False Claims from The Independent’s “15 glaring plot holes in famous movies”.
No movie, regardless of its stature, is beyond or below any rebuke or vindication. However, what many people continue to misunderstand, especially in the age of social media, is that there’s a difference between asserting a stance on a movie-whether it’d be popular or unpopular-and mistaking storytelling devices and/or character decisions in movies for “plot holes”. Many movies of poor quality have legitimate plot holes (Battlefield Earth for instance), but many other famous examples of alleged plot holes that’ve been debated for years are not actually the product of bad writing, but rather due to subtle writing or explicitly stated details that are sadly overlooked and can be mistaken for plot holes.
Deliberately or not, misinterpreting plot points in movies for the sake of stirring up conversation and/or comedy is a sport in the world of pop culture commentary, and a go-to parlor trick for various clickbait bloggers and content creators like Cinemasins, MoviePlotHoles.com, etc. Yesterday’s new entry in “nitpick culture”, an umbrella term for said content creators and people who propagate this type of film discussion, comes to us courtesy of The Independent’s Louis Chilton: 15 glaring plot holes in famous movies, from Star Wars: The Force Awakens to The Dark Knight Rises. Cinema may be subjective, but several alleged plot holes here are either completely (or mostly) false.
1. Titanic (1997): “Sometimes, even widely circulated complaints are totally fatuous. People watch Titanic, for instance, and ask why Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t simply hop on the door alongside Kate Winslet at the end. It’s enough to make you want to scream: “That’s not how buoyancy works!”
Time and time again, people have debunked this question around Titanic. There wasn’t enough room for Jack Dawson to fit on the door along with Rose DeWitt Bukater due to the factor of that their combined weights would cause them to sink. In a 2016 interview with The Daily Beast, James Cameron stated that Jack would’ve died of hypothermia in the freezing 28-degree water if he wasted time trying to switch places with Rose, repurpose her life jacket, etc. Jack’s death also serves the thematic crux of this film, which renders much of the debate around his death moot.
2. The Shawshank Redemption (1994): “Frank Darabont’s prison drama features a famous twist, in which it is revealed that the wrongly imprisoned Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) has secretly tunnelled out of Shawshank prison, hiding his escape path with a poster of Rita Hayworth. But how did he manage to reattach the bottom of the poster after leaving through it?”
Andy only pinned the top two corners and lifted the poster up and into the hole when he escaped. Logically, he would’ve used a pint of glue or resin from the prison labor workshop to pin the top two corners. A tack can quite easily be pushed into plaster. We know the walls were plastered because Andy dislodges a chunk when scratching his name into the wall prompting him to dig the tunnel. In real life, inmates use toothpaste to hang posters in their cells.
3. Toy Story (1995): “Much of the first Toy Story revolves around Buzz Lightyear’s (Tim Allen) refusal to accept that he is, in fact, a children’s toy. If this were the case, though, why would he play dead whenever a human enters the room? It’s a plot hole that has been questioned by fans for years, and no explanation is ever quite satisfactory.”
Buzz Lightyear was engineered as a toy, but his unawareness of the fact that he is one is compounded by his denial for half of the film. He freezes unconditionally due to his programming like how people involuntarily blink and sleep. Logically, he’d also freeze to blend in with his fellow toys due to the fact that humans are dangerous for their size. The film clearly shows why this isn’t a plot hole, and the fact that this isn’t spelled out in dialogue goes to show the skill of the screenwriters, whether it was deliberate or not.
One of the worst aspects of commentators who instigate “nitpick culture” is their tendency to relentlessly pick apart “plot holes” with an implicit attitude that movies need to excruciatingly spell out everything to them, but when movies do use exposition to explain certain details that may be confusing to audiences, it’s suddenly bad screenwriting (a complaint that directors like Christopher Nolan have been victim to; more on that here later).
4. Back to the Future (1985): “Picking holes in Robert Zemeckis’s timeless time-travel romp perhaps goes against the film’s goofy spirit. But it’s hard to get past one lingering quibble: why wouldn’t Marty McFly’s parents notice that their son looked identical to the strange and charismatic teenager who once set them up? Even if you accept that decades have passed since they last saw his face, it’s a stretch to believe that they wouldn’t notice the uncanny similarities.”
For the events of 1955, George and Lorraine McFly only knew Marty for a few days, and likely wouldn’t recall what he looked like 30 years later when they’ve moved on with their lives. Any resemblance between 1955 Marty and their son in the present would be chalked up to coincidence. George also stated that it was Biff that caused him and Lorraine to fall in love, not Marty; Marty was overwritten in their memories.
5. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003): “Towards the end of Peter Jackson’s nearly 10-hour fantasy trilogy, there comes an almighty deus ex machina, as the forces of good are saved by the arrival of the Great Eagles. But the scene left many viewers asking the question: why couldn’t the Eagles have simply given everyone a lift to Mordor in the first place? The apparent plot hole has spawned endless debates among Middle Earth fanatics, with counter-arguments digging deep into eagle lore to disprove its merits. But the fact remains that for the everyday viewer this was a head-scratchingly simple solution that everyone on screen ignored.”
Any serious viewer will be astute enough to understand that the Eye of Sauron would’ve prevented our heroes from flying on any Eagles to Mordor, so their journey had to utilize stealth. By taking the long road, they kept Sauron unaware while combating and defeating their enemies. Eagles flying directly for Sauron’s borders would’ve been met with militant resistance, and it’d be a tall order for the Eagles to agree to.
6. Citizen Kane (1941): “Even a film as immortally great as Citizen Kane has its foibles — and the iconic opening scene is one such. As Charles Foster Kane perishes alone in his bedroom, he utters the enigmatic word: “Rosebud”. The word becomes a riddle which newspapermen scramble to decode. The only problem? There was no-one around to hear him say it.”
Charles wasn’t alone. His butler Raymond heard him say it despite not being shown on screen as the scene is designed to visually convey the despair of Charles’s final moments. He is quoted in the screenplay, “…I heard him say it that other time too. He just said ‘Rosebud’, then he dropped the glass ball and it broke on the floor.”
7. Beauty and the Beast (1991): “The titular beast in this classic Disney cartoon is shown to be on the cusp of his 21st birthday; that is when the spell becomes permanent. And yet, one of the songs suggests that he has been living as a beast for a full decade, meaning he was cursed back when he was still a pre-teen. Not only does this raise a whole lot of questions about the circumstances leading to the curse, it also directly contradicts the portrait we see of the beast back when he was a human, and very much looking like an adult.”
The only evidence used to substantiate this inconsistency over his age are the lines “Until his twenty-first year” (said by the narrator) and “Ten years we’ve been rusting” from Be our Guest. The ten years of rusting would logically refer to that it’s been ten years since the Prince and his staff had entertained guests due to the Prince’s aggressive and unwelcoming demeanor, which means that he would’ve actually been cursed a few years prior to the beginning of this film.
8. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015): “Over the course of its dozen-odd films, the Star Wars franchise boasted its fair share of plot holes and inadvertent Easter eggs, though one moment in 2015’s The Force Awakens had fans especially up in arms. When Rey (Daisy Ridley) and the gang return from the starkiller base after Han Solo’s death, General Leia (Carrie Fisher) rushes to give her a sad, grief-stricken hug, completely ignoring Chewbacca, her decades-old friend and Han’s former confidante. Out with the old, I suppose.”
The fact of the matter is that if you pay attention, Chewbacca is walking with the staff members who are taking Finn away to medical assistance, and Leia, as explained by J.J. Abrams in a 2016 interview, tends to Rey in a moment of shared grief over Han Solo’s death, akin to her aiding Luke in coping with the loss of Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: A New Hope (1977). Leia wasn’t supremely concerned with speaking to Chewbacca until later. Even if this were a legitimate criticism from fans, this is debatable and a human character decision rather than a “plot hole”; this doesn’t fit the criteria for any discussion regarding “plot holes”.
9. The Dark Knight Rises (2012): “Though the film had its ardent defenders, there was much about Christopher Nolan’s 2012 trilogy-capper The Dark Knight Rises that just felt a little underbaked. Whether it was the entire police force being lured underground and trapped, or the fact that internationally famous billionaire Bruce Wayne was able to fake his death and live out his life without being recognised, the plot holes ran so deep in this film you could follow them all the way to the batcave.”
9a. The majority of alleged plot holes in this film are nonexistent due to evidence found within the film and its predecessors. As for Chilton’s first claim, take into account that Bane, an international terrorist and mercenary who was being hunted by the CIA prior to the beginning of the film, and the League of Shadows (an army of mercenaries) have facilitated their base of operations underneath Gotham City, raided the city’s stock exchange and caused major financial disruptions for Bruce Wayne. After the stock exchange robbery, Commissioner James Gordon, Deputy Peter Foley, and then-officer John Blake convened about the teams of officers that Foley had sent down to search for them; Foley stated “We’ve had teams down there, but it’s a huge network.” Blake then gave Foley all the tunnel maps and then Gordon said, “Get more men, work a grid. I want Bane found”, so they sent even more teams down there. This mission fails and leads to Bane and the League of Shadows taking Wayne Enterprises hostage and kidnaping several members in order to hijack the company’s fusion reactor. This is not a bomb threat or a holdup at a gas station; this is a serious terrorist threat that needed to be treated with urgency. Gordon told Foley to send “every available cop” in order to hunt down Bane and the League of Shadows-whom Gordon doesn’t know where they are or how many there are. Enough officers had to be sent to cover all entrances to the sewers and its vast, underground network. It’s likely that the National Guard couldn’t be called in due to time constraints.
