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Plot Holes
One of my favourite films of recent years was Thank you for smoking, an enjoyably biting satire of the tobacco and lobbying industries in the United States. In one scene Nick Naylor, Aaron Eckhardt’s lobbyist character, visits a Hollywood producer with an eye to arranging cigarette product placement and sponsorship in an upcoming sci-fi epic.
“Think of it” says the producer. “Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta Jones are floating in Zero-gravity, the stars visible behind them through an observation dome, having just had mind-blowing sex, what more natural for them to do next but to have a cigarette?”
“Wouldn’t there be a problem with that?” asks Nick. “Can you smoke in an all-oxygen environment?”
The producer airily waves the problem away. “It’s not a problem. We’ll just have them say ‘Thank goodness we invented the whatever device’. It’s a one-line fix.”
It’s a great line. It shows just how easily plot holes can be fixed with a simple line of dialogue. The fix doesn’t even have to be overly convincing so long as it’s delivered well enough for the audience to continue suspending disbelief. The phrase “It’s a one-line fix” has become a staple of conversations about film plotholes in the David household; we always seem to come round to where the holes were, whether they pulled us out of the film, and if so how they might have been fixed.
The thing about film as a medium is that it’s constantly moving and, in the same way the eye can’t see faster than a certain framerate the mind follows what’s on screen at the rate it is progressing, so the one line fix doesn’t actually have to resolve plot holes or even really make sense. It just has to cover the cracks for long enough to keep the plot moving without the audience going “Wait, hang on…”, because once it’s past the flow of the plot will keep most people spotting the holes until they’re out of the cinema and halfway down their second pint. There’s a great example in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which I saw last night. The Captain does something which is impossible in terms of the plot structure, and we immediately get a reaction shot from Stan Lee in his usual cameo appearance. The shot gets a laugh, the audiences amusement at Stan's gurning reaction distracts them from the hole, the film moves on and by the time anyone has thought of going “Hang on…” a baddy is getting punched in the face and it’s all been forgotten.*
A good example of a film rammed with holes but which is delivered with such panache that you don’t think of them until later has to be The Dark Knight. The plot is riddled with problems: for the Joker’s plan to even begin to work he would need considerable magic powers, and yet the first time I saw it I didn’t notice a single one as the scripting carried me with it. On the other hand I watched Pacific Rim last weekend which I sat through with an air of nigh-constant weary contempt. It’s a film about Giant robots punching space-monsters, for goodness sake; a medium for which you'd think I'd be pretty much the target audience. The design is fantastic, the plot is perfectly serviceable for a giant robots punching space-monsters film, and yet my suspension of disbelief was lost very quickly and rarely if ever reengaged throughout due to startling problems which were entirely script-generated. You see, the big difference between The Dark Knight and Pacific Rim is that during Dark Knight all the characters seem to act for reasons that make perfect sense based upon their established personalities and events seem to unfold naturally from that, whereas in Pacific Rim barely a scene goes by without someone acting in an entirely irrational way simply to advance the plot – and what annoys me is that it doesn’t have to happen like that. Pretty much every problem with Pacific Rim could be solved with a one line fix.
Allow me to illustrate my point with a few examples.
1) One of the supporting-actor giant robot pilots, an Australian, hates the handsome, all-American lead because he’s ‘dangerous’. No other reason is given as to why a professional military operative would take an instant and apparently irrational dislike to someone his superiors have chosen to work with him based on their assessment of the value of his skillset.
One line fix: “You should have been fighting that monster back in ’97, but you screwed up! It’s your fault Cairns got destroyed during the Iron Man championships!. You’re responsible for my brother’s death. You’re dangerous!”
2) With the earth on the brink of destruction, the gruff, rough, tough military commander refuses to let the attractive Japanese girl character whom the hero has identified as perfect for a last-ditch attempt to save the world take part in the battle because the film needs an extra fifteen minutes of running time and so some drama is needed to stretch it out.
One line fix: “The trauma she endured as a child makes her unsuitable for front-line combat. She could break down at any moment, jeopardising the entire mission! Sending her puts the entire planet at risk!”
(Additional benefit – the Japanese girl gets some character development beyond “I look pretty good in a leotard and I’m up for some tonsil hockey with the hero”).
