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Voss wrote:

Backfire wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I don't know that pacing is a lost art so much as the current trend is really fast pacing. Getting to the point and getting there fast is prioritized over "messy" issues of continuity. It's partially advantageous in a way. If the plot moves quickly enough from scene to scene people don't have time to notice minor continuity errors.

Big problem today is that action scenes take FOREVER. If there is some kind of fight, duel or land/air/space combat scene, it takes ages with tons of hits, millions of cuts, swirling camera work, explosions and whatnot. Take a look at Luke vs Vader confrontation at Empire Strikes Back - no director today would film anything like that. Luke and Vader would first swirl lightsabers for 5 minutes, then they would exchange few lines of witty retortees, then another long swath of lightsaber action etc. Also, if there is one vs many fight - such as if the bad guys have some disposable minions to kill - then these minions come in by HUNDREDS and hero cuts them down like 50 per scene. When you use so much time for action scenes, of course you have less room for plot and character work. Producers and directors are nowadays so afraid to bore their audiences that they need to cram absurd amount of action to the movies, but end result is that action feels less and whole experience is tiresome.

I largely agree and this is something I don't get. Whatever current directors believe makes for an 'epic' fight scene bores me horribly. The ESB fight is actually fairly long, but it's dramatically cut right- there are three separate stages cut by the activity of the other characters, and each stage has its own theme and purpose- analysis of Luke's training, demonstration of Vader's power, then the sudden disarming end.

The counterpoint to the ESB fight is the Annie vs Obi fight at the end of the prequels. That should have been a dramatic confrontation and a swift fight. But instead it was a slog of green screen after green screen in ever more absurd and awkward places that no one sane person would even bother trying to fight in (and they'd be dead of toxic or thermal shock long before the lightsabers start banging together in earnest). What should have been an emotionally charged scene is instead... well, something that makes me check the time. Nothing at all of interest happens between the verbal confrontation and Obi cutting Anakin out of his reckless jump. Nothing. They could have done the whole fight right in front of the ship and moved on.

The Hobbit films are rather similar- extensive CGI and action scenes with a lot of length and not much in the way of stakes. It's CGI for the sake of it, at the expense of storytelling.
And as much as I like the movie overall, the beginning of Age of Ultron fits this category. The mighty supers are just punching fools through wacky and unconvincing slo-mo shots. The end isn't quite so bad, as there are civilians, stakes, sacrifice and insight into characters and motivations, but the beginning set up expectations for awful by being empty and soulless.

But action scenes are what makes a movie fun and actually worth it to watch. The light saber duels in the OT are all incredibly boring. The much longer and more elaborate duels are much more fun to watch. Besides, I need action scenes to counter my short attention span .
I do agree that the Hobbit movies overdid it though. But when you try to stretch a tiny novel out into three long movies, you kinda have to fill up all the room with action scenes. If they had been faithful to the book, they could have easily covered The Hobbit in a single movie.

Backfire wrote:


Oh yeah. I was actually somewhat pumped when they staged the fight, because previous lightsaber fights in prequels had been so devoid of emotion...now finally we had characters who had something going for the fight. And then the super epic fight was boring as heck as they just whacked away on lightsabers without any thought or point. At some points it got real silly, they were climbing in girders and whatnot, fighting on a lava stream...and then Obiwan casually hops to 0.5m higher elevation than Anakin and supposedly it is now hopeless situation for Anakin??

^oh right, there is a big plot hole, for purposes of the topic.

That is a good point though. Given how much they were jumping around just a few seconds ago, Obi Wan standing about half a meter higher than Anakin should not have mattered that much.

 LordofHats wrote:

Backfire wrote:


Oh yeah. I was actually somewhat pumped when they staged the fight, because previous lightsaber fights in prequels had been so devoid of emotion...now finally we had characters who had something going for the fight. And then the super epic fight was boring as heck as they just whacked away on lightsabers without any thought or point. At some points it got real silly, they were climbing in girders and whatnot, fighting on a lava stream...and then Obiwan casually hops to 0.5m higher elevation than Anakin and supposedly it is now hopeless situation for Anakin??

^oh right, there is a big plot hole, for purposes of the topic.

It's not a plot hole at all once you realize that Obi-Wan's special ability is High Ground. He's actually a reality warper, who alters space such that he always holds high ground on any uneven terrain. Think about it;

Obi-Wan vs Maul : Obi-Wan wins, because for Obi-Wan low ground is actually high ground
Obi-Wan vs Jango : draw, because while Obi-Wan mystically converted the low ground into high ground once he stepped onto even terrain with his opponent he lost his buff
Obi-Wan vs Dooku : Dooku wins because terrain was perfectly even and Obi-Wan couldn't abuse his buff
Obi-Wan vs Dooku 2 : Dooku wins because terrain was perfectly even
Obi-Wan vs Grevious : Obi-Wan wins the moment he is knocked into an area below Grevious, thus granting him the High Ground
Obi-Wan vs Anakin : Obi-Wan wins because he had the high ground almost the entire fight

Really Obi-Wan should have been sent to fight Palpatine. The Senate building is horribly uneven terrain and Obi-Wan would have had the High Ground the entire time!

Oh my God, my sides hurt.

One more thing I have always wondered about Star Wars is this: How the hell did the Ewoks beat the elite forces of the Empire? The Ewoks are tiny creatures with stone age technology. They should have no chance at all against much larger and stronger opponents that are armoured from top to toe and equipped with high-tech weapons, vehicles, air support and everything. Not to mention the advantages of organisation, strategy and tactics the Empire obviously should have had. It seems to me that the Imperial army is so incompetent the rebellion would have succeeded anyway and all of the heroes' exploits were kinda unneeded

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Voss wrote:

Backfire wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I don't know that pacing is a lost art so much as the current trend is really fast pacing. Getting to the point and getting there fast is prioritized over "messy" issues of continuity. It's partially advantageous in a way. If the plot moves quickly enough from scene to scene people don't have time to notice minor continuity errors.

