Major Plot Holes in Seven Classic Films

Considering the hundreds of people involved in the writing, filming, editing, promotion and distribution of a film, most people would expect plot holes to be a rare occurence.

However, it seems very few films, especially big-budget blockbusters, manage to emerge unscathed from the detailed scrutiny of their adoring fans, who cry foul when they find the smallest mistake.

Aside from unnecessary nit-picking, some of the most popular films to come out of Hollywood are hiding some spectacular leaps, or failures, of logic and consistency.

IBTimes UK takes a look at some classic film plot holes:

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Raiders of the Lost Ark is pretty much a perfect film. Hundreds of movies have tried to follow in its footsteps but none has succeeded in the same way as the film that gave the world Indiana Jones.

Throughout his race against the Nazis to discover the Ark of the Covenant, Indiana (Harrison Ford) shows his resilience, dodging death from fists, knives, bullets, snakes and one really big boulder.

The Problem

The audience sees Indiana Jones die - unless he has the ability to rip through metal, or hold his breath for several hours.

In the film's later stages, Indiana is seen sneaking past German patrols and clambering on to the top of a Nazi submarine as it drops beneath the water. The camera pans away to heroic music, cleverly ignoring the fact that our hero would have drowned seconds later.

The doors of the submarine are closed (from the inside), the sub is sinking into the ocean very quickly and not even Indy can hold his breath for that long. That's not to mention the fact that he would have frozen to death.

A deleted scene is understood to feature Indy clinging to a periscope and thus staying out of the water. This may be true, but if you cut a scene out of a film, it's fairly crucial to ensure you aren't seemingly killing off your main character.

Jurassic Park (1993)

Everyone loves Jurassic Park, a film that got people so excited about the possibility of bringing back dinosaurs that news reports soon after its release appeared to show scientists scrambling to see if they could bring a T-Rex back to life - despite the fact that this did not end well on screen.

Jurassic Park has a number of spectacular scenes, but one particularly memorable moment is the unveiling of Steven Spielberg's T-Rex. The film's heroes are enjoying a tour of the park when they come alongside the T-Rex enclosure, bordered by a huge electric fence. A goat is tied to a pole to bring out the dinosaur, but to no avail. Then the power fails, and soon afterwards the giant predator pulls down the fence and starts smashing up the jeeps, pausing to eat a man on a toilet.

Moments later, Sam Neill and the two irritating children are forced off the road by the dinosaur as it searches for them. They climb the small wall into his enclosure and set of abseiling down a giant wall, as the T-rex pushes a jeep over the edge towards them.

The problem

Where did that drop come from?

Throughout the scene, the T-rex enclosure is clearly shown to be on the same level as the road, with the dinosaur walking out and towering over the cars. There's no way the monster could climb out of there - not with his tiny little arms.

So either the its exit from the enclosure, accompanied by heavy rain, created a spectacular landslide, or Spielberg made the huge drop simply for the sake of an exciting scene. Either way, nobody noticed.

Toy Story (1995)

The original Toy Story launched one of the most successful and adored trilogies in family cinema history and remains a cast-iron classic of character, tone, humour and heart.

The story follows the adventures of cowboy doll Woody (Tom Hanks) who sees his position as "Andy's favourite toy" jeopardised by the arrival of Buzz Lightyear (Tim Curry) a cool new space toy, who is utterly convinced he is a real space adventurer.

Throughout much of the film, Woody struggles with his pride while trying to explain to Buzz that he is no more than a child's plaything.

The problem

Whenever Andy comes into his bedroom, all the toy's run back to their original places and freeze, an understandable gesture to avoid being thrown out of the window by a traumatised child.

But why does Buzz Lightyear do it? He believes he's a real person and so surely would feel no need to play along with the "pretend to be a toy game", especially in the early scenes when no-one was on hand to explain his existence to him.

As we see later in the film, the toys' sentience is not a figment of Andy's imagination, but instead Buzz Lightyear pretends to be a toy for literally no reason.

Ghostbusters 2 (1989)

The second Ghostbusters film is not a patch on the first, but any film that contains Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd is destined to be a success, and so it was.

The film's plot sees the Ghostbusters disbanded after suffering a number of legal actions by city agencies following the apocalyptic events of their first adventure. They gradually begin working together to investigate some strange occurrences and sightings of evil pink slime.

