Best sci-fi movie plot holes of all time

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Fantastic Four picture

Plot hole: Dr Doom has amazing powers, able to crush people or pop their heads in an instant, which he does to all the humans but not to his biggest threat, the Fantastic 4.

Neil Buckley

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Brainstorm picture

Plot hole: The demonstration to the Board of the system's potential is ported through acoustic modems. Even in those days (early 1980s), anyone would have realized that the bandwidth simply wasn't possible at 300 bps.

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A Sound of Thunder picture

Plot hole: Travis does the last time jump to change the events of a previous time jump. As all the jumps were to the exact same time to kill the same dinosaur, the travelers of the second jump must have found there the travelers of the first one. The travelers of the third jump must have found the travelers of the second and the first, and so on.

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Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday picture

Plot hole: After Steven breaks out of prison, he goes to Jason's home. Then Jessica's boyfriend shows up talking on the phone and he says he will ask Jessica for permission to shoot their show at Jason's house. He should know that Jessica doesn't know she is a relative of Jason.

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Star Trek Into Darkness picture

Plot hole: During the warp-speed chase, the Vengeance literally blasts the Enterprise to pieces, and dozens if not scores of Enterprise crew members are killed and injured in the carnage. The medical crew, including Chief Medical Officer McCoy, should have been working feverishly on the wounded and dying for hours, at least. Instead, as Kirk asks Khan for help, the Sickbay is practically deserted, and McCoy is almost idly conducting blood experiments on a dead tribble. There's no sense of a catastrophic medical emergency whatsoever. It's as though the Sickbay sequence was shot for a different script in which there was no emergency, and then lazily inserted into a rewritten script.

Charles Austin Miller

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Apollo 18 picture

Plot hole: How would any of the EVA/16MM video footage be recovered in the first place? Astronauts took pictures like these on rolls of film, and those were developed well after the end of the flight. If the spacecraft had not been recovered at all, then the footage would simply be a piece of orbiting space junk. (01:22:40)

Jackson Tyler

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The Meg picture

Plot hole: The movie establishes the narrative that megalodons have been locked beneath a layer of hydrogen-sulfide and that the first sub to penetrate that layer is their own research sub, thus allowing the megalodon to escape the hydrogen-sulfide layer for the first time in modern history. So, how could there be a megalodon present to at the very beginning of the movie, which interfered with the protagonist's rescue efforts?

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Virtuosity picture

Plot hole: When Sid shoots the TV-show host, the number of viewers doubles in two seconds. How would all those people find out so fast and switch channels?

Jacob La Cour

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Critters 2 picture

Plot hole: When the old women are painting the eggs, you can see them blowing the yolk out of some. Why didn't they blow the yolk out of the Critter eggs?

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Sky High picture

Plot hole: In the scene where The Commander and Jetstream are called to fight the giant robot, Will's mom says "What if he forgets his lunch?" In every scene where he's eating lunch at school, Will has a school lunch.

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Twelve Monkeys picture

Plot hole: At the end the police shoot Cole while he was chasing Dr Peters but the police do not stop Dr Peters and question him as to why a man was chasing him at the airport with a gun, instead he is unchallenged and allowed to continue his journey.

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Suggested correction: There is no connection between Cole and Dr. Peters, nobody knows he is specifically chasing him. Dr. Peters is beyond the gates and on his way into the plane so unless they want to stop the entire flight, which is unlikely, he is left alone. Perfectly reasonable.

lionhead

Cole is chasing a man and Dr. Peters is running away (and knocking people over in the process). Further, they were screaming "there he is...stop him he's got a deadly virus" and pointing at Dr. Peters. Highly unlikely they would have let the plane depart.

There was a dude with a gun, a lot of people were running, panicking. Perfectly reasonable reaction from Peters. The police were after Cole anyway, so the attention was on him, not on Peters. And as I said, Peters was already past the inspection, so he was where he was supposed to be and there was no reason to stop him.

lionhead

Not to mention that Dr. Railly can also corroborate the reason Dr. Peters is being chased.

Dr. Railly can corroborate the reason Cole is chasing Dr. Peters. When she points out that he is even on the front page of USA Today with a Nobel Prize winner, I think they'd definitely investigate.

The shrink was still alive and seemed to give up quickly on her mission to stop a virus from killing billions. Like she just let them take her while she remained silent instead of continuing to scream that he had a virus so Cole died in vain. And they would know why he was chasing them because all they would need to do was ask him.

Her concern was with Cole, she tries to protect him throughout the movie. After Cole is shot she knows there is no way they let her continue the chase, all she cares about is Cole. Cole is being chased by the cops, no reason for them to believe what he is yelling, no reason to believe her either, since she is as an accomplice.

lionhead

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Stealth picture

Plot hole: After E.D.I. goes rouge, Kara brings up his weapons list, which consists of 2 ThroatRippers, 2 ShockHammers, and 3 Blue Ferrets, so E.D.I. has 7 missiles. He fires two during the Russian dogfight, another two when he and Ben escape from Alaska, and another two at the Korean border - one of which is the last missile. That's 6. So where did the last missile go?

Brad

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Recess: School's Out picture

Plot hole: Summer vacation couldn't be taken away just because it is winter, (or just snowy), they could just go by the date.

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Lockout picture

Plot hole: Hock sneaks a gun into the prisoner interrogation area because he is told that guns are not allowed there. If the prison was so strict about keeping guns out of that area then they would surely have metal detectors to prevent such a thing from happening. (00:15:25)

Phaneron

Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.

Suggested correction: Not a plot hole at all. Most of the people who are allowed in those areas will be government employees, who will be deemed trusted enough to follow the rules.

If they won't even allow a member of the Secret Service - the President's own security team - to have a gun in that area, they wouldn't simply trust them to just follow the rules.

Phaneron

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The Fourth Kind picture

Plot hole: When Abby and her kids are abducted, the sheriff is sitting right outside her house and sees this happening. Yet the video didn't record. Well the sheriff saw it all with his own eyes so why wouldn't his testimony hold up? The tape actually shows the UFO so there's proof right there. (01:08:55)

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Diamonds Are Forever picture

Plot hole: When Saxby tells Blofeld to watch Peter Franks on the CCTV, Blofeld would have recognised him as James Bond. Why does Blofeld keep quiet about it? What possible use could he have for catching, rather than killing, Bond? (00:38:34)

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Gemini Man picture

Plot hole: While a tracker can certainly make it so that Junior knows where Brogan is at a given moment, it is impossible for Junior to know where exactly the plane is going to land and be lying in wait, with Brogan walking right past him. Junior would have to be well ahead of the plane in order to do that, and know exactly what direction Brogan would walk to cut him off and ambush him.

BaconIsMyBFF

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Army of the Dead picture

Plot hole: Unless Tanaka is lying, the fact that aircraft cannot fly INTO Las Vegas but can fly OUT of Las Vegas makes absolutely no sense. The whole point of a quarantine zone is to keep people INSIDE.

wizard_of_gore

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Runaway picture

Plot hole: Considering Luther is responsible for the death of 6+ people and 2 cops, there is no way there would not have been a small army of cops including 2 or more snipers covering the restaurant stakeout. There is no way he could have murdered Jackie and then just run off into the bushes.

Grumpy Scot

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Death Race 2 picture

Plot hole: If the cars are assigned on a "first come, first served"-bases, how can the tv programme have footage of the drivers posing with their cars, seeing as not all of them survive?

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