Big problem today is that action scenes take FOREVER. If there is some kind of fight, duel or land/air/space combat scene, it takes ages with tons of hits, millions of cuts, swirling camera work, explosions and whatnot. Take a look at Luke vs Vader confrontation at Empire Strikes Back - no director today would film anything like that. Luke and Vader would first swirl lightsabers for 5 minutes, then they would exchange few lines of witty retortees, then another long swath of lightsaber action etc. Also, if there is one vs many fight - such as if the bad guys have some disposable minions to kill - then these minions come in by HUNDREDS and hero cuts them down like 50 per scene. When you use so much time for action scenes, of course you have less room for plot and character work. Producers and directors are nowadays so afraid to bore their audiences that they need to cram absurd amount of action to the movies, but end result is that action feels less and whole experience is tiresome.

I largely agree and this is something I don't get. Whatever current directors believe makes for an 'epic' fight scene bores me horribly. The ESB fight is actually fairly long, but it's dramatically cut right- there are three separate stages cut by the activity of the other characters, and each stage has its own theme and purpose- analysis of Luke's training, demonstration of Vader's power, then the sudden disarming end.

The counterpoint to the ESB fight is the Annie vs Obi fight at the end of the prequels. That should have been a dramatic confrontation and a swift fight. But instead it was a slog of green screen after green screen in ever more absurd and awkward places that no one sane person would even bother trying to fight in (and they'd be dead of toxic or thermal shock long before the lightsabers start banging together in earnest). What should have been an emotionally charged scene is instead... well, something that makes me check the time. Nothing at all of interest happens between the verbal confrontation and Obi cutting Anakin out of his reckless jump. Nothing. They could have done the whole fight right in front of the ship and moved on.

The Hobbit films are rather similar- extensive CGI and action scenes with a lot of length and not much in the way of stakes. It's CGI for the sake of it, at the expense of storytelling.
And as much as I like the movie overall, the beginning of Age of Ultron fits this category. The mighty supers are just punching fools through wacky and unconvincing slo-mo shots. The end isn't quite so bad, as there are civilians, stakes, sacrifice and insight into characters and motivations, but the beginning set up expectations for awful by being empty and soulless.

But action scenes are what makes a movie fun and actually worth it to watch. The light saber duels in the OT are all incredibly boring. The much longer and more elaborate duels are much more fun to watch. Besides, I need action scenes to counter my short attention span .
I do agree that the Hobbit movies overdid it though. But when you try to stretch a tiny novel out into three long movies, you kinda have to fill up all the room with action scenes. If they had been faithful to the book, they could have easily covered The Hobbit in a single movie.

Backfire wrote:


Oh yeah. I was actually somewhat pumped when they staged the fight, because previous lightsaber fights in prequels had been so devoid of emotion...now finally we had characters who had something going for the fight. And then the super epic fight was boring as heck as they just whacked away on lightsabers without any thought or point. At some points it got real silly, they were climbing in girders and whatnot, fighting on a lava stream...and then Obiwan casually hops to 0.5m higher elevation than Anakin and supposedly it is now hopeless situation for Anakin??

^oh right, there is a big plot hole, for purposes of the topic.

That is a good point though. Given how much they were jumping around just a few seconds ago, Obi Wan standing about half a meter higher than Anakin should not have mattered that much.

 LordofHats wrote:

Backfire wrote:


Oh yeah. I was actually somewhat pumped when they staged the fight, because previous lightsaber fights in prequels had been so devoid of emotion...now finally we had characters who had something going for the fight. And then the super epic fight was boring as heck as they just whacked away on lightsabers without any thought or point. At some points it got real silly, they were climbing in girders and whatnot, fighting on a lava stream...and then Obiwan casually hops to 0.5m higher elevation than Anakin and supposedly it is now hopeless situation for Anakin??

^oh right, there is a big plot hole, for purposes of the topic.

It's not a plot hole at all once you realize that Obi-Wan's special ability is High Ground. He's actually a reality warper, who alters space such that he always holds high ground on any uneven terrain. Think about it;

Obi-Wan vs Maul : Obi-Wan wins, because for Obi-Wan low ground is actually high ground
Obi-Wan vs Jango : draw, because while Obi-Wan mystically converted the low ground into high ground once he stepped onto even terrain with his opponent he lost his buff
Obi-Wan vs Dooku : Dooku wins because terrain was perfectly even and Obi-Wan couldn't abuse his buff
Obi-Wan vs Dooku 2 : Dooku wins because terrain was perfectly even
Obi-Wan vs Grevious : Obi-Wan wins the moment he is knocked into an area below Grevious, thus granting him the High Ground
Obi-Wan vs Anakin : Obi-Wan wins because he had the high ground almost the entire fight

Really Obi-Wan should have been sent to fight Palpatine. The Senate building is horribly uneven terrain and Obi-Wan would have had the High Ground the entire time!

Oh my God, my sides hurt.

One more thing I have always wondered about Star Wars is this: How the hell did the Ewoks beat the elite forces of the Empire? The Ewoks are tiny creatures with stone age technology. They should have no chance at all against much larger and stronger opponents that are armoured from top to toe and equipped with high-tech weapons, vehicles, air support and everything. Not to mention the advantages of organisation, strategy and tactics the Empire obviously should have had. It seems to me that the Imperial army is so incompetent the rebellion would have succeeded anyway and all of the heroes' exploits were kinda unneeded

The Ewoks had the high ground.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

But action scenes are what makes a movie fun and actually worth it to watch. The light saber duels in the OT are all incredibly boring. The much longer and more elaborate duels are much more fun to watch.

