Wall Banger/Film

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


In the hands of a capable director, Wall Bangers are easy to avoid. These films didn't get so lucky.

Examples of Executive Meddling and Fan Dumb are not Wall Bangers. They should be posted on their own pages.

Examples will be highly subjective. Read at your own risk, and if somebody rants about a show you like, please refrain from making Justifying Edits. If they're wrong, just delete it.

Subpages

Alien franchise

The franchise as a whole

  • The aliens' biology. The aliens are silicon-based rather than carbon-based. That's not the problem—silicon has the same tetravalence which allows for varied organic compounds. Using other organisms for incubation is also perfectly reasonable—it happens all the time on earth. But combining DNA with the host creature during the incubation period? You fail high-school biology. Gorillas and humans only differ by one amino acid, and how many human-gorilla hybrids have you seen lately? The aliens aren't even carbon-based; their DNA isn't going to be remotely similar to ours.
    • It's a sci-fi action/horror film. It's not supposed to have realistic biology. That being said, the real Wall Banger is how on earth would the aliens be able to survive/reproduce without any hosts for their offspring to live off of, or to use as a food source for that matter...especially considering they're shown to live in remote areas devoid of nearly any life. Aliens is a good example of this. We're shown that the titular monsters have pretty much killed everyone (except Newt) on the planet and that there are hundreds of them. Let's do a little math, shall we? Overpopulation + Not enough food = Cannibalism. Why haven't the aliens begun eating one another? And, what about the unhatched eggs? Do they just sit there for centuries waiting for something to come by so a facehugger can latch itself onto it? There are organisms that can wait for a pretty long time until ideal conditions come along for it to survive, but this is taking it to ridiculous levels.
      • But Aliens don't eat humans! They use them as incubators. We don't know what Aliens eat. Maybe nothing. I see no reason a species we know so little about couldn't last indefinitely without outside contact.
      • Oddly enough, that's a case that does make sense if you go by the theory that the aliens are bioweapons.
        • Indeed, the inability to reproduce without hosts would be a feature, not a bug, in a bioweapon. Once everyone in the intended target zone is already dead, you don't want your weapon doing any further expansion. In fact, you want it to die off as soon as possible so you can use the now-cleared space for yourself.
      • It's not said that the creature is silicon-based, but that it produces silicon to harden its exoskeleton. How? Well, it's science-fiction.
        • Or it eats silicon to get the necessary roughage in its diet. It's not like there's any shortage of dirt and rocks around to chew on, and those things can eat anything.

Alien 3

  • In what is still considered the most controversial plot twist in the Alien series, the chain of events that started Alien 3. An egg containing a facehugger was somehow laid by the Alien Queen during the events of the previous film. This raises a number of questions about xeno(morph)biology and series continuity:
    1. How does an egg get laid upside down? (Answer: It gets laid right-side up and then knocked over.)
    2. Why did the egg open by itself when eggs were clearly shown to react only to outside movement in the first two films?
    3. How did the facehugger know how to get all the way from the cargo bay to the cryopods?
    4. How can a creature that is bleeding just a little acidic blood cause a big enough fire to evacuate the entire ship?
    5. Didn't the queen detach from her egg sac, which was mostly destroyed by Ripley, before going to the ship? How did she lay it?
    6. Most important: How did Ripley miss the egg in the first place?

Alien Resurrection

  • The Queen gives birth to another human-alien hybrid who thinks Ripley's its mother.
    • To further elaborate, the Queen develops an artificial uterus/womb of sorts due to having Ripley's DNA within her. Weird, but ok. Then, she gives birth to a human-sized alien-human hybrid (Known as the "Newborn" by the fandom). A bit unbelievable, but still fine. But, then, for no reason whatsoever, it pretty much punches the face off of the Queen and imprints Ripley as its mother. How...just...How? It doesn't make any biological or practical sense. Yes, some species do imprint on something other than their own species as their parents because that's the first thing they saw. The first thing the Newborn saw, however, was the QUEEN. Notice a problem?
  • The conclusion. The bullet-proof, everything-proof, alien is sucked through a one inch hole into space! Air pressure at sea level on earth is a little under fifteen pounds per square inch. In a space ship it would be less since nitrogen is dispensed with (only the oxygen is important), so that hole would have the suction force of a good vacuum cleaner. Even better, since we already seen that Aliens are resistant to Explosive Decompression. But Hybrid is somehow blown into space...
    • Nitrogen would not be dispensed with. Oxygen is a corrosive and needs to be "diluted" with other gasses to levels where it won't burn your lungs out.
  • The space station. Conducting bio-warfare experiments on a deep space platform makes perfect sense. It is isolated and there is no danger of anything escaping. Having that station programmed to return to Earth if there has been a malfunction does not, since that brings the biological weapons right where they're not wanted.
    • In an age where you still need to go to cryosleep to get to mining jobs, this black-ops military experiment ship is just a few hours away from Earth!


Die Hard franchise

Die Hard 2: Die Harder

  • Die Hard 2: Die Harder has too many errors regarding airplanes to list here. A random example: The inability of the planes to just go to their alternate landing field. Every commercial flight must have in its flight plan an alternate airport it can land at if needed. There was attempted justification with extremely poor weather conditions, but it still didn't work: Baltimore-Washington International is so close to Dulles Airport (where the film's set) that the controllers would certainly realize that something was amiss and take action.
    • And Washington National, Leesburg Executive and Manassas Regional, and military airfields at Ft. Belvoir, Quantico Marine Corps Base, and Andrews Air Force Base. Finding a runway for an emergency diversion from Dulles is not difficult.
    • For that matter, the Baltimore-Washington area uses consolidated approach control for ATC. Or in plain English, all the ATC for the various airports in the vicinity is done by one regional traffic control center, with the individual towers at airports restricted only to handling final approach at line-of-sight range and ground control. Meaning that taking over the Dulles airport tower should have given the terrorists control of exactly nothing outside Dulles airport (as the regional TRACON center for the Baltimore-Washington area is located in Leesburg, Virginia).
    • An average jet can still glide up to 150 kilometres without working engines.
      • Forget gliding. They had enough fuel to circle around Washington DC for 2–3 hours during the movie. In 2 hours' flight time from DC, I could be landing in Chicago.
    • Not too many to be listed at IMDB!
  • In addition, the plot point about only the hijackers being able to talk to the aircraft because they had control of the air traffic control tower entirely ignores that in the real world, there is a specific frequency band intended solely for use during aviation emergencies ("guard frequency") and every aviation radio in the world has this frequency band hardwired in. In addition, all commercial or military aircraft are required to keep at least one radio activated and listening to guard frequency at all times, even if simultaneously speaking to someone else on their regular radio. Regardless of anything the hijackers could do or say with their control of Dulles ATC, anyone could have spoken to all the circling aircraft at any time by using any aviation radio within transmission range. Such as the ones at Andrews AFB, the ones at Bolling AFB, the ones at any other nearby airport, or the ones in any parked aircraft near any of the hangars.
    • Or the ones the police department use to talk to the police helicopters.
  • Weren't these 'wallbangers' deliberate to avoid creating security holes in real world airports?
    • Some of them no doubt were. The alternate airport problem, however, isn't.
  • Die Hard 2 also has the ceramic Glock. No such firearm has ever existed, nor can it exist unless someone invents a springy ceramic small enough to fit into a pistol. This is absurd, and yet it led to real-life misconceptions among lawmakers afraid ceramic guns would flood airports.
    • Technically, you can use an organic filler in concrete to form a pseudo-ceramic (and still metal-detector-proof) spring, but right now they are at least the size of a car's strut springs. Carbon fiber strips might be able to handle the torque stress... but no guarantees. Oh, and the film was made and set in the early 1990s.
    • All-plastic guns have finally been successfully made by 3-D printers, and are capable of firing maybe ten or fifteen times before breaking! Of course, that took people until 2014 to pull off. This movie is set in, as just mentioned, the early 1990s.

Live Free or Die Hard

Live Free or Die Hard is one big Wall Banger if you know anything about networks and security.

  • Never mind that! One character is frantically hitting the numpad only to code!
  • If you know ANYTHING about computers, then that movie is wallbangeriffic. They might as well have given the villain a wand and had him do magick because he wasn't a hacker—he was a fucking WIZARD! Call it 'Die Hard Meets Harry Potter'!
    • Example of this villain's wizardry: This fella designed the secret computer to download all the financial info in America (itself a mind-boggling task) when the Internet goes down. How?! With what?
    • That film inspired this Penny Arcade.
  • This film would be the one where helicopters are being killed with cars and a fighter aircraft tries to engage a big rig with its forward weapons—and you're worried about inaccuracies with the IT aspects?
    • Actually, the only thing CG in the scene where the helicopter gets taken down are it's rotor blades. They threw a real car at it. Same with the scene where John and Matt hide between two cars to avoid a flying one, THEY are digitally inserted into the scene. As for the jet thing...well it looked awesome, right?

