6 Movie Plots Solved In Minutes With Common Sense
The whole fun of movies is that these characters' problems are not like our own. Where our biggest adventures involve trying to chase a cat out from under the bed with a broomstick, these people are running from robot explosions or cross-examining flamboyant serial killers. But lots of times, a little closer look at a movie plot reveals that they were making things way harder on themselves than necessary.
X-Men: Days Of Future Past - Xavier Forgot He Controls Minds
Days Of Future Past was the second delicate reboot of the X-Men franchise. In it, Charles Xavier sends Wolverine back in time to stop Mystique from assassinating Bolivar Trask and prevent a human-mutant war that eats the future. Xavier has a gentleman's agreement not to use his mental powers against Mystique, so this involves a lot more dialogue and espionage than you'd expect from a man who can control minds.
What Would Have Made More Sense:
Let's go along with the conceit that Xavier won't enter Mystique's mind and force her to step down. None of us are telepathic mutants and we can never fully understand their ways and customs. But ... couldn't he ignore Mystique and just go into the mind of Trask himself, then incept away all his mutant genocide thoughts?
You're already in the comments typing this, but the plot tries to account for it by starting the movie with Xavier's powers being broken. Except they don't stay that way for long. A few minutes after, you know, trying, he's mind-controlling people like crazy. He could have gone right up to Trask, shook his hand, and made him devote his life to, say, breaking the dildo-sitting world record. And to make it harder, he could have scanned the world for the man with the most flexible colon and planted it in his mind as well. It wouldn't have to be exactly that, we guess. The point is he needed something else to do with his life.
It's a movie about saving the world from hate, and they give the main character the one specific superpower that can do that directly. He works hard to make it complicated, but Professor X could do any number of clearly harmless, obviously beneficial things. In fact, once Xavier found out he was going to lose his hair, he could have planted an idea in some TV producer's brain to remake Star Trek, only with a bald Kirk so women in the future would find hairless men sexy. It sounds ridiculou- wait ... dear God ... are we, right now, living in the Days Of Future Past universe?
Billionaire weapons dealer Tony Stark is kidnapped by a terrorist organization called the "Ten Rings" but manages to survive by fixing the hole in his chest with 1,200 pounds of laser-blasting armor. Late in the movie, Stark discovers his business partner Obadiah Stane masterminded the kidnapping and was secretly supplying weapons to the terrorists. He is shocked! Horrified! And like all things will, this eventually led to a robot suit battle.
It's the comic book equivalent of slapping someone with a glove.
What Would Have Made More Sense:
Halfway through the movie, a female reporter showed Stark some pictures of Stark Industry weapons being used by the Ten Rings in Afghanistan. When Stark denied his involvement, she retorts by revealing that the weapon's shipment was officially authorized by Stark Industries:
So with this huge intel, all the reporter had to do was something she almost certainly had in mind all along: report it. She had a pile of information and a quote from Stark himself, surprised by it and not denying it. Stark Industries would have been immediately under investigation by every agency and news outlet. MSNBC's entire news cycle would be devoted to reading evil Stark documents and interviewing evil Stark employees. However, FOX News' editorial direction wouldn't change as they continued to demand, "Why the media can't just leave evil billionaires alone?"
It wouldn't take much effort to uncover the plot. Stane's evil schemes were right there on his computer, and there had to have been dozens of inept, bumbling employees working on his very suspicious personal projects. Plus, with Stark being kidnapped and tortured, that would make Stane the acting CEO and lead suspect before the first inspector arrived at one of their death warehouses.
"You know we back up everybody's files every week in case someone's hard drive
crashes, right? Pretty much every major company does."
But ... nothing like this ever happens. The journalist shows Stark the pictures and then never bothers to publicize them or even report them to her boss. Is it because Stark slept with her early in the movie, and she is still pining for him? It'd be like a reporter finding out Donald Trump's business partners had ties to ISIS, then just dropping it in hopes Trump would throw her some dick.
"Actually, this story is going to seem like small potatoes the moment the world finds out Odin is the one true God."
The Decepticons are searching for the AllSpark, a mysterious McGuffin that can turn ordinary objects into transformer objects. The AllSpark is on Earth, and the map to it is etched on a pair of glasses owned by Sam Witwicky's great-grandfather. In a way, it's genius -- with a map right on your glasses, you can drive to your space artifacts without having to do any folding or refolding.
The Decepticons initially deployed a stealthy spy robot, "Frenzy," inside Air Force One, where its space Internet sensors discovered Witwicky was selling the glasses on eBay. It then hacked eBay to discover Witwicky's location. Knowing by now everyone watching the movie would be bored beyond reason, the very next scene has poor Witwicky and his girlfriend, Mikaela Banes, running from vague, robot-like avalanches of metal shapes.
"Prompt payment and good communication, but buyer showed up at my house and attempted to murder me. Three stars."
What Would Have Made More Sense:
The glasses were on eBay. Couldn't the Decepticons just, you know, buy them? Like, couldn't that space hacker Frenzy just put in a bid? It shouldn't be that hard for a bunch of super advanced space robots to put the cash together, or fool PayPal into thinking they had.
And if coming up with the money was too difficult, the Decepticons still knew the address to Witwicky's house. They could have sent the same tiny robot in infiltrate his home security, which was probably easier to circumvent than Air Force One's. It could've stolen both the glasses and the AllSpark over the weekend without the government or the Autobots knowing anything about it. It's only through severe stupidity by every robot and filmmaker involved that this was anything other than, at worst, an online auction or at best, a roboburglary.
Ha ha ha! You know ... ha ha, you can't take another one if it's bad!!!"