Not for me. They put the story on hold, and nothing of any consequence can occur. Mostly what they do is give me time to appreciate the directors' failings and general incompetence.
A duel at its heart is a story-telling device, providing insight into the characters and (hopefully) some raw emotion. They should be fast, lethal, and nothing at all like watching the entire Nutcracker ballet.

Kenobi vs Vader in the original works for the former and does pretty poorly at the second. ESB and RotJ manage both.
The prequel duels accomplish nothing but eating up screen time.
The new trilogy duels... eh. TFA has some glimpses of something, but it seems more just the idea that an SW film requires a lightsaber duel. TLJ substitutes a pointless fight with nameless mooks and a somewhat insightful confrontation where one side doesn't bother to engage, but it does shine a light on the other party... but only his flaws, which have been shown off enough.

I do agree that the Hobbit movies overdid it though. But when you try to stretch a tiny novel out into three long movies, you kinda have to fill up all the room with action scenes. If they had been faithful to the book, they could have easily covered The Hobbit in a single movie.

I actually think a single film would have been difficult without cutting parts out. There are too many important encounters that have to be there. On the other hand, without the made up chase sequences, he random dwarf-elf bigotry (in Rivendell), the extended gandalf torture porn sequence, and the absurdly lengthy cat and mouse and army sequences, it could have been done in two, and not made the films feel like doing the whole trip into mordor on foot, belaboring every step.

IIRC it was meant to be 2. New Line wanted another trilogy.

 Iron_Captain wrote:


One more thing I have always wondered about Star Wars is this: How the hell did the Ewoks beat the elite forces of the Empire? The Ewoks are tiny creatures with stone age technology. They should have no chance at all against much larger and stronger opponents that are armoured from top to toe and equipped with high-tech weapons, vehicles, air support and everything. Not to mention the advantages of organisation, strategy and tactics the Empire obviously should have had. It seems to me that the Imperial army is so incompetent the rebellion would have succeeded anyway and all of the heroes' exploits were kinda unneeded

Pretty much everybody in the Star Wars setting is militarily incompetent. And while there is great weapon proliferation, there is little to no knowledge of effective military tactics or good hardware design. Plus the vast majority of sentient beings in the Galaxy are extremely pacifist.

This is why anybody who was able to organize any type of large scale military operation in Star Wars tends to quickly take control of the galaxy. There is very little resistance from the general population which means you can effectively control them with very few actual soldiers. The flipside is that you yourself are vulnerable to even a small number of opponents, hence why the tiny rebellion was able to destabilize the Empire.

If Star Wars encountered any factions from pretty much any sci-fi setting other than Star Trek they'd get steamrolled. Star Trek are even more incompetent than the people in Star Wars.

 Mr Morden wrote:
In Bad movies (The Last Jedi is a prime example of this) however you are sitting there going "wtf" and it breaks immersion.

This, so much.

I just watched Kingsman: The Golden Circle, and I WTF'd far too many times to enjoy it.

Voss wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

But action scenes are what makes a movie fun and actually worth it to watch. The light saber duels in the OT are all incredibly boring. The much longer and more elaborate duels are much more fun to watch.

Not for me. They put the story on hold, and nothing of any consequence can occur. Mostly what they do is give me time to appreciate the directors' failings and general incompetence.
A duel at its heart is a story-telling device, providing insight into the characters and (hopefully) some raw emotion. They should be fast, lethal, and nothing at all like watching the entire Nutcracker ballet.

I think it's wushu-influence. Martial arts movies have often very long fight scenes and part of the lore there is that even between uneven opponents, it takes time to achieve finishing blow.
However, many directors seem to miss that even kung fu-movies often have a point in the fight, in good martial arts movies the fight is part of the character arc (proof of growth, act of revenge, painful lesson etc). Also, a fight can have a substory of its own. In a way "outer" and "inner" stories.

Lightsaber fight in Empire Strike Back is example of this. Outer storyline of the fight is that Luke wants to rescue his friends and avenge his mentor, while Vader wants to subdue Luke and convince him to dark side. Inner storyline is that Luke is talented but inexperienced and has to scrap to keep up with Vader who is mostly toying with him.

One of the best movie duels of all time is the fight between Shu Lien and Jen Yu in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". Now that fight is really long but it has a point. Outer storyline is that Jen hates being patronized and has stolen a valuable sword, while Shu Lien tries to recover the sword and envies the attention young and talented Jen gets. So there are both plot point and character tension in the duel. But the fight also has an inner storyline: Jen's magic sword is superior weapon and forces more experienced Shu Lien to literally plough through her entire armoury in trying to defeat it.

An opposite example is fight between Neo and Seraph in second Matrix movie. Characters don't know each other and have no reason to fight. Seraph even says that they are fighting just for the sake of it. The fight also has no inner story. Fighters are evenly matched and have equal abilities and neither gets hurt. It is just couple of minutes tightly choreographed whacking, and it is boring as hell and adds nothing to movie but runtime.

Star Wars prequel lightsaber fights have little going for them. Phantom Menace fight I suppose has a weak inner storyline in that Darth Maul is skilled but needs to separate the Jedi to be able to defeat them. Grievous-Obiwan duel was interesting in a way that it put a Jedi vs skilled non-Jedi. However the fight itself was silly and Grievous character was presented as too comedic and weak, just like nearly all prequel villains. Obi-Wan vs Anakin had at least outer storyline for it, but no inner storyline whatsoever. It was really boring after first 10 seconds.
Also it is really disappointing how the Jedi do not use Force during the fights. It's as if only the Sith have effective and useful Force attacks.