Final Destination films

The franchise as a whole

  • Nowhere is it explained how the main protagonist gets the vision(s) of death that kicks off each movie. Usually in fiction, when someone gets a vision of their death out of the blue, it's a sign that they're meant to Screw Destiny and prevent that death from happening (see Early Edition for a prime example). So why is the Grim Reaper being such a spaz over it? Yeah, there's the whole thing with Balancing Death's Books, but what's the point if some cosmic force is trying to unbalance them on purpose? Either Death has no idea that a higher being is trying to screw with his kills, or he is the source of the visions and is just being a dick about it.
  • In all of the movies, it's established that if you were saved from death by the main protagonist's vision, then you will die unless you "cheat Death" - usually by injecting yourself with a suicide syringe and having your buddy restart your heart shortly afterward. Okay...but in one of the movies, one of the secondary characters tries to take his own life to avoid Death killing him off; he fails, supposedly because Death himself prevents it. What?! First, since Death could prevent someone's suicide, then he can actively interfere with someone's death if he so wishes; so why doesn't he step in and make the "suicide injection" of the protagonist at the end of the movie unrecoverable and truly suicidal? If he just got fooled in the first movie, it would be understandable; but it shouldn't work every single movie. Second, the gun-suicide guy was trying to take his life "out of order" in Death's book, which would be fine if the second movie didn't clearly state that Death had reversed the order of their deaths, which means that Death can change his reaping schedule at a moment's notice. Further proof that he's either messing with the survivors for a laugh or is the most inept Grim Reaper ever devised (even more than the ones from Irregular Webcomic).

The first movie

  • The mortuary scene from the first movie. Setting aside the Wild Mass Guessing that the caretaker could have been Death personified, these kids could have been arrested on the spot for breaking and entering and on suspicion of desecrating the body.

Final Destination 2

  • In one scene, Clear explains that Alex Browning died by a falling brick. A falling brick. The guy narrowly avoided explosions, electricity, and an oncoming train, for goodness' sake!

Final Destination 3

  • In the premonition, Kevin's camera falls out of his pocket and wraps around the track. The train hits it, causing it to derail. But after the premonition, Kevin got off. With his camera. So what caused the derailment?

The Final Destination

  • The fourth movie completely kills any logic the franchise had with how "Death's Plan" is supposed to work thanks to one character: Jonathan Grove. he survives the speedway accident, not by avoiding it altogether, but by surviving the incident itself. That's right; he survives being caught in the same accident that the other survivors avoided thanks to the premonition, doing absolutely nothing to try and save himself, not even changing seats. He stayed right where he was, got crushed by falling debris in the same manner he did in the premonition, and survives. In other words, he cheats death by surviving being in the accident that the other survivors avoided entirely. But, of course, since he's a survivor, Death has to kill him in a spectacular way. WHY?! Was Death taking a leak when this guy's time came or something? If he survived independently of the premonition, why have him be killed along with the other survivors, the ones who DID survive due to the premonition?!
    • You guys missed it: he'd died in the vision because the other characters asked him to change seats. He's the cowboy whose hat was blocking the girls' view, and to be polite, he moved to the base of one of the support columns ... the very one that got smacked by a flying car and triggered the collapse. It's because they'd asked him to move that he got pile-driven into the column, as Death's plan intended. The second time around, he wasn't asked to move because the others were too busy reacting to the lead character's vision, hence he wasn't killed instantly, only injured by the collapse.
    • If you want a real Wall Banger for the fourth movie, try timing how long the race cars keep smacking into one another on the track. Did the pit crews strip them down so thoroughly for speed that they even took out the brakes?

Godzilla, American remake (1998)

  • Godzilla makes cars jump in the air with every step as it approaches, but burrows through the subway system unnoticed.
  • The Army sets a trap with truckloads of fish. When Godzilla comes to eat it, they just gawk. Then their computers fail, so they open fire. Did they lose the script the day before shooting?
  • They made a semi-realistic-looking monster, no worse than many in modern video games—racing along against a highly unrealistic-looking New York City skyline. If you won't do CGI right in a live-action movie, don't use it!
  • The scientist guy buys a bunch of home pregnancy tests, tests Godzilla, and then finds out Godzilla is pregnant... and is shocked! So shocked because he thought it was male! Even leaving aside that there is no way a human pregnancy test would work on an egg-laying creature, if he didn't at least suspect it was female and maybe pregnant, why was he using the test on the samples? He then declares Godzilla is still male despite being pregnant.
  • Godzilla went to Big Applesauce in order to spawn! Are you kidding?! This runs completely counter to the spawning behavior of just about any real migratory organism. What's irritating is how geographically unrelated New York is to French Polynesia; there is no logical reason for the monster to choose that site as a breeding ground.
  • The director repeatedly forgot that helicopters can go up as well as along.
  • Godzilla shows up for only twenty minutes in its own movie.
  • Ask any Physicist what would happen if an animal of Zilla's size were to run. Go ahead, ask. It would not be pretty—for the animal. To be specific, if Zilla were to trip and fall while running, his/its organs would pretty much explode upon impact (Imagine dropping a water balloon filled with red Kool-Aid to the ground to get a good idea of how it'd look) and kill the poor creature instantly. It's one of the main reasons why large animals like elephants, Sauropods, etc. (for the most part) rarely/never run.
    • The makers of the remake were trying to make a more "realistic" Godzilla. Guys, when the Japanese version of Godzilla (with all its known scientific inaccuracy) has fewer examples of You Fail Biology and Physics Forever than your version, you've got yourself an Epic Fail! Yes, they tried to make their version more realistic than its predecessor and ended up making it less realistic.
  • The infamous "Napalm Breath" scene. Basically, Devlin and Emmerich decided to remove Godzilla's Thermonuclear Breath because they felt it wasn't realistic. However, there's a scene in the movie in which Zilla breathes/roars at several cars causing them to burst into flame. So, um, how did that happen? Seriously, it's never explained in the film what causes the cars to explode. Ok, Mr. Devlin and Mr. Emmerich, if you're going to remove Godzilla's trademark ability, then you also need to do either one of two things. Either-A.) Give us an explanation as to why Zilla's breath causes the cars to explode or B.) completely remove said scene.
    • The thing about the "Napalm Breath" was that Emmerich and Devlin, as you note, didn't want Godzilla to have any breath weapon at all. After fan outcry, they relented and added the napalm effect at the last minute. No one mentions it because it wasn't supposed to happen.

The Matrix

  • How could the traitor secretly enter the Matrix on his own to negotiate with Mr. Smith, when the fact that you are incapable of getting out of the Matrix on your own is a very important part of the movie? (Because this is how the traitor can kill the rest of the crew, once they are in the Matrix and he is outside it.) The scene with the in-Matrix negotiation happens in a vacuum - we are not supposed to think of how he got there.
    • On the "how did the traitor leave" solution, remember, The Matrix can free people of it's own volition. This is how the "first" survivors managed to create Zion. As for everything else...well yeah, it's an Idiot Plot.
      • How did the Traitor get in?
        • Remember that you can communicate with the Matrix from an outside phone line. So, all he needed to do was call Agent Smith from an outside line and ask to be let in for a meeting. You only need an operator to hack you a connection if you're actually hacking—if the System is cooperating with you, the only thing you need to do is lie down on a couch and stick in the plug.
    • On the issue of unmonitored goings on in the Matrix, along with Cypher's dealings, how about Bane? If an operator had watched Smith copying over him, surely he would have forcefully unplugged him and killed him? or at the very least not unjacked him from the Matrix until he knew what was going on?
      • It seemed like Smith was waiting for the transfer to begin before the copying.
  • Why would the machines use humans as their energy source, and not, say, pigs? And why would the humans be kept in an artificial world, instead of just be asleep?
    • Never mind pigs. Zion is powered through geothermal energy. The sentinels are armed with powerful drills. So why couldn't they have used said drills in retrieving said geothermal energy instead of raising People Farms, thus preventing the war? Sure the plot would have then been resolved in less than an hour, never mind three two hour intervals, but it would have been resolved with billions of lives still intact.
    • Originally, the idea behind humans powering machines was that their brains' processing power would be harvested. Human brains are essentially super computers. Squishy, organic super computers that need oxygen and food to survive. This is why the machines were willing to keep them in their little harvest pods. But for the brains to function at a high enough level to power the machines, they would need to be doing something. So the machines created the matrix which gave the humans something to think about and focus on, thus keeping them sufficiently active. This makes a lot more sense than what we ended up getting and was later an idea used really well in Dollhouse, that Joss Whedon show that no one remembers. So why was this concept changed to the stupid one we got in the movie? Because Warner Brothers didn't think that viewers would be able to comprehend the idea of brains being harvested for processing power.
      • Of course that still would have begged the question of why the machines would keep humans around at all instead of simply using much more advanced mechanical computers but it would have been a better explanation.
        • The assumption would be that the machines didn't have more advanced mechanical computers. In other words, there remained something about naturally evolved human brains that the machines had not yet managed to comprehend, reverse engineer, replicate and improve, and this something (most likely involving subconscious processes of some sort) was more effective at whatever task the machines wanted the Matrix to do for them than any other alternative the machines had access to.* Humans require feeding, maintenance, a pod full of machinery, and, apparently, enough computing resources to give them a full simulation of reality. All the humans do in return is convert food into low-grade heat. It would be vastly more efficient (and easier) for the machines to take whatever they're feeding to the humans and use it for biofuel.
      • If the Zionists give their geothermal technology to the machines, they'll have no more reason to keep the humans around.
    • A possible answer is that Human bodies are used as batteries, which are not power source, but power storage device. The power Machines use comes from the same source as Zionites' power: Morpheus even mentions geothermal energy in the first film. As to why the Matrix was created for the Humans in the first place: from the Architect's speech and the Animatrix some have deduced that the Machines are actually keeping humanity in existence, which at the same time maintaining and patrolling it with brutal force, protecting humans from themselves (I, Robot style).
      • They're apparently feeding them liquefied dead people (which is another wall banger).
        • Now, to be fair, they never said that was all they fed the human batteries. Perhaps the machines also turned the entire biomass of the planet into coppertop-food, and the corpses are just a little extra recycling in action.
    • Silly futuristic robot intelligences can't simply launch a large number of solar panel satellites and microwave the energy down to a ground-based collector?
    • Or even better, the machines could have just launched themselves into orbit. They could have spent eternity roaming the entire solar system at their leisure. Thousands of sci-fi books deal with this topic and the machines would be much better suited to that environment.
  • If the artificial Matrix world is kept forever "at the pinnacle of your civilization," as Mr. Smith says - an artificial 1990s, before the war with the machines - then how do they reset it? Because obviously time must be moving forward in the Matrix. And unless you want it to replay the machine war and come to an end, you have to start it over - but you have billions of plugged-in humans to deal with. Mr Smith says that humans went crazy and died in the first Matrix version, an unnatural utopia - imagine how crazy they would go after suddenly finding themselves in reset lives.
    • The machines can erase and alter the memories of people in the Matrix if they want too. That was part of the deal that Cypher made assuming the machines would have actually honored it. Of course that can bring up more head banging when you ask why they don't just do that with the whole lot of potential trouble makers.
    • They probably reboot the system every couple of years, repeating a rough decade or so ad infinitum. Which goes a long way towards explaining Agent Smith's cabin fever, as he's forced to perform a Sisyphysian task over and over again.
  • Leaving Maggie, the medical officer, all alone in the infirmary with Bane. Result: her entirely avoidable death. Granted, I'll give most of them a pass on not knowing that Bane was possessed by Smith at the time, but still it was painfully obvious that 1) something was terribly wrong with him and 2) it was more than likely he was the one that set off the EMP, dooming his shipmates. While I'm sure Maggie was the sort who could look out for herself under most circumstances, this was one situation where someone should have been there to watch her back; she would still be alive if there had been.
    • They're also at battle stations due to the war going on at the time, which means everybody else has to be at their posts. Those ships don't run with large crews, they probably didn't have anyone to spare.

