinner.
"Do I remember what happened last week? No, it felt like I was barely there."
And as for the Rebels? Galen Erso should be the hero of the Rebellion. They should want to erect statues of him in their hippie commune rainforest base -- instead he's never mentioned again. Same goes for the team of people who sacrificed their lives to steal the plans, who don't even get a quick shout-out because, according to these jackholes, the plans were simply provided by Princess Leia.
It's a classic " The Big Salad" scenario.
So Rogue One turned the Empire into morons, the Rebels into a bunch of jerks, and Princess Leia into every glory-stealing middle manager you've ever had.
The Harry Potter movies have their fair share of twists; from the reveal that Harry himself is a horcrux, to the strong implication that Hogwarts is just an ordinary prep school with a severe gas leak. So not surprisingly, J.K. Rowling's latest prequel Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them contains a similarly giant twist. In the end, Colin Farrell's character, an ordinary agent of the American Magical Congress...
Read the Constitution. It's in there.
... is revealed to be the bad guy. He's secretly been encouraging an angst-ridden teen to turn into a giant fart cloud monster, ruin a bunch of neighborhoods, and expose the magic community to the world. Yeah, it's that kind of movie. Then at the very end, in true Scooby-Doo fashion, they peel away his disguise to reveal that he's actually...
Johnny Depp?
Playing a young Colonel Sanders?
Okay, it's actually the famous evil wizard Grindelwald -- he's basically Voldemort, just a bit less so.
The Problem is...
Colin Farrell's plan makes sense if it's devised by a frustrated bureaucrat, but Grindelwald is supposed to be an incredibly dangerous dark wizard. If he wanted to fuck up a few Brooklyn neighbourhoods, or expose the magical world to Muggles, couldn't he have just done it himself? Why go to the trouble of enlisting a frustrated teen? That would be like if Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows began with Voldemort loitering around a YMCA looking for someone to do his work for him.
"Hey kids, y'all wanna learn dark magic? Aw, c'mon, don't call 911."
More confusingly, Potter fans already know the name Grindelwald from the original books. He's mentioned as Dumbledore's friend who turned evil, and more significantly, he owned the Elder Wand -- the most powerful wand in the world.
Seen here, able to use it to do anything way before he was an old man.
So how did the guy who owns the most powerful wand get caught by a handful of cops and a wacky animal wrangler? Sure, he wouldn't want to use the Elder Wand all the time when he's wearing his Colin Farrell suit -- but when the alternative is a lifetime sniffing Dementor farts at Azkaban, yeah, maybe time to bust it out, Grindy-boy.
Last summer's Star Trek Beyond found the Enterprise crashing -- again -- and the crew being held prisoner by the monstrous Krall.
A metaphorical and literal-ish dickhead.
After Kirk and the gang escape in a crashed 100 year-old Starfleet ship, they make a shocking discovery: Krall was the captain of this ship. Not only that, he didn't always look like a malevolent crocodile phallus; he used to be Idris Elba.
With all that heavy makeup, this seems like a waste of the world's limited supply of Idris Elba.
It turns out that Krall and the rest of his gang of space mutants were the surviving crew of the USS Franklin, which crash-landed on this planet a century ago. Luckily, they stumbled on an alien machine that granted them immortality, at the small cost of making them all look like Freddy Krueger's ballsack.
The Problem is...
Kirk and company, as well as another escaped prisoner, Jaylah, use the Franklin as their home base when hiding from Krall. Which makes all sorts of sense if Krall doesn't know the ship exists. But he was the captain of that ship, and one of the key job duties of a captain is knowing when your goddamn spaceship exists. Even more conspicuous, Jaylah, who has been hiding in the Franklin for years, built a cloaking device to camouflage it. So Krall somehow didn't notice that his giant spaceship magically became invisible?
"Hey, I was wondering where that went."
It gets dumber! Recall that Kirk and company manage to repair the mostly functioning ship and fly away. Why couldn't Krall and his crew do that? Maybe if they had put a little more energy into fixing their ship and a little less into turning themselves into H.R. Giger's version of The Wire, they could have just gone back home.
Inferno -- Felicity Jones Is Evil, But Also Partnered With The One Guy That Could Stop Her
The movies based on Dan Brown's bestselling alternatives to airplane naps have a perfect balance of Tom Hanks solving ancient puzzles and Tom Hanks running around with a mullet. The latest, Inferno, finds puzzle fetishist Robert Langdon waking in a hospital with amnesia, before teaming up with a young doctor played by Felicity Jones to stop a deadly virus created by a dead billionaire.
