“We’ve almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!” The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
“Senator Amidala is in a coma. Even if she recovers, she will never be the same and may not live long.” But no… George had to have his god-damned funeral scene, even if it demanded Simone Biles levels of mental gymnastics to save Carrie Fisher’s most emotionally resonant moment from ROTJ, as well as one of the more intriguing OT lore dumps.
Bonus points if a scene was scripted or filmed and got cut.
“So, we started using teleportation now.”
- Everyone in Game of Thrones from season 6 onward.
Did you just win the thread? I think you just won the thread.
Your comment’s weird, but not downvote level weird? Certainly not more downvotes than upvotes level weird… are people reading this comment in different ways?
It’s a bit Reddit-y, that’s probably why.
It’s probably just a “this comment could have been an upvote” situation.
Probably one of the most famous examples, but the robots in The Matrix originally kept humans around as wetware CPUs using their spare brainpower. Studio execs forced the Wachowskis to change it to them using humans as batteries, even though that makes no sense. Agent Smith possessing someone in the real world in the sequels would have made a ton more sense with the original explanation.
That doesn’t really work either. Human brains are not great at computing unless you are looking for “good enough,” results, and only on some pretty narrow fields, facial/speech recognition, some physics interactions, etc. But worse than that… we’re kind of using them. If they wanted us to compute, the whole function of the Matrix is just taking up run cycles. And you can’t just coopt them during sleep, we need the rest periods ,or we literally die. Only one answer makes sense to me, it’s a nature preserve. They didn’t want to be responsible for destroying their creators, and the only other sapient species known to exist. So they build the Matrix to keep us docile. Then, the energy reclamation actually makes some sense. They’re never going to be net positive, but assuming they are having difficulty keeping their society powered, they would be incentivesed to reclaim every watt of power they could from us to reduce our burden on their grid.
Human brains are excellent at computing certain things that are almost impossible for a regular computer. Having worked for years on computer vision I can tell you how hard it is to make computers realize simple stuff, heck, you need massive server farms just to do a basic object recognition that any 3 years old can already do. Sure, you can train a simple AI to recognize some objects, but it will never (currently) be as many objects or as precise as a person can instantly recognize.
The truth is human brains are excellent at what they evolved to do, i.e. pattern recognition. So much so that when trying to figure out data it’s usually easier to plot the data in many different ways to see if something shows up. In fact usually when you try to do cluster analysis the first machine result is, let’s say not great, but you can see that things are wrong and adjust the parameters.
As for your other point your brain does this automatically, they can just put a billboard with the thing they want analyzed and your brain (and millions of others) will give them the answer. Or they could use our dreams, even during sleep our brains are still active, and they could run any scenarios then. There are many other ideas, e.g. people playing videogames inside the matrix are actually controlling robots, or people working in forklifts are actually piloting construction robots in the real world, etc.
The original CPU idea was excellent, but computers weren’t so ubiquitous back then, and the producers thought that the audience wouldn’t understand it.
Humans are great computers, we’re just not digital. Our brains are definitely analogue computers, where closer neurons or stronger synapse connections can mean higher voltage signals from one cell to another. This is a very powerful and nuanced form of computing. It’s not great for exact calculation of numbers, but it is great for interpreting data, even extremely large data sets. Human brains (many animal brains really) are also really fantastic at image processing in particular.
If it’s worthwhile to have a dedicated video card in your pc, then likewise, it would probably be worthwhile to have human brains in your evil robot hivemind. It would make some kids of processing much more efficient.
I’ve seen this posted a few times but I could never find a source. I think this is just what people want to believe!
I love the explanation. “Human body heat combined with a firm of fusion generates electricity.”
So they have Fusion, and yet they’re relying on body heat. Yeah, makes a lot of sense everyone knows the human body is several hundred thousand degrees.
Also instead of Neo Jesus, when he kills the squiddies outside of the matrix, that should’ve been because they were still in there but Zion and co didn’t realise there was another layer to go.
Instead we got Revolutions.
Disagree, the “another layer” thing would be extremely lazy writing.
Disagree, the “another layer” thing would be extremely lazy writing.
And “Neo has actual superpowers for no reason” wasn’t?
