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Rants >> Rant 380

::Today's soundtrack: Queen "Another One Bites the Dust" ::


WARNING: The following contains movie spoilers. If you do not wish to be spoiled, then do not read some or all of this. That is all.

Since I enjoy watching movies, I have seen quite a lot of them. I also really get into them and sometimes look at them with a scrutinizing eye. This causes me to notice plot holes and things that flat out do not make sense sometimes. EXAMPLES!!

Avatar. I will repeat this over and over to my dying day. Not only did Avatar reuse a clichéd film structure and character archetypes, but it also had one gaping plot hole. The whole point of the lead character Jake being placed into an avatar body was to gain the trust of the native Navi tribe and ask them to move their settlement. Jake NEVER ONCE brought the topic up for discussion... EVER. I only saw this film one time, but I was literally keeping my senses open for that moment and it never came. A whole war ensued and many people on both sides of the conflict lost lives. This terrible hole could have been fixed with two lines of dialogue during the "Jake and Neytiri fall in love" montage, but no. James Cameron is supposed to be an awesome filmmaker and he let this one out without noticing this horrendous flaw. What the hell?

Tron and Tron Legacy. I recently watched both of these films in a row and they have the same issue. In case you don't know, one of the ideas within the premise of Tron is that this computer company developed a laser beam which breaks down matter and digitizes it. In both of these movies, this very laser is left, when not in use, POINTED DIRECTLY AT A SCIENTIST'S WORK STATION. Yes, I am going to leave my experimental and possibly dangerous matter conversion laser pointed right at my chair. What could possibly go wrong? These are some irresponsible computer scientists, right there. Unfortunately, this is the key point in BOTH movie's plots! You'd think having been accidently hit with this laser in Tron, that the scientist would have learned and pointed the barrel of that thing elsewhere sometime before the sequel rolled around. Nope!

Puppetmaster. If you haven't seen this 1989 horror film, then let me give you the run down. In the 1940's the master puppeteer discovers a magic spell that will give life to his puppets using a link to his own life force. In the 1980s a man seeking the secrets to eternal life goes looking for these legendary puppets and the magical formula. He finds it, and since he is an evil person, the puppets are now evil and he uses them to kill his psychic friends so they don't try to stop him. Under its own premise AND spelled out explicitly within the film, the puppets are good when controlled by a good puppetmaster and bad when controlled by a bad one. Simple enough. My problem is this: since the old man in the 1940s made puppets as his friends, then why the merry hell did he create ones with brutal and deadly aspects? A puppet with knives for hands, one with a drill in its head, et cetera. If he was good and meant his puppets to be good, what's with all the sharp objects, sir? Why in the world did he make ones that could be so easily turned into objects of death? It makes no sense!

Splice. In the film, there are two scientists who create a new lifeform my mixing DNA strands from many different species. Their first go at this yields a slug-like creature which produces valuable proteins that could be used to inoculate livestock. Their employers want them to focus on these proteins, but the scientists want to take genetic splicing to the next step: include human strands in the next hybrid. They basically do this experiment in secret and do in fact create a new animal in the lab. It grows at an accelerated rate and is maturing and learning quickly. My issue with it is this: these scientists made this new creature in secret and no one else knows about it, so only they can watch over it, feed it, teach it, and keep it out of trouble and yet... they leave it alone all the fucking time! This creature even gets away from them on multiple occasions and yet they keep leaving it on its own! What... what is WRONG with you people? Why don't you take it in turns to watch over it? How can you keep leaving it alone in what has already proven to be an unsecure location? The MOST irresponsible mad scientist award goes to...

Tomb Raider. The main plot of the movie is that the secret society the Illuminati is looking for these two ancient artifacts in order to use them and "control time" or something equally sinister. However, Lara Croft, the heroine of the film, discovers early on that she has one of these two artifacts. The bad guys eventually steal it from her, of course. She knew when she found the artifact that bad people wanted it to do bad things and that they needed BOTH parts to do bad things. Why didn't Lara destroy the artifact when she realized she had it? The baddies would have been shit out of luck without it. Oh, right, if she would have done that then there would have only been twenty minutes worth of movie and we can't have THAT.

It's a Wonderful Life. Don't get me wrong: I really love this movie and it does choke me up a bit every year around the holidays. That doesn't stop the fact that every damn time I see it I am troubled by the ending. Everyone in town has arrived to show their support for George Bailey and giving him a donation so he can balance his business's books and not go to jail. Then, Sam Wainright sends a telegram offering him up 25,000. Sooooooo.... these other people who already left money in these hard times don't want a take-back? Seriously, one really rich guy just made the saving donation, so everyone else can get their money back and go home now? Just always nagged at me, that.

Superman: The Movie. Another film I love is not above its obvious flaw. I'm talking about the ending, and, no, I'm not even getting into the reversal of the Earth's rotation bit. I'm going to give them that. Granted the turning back of time, why didn't Superman stop the second missile? What the hell, right? You might think that he did, but you'd be wrong. He turns back time and then goes to visit Lois at her car, she gets out of the car and recounts the horrible earthquake, the gas station explosion, and all that. Then Jimmy Oleson shows up since Superman left him on the side of the road a ways, and he too talks about the earthquake. The earthquake, you'll remember was caused by the missile hitting the fault line. Now, if Superman did NOT stop that missile, and seeing as to how there was still an earthquake he apparently did not, then why didn't that huge crack in the road which swallowed Lois's car show up this time? If the telephone poles still fell over, the gas station still exploded, why didn't the big crack appear? Listen production team, either he stopped the missile which stopped the quake and prevented the crack, or he didn't stop the missile, the quake happened and the crack would appear. You can't have it both ways, people! For shame!

For some reason, many of these instances get over looked by the viewing public at large. It makes me wonder how such obvious oddities made it to the final cut of the film as is. You folks have noticed stuff like this, too, yes?

William the Bloody (under scrutiny)

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