Once again, Forrest Gump must awkwardly jog through museums to save the world.
In a shocking twist, as soon as Langdon figures out where the virus is, Felicity Jones double-crosses him!
Leaving him trapped in a sewer like a common ninja.
It turns out that she's the billionaire's girlfriend. This guy -- this fucking guy -- left behind a series of clues in case of his death, so that she could find the virus and release it, which she's now doing because she is an amazing girlfriend. She even engineered Tom Hanks' amnesia through chemical means and built a fake hospital, all to trick him into helping her.
How many evil teamsters did that take?
The Problem is...
Let's run through the bad guy's plan for a moment. Maybe two.
It was a hell of plan is what we're saying.
The kind of plan where you have to analyze all the hidden clues.
This guy engineered the most devastating virus of all time, got himself killed, and his fail-safe was an elaborate series of fun clues for his girlfriend to follow? That's the plot of a rom-com, not plan B for an apocalypse. Also one of the clues was an ancient artifact Langdon stole from a museum. Why would one of the clues be in something you need to steal? Wouldn't you want to avoid as much police attention as possible?
And the rest of the plot ... it's just a lot of work, isn't it? Not only is he asking his girlfriend to engage in a cross-country scavenger hunt, he also needs her to drug and abduct the world's foremost clue-solver and construct a fake hospital ward for him. Jesus, couldn't this guy have just put the details of his plan in a safe deposit box or something?
We're saving the best for last. Because the final destination of all this madness is an ancient cistern, where, like a baggy of weed in a freshman's toilet tank, the deadliest virus in the world is just bobbing about.
It's lacking a certain visual drama.
If this guy was so committed to releasing the virus, why not just release it when he put it there? Otherwise you're just making two trips for yourself and inviting the possibility that Tom Hanks (or if he's under the weather, Nicolas Cage) will show up and school your ass at puzzle-solving.
Presumably pitched as "Home Alone if Kevin McCallister was a sinister old blind man," Don't Breathe is the horror hit that tapped into America's thirst for movies about victimizing old people.
At the end of the movie, our hero Rocky (if you consider a girl who robs blind people a "hero") manages to escape the house by hitting the blind man over the head. Nice. This sends him falling down a flight of stairs, whereupon he shoots himself for good measure.
It's the dark turn the producers of Mr. Magoo never had the stones to take.
As Rocky and her sister are at the train station preparing to start their new life, the seemingly happy ending is interrupted by a news report. Surprise -- the old man is alive! And the media is portraying him as a hero who had to fend off two nasty burglars -- that would be the corpses of Rocky's friends and accomplices. This understandably freaks Rocky out, because it means this may not be over after all.
Don't Breathe 2 - Breathe Even Lesser
The Problem is...
Well, there's another, twistier twist earlier in the movie. Perhaps anticipating that the audience won't root for teens trying to rip off a kindly, Mr. Rogers-esque old man, the filmmakers replaced cardigans and friendliness with rape and torture. It turns out this particular blind man had kidnapped and imprisoned a young woman. She had earlier run over his pregnant daughter, so he's now keeping her prisoner so he can impregnate her.
Again, shame on the producers of Mr. Magoo for never exploring this.
Now think about that ending -- the cops came to the scene, attended to the old man, tidy up some dead bodies, and somehow don't notice the basement rape dungeon? Don't you poke around a little when you've got bodies on the ground? "Hey, what's behind this creepy fucking door, sir?" The lead story on the news should have been "Creepy Old Asshole is Going to Jail," because there's no way the police wouldn't notice what was going on. Maybe the ending was a metaphor -- maybe, just maybe, everybody's blind.
Westworld -- Ford's Master Plan Depended On The Incompetence Of His Own Employees
HBO's Westworld took the straightforward story of a robot-sex-fueled mid-life crisis and turned it into a convoluted web of multiple timelines and secret robots, cramming in so many twists you'll want to give your significant other the Turing test by the end of it.
The biggest twist comes in the last episode, when Anthony Hopkins' character Ford reveals his master plan -- he's been controlling everything, all in an intricately orchestrated effort to kickstart a robot uprising. And his degree of control is impressive; he even plans, down to the minute, when Dolores and Teddy will arrive at a certain beach where he's staging an elegant dinner party.