I only thought of this after watching it on TV this weekend.

Battle L.A., my favorite comedy.

This movie is just so full of those "WTF" moments and so many of them are so wacky I honestly think the film was originally intended as a spoof. While the film itself is a walking storm of military and alien invasion movie cliches, there's four glaring issues in it that will never cease to amuse me for how stupid they are on a plot level.

The first is in the opening of the invasion when the U.S. military just assumes that an invading alien force from out space has no air support. Yes. The US Military decided that aliens from outer space could cross who knows how many light years, land on earth, and begin an invasion with just foot troops. It doesn't really help that the film slugs out new alien contraptions mostly just to force the characters to do something other than they are currently doing making every plot point feel forced, but the later appearance of a armed hover jeep or a walking artillery piece aren't quite as wacky as assuming space invaders don't have any aircraft. Even if none had been seen at that point I don't believe anyone in their right mind would ever have made that assumption. It makes the first big plot twist of the film so predictable that instead of feeling bad for all the dead soldiers I laughed loudly in the middle of the theater. My fellow movie goers glared at me.

The second is after the first big plot twist when the main character, the oh so tragic NCO who we should all feel so extra bad for because his men died in combat, spends a very "tense" couple minutes performing an impromptu autopsy on a not yet dead enemy combatant looking for a good way to kill the quite sturdy alien foot troops. He finds it sure enough. Just right of where the heart should be. I.E. center of mass. I.E. Where soldiers are supposed to shoot anyway. I.E. Where the characters had been shooting aliens already up to that point in the film. Of course certainly after that scene the aliens start dropping in good order in accordance with the plot's needs.

The third, and possibly even more silly than the previous two is the typical "mother ship" of the film. The glaring design flaw in the alien invasion plan so obvious I doubt any species capable of space travel would be dumb enough to have it. Yeah it's buried underground in the middle of LA. Somehow. Despite all the news cameras and choppers seen in the opening of the film, all the military personnel and aircraft. Yeah. The aliens managed to somehow move their floating secret base into LA and bury it underground without anyone noticing. That in itself was so stupid I was ready to walk out of the theater but I wanted to see how many more cliche's I could check off the list (enough).

The last is the end of the film so stop reading if you care about spoiler for a movie from 2011. At the end of the film after being out in the field for two days, fighting constant battles, eating maybe some junk food on the second day, and being reduced from a platoon to five guys/gals the heroes instead of doing anything sensible load up on ammo and go back out to fight more aliens. lolwut? And their commanding officer lets them go. Okay. Yeah. let's not debrief the guys who just took out an alien command center and have had very close contact with the enemy. Let's not cycle them into another unit. Lets not make them get some damn sleep because they've been running on adrenaline and sappy speeches for two days. Or you know. make them actually eat some food, instead of just accepting a eye rolling movie one liner about how they already had some blood of their enemies today.Nope. They don't have time for any of that gak soldiers in real life would probably be killing for cause this is a mid-budget Hollywood war film and in mid-budget Hollywood war films American soldiers are demi-gods and we should all be on our knees ready to blow for them cause they're that much more American than the rest of us (you might notice I really hate it when movies depict the military this way).

 alanmckenzie wrote:
One that's always bothered me is the T-Rex attack scene in Jurassic Park.

The T-Rex pushes the car off the same side of the road from where she had just stepped...

Except now there's like a 15 meter drop.

Hoping someone can provide me with some reasoning here.

Yes I remember that one.

Maybe we should also just link to Cinema Sins a YouTube video series that frequently points out common cliches and general inconsistencies in movies. Though probably 1/3 of what he counts as a "sin" I think is a bit of a stretch/overly picky but its his shtick I guess. Special mentioned for the episode Everything Wrong with Dragonball: Evolution which actually caused the guy to break his usual rule of not referencing source material to point out all the massive flaws between the movie and the source material.

Also Dragonball: Evolution belongs in here.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Voss wrote:

Backfire wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I don't know that pacing is a lost art so much as the current trend is really fast pacing. Getting to the point and getting there fast is prioritized over "messy" issues of continuity. It's partially advantageous in a way. If the plot moves quickly enough from scene to scene people don't have time to notice minor continuity errors.

Big problem today is that action scenes take FOREVER. If there is some kind of fight, duel or land/air/space combat scene, it takes ages with tons of hits, millions of cuts, swirling camera work, explosions and whatnot. Take a look at Luke vs Vader confrontation at Empire Strikes Back - no director today would film anything like that. Luke and Vader would first swirl lightsabers for 5 minutes, then they would exchange few lines of witty retortees, then another long swath of lightsaber action etc. Also, if there is one vs many fight - such as if the bad guys have some disposable minions to kill - then these minions come in by HUNDREDS and hero cuts them down like 50 per scene. When you use so much time for action scenes, of course you have less room for plot and character work. Producers and directors are nowadays so afraid to bore their audiences that they need to cram absurd amount of action to the movies, but end result is that action feels less and whole experience is tiresome.

I largely agree and this is something I don't get. Whatever current directors believe makes for an 'epic' fight scene bores me horribly. The ESB fight is actually fairly long, but it's dramatically cut right- there are three separate stages cut by the activity of the other characters, and each stage has its own theme and purpose- analysis of Luke's training, demonstration of Vader's power, then the sudden disarming end.

