I feel like every story has a plot hole.
Especially time travel stories, none of them ever has a consistant rule of time travel.
TBH, most fiction have 0 plot holes. Most people who use the term ‘plot hole’ in commentary on the internet are using it incorrectly. They tend to use it to mean “something happens which I personally dislike or don’t understand” rather than it’s real meaning, “something that directly contradicts previous plot points and leads to a logical inconsistency.” That is, it’s only a plot hole if it literally cannot happen because it would negate some other plot element.
A character making a decision that feels out of character isn’t a plot hole. Someone not choosing to use the sci-fi magic tech to solve a problem when it exists in-universe isn’t a plot hole. It might be bad writing. But it’s not a logical inconsistency.
A plot hole would be something like a plot point centering around a character’s illiteracy (in a manner where it’s clear they’re not faking) after a scene where the character is shown reading.
One of the biggest ones in mystery is “Why didn’t X simply Y”
They can literally just be stupid. Or ego driven. Etc.
There’s a great series of mystery games where the final villain even admits this exactly. He found evidence of a murder plot against the sister of his dead girlfriend, and instead of reporting it or detaining those involved, he let it almost happen. It was literally all so he could feel like a hero saving them at the last second, and he says as much directly.
It can also be bad writing. Like, an author can just write inconsistent characters. That doesn’t mean it’s a plot hole.
Blade Runner 2049 doesn’t seem to contradict itself or the original.
Ex-wife and I saw that in a theater by ourselves. Not another human came or went. What an experience.
Breaking Bad, maybe?
Closest I can think of is the magnet thing in the season 5 pilot would definitely not work IRL
First, we have to agree on what a plot hole is.
My definition of a plot hole in a story is something that simply can not happen given the existing rules of the story, or something which could only happen in an unexplained and if not literally impossible than at least so unlikely it is practically impossible way that defies everything else we know about the story.
This would be an item inexplicably jumping locations, a character having knowledge they could not possibly have, or a character or item being in two places at once. Things like that which gnarl the story.
What it isn’t: A character making a bad decision, a character acting unusual (even to the point of acting out of character- that can be bad writing, but not a plot hole), a character forgetting something, a plot contrivance, an unlikely coincidence, something being unrealistic but consistent within the context of the story.
I commonly see poorly written scenes, or scenes where someone thinks a character was acting irrationally, or scientific or legal or other plot points that are intentionally written to serve the story described as plot holes.
With that description, I’d say quite a great number of works of fiction don’t have plot holes.
A character acting out of character may not technically be a plot hole, but for the consumer of the media, it is tantamount to the same thing. The character’s previous characterization is equivalent to “the existing rules of the story”.
Not to say that characters cannot change, but you can tell when a character suddenly does something out of character simply because the author decided that some event has to happen for the plot to work, and it makes the plot seem impossible.
Yeah, say you have a story about Gandhi, and in act 3 he stabs a British soldier in the neck, and chomps on a hamburger. I’d call that a plot hole, even if the events are entirely possible.
I 100% agree with this.
One of the classic examples often given (and one of the top results if you search for “famous plot holes”) is from The Lord of the Rings. “Why don’t the Eagles just fly them to Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring, allowing them to bypass all the trouble getting there?” It’s often cited as a well-known plot hole and given as an example to define what a plot hole is.
Yet it’s not a plot hole at all. It’s just characters making decisions the reader might not agree with.
For my money I’d say “Hot Fuzz”. The script is so tightly written that it’s AMAZING on rewatches. Almost every single line of dialogue is either a joke, set-up for a joke, a payoff, advances the plot, foreshadowing, establishes characters, or some combination of all of these.
The only things I could maybe see people thinking of as plot holes would be how absurd some character motivations are, but to me that just falls into suspension of disbelief.
He’s not Judge Judy and executioner!
Yarp.
Is it cops can be likeable? That’s a pretty big plot hole for me.
My wife’s sister is awesome and funny as fuck. And when she’s not a fireman she’s a cop.
Cool story bro. I’m sure she is “one of the good ones”. Just kidding I bet you aren’t even married.
