3 Plot Holes in Famous Movies that the DVD Fairy Needs Hollywood to Answer

Preferably with something other than "We were lazy". I'm willing to wait. The following three films have nothing in common, save that there are small parts in them that follow threads of logic so astoundingly stupid that it impresses me that the stories were permitted to carry on afterward. They were things I never noticed as a kid, but now as an adult with way too much free time on her hands, these are the three things that will stop me in the middle of a movie, causing me to miss several minutes of dialogue because I'm still asking about what was really going on.

Plenty of other films and TV shows were runners up for this list -- but honestly did not produce enough material to take up a third or even a fourth of an article.

...Honorable mention goes especially to the 80s sitcom, Full House, because the DVD Fairy wants to know why the Hell there was never an earthquake in that show, despite taking place in San Francisco.

And why the Hell isn't Bob Saget funny?

So without further ado, here are three plot holes in famous movies that you may or may not have given second thought to.


NUMBER THREE - STAR WARS (ANY OF THEM) AND ITS STUPID SPACE BLOCKADES

In every Star Wars movie ever, there is a scene where our group of intrepid heroes -- whoever they happen to be at the time -- must leave a planet via spaceship. Inevitably, they must sneak past a blockade of Imperial Star Destroyers, the Trade Federation, the Death Star, or the Westboro Baptist Church.

What's pictured WILL follow you into an asteroid field, Han Solo

They're these huge blockades, tens if not hundreds of these enormous ships that are large enough to be their own ecosystems. All lined up and ready to take out any rebels or fugitives or bad child actors that try to pass them.

So What's the Problem? These blockades do not surround the entire planet. They never do. They don't even make a full ring around the planet, much less cover the whole sky. So why -- WHY, I ask you -- do the heroes never just...oh, I don't know: Fly to the other side of the planet? Or to the North or South pole? And just leave from there -- y'know, where there are obviously no enemy ships parked?

Is it more fuel efficient? Your ship can take you from one end of the galaxy and back without needing a refuel -- literally millions, if not billions of miles of fuel, but you can't be bothered to spare another few ten to a hundred thousand miles. This is a meager enemy force, taking up perhaps one percent of the entire planet's sky, and apparently to get anywhere else in space you just have to pass through them. Clearly this makes so much sense that it just seems stupid.

Outer space. There's a lot of it.

This is the sci-fi movie equivalent of refusing to take a back road when a ten car pileup has caused a traffic jam on the main highway. On a day when conditions were perfect, it'd take you five minutes longer to take this other route, that's five minutes you don't feel like sparing, so YOU'RE GOING TO WADE IN, DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES. It's just a million times more stupid because instead of having one back road that will get you where you're going, there are literally thousands of other routes.

To be fair, this isn't the fault of just Star Wars. There are few sci fi films that do not make this mistake. But you've been called on it now, Hollywood, so try something else.


NUMBER TWO - SLEEPING BEAUTY AND THE CHILD THAT SHOULD NOT HAVE SURVIVED

Disney's 1959 animated film is one of my favorite Disneys of all time. Several of its plot points were holdovers from the original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs -- mainly plot points involving Prince Phillip, because men were too difficult to draw without rotoscoping back in the 30s. Animation was too new, and animators were too undertrained. It's also one of the only animated feature films by Disney that contains absolutely no original music. The score and the musical numbers were adapted from Tchaikovsky's ballet of the same name. It was the first animated movie to be shot in Technirama widescreen, and a million other random factoids taken straight from its Wikipedia page. It also features one of the company's most enduring and menacing villains ever brought to screen (and she didn't even need her own song).

Suck it, Scar.

It's also one of the few Disney Princess movies where the Princess actually spends less time on the screen than the side characters do.

A large part of the plot surrounds three good fairies (Flora, Fauna, and Merriweather) and their promise to raise the Princess Aurora to adulthood away from her parents. This comes after the villain of the film, Maleficent, prophesies that she will prick her finger and die on her sixteenth birthday, and steps are taken to prevent this from coming to pass. They believe that if they keep her hidden and raise her as a peasant, away from the prying eyes of the evil fairy, that she will not be able to anticipate Aurora's return to her parents and will not be able to carry out her plan. The way they intend to keep her hidden is to disguise themselves as humans, remove their wings, and hide their wands away, to live as mortals. They swear an oath to not use magic until after the sixteen years have passed. If Maleficent cannot find them, then she cannot find the baby she's looking for.

So it's a good plan, right? Anyway, they make her a dress and a cake on her sixteenth birthday (after caving and using magic on the last day), and return her to the castle in secret, only for Aurora to wind up falling under Maleficent's spell right before sunset anyway.

So What's the Problem? Now, I'm not going to do the obvious question that everyone asks, which is "Why didn't they just take Aurora back to her parents AFTER she turned sixteen?" That's too easy.

No, the glaring hole in the plot that I see, every time I watch this movie, is that somehow, these three fairies have survived at all for sixteen years, starting with a newborn baby. They've made their own clothes. They've fed themselves and the child. They've kept the place relatively clean. And yet, on the day they are meant to take the Princess back to her family, they show they do not know how to cook, sew, or clean the house. Eventually they mess up their projects so badly that they have to just cave, go dig out their wands, and magic everything to how they want it to be.

How the Hell are these crazy old bats still alive? And how did they raise a child to adulthood?

Pictured: The most useless old biddies in the universe.