Instead, the Decepticons deployed swarming piles of pots and pans to attack Witwicky. In military terms, it was like declaring war on Mexico in order to pick up a chalupa combo. The plan was so bad, it alerted both the Autobots and every government on Earth who managed to defeat the Decepticons using only 144 minutes of explosions.
Primal Fear - Everyone Who Knows Roy Forgets To Talk To The Press
If you haven't seen Primal Fear, its description is going to sound absurd. It was about a stuttering wimp of a boy named Aaron, who killed a priest and got away with it because the murder was committed by his split personality, Roy, who was forced to make homemade porno movies with the archbishop. The only thing that kept it from being ridiculous was Ed Norton's acting, which was especially amazing since Aaron was totally sane and made Roy up. So Norton was pretending to be a timid man pretending to be a crazy man in a good movie pretending to have a Mexican soap opera plot.
In the end, his lawyer (Richard Gere), who believed him, convinced a court Roy was a real thing and Aaron shouldn't be responsible for the murder. It wasn't the first time a good lawyer looked like a total asshole, but it's one of the most memorable.
What Would Have Made More Sense:
Roy's case had received national media attention. Everyone clicks on an article with the headline "Archbishop Murdered by Simpleton's Split Personality." But honestly, most of them click on the reaction piece, "3 Reasons Our Culture Says All Murderer Split Personalities Have to Be Men" or the reaction to that, "What Feminists Need to Learn About Murder" or the reaction to that, "Popular Split Personality Blogger's Home Address and Private Photos Leaked by #Roywasright Supporter."
The point is, everyone in the world was looking at it and talking about it. Which makes sense until you realize the media, lawyers, reporters, and FBI had all forgotten to look into Aaron's past. And apparently, every single person from Aaron's past forgot about him. It seems like one of his classmates or neighbors might have remembered him being a totally different guy every now and then. The closest thing they did to a background check was this conversation between Roy and his lawyer:
You from Kentucky, Aaron?
Yes, sir. I'm from Creekside.
Does it say that there?
No.
... and that's the end of the probing. Seriously. There was no further probing of his past, which is pretty lucky considering his plan hinged on convincing everyone he was a weak, stammering idiot. And even if no one from his past came forward, it'd probably be strange if there were no medical records for a man with this much wrong with him. All it would have taken was for one single person from Roy's past to turn on the TV or read a newspaper and Norton's plans would've sunk faster than Gere's face at the end.
Men In Black 3 - The MIB Forget Spaceships Exist
In this movie, Will Smith (Agent J) goes back in time to save his partner from being murdered in the past. While there, they work together to deploy a planetary shield to prevent conquering space squids. However, since it's 1969, the only way to get the shield into space is by piggybacking on the Apollo 11 rocket. You know, it might have been faster to say it involves every sci-fi concept that's ever been.
What Would Have Made More Sense:
Although we give this film mad props for neuralyzing all memory of that first terrible sequel ...
"That was not Men In Black II. It was only swamp gas."
... the first film sort of slaughters the plot to Men In Black 3. In the third one, our heroes need to deploy the ArcNet Shield in orbit, hence the film's climax atop the Saturn V rocket. Although this makes for fine cinema with an emotional ending, it kind of ignores how the MIB already had access to spaceships in 1969.
For example, remember these guys?
In the first Men In Black, we learn the 1964 World's Fair was a cover-up for UFOs, hence its suspicious location in Queens. Not only do these flying saucers still work, we see them work in the first movie. All Agents J and K had to do in Men In Black 3 was drive to Flushing Meadows, and boom -- problem solved.
Actually, J and K may not have even had to deploy it themselves. New York was loaded with aliens in 1969, among them the alien they received the ArcNet from. Why not ask one of them to deploy the shield on their way home that evening? The point is, gunfighting their way to the top of the worst spaceship on the planet was a dumb but awesome idea. And honestly, if you're fixing a timeline, "dumb but awesome" is probably the combination we're most comfortable with.
In the 2009 movie, which you may recall not being very good, Skynet sends yet another cyborg after John Connor, this time without any time travel. It's a pretty complicated scheme since the secret cyborg isn't aware he's a cyborg, and his plan starts with a random explosion that reveals his secret to everyone. So he's a robot, but a nice one, which leads to the idea of using him in a plan to sneak into Skynet. It's important to know that after Terminator 2, all Terminator plots were written by putting books into a food processor until it starts a fire, then asking firefighters to write a film as they put out the blaze.
In this particular Terminator movie, the cyborg unwittingly leads Connor into a trap, which was Skynet's plan all along. Luckily, that seemed to be the end of the plan, so Connor manages to get out by fighting a terminator and leaving.
What Would Have Made More Sense:
Almost anything, but seriously, didn't Skynet capture this guy earlier in the movie?
For those who were lucky enough to miss this movie, that's Kyle Reese, Connor's father (by way of time semination). Skynet knew he was Connor's dad since we see Reese was the No. 1 target on their list. And to be clear, he was on the same list as Connor and other members of the resistance being killed, which means this was absolutely not a "keep alive" list. So why did they?
They captured the father of the leader of the humans; they don't bother to robokill him or roboterrogate him. They simply throw him in a cellar. Maybe there was some step of the bizarre plan where they lured Connor into their base and tricked him into kissing his own dad, but we never got to see it. It was merely pointless stupidity. Or maybe they knew, depending on which rules of time travel you go by, that killing Reese would retroactively erase the first and second Terminator from the universe, which was an act of evil even robots are not capable of.
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We've got so many plots nailed, someone should pay us to write a damn movie. Like where's all the CTRL+F usage in The Matrix? And why didn't Peter Parker seek medical attention after he's having the worst acid trip ever? See what we're talking about in 23 Movie Plots That Could Have Been Solved In Minutes and 30 Famous Movie Plots Solved In Minutes By Common Sense.
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