3) At about the halfway point there’s a plot-critical fight scene in which space monsters slaughter their way through half of the remaining force of giant robots, putting all humanity in peril. After the space monsters have done their worst, the hero’s robot pulls out a gigantic sword and proceeds to eviscerate the previously indestructible monsters in a matter of moments. In other words, they didn’t bother using their most powerful weapon until half of their friends were dead.
One line fix: “We’ve been working on something new – it’s a gamma-enhanced vibrosword. We’ve fitted one to your robot, but it’s very risky. There’s a chance – a small chance, ha ha – that activating it might cause your reactor to cut out and leave you completely helpless”.
I could go on about Pacific Rim, but fans of it tell me that it’s an homage to giant robots punching space monster cartoons and this sort of thing is to be expected. Now I’m not surprised that giant robot vs space monster cartoons have pretty low production and writing standards – it’s why I stopped watching them in the first place. What does surprise me is that a Hollywood executive at some point signed off a hundred million dollars or so to make a film (which presumably they wanted a return on) whose script deliberately made it inaccessible to people who otherwise might fancy giving them money and spreading good word of mouth about the film. If it had been my hundred million dollars I’d’ve been asking some pretty sharp questions, let me tell you.
Anyway, with that in mind, some one line fixes which might have considerably helped other films:
Star Trek (2008) “Nero is so blinded by rage and grief that he is no longer rational, captain. Instead of preventing the catastrophe, destruction is the only thing he now understands.”**
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: “I’ve got an idea! Dragons are allergic to gigantic chocolate Santa Clauses! Let’s make one of those!”***
Man of Steel: “Your presence on Earth has introduced the last of the Kryptonian matrix into the biosphere, and that’s why we must Terraform this planet and not any of the others in the universe.”
So that’s the question for today. Which films would benefit from a one-line fix, and what would it be?
* This isn’t the best joke in The Winter Soldier btw. The best joke is what it says on Nick Fury’s gravestone.
**A line similar to this was used in Quantum of Solace to explain why Bond went rogue, and served its purpose perfectly well
*** Actually, this wouldn’t have helped much, but it would still have made more sense than what we actually got
“Think of it” says the producer. “Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta Jones are floating in Zero-gravity, the stars visible behind them through an observation dome, having just had mind-blowing sex, what more natural for them to do next but to have a cigarette?”
“Wouldn’t there be a problem with that?” asks Nick. “Can you smoke in an all-oxygen environment?”
The producer airily waves the problem away. “It’s not a problem. We’ll just have them say ‘Thank goodness we invented the whatever device’. It’s a one-line fix.”
It’s a great line. It shows just how easily plot holes can be fixed with a simple line of dialogue. The fix doesn’t even have to be overly convincing so long as it’s delivered well enough for the audience to continue suspending disbelief. The phrase “It’s a one-line fix” has become a staple of conversations about film plotholes in the David household; we always seem to come round to where the holes were, whether they pulled us out of the film, and if so how they might have been fixed.
The thing about film as a medium is that it’s constantly moving and, in the same way the eye can’t see faster than a certain framerate the mind follows what’s on screen at the rate it is progressing, so the one line fix doesn’t actually have to resolve plot holes or even really make sense. It just has to cover the cracks for long enough to keep the plot moving without the audience going “Wait, hang on…”, because once it’s past the flow of the plot will keep most people spotting the holes until they’re out of the cinema and halfway down their second pint. There’s a great example in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which I saw last night. The Captain does something which is impossible in terms of the plot structure, and we immediately get a reaction shot from Stan Lee in his usual cameo appearance. The shot gets a laugh, the audiences amusement at Stan's gurning reaction distracts them from the hole, the film moves on and by the time anyone has thought of going “Hang on…” a baddy is getting punched in the face and it’s all been forgotten.*
A good example of a film rammed with holes but which is delivered with such panache that you don’t think of them until later has to be The Dark Knight. The plot is riddled with problems: for the Joker’s plan to even begin to work he would need considerable magic powers, and yet the first time I saw it I didn’t notice a single one as the scripting carried me with it. On the other hand I watched Pacific Rim last weekend which I sat through with an air of nigh-constant weary contempt. It’s a film about Giant robots punching space-monsters, for goodness sake; a medium for which you'd think I'd be pretty much the target audience. The design is fantastic, the plot is perfectly serviceable for a giant robots punching space-monsters film, and yet my suspension of disbelief was lost very quickly and rarely if ever reengaged throughout due to startling problems which were entirely script-generated. You see, the big difference between The Dark Knight and Pacific Rim is that during Dark Knight all the characters seem to act for reasons that make perfect sense based upon their established personalities and events seem to unfold naturally from that, whereas in Pacific Rim barely a scene goes by without someone acting in an entirely irrational way simply to advance the plot – and what annoys me is that it doesn’t have to happen like that. Pretty much every problem with Pacific Rim could be solved with a one line fix.