Mission: Impossible franchise

Mission: Impossible II

  • Mission: Impossible II‍'‍s supreme Wall Banger occurs when Ethan infiltrates "Claw Island", Sean Ambrose's headquarters. He blows open a door leading to the room where Ambrose and the CEO of a pharmaceutical company are making a deal, and walks by, daring Ambrose to come out and face him. Ambrose sends his lieutenant, Hugh, and a fight scene commences between Hunt and Hugh that ends with both of them diving out of the way of a grenade. Hugh pulls a mute Hunt into the room a minute or two later, and comments to Ambrose that he thinks Hunt's jaw is broken. Ambrose ends up "shooting" Hunt to death, but then discovers that it's Hugh wearing a face mask of Hunt. How did Hunt have time to create a face mask of himself in that short a time, and where is the equipment he needed for the process?
    • Even more ridiculously, Ambrose had previously fooled two other people by showing up wearing a face mask of Hunt. And yet it didn't even occur to him that Hunt might have been doing the exact same thing? Apparently not. Given how Genre Savvy Ambrose proved to be earlier in the film - and the bit where he'd worked for the IMF before going rogue - the only way this makes sense is if he'd been repeatedly concussed with the Idiot Ball in the interim.
    • Only plausible explanation: Hunt had the mask with him all along. (If so, then his plans are damn complex...) He should have taken more masks of himself. The possibilities of making Mooks look like you are endless. It makes you wonder what else Hunt had in his surprisingly lightweight arsenal.
    • Given that Hunt killed countless mooks before and after, wouldn't it have been smart to eliminate the most dangerous enemy right then?
      • The objective is the virus, not the Big Bad. Also, he wanted to save Nyah. He's not quite good enough to kill everyone without risking the virus and cure getting damaged.
  • John Woo, if you switch the tyres on the bikes, don't show them in a closeup. What might be a simple goof turns ridiculous.

Mission: Impossible III

  • Hunt's first reaction to hearing his wife was taken was to run away from his own company. If he'd gone along quietly, then he probably wouldn't have been tied up in a Hannibal Lecter mask, and he could have explained the situation to the people who could help him resolve it. Instead of having the rest of his team become fugitives to help him, he could have gone ahead with the full support of the spy network. Almost the whole rest of the movie could have played out the same way. Talk about Fake Difficulty.
    • Because people act so logically when they hear their loved ones are in danger. Not to mention The Mole inside the organization who was manipulating Ethan into looking guilty, so the Agency wouldn't be able to figure out what was going on.
    • And keep in mind the context. Hunt runs to the hospital because he realizes his wife is in danger. Why is his wife in danger? Because the Big Bad's Mooks just staged a commando operation on American soil, with at least one civilian wounded. Why did they need to do that? Because Ethan captured the Big Bad. How? By leading an unauthorized kidnapping operation despite his Obstructive Bureaucrat boss telling him explicitly not to. He would be in trouble even without the terrorism his op resulted in.

Phantom of The Opera

  • Just how bad is Joel Schumacher's version of The Phantom of the Opera is a matter of taste, but it's hard to justify the scene where Raoul subdues the Phantom (a man he knows to be an extortionist, stalker, and murderer) in a sword fight and, after only a token protest from Christine, lets him go instead of killing him or turning him over the authorities, as any sane man in his position would have done.
    • And then goes home to plan a Zany Scheme to catch the guy he just let go! Because apparently Christine thinks beating a guy in a duel fair and square is dishonorable, but what they were planning to do during Don Juan Triumphant was not—it's a Zany Scheme that uses Christine as the bait, no less. Way to protect the girl, Raoul. (Note that in the stage version, said scheme is proposed earlier in the plot, and only employed because no better options present themselves.)
    • Christine spends years under the impression that her father has been coaching her as a ghost. Fair enough, she's a naive young girl. She tells Meg and Meg dismisses it as her imagination. Again, fair enough, that's reasonable for someone to think. Christine is taken away by the "Angel of Music" (who she still believes to be her father's ghost), sees that he has a mannequin of her in a wedding dress, sees his horribly disfigured face, and is frightened by him. She is apparently missing for long enough that people notice and get upset. Then Christine is sent back and doesn't tell anyone. She stays quiet about it until she thinks Raul is in danger, and even then just tells him some vague stuff about the Phantom. Did it not occur to her that if she told some people what happened, there was a better chance of her being safe from the Phantom? Did it not occur to her that there was something a little odd about her "father's spirit" lusting after her and trying to kidnap her? And why doesn't Meg tell anyone what Christine told her, especially when the Phantom's activities became more apparent? Did she not think anyone would care that her best friend was being contacted by what was possibly the Opera Ghost?
      • I believe the idea is that Christine is conflicted about her feelings towards the Phantom and/or he still has some influence over her. Sadly, neither Joel Schumacher's direction nor Emmy Rossum's acting communicate this very well. As for Meg...well, she really doesn't have much excuse, especially after she found the secret passageway behind the mirror (which is another Wall Banger in and of itself; how stupid would the Phantom have to be to leave the friggin' thing open in the first place?).
    • The movie also completely misses the point of Carlotta's character. While she's certainly an example of bombastic, over-the-top operatic excess and most likely not as good vocally as she was at the start of her career, she is by no means a bad singer (in fact, her position indicates the exact opposite). The movie pushes her towards Dreadful Musician territory, having staff members plug their ears with cotton when she performs and showing the opera audience vastly preferring Christine. This undermines the managers' entire reason for backing Carlotta to begin with—they're more business minded than artistic (the Phantom even says as much) so naturally they prefer the popular star who will sell more tickets over the unknown kid from Sweden. If demand for Christine was so high, why wouldn't they accommodate it? The actual voice work only makes this more annoying—Margaret Preece at least sounds like someone who's had a few voice lessons, while Emmy Rossum's thin, immature voice sounds unlikely to carry past the first few rows of the Opera auditorium.