What do you mean “no reason”? IMO it was executed and explained well.
Neo having super powers in the matrix was explained. Not how he had them in “real life”.
In Frozen 2, the elemental spirits have trapped a kingdom in a magical barrier for many years as punishment for building a dam to stop a river. The day is “saved” by an earth spirit incidentally destroying the dam and freeing the river. There was this whole thing about the spirits calling out to Elsa to come and save them, but apparently the spirits had the ability the whole time to break the dam. The whole plot was basically pointless. Maybe instead they needed Elsa to break the dam, or needed to combine their powers.
Not going to pretend that Frozen 2 is my favorite movie, but having seen it dozens of times with my kids…
The dam wasn’t the problem. It was a symbol of the problem, which was the rift between the 2 peoples living in such close proximity. Nature is indifferent, people are not. Nature doesn’t care if there’s a dam, it just becomes a different habitat. People should have cared about impacting each other’s way of life.
Nature removed the dam, and the barrier to the people coming together, when the responsible parties decided to right their wrongs and consider each other, regardless of the high cost. Even if that’s not the case, the story remains that nature’s power has to be harnessed to a purpose by people. But I think they were going for the former.
Anyway, not a great movie, but also not a plot hole.
Pirates of the Caribbean it was pointed out Bootstap was strapped to a cannon and dropped into the sea but the logical conclusion that by lifting the curse Will had to kill his own father was never a plot point. not exactly a plot hole just a missed opportunity.
I kinda think that if you can imagine a one-line fix to a plot hole, it isn’t really a plot hole.
I remember someone insisting to me that there was this huge plot hole in the film of the Fellowship of the Ring, because Merry and Pippin don’t get told about what Frodo and Sam are actually doing until the Council of Elrond, but still willingly run around risking life and limb to help them. Now, not only is this not a plot hole in itself (I’m pretty sure I’d help anyone fleeing a demonic horseman, just on principle, never mind if that person was my lifelong friend/cousin), it’s also quite obvious that they could have been told everything offscreen. The audience didn’t need to hear all that explanation again, five minutes after we first heard it.
A lot of plot holes people like to complain about are basically of this nature. ‘Can you imagine a fix?’ Yep, easily. ‘Did the audience need to hear it?’ Nope, because I could easily imagine it. ‘Well, there you go, then.’
DBZ fan. Lots of things:
- SSJ4 could be canon. It just requires a full moon and a tail. When all the Saiyans in-universe don’t have them, it’s kinda impossible…
- Becoming SSJ easily (Goten and Trunks) is easily explained by saying that because their fathers already were SSJ by the time of conception, it had become a natural reflex to them, rather than a barrier that needed to be broken.
- They’ve been able to blow up planets since the days of 9000 power levels, probably even with 1000, yet with power levels of 1B the fights are largely the same. Explain this as some sort of ki concentration, where your energy has…more energy per energy, or something?
- Goku’s “telepathy” was always just him feeling someone’s energy, and feeling how flustered and overwhelmed they are. He does a similar thing to Future Trunks, but it wasn’t called telepathy, it was “searching his emotions” - another BS way of saying “shit, you don’t look good, what’s up!”.
- The Dragon Balls take a year to charge, but are often usable pretty much right away - the RR army get them 8 months after they were used, and despite being used to revive Goku the Earth balls are used basically a month later because Kami is revived. Maybe just explain it as Kami needing time to revive them as they’re intrinsically linked? It Kami goes on bed rest, you’ll have Dragon Balls in a few weeks…
- Launch didn’t disappear. She married Tien, they have kids, and she stays at home to raise them.
I could probably write a book to “fix” the show, but these fixes just tend to annoy fans because they want a “canon” answer to a show that is hilariously broken.
The Kessel Run being measured in distance rather than time could have been solved with a closeup shot instead of wide angle.
The way it’s scripted, Han thinks he’s got two local yokels and is feeding them a line. Obi-Wan, of course, is not a yokel, and reacts to that info with a “come on, dude” kind of look. Alec Guinness does do it, but not in a noticeable way. If there was a closeup shot, it would have worked. The wider shot that went into the film makes his reaction barely noticeable.