The counterpoint to the ESB fight is the Annie vs Obi fight at the end of the prequels. That should have been a dramatic confrontation and a swift fight. But instead it was a slog of green screen after green screen in ever more absurd and awkward places that no one sane person would even bother trying to fight in (and they'd be dead of toxic or thermal shock long before the lightsabers start banging together in earnest). What should have been an emotionally charged scene is instead... well, something that makes me check the time. Nothing at all of interest happens between the verbal confrontation and Obi cutting Anakin out of his reckless jump. Nothing. They could have done the whole fight right in front of the ship and moved on.

The Hobbit films are rather similar- extensive CGI and action scenes with a lot of length and not much in the way of stakes. It's CGI for the sake of it, at the expense of storytelling.
And as much as I like the movie overall, the beginning of Age of Ultron fits this category. The mighty supers are just punching fools through wacky and unconvincing slo-mo shots. The end isn't quite so bad, as there are civilians, stakes, sacrifice and insight into characters and motivations, but the beginning set up expectations for awful by being empty and soulless.

But action scenes are what makes a movie fun and actually worth it to watch. The light saber duels in the OT are all incredibly boring. The much longer and more elaborate duels are much more fun to watch. Besides, I need action scenes to counter my short attention span .
I do agree that the Hobbit movies overdid it though. But when you try to stretch a tiny novel out into three long movies, you kinda have to fill up all the room with action scenes. If they had been faithful to the book, they could have easily covered The Hobbit in a single movie.

Backfire wrote:


Oh yeah. I was actually somewhat pumped when they staged the fight, because previous lightsaber fights in prequels had been so devoid of emotion...now finally we had characters who had something going for the fight. And then the super epic fight was boring as heck as they just whacked away on lightsabers without any thought or point. At some points it got real silly, they were climbing in girders and whatnot, fighting on a lava stream...and then Obiwan casually hops to 0.5m higher elevation than Anakin and supposedly it is now hopeless situation for Anakin??

^oh right, there is a big plot hole, for purposes of the topic.

That is a good point though. Given how much they were jumping around just a few seconds ago, Obi Wan standing about half a meter higher than Anakin should not have mattered that much.

 LordofHats wrote:

Backfire wrote:


Oh yeah. I was actually somewhat pumped when they staged the fight, because previous lightsaber fights in prequels had been so devoid of emotion...now finally we had characters who had something going for the fight. And then the super epic fight was boring as heck as they just whacked away on lightsabers without any thought or point. At some points it got real silly, they were climbing in girders and whatnot, fighting on a lava stream...and then Obiwan casually hops to 0.5m higher elevation than Anakin and supposedly it is now hopeless situation for Anakin??

^oh right, there is a big plot hole, for purposes of the topic.

It's not a plot hole at all once you realize that Obi-Wan's special ability is High Ground. He's actually a reality warper, who alters space such that he always holds high ground on any uneven terrain. Think about it;

Obi-Wan vs Maul : Obi-Wan wins, because for Obi-Wan low ground is actually high ground
Obi-Wan vs Jango : draw, because while Obi-Wan mystically converted the low ground into high ground once he stepped onto even terrain with his opponent he lost his buff
Obi-Wan vs Dooku : Dooku wins because terrain was perfectly even and Obi-Wan couldn't abuse his buff
Obi-Wan vs Dooku 2 : Dooku wins because terrain was perfectly even
Obi-Wan vs Grevious : Obi-Wan wins the moment he is knocked into an area below Grevious, thus granting him the High Ground
Obi-Wan vs Anakin : Obi-Wan wins because he had the high ground almost the entire fight

Really Obi-Wan should have been sent to fight Palpatine. The Senate building is horribly uneven terrain and Obi-Wan would have had the High Ground the entire time!

Oh my God, my sides hurt.

One more thing I have always wondered about Star Wars is this: How the hell did the Ewoks beat the elite forces of the Empire? The Ewoks are tiny creatures with stone age technology. They should have no chance at all against much larger and stronger opponents that are armoured from top to toe and equipped with high-tech weapons, vehicles, air support and everything. Not to mention the advantages of organisation, strategy and tactics the Empire obviously should have had. It seems to me that the Imperial army is so incompetent the rebellion would have succeeded anyway and all of the heroes' exploits were kinda unneeded

And there is the problem.our attention span has shrunk to a goldfish.

Which is weird, because then we should want more realistic dueling which only lasts maybe a minute. First mistake = last mistake.

Some of the biggest plotholes I remember are in Star Trek movies. Lets start with Generations.

-so the new Enterprise takes a 'quick run near Solar System', then get a distress signal from a ship and suddenly there is no one else around within several lightyears. Huh?

-the plot is that Soran wants to blow up stars to change course of Nexus so it will hit a planet he's on. Somehow, he can't enter the Nexus in a ship, even though that is how he got in it first time around. Okay, maybe it's like too risky or something and doesn't work every time?

-but why would blowing up a star change course of Nexus? Mass of the star doesn't go anywhere when the star blows up, it is just rearranged. Well it does, but it takes thousands of years.

-so then Soran and Picard both enter the Nexus. Apparently, it is possible to leave the Nexus and enter any point of timeline. Armed with this unimaginable power, Picard wants to enter the moment just before the star blows up, to have another chance against Soran in a fistfight.

-admittably, above leaves open a possibility that since Nexus grants the wisher anything they want, Picard just got an illusion of coming back and everything what happened in Star Trek franchise after that is just Picard daydreaming in the Nexus.

So lets move to reboot franchise and Into Darkness. Oh boy that film was junk but highlights...

-So Khan blows up stuff and teleports away. Where does he teleport into? To KRONOS, another side of the sector! This incredible teleport technology which would completely upturn entire civilization of the Star Trek races, is instantly ignored.

-After declaring how they can't go to Kronos, they go there.