Allow me to illustrate my point with a few examples.
1) One of the supporting-actor giant robot pilots, an Australian, hates the handsome, all-American lead because he’s ‘dangerous’. No other reason is given as to why a professional military operative would take an instant and apparently irrational dislike to someone his superiors have chosen to work with him based on their assessment of the value of his skillset.
One line fix: “You should have been fighting that monster back in ’97, but you screwed up! It’s your fault Cairns got destroyed during the Iron Man championships!. You’re responsible for my brother’s death. You’re dangerous!”
2) With the earth on the brink of destruction, the gruff, rough, tough military commander refuses to let the attractive Japanese girl character whom the hero has identified as perfect for a last-ditch attempt to save the world take part in the battle because the film needs an extra fifteen minutes of running time and so some drama is needed to stretch it out.
One line fix: “The trauma she endured as a child makes her unsuitable for front-line combat. She could break down at any moment, jeopardising the entire mission! Sending her puts the entire planet at risk!”
(Additional benefit – the Japanese girl gets some character development beyond “I look pretty good in a leotard and I’m up for some tonsil hockey with the hero”).
3) At about the halfway point there’s a plot-critical fight scene in which space monsters slaughter their way through half of the remaining force of giant robots, putting all humanity in peril. After the space monsters have done their worst, the hero’s robot pulls out a gigantic sword and proceeds to eviscerate the previously indestructible monsters in a matter of moments. In other words, they didn’t bother using their most powerful weapon until half of their friends were dead.
One line fix: “We’ve been working on something new – it’s a gamma-enhanced vibrosword. We’ve fitted one to your robot, but it’s very risky. There’s a chance – a small chance, ha ha – that activating it might cause your reactor to cut out and leave you completely helpless”.
I could go on about Pacific Rim, but fans of it tell me that it’s an homage to giant robots punching space monster cartoons and this sort of thing is to be expected. Now I’m not surprised that giant robot vs space monster cartoons have pretty low production and writing standards – it’s why I stopped watching them in the first place. What does surprise me is that a Hollywood executive at some point signed off a hundred million dollars or so to make a film (which presumably they wanted a return on) whose script deliberately made it inaccessible to people who otherwise might fancy giving them money and spreading good word of mouth about the film. If it had been my hundred million dollars I’d’ve been asking some pretty sharp questions, let me tell you.
Anyway, with that in mind, some one line fixes which might have considerably helped other films:
Star Trek (2008) “Nero is so blinded by rage and grief that he is no longer rational, captain. Instead of preventing the catastrophe, destruction is the only thing he now understands.”**
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: “I’ve got an idea! Dragons are allergic to gigantic chocolate Santa Clauses! Let’s make one of those!”***
Man of Steel: “Your presence on Earth has introduced the last of the Kryptonian matrix into the biosphere, and that’s why we must Terraform this planet and not any of the others in the universe.”
So that’s the question for today. Which films would benefit from a one-line fix, and what would it be?
* This isn’t the best joke in The Winter Soldier btw. The best joke is what it says on Nick Fury’s gravestone.
**A line similar to this was used in Quantum of Solace to explain why Bond went rogue, and served its purpose perfectly well
*** Actually, this wouldn’t have helped much, but it would still have made more sense than what we actually got
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Then again, I'd've ignored his orders as well as he was clearly not fit for the job he was doing. I can think of someone who I would follow into battle in rackettey contraptions though...
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http://youtu.be/iBELC_vxqhI?t=2m10s
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(Anonymous) 2014-04-10 01:55 pm (UTC)(link)'Dammit Kirk, you are clearly the most irresponsible and incompetent captain available but I cannot court martial you whilst you still have the holocrystals of the entire Senate in an orgy with wombat nuns. You are still in command, no matter how stupidly you act.'
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(Anonymous) 2014-04-10 01:56 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
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(Anonymous) 2014-04-10 01:59 pm (UTC)(link)'What you havee not realised, young Bilbo, is that the entire Dwarven military Strategy throughout history has been to allow themselves to be captured and then be rescued by someone cooler. Modeled on the French, apparently.