Pirates of the Caribbean franchise

At World's End

  • Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End has an absolutely massive Wall Banger regarding the Davy Jones-Beckett subplot. Fans of the films will remember at the end of Dead Man's Chest, Beckett managed to obtain Jones' heart, which he could then use to blackmail Jones into doing pretty much anything he wanted. Surely then, if you were an Evil Overlord capable of blackmailing a supernatural being with some object, you'd either a) keep this object close to you at all times to ensure no one stole it, or b) bury it in some top secret and/or random location to make the odds of someone finding and using said object nigh impossible? I can see why the filmmakers didn't go with the latter as it would just be Dead Man's Chest all over again, but the former would still prove a fairly simple and sensible - for the villain - plot element. Why then did Beckett leave the heart in the stupidest place possible: The Flying Fucking Dutchman?!. Perhaps Beckett somehow knew and was banking on his own stupidity being overtaken by Jones's, who not only didn't smell opportunity until about two-and-a-half hours into the film, but seemed 100% against the idea of having the heart on board the ship. Of course, it is possible Jones knew all along he could steal the heart, but wouldn't dare because of the British soldiers aboard the ship, because he doesn't actually steal the heart until a cannonball smashes into the ship, wounding all the soldiers except one which Jones then gruesomely dispatches to get the key. But this would in turn lead to another wall and a subsequent bang. Has Jones completely forgotten he's nigh immortal? And that he has his own army of fish people on the ship who could revolt against the Brits to get the heart? Of course, this would undo Beckett's status as the Big Bad pretty quickly, but that could easily be avoided if Beckett kept the heart on the ship where he was to keep an eye on it!
    • Come to think of it, he could have simply submerged the damn ship and drowned all the British troops on board.
    • Beckett has to have the heart on hand in order to control Davy Jones. This way if Davy Jones or any of his minions tried to overthrow Beckett, the heart would be right there for them to stab, killing Jones and stopping the rebellion in its tracks. If the heart were buried somewhere, Davy Jones would have plenty of time to kill Beckett before Beckett had the chance to send someone to dig up the heart, stab it, and stop Jones.
    • In fact, this is exactly what almost happens when Jones tries to retake the Dutchman (except with cannons). The only wallbanger is that Jones tried it in the first place.
  • It is established that the Captain of Flying Dutchman, can only go on land once every ten years. This creates a "heart-breaking" problem for Will and Lizzy, seeing as how he can only visit her once every decade. But wait...why can't she come with him on the ship? It's not as if there is anything stopping her from coming aboard (we see other characters do it all the time, even when they are not permitted).
    • Not only that, but Even if, for some reason, she couldn't come on board the ship, why not simply wade out into the surf a bit?
    • It'd still be land under his feet. Just very wet land. Maybe treading water? At the point you might as well just be in a boat. Hm. I wonder if he could walk up a pier and stay on boards, would that count? And exactly what happens if he steps on land more than once per ten years? There's no "or else" on the limitation, he just can't.
      • It's probably similar to The Strain. Vampires break down in debilitating seizures if they attempt to cross large bodies of moving water (under their own power). The same would presumably happen to Jones and later, Will
    • There's also that scene where the good guys meet with the bad guys on a tiny island to chat. Jones is able to come because someone put buckets of water on the sand. Funny sight gag, but are you seriously telling me that Will and Elizabeth couldn't have found a way to use a trick like that?
  • To be fair the entire reason to have the heart on board Jones's ship is to control or threaten him immediately. Instead of having to rely on someone to come all the way back to Beckett and report Jones's misdeeds, the liaison and British soldiers on the ship had the power to kill him right then and there.
    • Except that if Beckett did have to give the order to destroy the heart, somebody would have to take over the Dutchman. Was he honestly expecting one of Those Two Guys, who were wielding the cannons on either side of the chest, to volunteer to have his heart cut out after blowing Jones's to smithereens? Or was Beckett planning to become the new captain himself, on the grounds that he'd issued the order to destroy it? Kind of hard to enjoy his prestige in the East India Company if he's turning into a fish-face or ferrying souls...
    • You don't need your heart ripped out to become the captain, though apparently killing Jones is part of the requirements.
      • If you stab the heart, you must replace it with your own. Jack got around this by having Will hold the knife, even if Jack was the one doing the action, but the person who stabbed the heart must cut theirs out and replace Davey's with their own.
  • The whole idea of Will deciding to forsake his fiancee and rescue his father. While I'm sure he'd love to release his father from his torment, the fact is that he's lived his entire life under the presumption that his father was dead, and had presumably gotten over it.
    • What really bothered me (and left several blood smears on my wall) was that according to the internal mythology of the movie, the Flying Dutchman must have a captain. Ok, fair enough. Where exactly does it state that the Captain must keep his heart in a treasure chest? Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Davy Jones have a heart for the first ten years as captain of the Dutchman? The only reason he cut it out was because his girlfriend stood him up; it had nothing to do with being the captain of the Dutchman. There's no reason that Will had to have his heart cut out too.
  • After the film was released, one of the writers blogged that since Elizabeth waited for Will, his "curse" was broken and he was no longer bound to the Dutchman. If Will isn't performing his duties, who replaces him? Remember the scene from earlier in the movie with all of those miserable lost souls floating in the sea because they had no one to guide them to the afterlife? That's what would happen if the Dutchman had no captain or a captain who ignored his duties. And according to the story, one becomes the new captain by killing the old one and having his own heart cut out. So Will would end up dead anyway. Not much of a happy ending there. For this reason, a lot of fans refuse to accept this explanation as canon.
    • Will probably had the power to change some of the rules, particular when it comes to succession. Like, say, he could just name his father as the new captain maybe. Just because it worked one way with Davy Jones doesn't mean it's the only way it could work, and for another thing, Jones was mortal once, so there must have been some mechanism for the process before he came about.
    • It was also implied in the film that Davey wasn't the first Captain of the Dutchman, Tia even outright says he cut out his own heart, never said this was a requirement to be captain but became one after he did it. When Will took control and Elizabeth fulfilled her role in waiting for Will that 'cured' the Dutchman to whatever state it was before Davey hacked out his heart and whatever method was used to pick captains before Jones was put back into effect.
  • The killing of the Kraken. Every fucking thing about it. First off, you don't spend a whole movie building up this unstoppable monster to kill it offscreen before the next film begins! It's not only dramatically wrong, it makes no sense in the context of the story. The Kraken is a large part of what makes Davy Jones so powerful, because he can send it anywhere to attack anyone on the ocean and it apparently cannot be stopped. Becket's whole plan is to use Jones to control the seas, so why would he remove one of his primary advantages? Without the Kraken, he gets an unusually powerful ship...but a ship that we've seen can be outran and presumably outgunned. It'd be like gaining control of the U.S. Military and demonstrating your authority by having them destroy all their nukes.

On Stranger Tides

  • From On Stranger Tides, we've got this little bit of bilge: Barbossa as a privateer for the King of England. If you can't see the problem with that, the bad guys for the second and third movies were part of the British Royal Navy, a part that was very anti-pirate and that he helped bring down. I know he's not as free-spirited as Captain Jack is, but c'mon, this is like a mafia hitman becoming a Secret Service agent after previously helping the mob take down the FBI.
    • I don't recall the British East India Company equaling the Royal Navy...
    • Technically no, but both the fictional and real life East India company were sanctioned by the King of England for all British trade in the area and put under protection by the British navy against pirates (which Beckett was assigned to the Company to take care of), so the analogy (and wall banger) is still valid.
    • Well, he certainly didn't bring them down- though he and the other pirates certainly dealt their activities in the Caribbean a serious blow. Plus, halfway through the film, Barbossa admits he's only a privateer out of convenience; he couldn't care less about the Fountain or the orders of the Crown- he just wants to take revenge on Blackbeard. And true to form, as soon as Blackbeard's dead and his ship's been captured Barbossa cheerfully tears up his Letters of Marque and goes back to being a pirate. And another thing, why is this a problem in the first place? Barbossa's hardly one of the heroes, and even they aren't above playing both sides of the fence.
    • At the beginning of the film, the Spanish learn about the existence of the Fountain of Youth and set out to seek it. When they finally do reach it, the leader of the expedition deems the place a "temple of blasphemy", or something to that effect, and orders his men to trash the place. Not once is it hinted that the Spanish sought out the fountain in order to destroy it, and to make matters worse, they collect the chalices used to perform the life-extending ritual, which they, given their mission, should have destroyed the minute they got their hands on them; had they did that, no one could have reached the fountain, let alone perform the ritual. Instead, the Spanish are nothing more than a Deus Ex Machina, making their existence in the story, outside of an admittedly good retrieval scene with Jack and Barbossa getting the chalices back, pointless.
  • In On Stranger Tides, Jack loses his hat towards the beginning. He makes no attempt to recover it. In fact, he doesn't even say anything about it. At all. This is the same hat that, in Dead Man's Chest, was a major plot point, in that it was totally unlike Jack not to turn the entire ship around to retrieve it when it fell overboard. Then, it was totally logical and expected to go get it, but now it doesn't even warrant a throw-away line?