This leads to decades of treating Han’s line as actual truth and trying to figure out what he meant. Legends and Disney canon provided basically the same answer. Kessel is surrounded by black holes, and skimming closer to the event horizon would mean taking a shorter distance. Wasn’t supposed to work that way, though.
It mostly always just bothered me that a parsec is a unit of distance that relies on the Earth’s specific orbital distance around the sun. The Faraway Galaxy of Star Wars would have no way to measure how far a parsec is.
Star Wars does that. Han mentions “I’ll see you in hell” just before running off to find Luke on Hoth, and now there’s a whole Wookiepedia entry on what “hell” is in that galaxy.
The silly thing is that they feel a need to justify it. They’re speaking English, every single word they say carries an incredible history of the world we live in from Rome to the speakers of Old Norse and otherwise. The simplest solution is a handwave: the creators translated everything out of Galactic Basic for you.
I can track that though. Almost every culture on Earth has a concept of “The Bad Place” that it’s possible to go after you die. I have always been meaning to check and see if the race that Luke Skywalker is, is referred to as human in canon, and if Canon has anything to say about why they look exactly like us. I suppose I could look for myself on Wookiepedia, but I know as soon as I open that website, I’m not getting anything else done today.
They’re human. I don’t think it’s been fully covered how this happened, but there was one interesting piece that didn’t get published.
It combines Lucas’ various other movies like THX-1138 and Indiana Jones. Earth is overrun with an AI-driven society in THX, and a group of humans get on a ship to escape. They fall through a wormhole and end up in the Star Wars universe, becoming the first humans there. Han and Chewie travel back through this wormhole, and crash land on Earth in a forest. Chewie survives, and him walking around starts a bunch of stories about Big Foot. Indiana Jones investigates, finds the remains of the Falcon and Han, and wonders why this guy looks familiar.
I think American Gothic was in there somehow, too.
Even if it did get published, I can’t imagine it being taken seriously as Legends canon. Chewie was already killed off in the Yuuzhan Vong stuff with Han surviving. But that’s the closest to an answer we ever got.
As it stands, Courscant is often believed to be the original human homeworld in-universe, and whatever the truth is has been lost to time. Star Wars is interesting with how old the universe feels–which is more of a Tolkein-like property than traditional science fiction–and this is a pretty good example.
Chewie died?
but speaking English is fine …
No, no, they’re speaking Basic!
I had a friend who was really annoyed that there was a Scottish accent in Force Awakens. I said that none of the characters are speaking English in-universe, so any and all accents are just analogies for how each character is heard. Nope. He was still annoyed because there’s no Scotland in the star wars galaxy.
Extra weird hang-up to have, because the films have always had English and American accents side-by-side, even though there’s clearly no England or America!
Anyway, it’s really no different to them calling their ships X-wings and Y-wings, even though they don’t use our alphabet.
The Martian when the main airlock blows up.
He ends up taping a plastic sheet over the hole with what I assume is super strong space tape and plastic and then continues to live in the station for 550 more days.
We spend the first half of the movie learning how unforgiving the environment is, and how delicate his ecosystem for life is, but you can also blow half the place up and just tape some plastic over the hole.
They did a much better job of explaining it in the book, but the movie literally went “just tape that removed up with plastic, then we’ll throw a wind storm at it to prove it’s good forever”
Another big plot hole in the Martian, also present in the book, is that messages are encoded in hexadecimal. But then why did he have a separate question mark card, when all punctuation can be encoded in ASCII/hex? Also
both him andNASA wrote in all caps. Again they have a full ascii set. Makes no sense.I found this post hilarious.
They did a much better job of explaining it in the book
How did the book handle it?
So, in the book:
When he’s making water out of hydrazine from the MDV, he gets the process a little wrong and accidentally causes an explosion. This slightly stresses the canvas around one of the three airlocks. He prefers to use that airlock to the other two because it’s the closest to the rover chargers, so he uses that one the most. Every time he cycles the airlock, it slightly expands and contracts, repeatedly stressing the canvas until it fails.
The resulting explosion hurls the airlock over 100 meters from the HAB, cracks the airlock and in the resulting tumble he bashes in his EVA suit’s helmet. So he fixes the crack with duct tape, cuts his space suit’s arm off, uses the resin from a patch kit to glue the arm material over the broken helmet (in the movie the helmet is kind of cracked and he tapes over it) so he has to go into the wrecked HAB, get one of the other space suits, change in one of the rovers, then fix the HAB.