I refuse to watch it
I agree, same actors as that stupid zombie movie.
…cops?
Primer is a time travel movie with no plot holes. But I don’t think you’re looking for plot holes, there are plenty of movies, even time traveling ones, that don’t have plot holes.
Real life is riddled with plot holes, you cant expect a work of fiction to be perfect.
By definition, no it’s not. If it’s a thing that can actually physically happen, it’s, by definition, not a plot hole.
“Wait a minute, so you expect me to believe a politician blatantly and openly do corrupt things and still won over the voters? Twice?” 🤣
Perfect example, if it was a book people would tell you no one could be that dumb.
the first film and show that come to mind are Primer and DARK, respectively.
Honestly, if Primer had any, I’m to dumb to spot them.
Primer is one of those movies that needs like 3 rewatches to spot a plot hole and no one’s got time for that. Another good show of this type is Steins;Gate (totally watch it if you like time travel stuff)
YES, WATCH STEINS;GATE!
Not Steins;Gate Zero though, that’s a sequel.
The most common criticism is that the first handful of episodes are slow, but I hard disagree. Every moment is either re-contextualized later on, or is important character work.
On the director’s commentary, he states that the ultimate cause of Granger’s illness is deliberately left vague and unexplained. That’s kind of like a plot hole, sort of. Or maybe it’s mystery box, and not a plot hole.
lol 100% same with DARK, tbf
*too
I rest my case
Primer is very smart about explanations in that it never fully explains anything. You’re only seeing their understanding of what they’ve stumbled across, which we can reasonably assume they barely understand themselves. After all, they accidentally invented time travel trying to create a device that reduces the mass of objects lmao they have no fucking clue what’s happening. The scene where they are debating what happens since he accidentally brought his cell phone back highlights how out of their depth they are. I don’t remember the exact lines, but Aaron says how cell phones work by pinging different towers until they find your phone. Then when Abe asks him “are you sure?” He says “no.”
They always kind of understand what’s happening but are ultimately making educated guesses.
Tbf the characters don’t have to understand or explain anything. If there is a way for the internal logic of the movie to work without contradicting itself, that should be good enough for no plot holes.
The point though is they partially avoid contradictions by baking into the story that we and they don’t know anything.
We still know what we see. Many movies are equally vague about the actual mechanics and still introduce contradictions.
Yes but this movie hinges on being technical and appearing specific. It’s kind of an interesting sleight of hand. They keep saying what the rules are but they don’t actually know the rules. There’s nothing to contradict. Literally the end of the movie is “how did this dude find out and travel back?” They have no clue what happened, they don’t know the rules, the possibilities are endless.
They assume getting back in the box takes care of doubles. They are bleeding from their ears and losing fine motor skills. They are just guessing all the time, which means the rules aren’t defined and can’t really be contradicted.
All we see are end results from the perspective of two guys too clever and reckless and unethical for their own good. We know almost nothing for sure.
Ideally you shouldn’t completely trust the characters either way. But ok it might be easier for the movie to avoid issues when there’s little info. It gives more work to the viewer too.
It definitely gives a lot of work to the viewer, especially the last 15 minutes or so. I find most people who are kind of getting it typically lose the thread during the Granger debacle, sometimes during the party scene.
How was Dark’s finale not a plot hole?
Tap for spoiler
It’s a time loop story where the loop ends by characters behaving different than they did in any other iteration of the loop and for no particular reason.
I had a hard time following the whole plot, so I could have easily missed something.
Tap for spoiler
my understanding was that they travelled to the prime world and changed the event that led to the creation of the parallel worlds and preventing everything. The machine that led to everything never was built.
Tap for spoiler
So the idea is there is a closed loop. There are events that initiate the plot. And by the end we realize the characters we’ve been following are responsible for those events. Thus creating a never ending cycle.
But at the end of the series, 1 of the characters just decides to do something different. This ends the loop. But why did that character change his behavior? Only reason I could find is to make an ending for the show.
Worth noting, in spite of this, Dark is such an amazing watch that I recommend to everybody!
You’re correct. Dark had one of the most irrational and nonsensical endings in television history. It undermined everything the series had established and worked toward. Such a shame.
