Top 5 Biggest Movie Plot Holes in the History of Modern Cinema

In today’s cinema industry, there’s a wide variety of different interesting movies to watch, each and every one of them with interesting plots that captivate your attention. However, when thinking of a scenario, especially one with a complicated plot, it happens so that the screenwriters make mistakes. They can’t usually be noticed, but there are some out there that are just plain obvious. These are called plot holes, certain moments that make no sense at all.

Here’s a list of some of the best (or worst, depending on the point of view) plot holes in the movie industry:

A popular scene in the end of the movie requires the main character, Indy, to cross a trap that requires him to spell God’s name in order to pass. The movie goes on like this – at first Indy thinks he has to spell Jesus, so he tries to step on J, but falls and catches one of the other stones with letters, pulls himself up and then spells Jehovah, as it is in the Old Testament.

However, what few people managed to notice is the fact that the plates Indy pulls himself up on, are L and Y and therefore, they should have crumbled too and should have fallen, because none of them are part of the word Jehovah

This movie classic was based on a Stephen King’s novel and is, to this day, one of the most exciting movies ever made. It’s also featured on the Internet Movies Database list of Top 100 Movies.

For those of you, who haven’t watched the movie, it tells the story of a prisoner’s escape from Shawshank prison, a very grim and dark place.  Andy, the prisoner, manages to escape through a small hole in the wall, which was covered by a poster for the many months while he was digging it. The day he escapes, the warden of the prison comes in his cell to check it.

This is where the plot hole comes – the poster is on the wall, stapled well on all four corners. Since Andy didn’t have a cellmate, there was no one who could staple the poster back in, and there’s no way to staple all four ends from inside the hole.

Even the director of the movie admits his mistake in the DVD’s director’s cut version.

That’s a movie you’re likely to be familiar with, since it was very popular when it came out. At the end of the movie, Harry Potter, after yet another magical adventure, has to go back in time using his time machine necklace to save his Godfather.

The plot hole is pretty obvious – everyone seems to be in a hurry to travel back in time and do what has to be done. But why? The plot puts no limitations on the time travel machine, which means he could pretty much travel back in time whenever he wants and succeed in saving his godfather.

If you look at the entire series, you’ll find out that the time-traveling was not used even once after that, even though half of the main and secondary characters died. Now if that’s not an obvious plot hole, I don’t know what is.

One of the greatest films in the sci-fi and cyberpunk genre, The Matrix also has some of the most obvious plot holes.

The movie tells the story of how the world we now know today is not a real place, but a computer simulation run by machines in order to extract the human’s bio-kinetic energy (yes that’s what they said in the movie). The real world is actually outside of the simulation.

What’s really the plot hole here is the fact that the machines are using the humans as batteries. How? You still have to feed them, don’t you? Most of the diehard fans say that some of the living humans are fed with dead bodies. That’s still a problem, because it doesn’t mean that there can be a balance between living and dead, and eventually you’d still have the living, which means there’s energy loss and not energy gain.

Even though it’s one of the few worthy movies in recent years, Minority Report actually has many plot holes. If you ignore them, the movie would be fine, but still, even noticing them ruins the experience.

The movie is based on a story by Philip Dick, a great science fiction author , and explains about a newly invented system in the near future, that uses extra-sensory perception capable individuals in order to spot crime before it even happened.  They are called precogs.

Precogs are the most vital elements of the movie, but also the biggest plot hole in it. Since they’re able to sense things in the future and prevent crime, shouldn’t they sense criminals getting arrested instead of murder occurrences? That means that they either have no perception of the future or are completely useless since they’ll be able to sense only prevented crime.

Beside precogs, another great plot hole in the movie is the fact that Anderton’s wife gains access to the prison by using one of his eyeballs. He’s locked inside that prison, so what sort of buggy, antiquated and defect system would allow her to do that?

I am pretty sure tha you will start watching all movies now more carefully, including those available with your satellite TV (in Danish the term is satelit TV) or cable TV (kabel TV) subscription. The big question is - Have you ever noticed a plot hole in a movie? Feel free to share it in the comments below. 

Canal Digital wishes you pleasant viewing experience.