-The plan is that they "get as close to Neutral Zone as possible" and send an away team to catch Khan. How close? Well, they travel right up to within weapon range of the planet. I repeat: a Federation Warship can enter, freely and unmolested and within the rules of the Treaty, on orbit of Klingon homeworld. What the hell?? What kind of Treaty is that? What sort of "Neutral Zone" is that?

-then they send in an armed team, in blatant violation of the Treaty. Nobody cares, not even the Klingons after Khan shows up and kills bunch of them, wearing a Starfleet uniform mind you. Wouldn't this like, spark a war or something?

-Plot point is that Khan's buddies are hidden inside torpedoes. How does this even work? Torpedoes are barely larger than a human. Average man would (and does) take up nearly all internal volume of the torpedo, leaving no room for targeting, propulsion and warhead. Which apparently the torpedoes nevertheless have as they're treated and described as operational weapons.

-Old time-travelled Spock is still active within the timeline and warns them around Khan. I know the explanation is that timeline has changed and not everything repeats the same, but how come nobody mentions enormous advantages Federation can get on science, exploration, politics and so on as they have Spock who knows everything about Khan, Cardassian, Borg, Dominion etc well in advance.

-and so on and so on. Above doesn't even cover half of it what these films have wrong in them. I wouldn't say they have plot holes, as it would imply they have a plot, which they don't. Heck, even JJ Abrams admitted that Into Darkness was basically just sequence of scenes not really connected to each other.

Is Running with the Idiot Ball a plot hole?

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Is Running with the Idiot Ball a plot hole?

Only if it necessitates someone being out of character (which happens a lot). If someone is generally stupid, and their stupidity drives a plot point it can make enough sense... unless that person is otherwise suppose to be smart, or has previously be shown/depicted as not being that stupid or something. In general though I'd say that even when an idiot ball isn't necessarily a plot hole it's usually pretty damn lazy.

The biggest plot hole for me, is that plenty of movies seem to have characters that have little to no common sense.


I could go into how the Star Wars prequels are full of characters who are dumb as rocks (is Qui-gon Jinn called that because he's drunk on gin the whole time?) or I could let Red Letter Media do it for me.

But the last hobbit movie. Awesome the dwarves are setting up a giant like wall! I know, lets leap over the bloody thing and get trapped between the orcs and the pikes.

Please, why can't people have more common sense.....

 welshhoppo wrote:
The biggest plot hole for me, is that plenty of movies seem to have characters that have little to no common sense.


I could go into how the Star Wars prequels are full of characters who are dumb as rocks (is Qui-gon Jinn called that because he's drunk on gin the whole time?) or I could let Red Letter Media do it for me.

But the last hobbit movie. Awesome the dwarves are setting up a giant like wall! I know, lets leap over the bloody thing and get trapped between the orcs and the pikes.

Please, why can't people have more common sense.....

If most movie characters had common sense, then most horror movies would never happen.

If you watch this vhs tape you'll die, VHS? who has that system anymore, tosses it out, why risk it.


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another major plot hole I just remembered.

Jurassic world. The whole mess could have been avoided if they had just checked the tracking device first.

sirlynchmob wrote:

Jurassic world. The whole mess could have been avoided if they had just checked the tracking device first.

Sort of. I mean, the chick did immediately call Asset Containment. Who immediately said it was still in the pen.

The real flaw here is that A) the other people immediately went into the pen instead of staying indoors when the location of the creature was unknown. And B) that the pen for some reason only has one human sized access door and one dinosaur sized access door. And they are on opposite sides of the enclosure and the guard opens the big dino door to escape, instead of the access hatch which should have been right there.

Really, any large dino pen should have had regular human doors at regular intervals. Not even have doors, just doorways into a hallway so you don't have to fiddle with a door if you need to escape quickly.

The Jurassic Park movies were not made by anybody familiar with how large animals are contained or transported.

 LordofHats wrote:
The third, and possibly even more silly than the previous two is the typical "mother ship" of the film. The glaring design flaw in the alien invasion plan so obvious I doubt any species capable of space travel would be dumb enough to have it. Yeah it's buried underground in the middle of LA. Somehow. Despite all the news cameras and choppers seen in the opening of the film, all the military personnel and aircraft. Yeah. The aliens managed to somehow move their floating secret base into LA and bury it underground without anyone noticing. That in itself was so stupid I was ready to walk out of the theater but I wanted to see how many more cliche's I could check off the list (enough).

They must have had the same people from Transformers 2, who were able to cover up the giant robots wrecking half of New York in plain view of thousands of people.

 Grey Templar wrote:
The Jurassic Park movies were not made by anybody familiar with how large animals are contained or transported.

If the dinos in JP were contained like similarly large and/or dangerous non-dinos in zoos (e.g. Tigers, Elephants, Killer Whales), then a lot of the plot nonsense never happens.

Aye. Electric fences aren't used instead of regular fences. You always have both a regular and an electric fence.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
The Jurassic Park movies were not made by anybody familiar with how large animals are contained or transported.

If the dinos in JP were contained like similarly large and/or dangerous non-dinos in zoos (e.g. Tigers, Elephants, Killer Whales), then a lot of the plot nonsense never happens.

Two further clichés annoy me in JP movies:
-dinosaurs are invulnerable to conventional weapons. Even Raptors can't be killed by bullets and they are no larger than current crop of predators which are hardly bulletproof. I think in Jurassic World there was one raptor killed by RPG, not sure.

-dinosaurs find humans absolutely delicious and always try to eat them, chasing humans and risking themselves to unreasonable extent even though there would be plenty of easier meals available. In JP3, Spinosaurus chased a group of tiny humans through entire island.

Pretty much.