What do you think the show worked towards and established prior to the ending? Because in my eyes what the show did up to the ending was in service of the ending.
Have you seen Coherence?
I have not, but it looks cool, will put it on my list.
I highly recommend it, but it takes at least 3 watches to fully appreciate:
1st watch, going in blind: “What the hell was that?”
2nd watch, looking at details, trying to figure it out: “Okay, I think I get it.”
3rd watch after scouring the internet: “Holy crap, they did this on that budget?”
The answer, as with all things, is Tremors.
Baby Driver came across as an especially tight script. I personally don’t have much of a radar for plot holes, so I might be way off. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
it is a solid movie, I am pretty critical but left satisfied on that one
It has one of the best scenes in movie history:
It gets my blood going every time. This movie also made any moments without music so terrifying. Such a mastuhpeec
It’s a powerful soundtrack, to be sure.
Shrek, of course
I don’t want to say “none”, but I think of the film “Captain America: Winter Soldier” as having some of the tightest writing in superhero comic book movies. It’s something of an outlier a case study imo of strong storytelling that the whole thing is so competently put together. There are far fewer suspensions of disbelief than most superhero movies, imo.
Unfortunately, due to different showrunners, there are a couple.
Like how Tony didn’t figure out hydra was infiltrating SHIELD when he hacked everything in Avengers 1. Probably should have figured that out.
And I know people like to say there are too many hydra people for them to not be well-known or easier to discover, but personally I don’t take issue with that.
If hydra has infiltrated key personnel, they can move whoever they want. I’d say they concentrated their forces at headquarters and on the carriers, since that was part of their big master plan. So of course there will be a lot of bags guys in the main areas and in the carriers, and it’s a testament to how few there really were that they failed. And they had sizeable resistance from non-compromised personnel.
None of these are plot holes. It may be bad writing, but it’s only a plot hole if it breaks the rules established by the story. Tony overlooking something, or HYDRA not putting their existence in SHIELD files isn’t a plot hole. A lot of people managing to keep conspiracy secret isn’t a plot hole.
This is an interesting observation. But honestly I don’t think this is really hard to explain at all.
I think within the genre of comic books, your point makes sense. But if we’re applying a lens of realism (which I think CA:WS did well, and I wish more Marvel movies would), Tony’s network intrusion would not have been at all likely to have uncovered that SHIELD had been ideologically compromised.
What we see in Avengers is that Tony secured unauthorized access to read files to which he wasn’t afforded access. First, it’s not actually at all reasonable to assume that he had full access to all SHIELD data everywhere, ever. It’s split across thousands of servers and departments. It wouldn’t be universally accessible to anyone. This is true even for large institutions that aren’t highly, highly sensitive intelligence operations. But it’d be doubly so for one that is. Most likely, he would’ve grabbed unencrypted traffic that was local to the helicarrier, recently accessed, and titled or contained notable text that was relevant to their current situation. That could certainly yield shipping manifests or operational plans to use the tesseract for weaponry.
But – and this is really the key thing – even if he had the ability to access all SHIELD records, and had the ability to meaningfully digest this enormous trove of information, it would still be incredibly hard to see that SHIELD was compromised. There aren’t going to be any emails that say “Hey Bob: did you kill Mike for finding out that we’re both Hydra foot soldiers? Hail Hydra, Lisa”.
Infiltration is a process of persuasion and carefully installing dual loyalists in key positions to compromise decision making processes, as you describe. It consists of grooming intelligence assets and identifying who can be trained to groom additional assets. That all takes place primarily through interpersonal conversations. There’s very, very, very little documentation of it in a file system that would reveal it if you didn’t already know about some compromised asset. To the outside world, all of HYDRA’s goals look so much like those of a modern international peacekeeping body that the only secret they need to keep is who the guns are pointed at and who has their fingers on the triggers. Which is fundamentally a key point of the movie.
ITT: Edgar Wright movies
I can’t think of any plot holes in Grandma’s Boy.
Nobody has called for Quentin yet?
Quentin! Oh Quentin Darling! Be a dear and bring me some of that white dudes dropping the hard r.