The easy answer would be that they've been cheating from the beginning, but there is too much evidence given in the film, itself, to suggest the exact opposite. The minute they get their wands out, Maleficent finds them. If they had used them at any other time, we would have been spared the whole scene before this showing the villain ranting about how incredible it is that they've managed to hide for sixteen years. (Leave alone how they managed to get thread and make clothing AT ALL considering all the spinning wheels in the Kingdom were destroyed.) But you go right on, little movie. Go. Dazzle the hearts of children that know nothing of textiles and how they're made.


NUMBER ONE - WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (AND THE UNDISCOVERED CHOCOLATE ROOM TRAP)

This is the movie that taught children a valuable lesson -- namely that some adults are much smarter than other adults, and if you're a rotten little brat, then those same intelligent adults are going to punish you for everything your parents ever let you get away with. They might also give you candy. If you're lucky. (Or unlucky.)

Whichever one of you kids behaves the most gets the antidote! C:

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is considered by and large to be a cult classic, a standard held that filmmakers like Tim Burton covet most greedily. It didn't do well in theatres but it's hard to find a single person in the TV-watching world that hasn't seen it. As often as it's noted for its music, it's wonderful scenery (from the bleak and brown-spattered streets of Somewhereburg, Germany to the colorful, playful interiors of Willy Wonka's factory), and the sheer likeability of the title character and the film's hero, Charlie Bucket, this movie is also often remembered for sporting some of the creepiest moments in cinema history. In spite of special effects that are laughable by today's standards, the moments of wonder and terror in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory are impossible to replicate.

The thing with Willy Wonka in this movie is that he's subtly dangerous. Outside he is perfectly amiable. He is polite, charismatic, and brimming with intelligence. When he takes offense he playfully brushes it off with a retort often too sophisticated for his opponants to really detect. It's obvious he's a man of wonders, and in his search for an heir, it's clear why he won't choose another adult. It's not about smarts -- it's about cleverness, and it seems to be a trait he quite accurately thinks other adults simply grow out of. And so he seeks a successor among the child golden ticket holders -- testing them with temptations in each part of his factory, laying out traps to play on their much-televised weaknesses -- all save for Charlie Bucket, who has not had the time for the paparazzi to set stars in his eyes and get him too jaded to win the day at the end. Rather than have the dialogue cheaply point out that each trap was an obvious setup ("Did that seem rehearsed at all?" asks a child after the first contestant has been sung to his doom by the Oompa Loompas. "No, they were improvising!" beams Johnny Depp as Michael Jackson Wonka), the only indication that you get within the original movie that Wonka intended to lose the dead weight is that each time they move to a new section of the factory floor, there is only enough room for the people that are left. The boat that takes the contestants from the Chocolate Room to what Rifftrax dubbed a "wide awake nightmare" does not have enough seats for Augustus Gloop and his mother, so it's probably a good thing he fell in the river, right? It's a shame they lost Violet and Veruca when they board the Wonka Mobile, but all the same, there was only space enough for five people anyway. It chills you the first time you realize it.

Not Pictured: Subtlety.

So What's the Problem? We never got to see one of the traps.

Willy Wonka has a pretty standard reaction to children misbehaving in his factory. He told them at the door not to touch anything unless he said otherwise. He made them sign a contract promising they had heard him say this and would obey him. An entire scene was devoted to this. And yet, every time a child backtalks him, steals something right out of his hand, or ignores his last warning, his voice drops to a monotone, nonchalant drawl. While chaos breaks out all around him, you can barely hear him uttering "wait stop come back here". And when the inevitable finally happens, he is patiently waiting for the horror to end, allowing the rest of his guests to scream, sob, and salivate while he maintains a bored, exasperated composure. He is not wasting any more energy than he has to on these disobedient little twerps. They signed a pain waiver. Everything that happens after they break the rules, he is completely covered for. He is the picture of calm, the adult that is not mad, just disappointed --

All save in one instance: When Augustus Gloop decided to forego chowing down on the meadow of sweets that was the Chocolate Room and, ignoring Wonka's rather earnest demands that he keep his fat fingers out of his chocolate river, fell ass over teakettle into the vat. And thus America and audiences round the world were introduced to their very first Gene Wilder Freakout:

GIVE ME MY BLUE BLANKET MY GRANDFATHER'S RESEARCH WAS DOODOO STELLAAAAAAAAAA

This is not the face of a man with a plan. Ignore the original novel and just look at the performance. This was clearly not the trap Willy Wonka had set. When Charlie Bucket stole Fizzy Lifting Drink, Wonka reamed him over the costs incurred just because he touched the walls, which now had to be cleaned. Now imagine the cost of emptying a supply of melted chocolate that flows through the entire factory because it's been contaminated with fat deaf German kid (and you KNOW that kid was scared enough to void his bowels at some point), then the cost to clean all the channels, then the cost to refill the whole system with melted chocolate again. Think about the sheer amount of resources. This kid, in refusing to just eat the giant gummy bears like everyone else, has just jacked up the cost of your most affordable chocolate (made entirely of sawdust) to thirty dollars an ounce.

Willy Wonka can not have intended for that to happen.

So this leaves the question: What other death trap is there in the Chocolate Room, undiscovered? What confectionary masterpiece in that candy paradise did Wonka think was so much more tantalizing to a diabetic chocoholic than a river made of chocolate? And what is going to happen when he transfers some poor Oompa Loompa from another division of the factory into the Chocolate Room and the poor thing just haplessly comes upon it someday? Where in the room is it?

Oh. There it is!