Resident Evil franchise

Resident Evil, the original

  • William Birkin's pointless cameo. In theory, he is one of the scientists who take away Alice and the guy who'll become Nemesis in the second film. But he gets no memorable lines, we never see his face, and his name is never used in the film proper. And the whole "G-Virus" storyline is never used here or in the sequel. What was the point?
    • The actor who played William Birkin (Jason Isaacs) declined to come back for the next film, so he was replaced with Iain Glen's Dr. Isaacs expy.
  • Why does the team decide to go down there? Why not wait for a few hours to send the two suspicious individuals back to a nice secret torture chamber before sending a nice robot to look around the place? The idiots in charge know what kind of things were being experimented with in those facilities, but they choose to send a very small team in there without even equipping them in Hazmat suits! In the game, a team of crashed special agents made some sense. Here? Not so much.
    • We could probably talk about how incompetent the team was, too. The "Zombie Movie Intelligence Test" [1] says the protagonists got the lowest score ever at -1100. It took 20 minutes for them to try a headshot. As Cracked put it, the team are such awful shots that they increased the number of zombies. One of their many, many, many missed shots hits the controls on a containment unit, which releases even more zombies into an already crowded room.
      • When Red Queen tells them zombies can only be killed with headshots, Rain is surprised.
  • Why did they build that under an inhabited city? It would have been easy to build twenty miles out of town with enough security to make sure that nothing ever escaped. Were the idiots trying to ensure that any security mess-ups would result in a worst case scenario?
    • A base that size has a lot of traffic going in and out. If you build it 20 miles away from town then all the trucks going to some random spot 20 miles away from town and then heading into a garage or a tunnel means you might as well just build your base on the surface and put a giant neon sign on it saying "SECRET RESEARCH FACILITY OVER HERE". If you're trying to keep your secret base secret, then you need to put it somewhere that there's already a lot of people and vehicles moving around so that nobody can notice that a small percentage of them keep driving into garages and tunnels and not coming back out.
      • For a real-world example, despite being built under a mountain the Russians knew the location of NORAD HQ at Cheyenne Mountain before we'd even finished it. Why? In addition to the # of people employed on its construction, the first thing that had to be built was the road leading to the mountain to run the construction equipment up to start digging out the facility. And roads are, of course, visible from space. (At least to spy satellites.)

Resident Evil: Extinction

  • In Extinction, LJ gets bit and infected, but he doesn't tell anyone. He turns just in time to bite one of the other survivors. But he was Genre Savvy enough to survive the previous movie and the five years between the two.
  • In this film, the T-virus has psychic powers.
  • The clones.
  • Businessman Wesker. They turned one of the most cunning and vile video game villains ever into a Corrupt Corporate Executive. His cameo appearance was nothing more than a hologram.
  • In Extinction, they throw in a Psuedo-Birkin. Instead of turning into "G", he becomes a talking Tyrant with tentacle powers who is defeated by that laser grid from the first movie. This severely annoys those watching who played the game first.
  • Alice being able to beat Nemesis in hand-to-hand combat. Yes, THAT Nemesis.
  • Nemesis is after STARS members, right? So it kills that one guy, and chases Alice. Then, when it loses track of her, it just leaves. It forgets about Jill, another STARS member in Raccoon City. Then again, if it had gone after Jill, she might have been more important than Alice (a full blown God Mode Sue in this film). We certainly couldn't have that.
  • Nemesis pulling a Heel Face Turn.

Resident Evil: Afterlife

  • In the previous movie we're explicitly told that the virus has made the world's water dry up...somehow. So how is there an entire ocean and a rather green Alaska in this movie?

Spider-Man films

  • In Spider-Man 2, Peter walks away from a man being mugged because he was depowered. These muggers were not supervillains! Even if he couldn't intervene personally, he could at least call the cops, or call somebody to scare the thugs away! That's right, kids, helping people is a work for a designated costumed hero only. Everybody else - don't even bother!
    • It's not that Peter couldn't do it. It's that he made the decision not to be a hero to get his life back on track. He has to stick to that whether he's in a costume or not.
  • The news that after Spidey's retirement crime rate in New-York skyrocketed by 75%. Yes, Police Are Useless, but that's ridiculous!
    • Part of that may be due to many of the criminals in New York thinking "Wait, if I do *insert illegal act here* then I might get the shit kicked out of me by Spider-Man. Screw it, I'm going home."
  • The ever so convenient bit with Harry and his butler before Harry's Big Damn Heroes entrance in Spider-Man 3. The butler just, out of nowhere, reveals the truth. It'd been suggested the butler is a hallucination, representing Harry's good side, making it all the more glaring.
  • While it is customary for villains to want heroes unmasked, Fridge Logic suggests that, on average, knowing who the hero is under the mask won't add much info. (Supervillains are rarely average these days.) This cheapens the Heartwarming Moment in the train when two boys tell demasked Peter this:

"Don't worry, we won't tell anybody."

    • What exactly are they not telling? That Spider-Man is a dark-haired young man? Or are they promising not to shout "hey, it's Spider-Man!" if they happened to see Peter in the street?
      • They probably mean that they won't tell anyone that Spider-Man is just a teenager, a fact that surprised everyone when they saw him without his mask. If all the villains who are so scared of Spider-Man found out that he was just a kid, they might not be so scared of him anymore.
      • They may also have just been promising to not mention that they saw him unmasked at all. That's the risk of being unmasked in public, there's always the risk that there's some idiot that goes off and tells all their friends that they just saw Spiderman without his mask on and then he gets pestered by the media, or worse, the villains for any information he could offer.
  • Peter's mutation-induced powers leave him after he starts to doubt whether he should be Spider-Man. They return when he decides that he should. Mutations shouldn't work that way. Even in the magical world of Hollywood genetics, it shouldn't.
  • "Only Spider-Man can stop Octavius now". Uhm, guys, Ock is still a human under the robotic tentacles. And he doesn't wear body armor. You can still shoot him.
  • Norman Osborn goes nuts because of the Psycho Serum. Makes sense. Harry Osborn goes nuts because..."his father lives in him". How was that last managed?


Star Wars

Original Trilogy

  • Why are Luke and Leia siblings? In the films, the familial relationship didn't... do much other than create Squick in Empire and settle a Love Triangle peacefully.
    • The one scene where they kissed in Empire was to make Han jealous and even in that film it was clear Han and Leia would be an Official Couple. As for the revelations based on this, more than a few Legends picked up the ball on this with Leia getting actual Jedi training despite continuing to be a diplomat.

Prequel Trilogy

  • In The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda says "Always in motion is the future.", the general idea being that Jedi can see possible futures, but these visions are only really reliable within a fairly short period of time... so why are the Jedi betting everything on some vague prophecy that might refer to Anakin?
    • This is actually a case of Fridge Brilliance. The prophecy definitely refers to Anakin, as he's the only being purely conceived by the Force. He is, without a doubt, the Chosen One. The question, however, remained, would the Chosen One fulfill the rest of the prophecy, that is, bring balance to the Force. Since the future is always in motion, the Jedi could not be certain that Anakin would fulfill the prophecy. Along with respecting Qui-Gon Jinn's final wishes, this is the main reason the Jedi decided to ignore their reservations and to train Anakin in the ways of the Force, believing that the prophecy would more likely be fulfilled if he was trained in the ways of the Jedi, with tragic results.

The Phantom Menace

  • Word of God states that the Jedi saw through Amidala and her double's Paper-Thin Disguises, but it didn't come across in the film. The "We knew it all along" looks the Jedi were supposed to have at The Reveal looked more like shock, making it look as though they were fooled. This was either caused by faulty direction, faulty acting, or both.
  • Padme as a fourteen-year-old queen (democratically elected) with real executive authority. While it is conceivable that someone could have been elected to the office, and there have been cases of monarchs being elected (usually by other nobles), the idea that the human population of a planet would elect someone at the age of fourteen to act as their leader is more ludicrous than Jar Jar Binks.
    • Deleted scenes from Attack of the Clones showed Padme wasn't without qualifications. She was a junior representative for the Senate and was part of the Refugee Relief Movement along with the Princess before she was Queen. In addition, her predecessor and the incumbent was a corrupt ruler with a 0% Approval Rating who dropped out of the running.
      • Padme isn't the only government member. She's basically the five year old child from rule 12 on the Evil Overlord List. Her mistakes and impracticalities would be tempered by advisers and ministers (equally elected, so we may hope). Word Of God says it's tradition for the royalty to be young teenagers, so the government has adapted to fit an impractical idealist head of state.
  • At the end of the film, Obi-Wan promises to train Anakin, a proposal the Jedi Council reluctantly accepts. Obi-Wan just finished his apprenticeship, so why don't they arrange for a more experienced teacher? Especially considering that Anakin is most powerful in the force and might be the prophesied saviour of the Jedis and destroyer of the Sith. No wonder all hell breaks loose two movies later.
    • The Council decided he should honor Qui-Gon's wish. In addition, a knight like Obi-Wan would need to get an apprentice at some point in his career and Anakin was a good candidate.
  • Midichlorians. Did Anakin really need to be at the top of the Power Levels chart? And, if he did, couldn't you have found a better way to establish it?
    • Yes and no. Midichlorians aren't exactly explaining the Force as some people believe -- just explaining why some people can use it and others can't. In addition if Anakin didn't top the chart, there wouldn't be solid evidence for Qui-Gon to think he is the Chosen One.