It is established that the mission was designed to survive a HAB breach, and was supplied with spare canvas and adhesive resin to make repairs, which he did. He had to reduce the height of the ceiling in that section of the HAB to make it fit, and from then on he alternated use of the other two airlocks.
The book kicked a lot more of the shit out of Watney. The movie doesn’t even mention killing Pathfinder, the dust storm enroute to the MAV or rolling the rover over.
That’s a great write-up response, thanks!
Space age hyper-tough epoxy.
Isn’t there something like the gravity on Mars is so low that even though there are massive dust storms with fast winds, they feel like a gentle breeze, and would never be able to topple a solid object, let alone a space ship.
…and it was all a dream.
Kinda the inverse of your question (or an example of this being done poorly) but in the latest or (second to latest) star wars, after being accused of recycling the old trilogy plot over again, the writers attempted to deflect away from the obvious similarities to Hoth by having one of the characters taste what appeared to be snow on a frigid planet resembling Hoth by exclaiming “It’s salt”
“They fly now” is a similarly atrocious example given that they’ve been flying for decades, just not in any of the main trilogy movies yet.
“Eagles can’t fly us to Mt. Doom because of a magic curse or some shit”- Gandalf to the council in Lord of the Rings
I think that one’s pretty well explained (albeit not explicitly) by the presence of the Nazgul and the eye of Sauron, which were either destroyed or otherwise occupied when the eagles made their rescue. People pretend Mordor had no airborne defenses for the bit, but it doesn’t really make sense
The Eye was proven to not be all-seeing or all-knowing. Same with the Ring Wraiths. And Orcs were shown numerous times to be inept guards.
So have an eagle fly Frodo to Mt. Doom on a night with a new moon, above the clouds. There is no way they would be spotted. A curse, while stupid, is the only explanation that really puts this plot hole to rest IMO.
Doesn’t have to be all seeing to spot a fucking eagle lol. This is akin to “Gandalf should’ve teleported the ring to Mordor, it never explicitly said he couldn’t”
I saw something maybe yesterday that was like, Samwise could carry frodo without being affected by the ring, so why didn’t they just tape the ring to a small animal and put it in a bag, and carry the bag to Mordor?
I’ll tell you that council didn’t think very hard before concluding “one of us must physically carry it all the way there.”
The best explanation would be the actual one - they don’t give a shit about Middle-Earth.
This is exactly right. They were just busy with important eagle business.
In the books it’s explained that the eagles were involved in a war of their own during the first two books and couldn’t send help without risking their own destruction. There’s actually a part in the books where frodo is like “why didn’t the eagles just fly us” lol.
A little bit more emphasis during Star Wars that Vader wanted the Storm Troopers to aim poorly and let them get away. It would have solved decades of jokes and arguments about Storm Trooper weapon accuracy.
I think Lucas thought he had it covered with Obi-Wan’s, “These blast points are too accurate for Sandpeople. Only Imperial Stormtroopers are that accurate” line. You are correct though, that is one change that was needed.
It was right there all along:
Grand Moff Tarkin : Are they away?
Darth Vader : They’ve just made the jump into hyperspace.
Grand Moff Tarkin : You’re sure the homing beacon is secure aboard their ship? I’m taking an awful risk, Vader. This had better work.
Evidently most of the fandom needs to have it beaten over their heads a bit more blatantly than that.
Another thing that would have been helpful is if it was made clearer just how monstrous the Ewoks actually are. There wouldn’t be as much shame to the Imperials for losing against them if people had only internalized a bit better that:
- Ewoks are strong enough that they can haul Redwood-sized logs up into the canopy to build deadfalls, using only crude vine ropes and muscles, and do it quietly enough that the nearby Imperial garrison didn’t notice.
- They are stealthy enough that an ordinary hunting party can sneak up on an elite Rebel strike force (including a Jedi).
- That hunting party was hunting a 3-meter-tall boar-wolf, by the way. Ewoks hunt these routinely.
