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.
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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
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.
This is what I thought was going to happen at the end of 2 and was so excited I had to watch 3 right away. I was disappointed.
Man that does work so much better....
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!
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.
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.
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.
“So, we started using teleportation now.”
- Everyone in Game of Thrones from season 6 onward.
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.'
Yeah, 90% of the time someone says pothole and I hear "The story didn't spoon feed me the answer and I'm inexplicably mad about it."
In another thread just today I was pointing out that this is the result of the Cinema Sins school of criticism taking over the average person's relationship with media. People seem to genuinely think that how good or bad something is comes down to tallying up "plot holes" to come up with a sin score and calling it a day.
Plot holes are fine. Even legitimate plot holes are fine; if a story actually captures your attention and holds your emotional engagement, you won't be thinking about plot holes because you'll be too busy enjoying the story. This is Hitchcock described as Fridge Logic; problems that only occur to you hours after the movie is over and you're staring into the refrigerator trying to decide what snack to make (yes, that's the actual origin of the term). And he was very much of the opinion that this was absolutely fine; as long as any apparent inconsistency wasn't so egregious as to break suspension of disbelief right there in the moment, it could be safely ignored.
When people fixate on minor plot holes it's either because a) fundamentally the story sucks, so their mind is wandering, or b) they've trained themselves to constantly find or invent logic holes instead of actually trying to engage with what the storytelling is doing.
I'm digging deep in my memory here so I can't provide any details, but there was one episode from a very early season of Grey's Anatomy where I got to the end of the episode and thought, "wait, did they ever solve this episode's medical mystery?" There was a lot of doctor-plot that episode and the patient plot just kinda got dropped. Well I watched the deleted scenes for that episode, and low and behold there's a line where they explain exactly what was going on with the patient. It wasn't the real highlight/purpose of the scene, but I'm still shocked they would cut it because it left an entire plotline (albeit just for that episode) completely dangling.
I haven't watched any Grey's Anatomy to speak of, but I suppose that sounds about right from what I've heard.
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.
but speaking English is fine ...
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 bitch 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 and~~NASA wrote in all caps. Again they have a full ascii set. Makes no sense.
At least they threw the wind storm at it, LOL.
“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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Oh man, look how far down the track the T-Rex pushed our car!"
How did Inigo know the Man in Black was in love with Buttercup? It's an easy one to fix, because there are several points where Grandpa skips parts of the story, but it could have been a single throwaway line.
There's a YouTube series called "how it should have ended" and 90% of them are basically answers to this question lol
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.
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.
Then back to the Future part 2, Marty McFly should have arrived in the future where he disappeared 30 years ago and his children were never born.
Even if he did arrive history should have begun reverting itself, as his disappearance from the past should have altered the present until he returns.
As long as he experienced no ghosting effects, that would have meant that he was functionally immortal until he returned back to the present.
That entire scenario could have been avoided if doc Brown had said we've got a few hours until the universe begins to rectify the fact that you are not in the past with the temporal causality of the present future
“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.
I saw some criticism of Netflix's 'Ripley' adaption, based on the fact that Andrew Scott is in his late 40s, so his character (and all associated characters) had to be maybe in their late 30s but not much younger. They said that a father wouldn't be as interested in him returning the USA in the same way that he would be if his son was in his early 20s (as in the 'Talented Mr. Ripley' film). I thought they could just add a line from the father, saying he'd tolerated his son galivanting around Europe until now, but now needed him home because his father was starting to consider retirement and wanted him to take over the business.