The truth is most large predators ignore humans entirely. We'd simply be too small to make a good meal worth the effort of chasing down. If we got too close they might take a swipe at you, but they wouldn't go out of their way to hunt us.

Even Raptors likely wouldn't pay humans much heed. Like Lions or Wolves, they'd limit themselves to larger prey worth the effort and only attack humans opportunistically. Heck, real raptors would probably have made decent pets. They'd have the same characteristics which made wolves possible to domesticate. Intelligent and social, which would be something humans could hijack to make them into pets.

Especially the smaller Raptors, like Veloceraptors(who were really the size of large chickens). Its not like a Veloceraptor would be any more dangerous than a dog. And dogs can be quite dangerous.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Aye. Electric fences aren't used instead of regular fences. You always have both a regular and an electric fence.

Heck, I do that for our goats!

Backfire wrote:

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
The Jurassic Park movies were not made by anybody familiar with how large animals are contained or transported.

If the dinos in JP were contained like similarly large and/or dangerous non-dinos in zoos (e.g. Tigers, Elephants, Killer Whales), then a lot of the plot nonsense never happens.

Two further clichés annoy me in JP movies:
-dinosaurs are invulnerable to conventional weapons. Even Raptors can't be killed by bullets and they are no larger than current crop of predators which are hardly bulletproof. I think in Jurassic World there was one raptor killed by RPG, not sure.

-dinosaurs find humans absolutely delicious and always try to eat them, chasing humans and risking themselves to unreasonable extent even though there would be plenty of easier meals available. In JP3, Spinosaurus chased a group of tiny humans through entire island.

Peter Jackson's King Kong is the absolute worst for this. Just so, so bad. It starts with a V-Rex dropping half a ton on uneaten Dino carcass to chase the forgettable actress for miles. The V-Rex wants to eat her so bad that he fights ninja Kong for her, even lunging for her while tangled up and at the mercy of another predator. Later on, when the actress pretty much genocides a herd of sauropods via The Lemming Maneuver, the V-Rexes weave around mountains of fresh meat in pursuit of her.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:


One more thing I have always wondered about Star Wars is this: How the hell did the Ewoks beat the elite forces of the Empire? The Ewoks are tiny creatures with stone age technology. They should have no chance at all against much larger and stronger opponents that are armoured from top to toe and equipped with high-tech weapons, vehicles, air support and everything. Not to mention the advantages of organisation, strategy and tactics the Empire obviously should have had. It seems to me that the Imperial army is so incompetent the rebellion would have succeeded anyway and all of the heroes' exploits were kinda unneeded

Pretty much everybody in the Star Wars setting is militarily incompetent. And while there is great weapon proliferation, there is little to no knowledge of effective military tactics or good hardware design. Plus the vast majority of sentient beings in the Galaxy are extremely pacifist.

This is why anybody who was able to organize any type of large scale military operation in Star Wars tends to quickly take control of the galaxy. There is very little resistance from the general population which means you can effectively control them with very few actual soldiers. The flipside is that you yourself are vulnerable to even a small number of opponents, hence why the tiny rebellion was able to destabilize the Empire.

If Star Wars encountered any factions from pretty much any sci-fi setting other than Star Trek they'd get steamrolled. Star Trek are even more incompetent than the people in Star Wars.

Agreed.

Let's take the latest movie. If the First Order had a single decent tactician in their high command they win this easily, and within the first thirty minutes. All they had to do was have half their star destroyers stay in hyperspace a second or two longer, drop out of hyperspace on the OTHER side of the Resistance force, and you have yourself a nice little Resistance Sandwich to snack on before taking the rest of the galaxy.


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 LordofHats wrote:
I only thought of this after watching it on TV this weekend.

Battle L.A., my favorite comedy.

This movie is just so full of those "WTF" moments and so many of them are so wacky I honestly think the film was originally intended as a spoof. While the film itself is a walking storm of military and alien invasion movie cliches, there's four glaring issues in it that will never cease to amuse me for how stupid they are on a plot level.

The first is in the opening of the invasion when the U.S. military just assumes that an invading alien force from out space has no air support. Yes. The US Military decided that aliens from outer space could cross who knows how many light years, land on earth, and begin an invasion with just foot troops. It doesn't really help that the film slugs out new alien contraptions mostly just to force the characters to do something other than they are currently doing making every plot point feel forced, but the later appearance of a armed hover jeep or a walking artillery piece aren't quite as wacky as assuming space invaders don't have any aircraft. Even if none had been seen at that point I don't believe anyone in their right mind would ever have made that assumption. It makes the first big plot twist of the film so predictable that instead of feeling bad for all the dead soldiers I laughed loudly in the middle of the theater. My fellow movie goers glared at me.

The second is after the first big plot twist when the main character, the oh so tragic NCO who we should all feel so extra bad for because his men died in combat, spends a very "tense" couple minutes performing an impromptu autopsy on a not yet dead enemy combatant looking for a good way to kill the quite sturdy alien foot troops. He finds it sure enough. Just right of where the heart should be. I.E. center of mass. I.E. Where soldiers are supposed to shoot anyway. I.E. Where the characters had been shooting aliens already up to that point in the film. Of course certainly after that scene the aliens start dropping in good order in accordance with the plot's needs.

The third, and possibly even more silly than the previous two is the typical "mother ship" of the film. The glaring design flaw in the alien invasion plan so obvious I doubt any species capable of space travel would be dumb enough to have it. Yeah it's buried underground in the middle of LA. Somehow. Despite all the news cameras and choppers seen in the opening of the film, all the military personnel and aircraft. Yeah. The aliens managed to somehow move their floating secret base into LA and bury it underground without anyone noticing. That in itself was so stupid I was ready to walk out of the theater but I wanted to see how many more cliche's I could check off the list (enough).