They discover a river of pink slime, which is gaining strength due to New Yorker's propensity for bad moods and violence and rush to tell the authorities. They are arrested.

The problem

It's as if the whole of New York (and the world) suffered some sort of collective amnesia.

Perhaps the idea of the team being sued is believable, but the audience is asked to believe that nobody in the public or in the government believes anything these guys say without proof.

Just for the record, these are the same four men who saved the world from a ghost outbreak, giant demon dogs and a building-sized marshmallow man.

Yet despite all of that, we are supposed to believe that the average New Yorker is thinking: "Well, yeah a Stay-Puff Marshmallow man climbing buildings is believable, but pink slime? Pull the other one."

The Matrix (1999)

The Matrix remains one the of the best science fiction films in recent years, inspiring hundreds of lesser clones and even (briefly) making leather trench coats cool again.

However, the film has one hole in the centre of its convoluted core which is never answered and threatens to sink the plot well before the bloated sequels finished the job.

The team, led by Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus and Keanu Reeves's Neo, are fighting the fake reality of the Matrix from the outside, jacking themselves into the simulation via a spike in the back of their heads and carrying out guerrilla attacks.

Cypher, played by Joe Pantoliano, is the shiftiest member of the team and, lo and behold, he turns traitor. This is first revealed to the audience when he shares a scene in a Matrix restaurant with evil agent Smith and reveals his plans to surrender to the simulation.

The Problem:

How did Cypher put together his secret meeting? All the previous scenes in the film made it clear that a person can only be jacked into the Matrix by someone else shoving a spike into their head while they work at a computer.

So what did Cypher do? Trick someone into jacking him in to Matrix and then ask them to promise not to watch him? Discover a new magical way of jacking in which is never referred to again? Both seem unlikely, if not impossible.

The Rock (1996)

Of course The Rock is ridiculous. It's a Michael Bay film. This means that everything that isn't either exploding or flying through the air in slow motion is drowning in an overwhelming sea of homo-eroticism.

The film follows a team of elite Navy Seals and Nicholas Cage as they try to take back Alcatraz from terrorists who threaten to use it as a launch site for chemical weapons.

Sean Connery, the only man to ever escape the prison, is recruited by the team to help them break back in.

In one scene, the team, are trapped outside a locked door, alongside which is a terrifying looking furnace. Connery explains that he got through the furnace from the inside by learning the timings and timing his movements to roll between blasts of flame. Despite the fact that he would be cooked anyway, the team let him try and reverse his old trick.

Cool as a cucumber and not even stopping to pull off his highly flammable hairpiece, Connery sets off rolling into the furnace and disappears.

The team starts to think he has abandoned them before Connery opens the door from the other side, exclaiming: "Gentlemen, welcome to the Rock!" - cue electric guitar and heavy petting.

The Problem

Connery opens the door from inside the prison. If that door was never locked then why on Earth did he ever go through the furnace at all? He could have just walked out of the prison.

When asked to explain this plot hole, Michael Bay threw several hand grenades and drove away. In slow motion.

Independence Day (1996)

Obviously the plot of Independence Day is not one that would typically be expected to hold up well under scrutiny. The film sees the world (portrayed briefly via a series of offensive caricatures) being saved by the good old USA, when it comes under threat from an apocalyptic alien menace.

At first the aliens seem indestructible, being protected by force fields, as they set about blowing up the world using massive laser blasts, but the humans fight back, with the final fighting force being led by the president himself (Bill Pullman) after Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith drop the alien defences using a computer virus.

One pilot, played by Randy Quaid, becomes the ultimate hero by flying his plane into the core of an alien ship, destroying it and showing the world how to bring the enemy down.

The problem

The fact that the aliens apparently use Windows 95 is a plot hole that has been widely discussed and, quite frankly, pales in comparison to the lack of logic when it comes to the treatment of Randy Quaid's character.

Quaid provides comic relief throughout the film, with characters treating him with embarrassment and disdain because of his "crazy" claim that he was once abducted by aliens.

The problem? People still treat him like a fool for believing in aliens while the world is being overrun by aliens. Surely once giant flying saucers are blowing up major landmarks such as the White House and Harry Connick Jr people would start to treat those claiming to believe in aliens with a touch more respect? Perhaps ask them for information considering they may well have first-person experience of the inside of one of the flying death machines? No? Alrighty then.