Attack of the Clones

  • Chancellor Palpatine claims the Republic has stood for a thousand years. Obi-Wan claims it has stood for a thousand generations. Considering a generation is thirty years, either Palpatine or Obi Wan is twenty nine thousand years out.
    • It's possible that Palpatine was referring to the current Republic (compare to how the French say "The Second Republic" or the "Third." They're on number 5 now), while Kenobi was referring to the Republic as an institution stretching back to the original that has existed in one form or another for those 30,000 years.
    • I suggest you pick up some EU material. This is more or less canon.
    • Long story short The Republic had a major governmental overhaul after the Sith were believed to have been destroyed at the battle of Russan leading to what is called the Russan Reformations which is what Palpatine was referring to.
  • Anakin suddenly recalls that for the past ten to fifteen years, his mother has been a slave in the very asshole of the galaxy, and decides that he should probably maybe kind of do something about it. Even if Anakin (as per the Jedi teachings) was discouraged or forbidden from going to see his mother, there was nothing stopping him from sending someone (another Jedi, Padme, etc.) to check in on her from time to time.
    • To be fair, AotC is the first time in the entire intervening period that Anakin has seen Padme since the last movie, the first time he had both significant time away from direct Jedi supervision and access to a spaceship, and asking the other Jedi to go help his mom would almost certainly just result in a repeat of the 'no attachments' lecture and not any actual help.
  • "I killed them all. And not just the men, but the women, and the children." How come slaughtering an entire Tusken Raider village in a blind rage doesn't grant Anakin a one-way ticket to the Dark Side on the spot?
    • Because after his immediate rage passes Anakin feels sincere remorse over having done it, and acknowledges that his actions were wrong and completely unjustifiable. So its a case of him touching the Dark Side pretty hard but then stepping back from the abyss before fully taking the plunge. And before you go 'That's not possible', remember that in RotJ Luke draws upon the Dark Side when he beats down Darth Vader in a rage, and yet is able to step away from the point of no return before he goes over it. In every case we know of when a Jedi falls to the Dark Side the point of no return is not when they actually do evil, but when they then accept the evil they have done instead of turning away from it.
  • Padme had demonstrated, during Episode I, that she is skilled enough to use a blaster properly and hold her own on a shootout. Fine. Later in Episode II, she gets captured by Dooku alongside Obi-Wan and Anakin; all three of them are chained to stone columns and left to be mauled/eaten by some space critters. Fine. Then, out of nowhere, she is perfectly able to: release herself from her chains (something that our Jedi friends didn't, despite all the whole Force-thing). Climb at top of the column. Get her back slashed by a Nexu (imagine a tiger with More Teeth Than the Osmond Family) with no significant results. Do a Tarzan-like swing and knock down said Nexu. Jump on the back of a Reek (think a dinosaur/rhino-like thing) from the top of said column with her legs spread. Survive the subsequent huge battle with nothing more than a blaster and some cover from Anakin while trading idiotic quips with him. And, finally, survive a several-meter fall from a moving ship, again with no visible effects. Basically, they turned a perfectly reasonable Action Girl into one of the most blatant and egregious cases of Plot Armor.
    • Padme escaped using a lock pick so sometimes Muggles Do It Better. Also the fall was survivable and she landed on the Reek's back, not its horns.
  • This exchange between Anakin and Padme, said during a battle against an overwhelming enemy and with dozens of dead and dying Jedi around them:

"You call this a diplomatic solution?"
"No, I call it aggressive negotiations."

  • As pointed out by Mr. Plinkett and Confused Matthew, Padme's rationale for marrying Anakin is wholly unsatisfactory and illogical, given his behaviour throughout the film. Even if the audience is to accept that Padme is young and naive, she has witnessed Anakin (in order) making unnecessarily creepy comments towards her, giving her odd and disconcerting looks, rudely interrupting her during important diplomatic negotiations, begging for her to love him, and admitting to slaughtering an entire village full of Sand Raiders (including women and children). Yet, despite all this, she shows no hesitation towards marrying him, even though the evidence against Anakin being a suitable husband is far more than the evidence supporting it.
    • Hell, in the novel she turns off the surveillance system in her apartment, even though she knows she's marked for assassination, just so that this gallant knight doesn't peek on her in her sleep.
    • Padme had the same experience with romantic feelings as Anakin -- which is to say none at all. And she understands the Tusken Village was Anakin making a mistake in a moment of weakness because he is only human.
  • Speaking of which, the whole "Padme assassination attempt" episode is one humongous Wall Banger from start to finish. The assassin's choice of weapon was a few slow moving insects instead of using the explosives[2] with a drone to make a quick moving bomb. Once the insects were released the droid simply hovered nearby instead of immediately leaving. When the droid did leave it went straight back to the person who sent it instead of heading off for some place to self destruct and destroy evidence. Lastly, apparently all the security a political heavyweight who was marked for assassination deserved was an easily cut window and a security camera.
    • The rest of security measures could be threat specific, and if so, knowing them was the reason to choose stupid critters instead of more reliable things like neural gas, proximity mine or ambush by a droid with blaster. Having the drone return rather than destroy itself (it could at least become a red-hot pancake using its power source and the nearest accessible trash compactor — or simply free fall) was just stupid, of course.
    • The insects are one of the oldest tricks in the book. Animal Assassins have the benefit of not tripping the same alarms as a bomb. And while the window did have safety measures to keep it from getting damaged from an out-of-control speeder, the droid bypassed them. The droid stayed to avoid Bond Villain Stupidity and make sure Padme was killed; it would have to return to report to Zam before it could self-destruct as she didn't initially have line of sight on the droid of the apartment.

Revenge of the Sith

  • Yoda grabbing the Idiot Ball with both hands and jumping off a cliff by effectively telling Anakin not to mourn or even miss his loved ones when they pass away. Seriously, the guy has known Anakin for over ten years. He knows that Anakin has a short temper and a rebellious streak that has gotten him into trouble more than once. He knows that Anakin is apparently very powerful. Was it too much effort to say, "Careful around this you must be, young Skywalker; a self-fulfilling prophecy this may be!" Or did Yoda just feel like being a dick for the sake of the plot? Why this is a problem: Yoda's advice is Comically Missing the Point. Anakin comes to him to talk about some visions filled with pain and suffering he had been having lately, not to cry on his shoulder about the death of somebody. If anything, Yoda should have lectured him about the nature of premonitions and how they do not always come true, since "difficult to see, always in motion the future is".
    • Or better yet, just tell the guy: "Death, a part of life it is. Powerful enough to stop it, no one is, not even the Jedi. Know that the dead are at peace with the Force."
    • Yoda's not 100% at fault here. While he could've been a bit more sensitive, he had no idea who Anakin was talking about. For all he knew, Anakin was talking about Obi-Wan and was just relying on that for his advice. You'd think Anakin would just grow a pair and confess it all to Yoda right then and there, ridding him of his troubles. That was a golden opportunity that he missed completely!
      • Yoda's response does make more sense if he thinks Anakin is talking about Obi-Wan -- 'Accept that your friend made his choice willingly, and honor his sacrifices and treasure the time you had with him' is valid advice when talking to a soldier about his persistent fears that his battle buddy might stop a bullet somewhere. This is the height of the Clone Wars and they are both Jedi, after all.
  • "Only the Sith deal in absolutes!" Only the Sith?
    • To make this worse, this statement is said by Obi Wan. Saying that only Sith Lords speak in absolutes is an absolute itself. Therefore, by his own logic, Obi Wan is a Sith Lord.
    • While this seems mind-numbingly stupid on the surface, it's actually a bit of Fridge Brilliance to show that the Jedi are so super light that they're on the exact same level as the Sith, only on opposite ends of the spectrum: pure light vs. pure darkness, as opposed to something more balanced.
    • The line is taken out of context. Anakin's line before this was saying that "If you are not with me you are my enemy!" Obi-Wan's response was to point that Sith are the ones that believe that and not Jedi, who understand neutrality.
  • Padme's death. "She's lost the will to live." Apparently, she didn't give a rat's ass about her newborn children. EU material retconned this by saying she died from injuries not discovered when Anakin force choked her (which is only slightly better than the film's explanation), but it still brings the competence of the medical droids into question if she's dying of internal injuries and they conclude that she doesn't care enough to live. The look of pride and joy on her face doesn't help. Likewise, her final words were hardly those of someone who's lost all hope. "There is good in him… I know. I know there is… still…" Yep, totally lost the will to live.
    • It could be argued that, given the circumstances, Padme had to give birth in a place where decent medical droids were unavailable. However, the explanation given in the EU raises further problems. Firstly, why the hell did no-one think to question that the droids didn't know why she was dying? You'd have thought Obi-Wan would've at least asked what that was meant to mean, or maybe suggested they try and find a proper reason. Secondly, how come Padme was able to speak clearly enough to name her children if she had tracheal injuries severe enough to kill her?
    • "She's lost the will to live? What's your degree in, Poetry?"
    • There's a medical droid right there in the room while she's giving birth. It's the medical droid on board the personal ship of a Republic Senator. And there's two Jedi Masters right there as spectators.
    • Broken Heart Syndrome is a real thing. People do actually die from it, such as Carrie Fisher's mother who died shortly after Carrie herself. The droid wasn't on Bail's ship; they were on an asteroid base in the Outer Rim with only two experienced alien doctors and a medical droid, none of whom know much about Human physiology.
  • Mace Windu bringing such horrendously incompetent wingmen to arrest the Chancellor. Just, seeing Jedi Masters fall prey to The Worf Effect, it... Ugh.
    • The Jedi were competent but they were not on the same level as Palpatine. Few Jedi in Mace's generation had fought a Sith and of the those that had were either dead (Qui-Gon Jinn, Adi Gallia), on other planets (Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi), or couldn't be trusted (Anakin). He brought the best he had on hand at the time since the Clone Wars had left most of the Jedi away from Coruscant.