The last is the end of the film so stop reading if you care about spoiler for a movie from 2011. At the end of the film after being out in the field for two days, fighting constant battles, eating maybe some junk food on the second day, and being reduced from a platoon to five guys/gals the heroes instead of doing anything sensible load up on ammo and go back out to fight more aliens. lolwut? And their commanding officer lets them go. Okay. Yeah. let's not debrief the guys who just took out an alien command center and have had very close contact with the enemy. Let's not cycle them into another unit. Lets not make them get some damn sleep because they've been running on adrenaline and sappy speeches for two days. Or you know. make them actually eat some food, instead of just accepting a eye rolling movie one liner about how they already had some blood of their enemies today.Nope. They don't have time for any of that gak soldiers in real life would probably be killing for cause this is a mid-budget Hollywood war film and in mid-budget Hollywood war films American soldiers are demi-gods and we should all be on our knees ready to blow for them cause they're that much more American than the rest of us (you might notice I really hate it when movies depict the military this way).

Actually, the very first plothole is that the aliens came to earth for water... which, even if there's no resistance from the obviously intelligent and marginally spacefaring natives, means you have to lift that water out of the earth's gravity well.

Any race that can cross interstellar distances can easily collect all the water they'd ever need in the Oort cloud without ever coming within 50 AU's of the earth. At that distance they'd barely be impacted by the SUN's gravity well.

Long and short: There is ZERO reason for those aliens to come to Earth in the first place.

 Gordon Shumway wrote:
People are missing the Citizen Kane of plot holes here. How does anybody know what Kane's last words were? Leave it to Citizen Kane to have the Citizen Kane of all plot holes. Interestingly, from looking at the above films, I've noticed that plot holes have nothing at all to do with whether one likes a movie or not. Or whether one considers it "good". One could extend the idea to suggest that plot isn't really all that important when it comes to move tastes. That, I view as a good thing.

The butler was in the room with him when he died. It's mentioned later in the film. It doesn't totally fit with what we're lead to believe from the opening scene, but it is addressed in the film.

 Vulcan wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I only thought of this after watching it on TV this weekend.

Battle L.A., my favorite comedy.

Actually, the very first plothole is that the aliens came to earth for water...

A plot hole shared by the original '80s V*. But not quite as bad as Signs, in which a species of aliens fatally allergic to water land on Earth and walk about unprotected. That's like us going skinny-dipping in a vat of sulphuric acid. Never mind being killed by whatever mechanism the protagonist uses to cover them in water, they should have burnt up simply by walking around in the open air.

*And Independence day, for that matter - or just about any alien invasion movie. I doubt there's anything on Earth the aliens couldn't have got elsewhere in the solar system without us even noticing.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
The Jurassic Park movies were not made by anybody familiar with how large animals are contained or transported.

If the dinos in JP were contained like similarly large and/or dangerous non-dinos in zoos (e.g. Tigers, Elephants, Killer Whales), then a lot of the plot nonsense never happens.

You know, I'm reading this thread and I'm thinking about how utterly boring the Jurassic Park (and many others) movies would have been if internet geeks had written them. "Here are some dinosaurs which don't escape. Humans look at them. Credits." For a lot of these, I think the correct response is just to shrug and say "Yeah, but it makes the movie more enjoyable." Either enjoyable in the sense that the viewer doesn't care about the weak bit in the plot because it enables something awesome." or enjoyable in that it lets the viewer look smart on the internet afterwards.

In fairness, JP did leave out a big plothole from the book, which was Malcolm going on about how chaos theory means life will inevitably rebel against attempts to contain it. Hence why we got massacred by cows and pigs thousands of years ago. Oh, and Michael Crichton would like to let you know that All Science Is Bad and humans haven't really progressed. Demonstrating how science is bad by showing how it can give us totally wicked awesome dinosaurs.....wasn't very well thought out.

Alas, JP the movie leaves out a major plot point of the book, that dinosaurs reproduce on their own despite management attempts to make them sterile (it is mentioned in the film, but not extrapolated in any way). Park's tracking system was designed to track the dinosaurs all the time but since the programmers assumed there would be fixed number of dinosaurs, it only tracked the same dinosaurs and ignored the 'new' ones. So they constantly assumed there were only 8 velociraptors in the park, when in reality there were dozens and they were escaping all the time.

Sure thing, that also doesn't make much sense if you think about it (the park has gamekeepers and caretakers, wouldn't they notice extra dinosaurs? Hundreds of cameras never notice dinosaur nests or baby dinosaurs?) but at least that is an additional explanation why things go haywire beyond mere "turn the power off".


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Elemental wrote:

In fairness, JP did leave out a big plothole from the book, which was Malcolm going on about how chaos theory means life will inevitably rebel against attempts to contain it. Hence why we got massacred by cows and pigs thousands of years ago. Oh, and Michael Crichton would like to let you know that All Science Is Bad and humans haven't really progressed. Demonstrating how science is bad by showing how it can give us totally wicked awesome dinosaurs.....wasn't very well thought out.

Hmm...Malcolm's point was rather that the Park was attempting to manage dinosaurs with 'standard' procedures and it wasn't going to work because dinosaurs were 'unstandard', ie. we don't know enough about them compared to modern animals like cows, chicken, elephants etc. In fact some of it was shown to be true even before the Park collapsed - nobody had foreseen a possibility that one of the dinosaur species spits venom, making it that much harder to handle.

And in fairness, dangerous animals sometimes do escape even from modern Zoos.

Totally agree about Crichton's preachiness. It got worse over time.