- Endor is full of predators like that, and despite that the Ewoks let their children wander the forest on their own. Upon being confronted with an armor-clad alien wielding a blaster weapon and riding a flying machine, one of those lone children thought to himself: “guess I’d better kill him.” Leia helped, of course, but the Ewok couldn’t have known she would.
- One of their literal gods, personified in the form of a physical avatar before them, ordered the Ewoks not to burn some people alive and devour their flesh. The Ewoks hesitated for half a second and then resumed piling the firewood with a jaunty song. Gods are spiffy and all, but don’t get in between Ewoks and their cannibalism.
Is it cannibalism? It feels more like a (talking) bear eating a human.
I do feel like the Stormtooper point got lost on Lucas too by RotJ honestly. In Empire they do pretty good except when they’re, again, explicitly trying to lure the hero into a trap. RotJ has the most weirdness of the originals and probably the most EU ‘redemptions’/revisions. With stuff like “here’s what was really up with the Ewoks”, Boba not dying, etc.
Replace some of the stormtroopers in ROTJ with regular army forces and it might have helped the stormtroopers’ reputation.
What? Never heard that. Why?
So that they can track the ship back to the rebel base!
That makes sense.
Christopher Reeve Superman. How come he’s fast enough to go back in time, but not fast enough to save Lois in the first place?
Scene needed is Jor-El explaining that Clark is as strong as he believes himself to be. He can literally focus the entire power of the Sun if he’s strong enough.
Do you think he was flying around the earth for kicks? No, he was using a gravitational slingshot to build speed. Granted, they could have explained it better, so I guess a line like “we need to use the turn of the world to speed up our satilites, and we still can’t match his velocity. Imagine how fast he’d be.” But less clunky, of course.
Honestly my head canon is that just like how humans on a hell of an adrenaline rush can do superhuman feats like lift a car for someone trapped under it, superman has basically the equivalent, breaking his known limitations through sheer force of adrenaline.
Kind of like how in one of the early seasons of the CW Flash series, Barry accidentally travels back in time while pushing himself to stop a tidal wave from destroying Central City.
Kind of like how in one of the early seasons of the CW Flash series, Barry accidentally travels back in time while pushing himself to stop a tidal wave from destroying Central City.
That one really annoyed me because like the next episode they were saying he needed to go mach 3 which was faster than ever! And I was like… Is time travel less than mach 3? I’m pretty sure have jets that can go Mach 3…
Yeaaah CW Flash was really inconsistent with its power curves and growth.
even if it demanded Simone Biles levels of mental gymnastics to save Carrie Fisher’s most emotionally resonant moment from ROTJ
I don’t think it’s “gymnastics” to imagine that an orphan toddler might end up with some false memories of what she imagines her mother was like.
What I’d rather have had as a tiny change to “improve” the situation would be to confirm that Palpatine used some kind of Dark Side alchemy to drain Padme’s life to keep Vader alive, I really like that notion. Wouldn’t need to be with dialogue, even, just have some kind of scene showing Palpatine meditating and channeling something.
“We’ve almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!” The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
It was explained in a deleted scene. In Independence Day, our computers are based on reverse engineering their crashed ship. That and why would a hivemind alien race ever even need cyber security? Up to that point, they probably never encountered a scenario where a planet they were harvesting had an intelligent race on it, said intelligent race recovered a crashed ship of theirs, and said race was advanced enough reverse engineer it.
Same with Jurassic park 3 and the T-Rex that somehow managed to kill everyone while at the same time being still confined in the cargo bay.
The original script made perfect sense and then for some baffling reason they deleted important scenes for the theatrical release. In the original script the raptors were also in there, they got out through the small hole the T-Rex made, and then they killed everyone and jumped into the sea and swim to shore. Then for some totally bonkers reason they edited it and decided that the raptors had already been transported earlier and had nothing to do with this bit.
Which would have been fine but then they should have reshot the entire boat sequence. The problem is then they would have needed the T-Rex to have escaped. Not really sure why they didn’t do that as it didn’t really change the plot all that much and at least then it would have made sense.
I think the problem was that they decided late on in production that they didn’t actually want to deal with the CGI of having the raptor swim in water since water is hard to do. But again they should have reshot it.