It’s crucial to know that Gordon only sent “every available cop”, not every police officer, in order to smoke out Bane’s army. There still is a significant backbone of the force remaining on the street, making up the resistance. Like a majority of Gothamites being unable to resist the League of Shadows’ revolution and a fusion bomb, most of these officers had to stay home with their families, while others stood by Gordon throughout the third act as they attempt to disarm the bomb and are rescued by Batman from execution by the League of Shadows’ kangaroo court trials. The Special Forces asked Gordon, Foley and Blake how many cops are left; Gordon stated that there are “dozens of us but (he) preferred not to say.” Around half of them are still on the surface since Foley called back many of his officers from the tunnel when Blake informed him that they were heading into Bane’s trap. The police officers left on the surface are shown to be older than many of the cops who were trapped in the sewers; the veteran cops were left behind to continue policing on the surface since they aren’t as able-bodied to combat Bane’s army. An example is the older cop that chased Batman after the stock exchange robbery and told his younger partner, “…you are in for a show tonight son.” He is later seen standing next to Gordon in the meat store and later scenes.
9b. The notion that Bruce Wayne would be instantly recognized in Italy is silly and Americentric considering that his fame is primarily exclusive to Gotham City’s, like how most U.S. citizens can’t name or recognize any European billionaires. Batman Begins showed him traveling the world for seven years dirt poor and nobody recognized him. When Ra’s al Ghul said “The world’s too small for someone like Bruce Wayne to disappear.”, he wasn’t being literal since he already knew who Bruce was and was familiar with Gotham. In The Dark Knight, Bruce traveled to Hong Kong with Lucius Fox and wasn’t stopped by any sightseers. It’s completely logical that people in Europe wouldn’t recognize a billionaire playboy from the United States who was only seen by the public eye twice in a three-year period (and one of the times he deactivated the paparazzi’s cameras at Miranda Tate’s charity ball).
10. A Quiet Place (2018): “Though it’s inarguably one of the better studio horrors of recent years, A Quiet Place has been mocked for a few of its smaller touches — such as the whiteboard with “How many in Area??” scrawled in huge lettering. One pretty conspicuous plot hole comes midway through the film, when the family go to a nearby waterfall, and are able to shout to one another without the noise being detected over the crashing of the water. Any sensible person would look at that and go… why not move nearer the waterfall? Some people just like the quiet I guess.”
Obviously, the Abbott family can’t move near the waterfall because they’d be more vulnerable to natural elements. Any construction of a new cabin or setup of tents would be calamitous as a waterfall wouldn't be powerful enough to cover these sounds. If any construction or tents slipped up they’d have no protection from the creatures. It was safer to modify an existing house and accommodate their lifestyles to it.
There you have it: 10 movies with their famous alleged plot holes thoroughly debunked. Various writers, myself included, have debunked alleged inconsistencies and trivial nitpicks over movies, and one fundamental source for this was published by Forbes writer Mark Hughes. When he discredited an alleged plot hole in Avengers: Endgame three days after its release, he presented a shrewd refutation of “nitpick culture”:
“A plot-hole isn’t just something you don’t understand in a film. Nor is a plot-hole just a failure of a film to literally show and explain every single detail to you, rather than give you the pieces and let you figure it out yourself because you are presumably capable of doing so. People too often use the term “plot-hole” for minor continuity errors or dangling plot threads that don’t actually substantively change the outcome or the main plot. Sometimes they mistakenly use “plot-hole” in reference to characters having better options and simply not choosing those options (for example: “It’s a plot-hole that they could’ve just done X or Y and it would’ve ended the threat at the start”). None of those things are really “plot-holes,” though, and if a reasonable and consistent explanation exists that fits into the film and resolves the supposed problem, then the existence of that explanation means it’s not a plot-hole.”
I have all the respect for journalists and film critics, but as much as I’m willing to correct false information from bloggers, I’ll do the same with falsehoods that are posted by journalistic outlets. This all goes to show that many filmmakers and screenwriters don’t always receive the credit they deserve (also see point three regarding Toy Story).