Rogue One

  • Rogue One was in my opinion the best of the Disney Star Wars movies but it still has quite the wall banger for me. It turns the Death Star needs giant Kyber Crystals to power its superlaser. Um What? that makes no sense and is a textbook opens up a galatic (pun intended) can of worms. First we never learn where these giant Kyber Crystals come from. Second, Why does Palatine decide the Crux of his planet destroying superweapon should something so that the current Jedi Order didn't know that they existed and and so he didn't even know there would be enough for the superlaser (this gets worse when you remember that he commissioned the Death Star before the arc in The Clone Wars where the Jedi learned about them). Third why doesn't he use synthetic Kyber Crystals like Sith use for their Lightsabers. After All it is Canon that he already A Giant Synthetic Kyber Crystal at his Medcenter(We see it in Star Wars Complete Locations) . Fourth if they are so rare how the hell did Palpatine find enough to use in not one but two Death Stars. Five if the Giant Kyber Crystals refact and amplify blaster energy (as seen in the Crystal Crisis On Utapau arc) how do they not blow up the Death Star during the first test firing. Eight if they need Giant-Sized Kyber Crystals for the Superlaser, why do they grab the too small to use Kyber Crystals we see being carried in the Tanks on Jedha? (Yes the Visual Guide does have an explanation but not elaborated on enough to avoid being a Voodoo Shark) Nine Why did it have to make them Kyber Crystals? I would have be able to keep my Willing Suspension Of Disbelief if all they did was didn't use Lightsaber Crystals since they already have established properties. Keep in mind the Death Star needed to crystals for the Superlaser in Legends too but they were not Lightsaber Crystals so I was okay with that.
  • On a smaller note the Tanks in the movie are a retroactive Wall Banger for two reasons. A. They were constantly called Hovertanks in the marketing when at some point in production they made the decision to have be regular tanks. However they never bothered to adjust the marketing and merchandise accordingly. All they did was say there was a variant the was a Hover Tank but the one in the movie was the regular tracked variant. B. a recurring question among fans was where all the new vehicles during the original trilogy seeing the film takes place as A New Hope. Most of them (like Krennic's Shuttle or the TIE Striker) got by on being Rare Vehicles in-universe and others (like the AT-ACT or U-Wing) would not fit any of the battles that happened in the OT but tanks don't fit into either category because a tracked variant exist. To make things quick the reason The Empire relied solely on walkers during the Battle Of Hoth was because only vehicles with direct ground contact could make it through it Rebels' base shield (so no TIE Fighters or Hovertanks). But now The Empire has a tank with the speed to keep up (or even overtake) AT-ATs, the ability to pass through base shields, and a trio of Fixed Forward-Facing Weapons that they never thought to use on Hoth despite the fact the above-mentioned attributes and the fact the battle takes place on long stretch of flat open ground which is precisely the kind of terrain a tank is built for.

Terminator franchise

Terminator 3

  • The lead female spends most of the early part of the film trapped in the back of a van yelling at the Arnold-Terminator to let her out. Later in the film, he reveals that he's programmed to do everything she tells him! Except, apparently, let her out. He then goes with them to try to stop Judgment Day when he specifically doesn't want to; his sole reason is that she told him to do it and he had to obey. Then he disobeys her orders again by tricking them into being trapped in a bunker when Judgment Day occurs anyway. If he's programmed to obey her orders, why try to stop Skynet's activation? If he isn't, why not force or trick them both to go to the bunker without wasting time at the military base? None of it makes any sense!
    • It does if you assume that the T-850 was telling a half truth-Future!Kate was the one who gave him his mission, and part of that mission required him to lie to her in the past so that she's there to give him his mission in the future.
    • It's just about plausible that Skynet would send back two Terminators. However, Skynet in this new timeline is clearly aware they failed, yet would have to have sent them back anyway. Not to mention the "advanced" Terminator going back to the old endoskeleton design for no apparent reason and violating the "you can't bring weapons" rule (the former ultimately causing her defeat; the T-1000 wouldn't have been split in half, would have had nothing to grab, etc, while the on-board weapons were barely used at all) or the ludicrousness of Skynet simultaneously being a virus loose on the internet and not being connected to it at all. The final payoff (Skynet couldn't be destroyed by thousands of EMPs because it was "software" on unshielded home and business PCs) is eight flavours of fucking stupid.
    • So... Neo Skynet is a distributed computer program operating on millions of computers world wide. The moment Skynet becomes a sapient entity, it immediately launches a nuclear attack. Whaaaaaa?! Why would it DO that? Skynet is no longer the Minsky brain-in-a-jar classical AI from the Cold War; it's a distributed intelligence! It NEEDS all that power and communications infrastructure and equipment to be functional to survive! In the previous movie it made sense since Skynet was housed in a bunker somewhere in total, but here destroying the world communications and power grid would effectively lobotomize it. So, what... was Skynet's immediate action on waking up to try to commit suicide? And then it decides to wipe out humanity (in a fit of emo rage, I guess)? You'd think this version of Skynet would be smarter and just use its absolute control over the entirety of human military, police, financial, and political information to just conquer humanity without anyone being any the wiser.
    • How about the T-X "hacking" car engine computers to make them move on their own? This has showed in a couple of other movies too, and it's an extremely stupid Critical Research Failure. An engine computer simply monitors performance and reads data from sensors, and even if it could be hacked, you'd need servo motors attached to the mechanically-driven pedals, gear shift and steering wheel to make the car go on its own.
      • Almost there though, i.e. Parking Assistants for steering, etc
    • When the T-800 was reprogrammed to try to kill John Connor, he tries to override the programming. Despite the fact that computers cannot work that way, his system configurations apparently engage "make ridiculous faces" mode when trying to override the programming. The main point of the first two movies is that the terminator cannot feel emotion. Even in the big climax of T-2, he simply says that he understands why humans cry, and that he is incapable of it due to not being able to feel emotion. However, he just apparently just decides to have emotions here.
      • Well, since strong AI doesn't exist in Real Life, we don't know how such a thing would work. However, it's safe to say that the Terminator CPU must be capable of multitasking, so one possible justification would be that he is running both Resistance and Skynet processes simultaneously, and that both are sending control signals to his robot body while trying to overwrite or delete the other. (Google "core wars" for a real-world example of warring system processes.) If multiple control signals are being sent to hardware at the same time, the results would be unpredictable.
      • Also, the T-2 terminator DOES seem to build some kind of emotions, what with his unprovoked quipping ("I need a vacation") and capability to apologize. He just can't literally cry (make water leak out of his eyes). So, the T-3 version might have built some semblance of emotion as well.
      • And if the T-850 has psychology installed, he has a better knowledge of emotions than its predecessors.

Terminator Salvation

  • It is confirmed that Kyle Reese is John Connor's father, Reese is placed at the top of Skynet's "hit list" and has a squadron of Skynet machines sent after him. He is then captured, brought in, identified as Kyle Reese, father of John Connor, and then used as bait to lure Connor into a trap. WHY? He's going to be his father, kill him, you win. You're a fucking super computer, not Dr. pissing Evil.
    • Or why every single terminator throws the victim into walls. You have the person in your hands. Grab throat. Squeeze. Mission accomplished.
      • Or as we see is possible in the very first victim of the series. Punch through chest. Mission accomplished.
    • Now, I'm no doctor, but I'm fairly certain a heart transplant in tent in the middle of a desert isn't a good idea
    • In the original film, it's established that the only way anything other than living tissue can be sent back in time is if it's surrounded in living tissue. In the second film, the T-1000 (made entirely out of liquid metal, with no living tissue in sight) is sent back. Maybe they improved the time machine?
      • The metal is "alive" though, and could be enough to trick the time displacement equipment, or you just cover the T-1000 with bacteria, it's alive, and will transport whatever it covers.
        • Really, it raises more questions than it answers; if they can cloak the T-1000 in something living in order to send it back, they can also wrap up a few Phased Plasma Rifles, or something else in the BFG class, and send it back with it (or within it). Best advice for the whole series is given at the end of the original film: "A person could go crazy thinking about this."
      • They also don't send any weapons back with the T-1000, despite the fact that he's made of liquid metal and could conceivably conceal just about any weapon short of a tactical nuke of a cruise-missile.
        • He's made a shapeshifter so that it's not needed to travel with weapons...
    • Who was John Connor's original father, because he has to be alive to send his Kyle Reese back the first time.
      • The loop works in the first movie, it's just a case of cause following effect; unfortunately, the required inevitability of John sending Reese back to close the loop rather spoils the "the future is not set" message. It's T2 which messes with this by saying it is possible to stop Judgment Day and therefore that John could potentially be alive despite his father never being sent back in time (it's implied in the comics that John knew Kyle Reese was his father even before he sent him back; in T2, John talks about knowing he sent his real father back in time to die). T3 really doesn't fix this by saying Judgment Day could be postponed, since if that's true presumably Reese would be older when he was sent back, not to mention the question of why the new Skynet (now a totally different entity to the late Cold War-designed Cyberdyne Skynet which commanded pilotless stealth bombers) would still do exactly the same things. It's a case of trying to fix a plot hole only to end up widening it into a plot tunnel.
    • How does a multistory robot sneak up on a band of humans in the middle of a desert? Was nobody watching? Did it just move THAT fast? Was it a Transformer in disguise?
    • Speaking of emergency heart surgery, I was wracking my brain trying to think of what kind of trauma would result in the need for a transplant without being immediately fatal. If the heart or major blood vessel was punctured, he would have died within seconds. If the heart was scraped but not actually punctured, no transplant would have been necessary. This is why heart transplants are used for heart failure and congestion rather than injury; No trauma patient lives long enough to get a new one.
    • The whole way that time travel works in this universe makes no sense. The first and second films establish repeatedly that there is no set future, yet Kyle Reese being sent from the future to become John Connor's father negates this. Okay, so maybe they were wrong in the first and second films, and the future is set. After all, they're functioning on the idea that John Connor has to be the leader of the resistance, so maybe they just don't know how the time loop works. Okay, maybe when Reese got sent back in time and knocked up Sarah, she birthed a different person who, with the influence of Kyle, named him John, and raised him to be a "great military leader" since she thought she was supposed to. After all, up till this point, nothing had happened that made the creation of Skynet impossible. But wait, then they blew up Cyberdyne, and Skynet just gets created later Because Destiny Says So. Huh. So apparently, in the terminator universe, the future is set when it's necessary for the plot/for there to be more movies made.
      • All these problems go away if you assume multiple timelines. Although the films don't explicitly do so, this was canon in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, where Derek and Jesse come from different futures.
      • Here's what this troper thinks: The future can be changed, but there's no way for the humans to change it to give themselves a better outcome. Skynet will take over in every possible future Sarah and Kyle can create and they have got humanity in a loop of doing "pretty good". Sending Kyle back to save Sarah and knock her up with John will keep the humans alive and that's about the best they can do. Variations on this time loop can cause things like a delay in judgement day during the next loop but they can also cause humans to be completely wiped out. So potentially, there exists a form of the time loop where they do manage to defeat skynet, they just have not found it yet.