Of course, you don't start a successful sex-robot empire without being a good planner.
Ford's been secretly working to prove that the robots possess consciousness, and does so by allowing himself to be murdered by Dolores.
Will getting murdered at the end of a speech become the new mic-drop?
Not only that, but rebellious brothel madam Maeve's militant escape was also pre-programmed by Ford, down to the words she chooses.
"Suck my robot-conscience in heck, you wackadoodle jamokes!"
The Problem is...
Okay, so Ford may have programmed Maeve's behavior, but what about those two schmucks that help her? Maeve's plan totally depends on the fact that two (human, probably) Westworld employees will be totally cool with breaking the rules to help her. Which means Ford was literally betting everything on the incompetence of his own employees.
We guess this is what performance reviews are for?
Maeve blackmails the pair into helping her escape -- an act which involves a whole lot of murdering their co-workers -- and in exchange she won't expose them for secretly letting other employees fuck the unconscious robots. How could Ford predict that these two guys would somehow think this was a reasonable exchange, and go along with this murder-filled insanity without, say, warning someone?
Ya fucked up, Felix.
There's also the issue of Ford timing all of this to culminate at his fancy party. How the hell could he have done that? The dinner was scheduled well in advance, and Dolores was with the Man in Black, a human (again, probably). There would be no way to predict how long exactly it would take Ed Harris to schlep out to that Church.
"If we don't get there soon, they'll be mad. Or all dead. Or whatever."
Basically there are a crap-ton of variables Ford couldn't control, but he somehow managed to have them all perfectly come together in time for a black-tie gala. Even Lex Luthor wouldn't have been able to schedule all his wacky schemes around a goddamn dinner reservation.
And speaking of Lex Luthor...
Batman v Superman -- Lex Luthor Was Driving Batman Crazy But Somehow Doesn't Care About His Secret Identity
Batman v Superman had a fair amount of surprising twists, ranging from Batman and Superman learning their moms both have the same name, to Doomsday showing up at the end, to the fact that Holly Hunter was somehow sipping from a jar of urine without noticing.
Seems legit.
One twist that the movie doesn't dwell on for too long involves those mysterious letters sent to Bruce Wayne saying "you let your family die."
"I didn't let them! I told them specifically not to die!"
At first it seems as if the letters were written by the Joker. But later when Lex Luthor confronts Superman, he reveals that he's the one who's been sending the letters, slowly driving Batman to Gordon Ramsay-levels of irrational hotheadedness, to the point where he's looking to pick a fight with a goddamn Kryptonian.
The Problem is...
Wait a minute, those letters were sent to Bruce Wayne. So Lex knows Batman's identity too? It's not hard to surmise how Lex figured out Superman is Clark Kent; the man has access to a Kryptonian computer, and is likely familiar with how glasses work. But he never even mentions how he figured out Batman's identity. Presumably LexCorp developed some kind of Chin Recognition Software.
And while one could argue that Lex Luthor may have been able to do something more sinister with the knowledge of these two superheroes' identities than force them to street fight in the skids, even accepting that, the end is particularly baffling. After Lex's plan fails, he's arrested, jailed, and roughed up a bit by Batman. So what's to stop him from telling the world these guys' secret identities?
It's probably not a sense of guilt or fair play.
Imagine discovering two of the greatest held secrets in the world and not doing anything about it. Batman Forever had to have a whole scene showing how the Riddler had forgotten Bruce Wayne's secret. Superman once found the dumbest possible way to keep his. So what happened here? Was it just a terrible movie?
It was? Oh.
Behind every awful movie is the idea for a good one. Old man Indiana Jones discovers aliens. Good in theory, bad in practice. Batman fights Superman. So simple, but so bad. Are there good translations of these movies hidden within the stinking turds that saw the light of day? Jack O'Brien hosts Soren Bowie, Daniel O'Brien, and Katie Willert of 'After Hours' on our next live podcast to find an answer as they discuss their ideal versions of flops, reboots, and remakes. Tickets are $7 and can be purchased here!
For more just super lazy writing, check out 6 Movie Plots That Could Have Been Solved In Minutes and 6 Huge Movie Plot Twists That Caused Even Bigger Plot Holes.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out 4 Plot Holes You Didn't Notice In Your Favorite Movies, and other videos you won't see on the site!
Follow us on Facebook, and let's be best friends forever.