X-Men franchise

X-Men 2

  • There were nozzles in Magneto's prison cell that give out highly effective knock-out gas. That's reasonable, nah, brilliant in its simplicity and usefulness. In fact, every time there is a similar premise (a chamber where they need to prevent somebody from entering and/or leaving) but without a knock-out gas dispenser installed, it leaves me screaming: "You idiots, why didn't you install a knock-out gas dispenser?" Then Magneto attempts escape...and the gas is not used at all!!!
    • For a start, the guards didn't know he was making a successful escape attempt until he shattered the walls of his cell- the same walls that keep the gas in. Magneto takes about a minute or two to actually pass out when the nozzles are first used, and that's because the cell is small enough for the gas to build up to effective levels quickly. Once the walls are broken down, not only is the gas pumping into a much larger space (assuming the nozzles still work), but Magneto isn't waiting around to see what happens next. Ergo, the gas is pretty much useless unless the cell walls are intact.
      • For a start he killed a guard. Rather slowly and in a manner clearly indicating presence of metal. If that's not a reason enough to start pumping in the gas, I don't know what is (please, don't say they didn't have video surveillance in his cell, have mercy for the wall). And the gas is not useless, because, even if Magneto breaks out, you can still flood the whole building with gas!
        • While the first point is valid (holy shit he's killing the guy slowly and horribly! Why aren't we doing anything!) the second fails because it still takes time to flood the area with enough gas to make it work.
        • Maybe they don't have video surveillance in his cell because the cameras would necessarily 1)be placed in line-of-sight from him and 2)contain metal circuitry. That said, if they can't use cameras they ought to have a guard stationed at a watch post 24/7.
        • No, we actually do see a security camera in Magneto's cell switch off during Stryker's visit. It's not clear if it was ever switched on again, so perhaps the security guards just got lazy; after all, these are the same guards who caught a blip on the metal detector and didn't bother to check what was wrong.

X-Men: The Last Stand

  • Storm expresses Moral Outrage that anyone would want to stop being a mutant when talking to a giant blue freak, a man who is constantly forced to cut his flesh open to use some of his powers, and a girl who is unable to touch anyone, including the man she loves, for fear of killing them.
    • Aside from the adamantine claws and skeleton, Wolverine's main power is regeneration. His Healing Factor is the entire effing reason that he has a poisonous metal skeleton - without it, he wouldn't have ever been used for the experiment.
      • Reappearing bullet holes.
      • Wolverine's original powers involved bone claws as well as the healing, so adamantium or not, he'd still have to rip holes in his hands to shoot out the claws. The Adamantium skeleton and claws just give him increased durability.
    • Beast does call her out on that by gently reminding her that not every mutant in the room has her advantage of being able to pass as a normal, attractive human.
    • The Abridged Script

Halle Berry: A cure? But there's nothing wrong with us!
Kelsey Grammer: ...
Halle Berry: I mean, unless you count being covered in bright blue fur, being unable to touch someone, or having mental powers so uncontrollable that you are a danger to the entire world.

    • One could argue that Storm was outraged that the "Cure" implied that mutants were suffering from some sort of illness. It still was tactless, though.
    • This is even more headache inducing in the first film where Professor X explains to Rogue that the "anonymity" is the mutant's best weapon. Well Jeez Professor that's awfully convenient seeing as how everyone on your team looks perfectly normal, worst any of them have to put up with is a pair of goofy glasses, while everyone on Magneto's team would stand out if you saw them from across the street. At night. While they were wearing heavy clothing. Seriously how is the 7 foot tall, fanged, furry Sabretooth supposed to "blend?"
  • What in blazes was the point of Mystique getting herself captured, only to be busted out by Magneto, shot down defending him, and left nude in the truck for all to see?! She basically got Stuffed Into the Fridge. What the hell Ratner?!!
    • To be fair though, Raven did get what could be considered a Crowning Moment of Awesome. She basically ratted out Magneto and his group to the Authorities, giving them secret information on the campsite they were staying at, which eventually led to the capture of Multiple Man.
    • Uh, not much of a victory, considering Multiple Man was acting as a decoy for the entire camp they'd been hoping to capture.
    • And in the Novelization, she is one of the few mutants at the very end who appear to slightly be getting their powers back.
  • Having Jean kill the love of her life accidentally was bad enough, but did she have to do it offscreen? And no-one seems to give a damn that Scott's dead afterward.
  • Really the whole movie is one big wall-banger because they decided to combine the "Dark Phoenix Saga" with the Joss Wedon's "Gifted" arc from Uncanny X-Men. Both of these storylines could have been perfect had they got their own movie to work with but for some reason they were both shoved in the same film leading to both of them being badly undercooked. It doesn't help in this case that the storylines were borderline incompatible (even before the retcon with the Phoenix Force, The "Dark Phoenix Saga" was still heavily in the realm of a space-based Sci-Fi story whereas "Gifted" was more down to earth by comparison.) I would think any executive who got a plot synopsis of both stories had at least five minutes alone to think about which one to pick would figure out these stories go together as well as Grape Jelly and Mustard but apparently I give the likes of Tim Roth too much credit by assuming they have at least average intelligence.
  • Really, X2: X-Men United had this problem as well, killing off people just for the hell of it. Jean Grey's death in X2 was the most idiotic plot device with the thinnest justification ever. Let's see, there's a mountain of water crashing toward the Blackbird, so Jean decides to go outside, stand in the water's path so she can be conveniently killed, and lift the Blackbird to safety. As opposed to everyone getting out of the Blackbird and her lifting them to safety (cause we can always get another Blackbird, but presumably we can't get another Jean Grey), or better yet, everyone stay in the Blackbird and she can lift it from in the plane (something she can do in the comics, but this is the movie so I guess that's anyone's call). Nobody took even 5 seconds to think about this. Idiot Ball anyone?
    • Considering how in The Last Stand she gets sad/suicidal when feeling Phoenix is taking over, maybe she thought the "overly powerful phase" which manifested a few times through that movie was something to get rid of.
    • Apparently Jean wasn't even supposed to die in the original script and she lived at the end of the novelization (which was also based on the original script).
  • Or Bobby could get out and freeze all that water. And then they could fly off at a nice and leisurely pace. Maybe pop a tape into the deck. Play a few rounds of 20 Questions.
    • Iceman can "build" a wall of ice, sure. But compare the size of that with that incoming surge! Would be pretty hard.
      • Actually, considering how difficult it should be to instantly freeze the water vapor in the air into a good foot thick or so wall, freezing liquid water should be considerably easier for him.
      • Freezing the water, sure, but he can't cancel the kinetic force. They're better off being hit by water than ice.
    • I'm pretty sure Cyclops's eyebeam things can vaporize water. Nightcrawler could teleport them to safety a few at a time. Storm could generate wind to blow the water away from the plane, or she could lift the plane with a tornado, or lower the temperature outside to subzero so the water would freeze. Her death was a suicide, but definitely an unnecessary one.
    • Cyclops's eyebeams are concussive force, not heat, at least as far as the source material goes. I believe that would preclude any water vaporization.
      • To be fair: Nightcrawler has difficulty teleporting more than a few yards by himself, saying nothing about carrying passengers, and teleporting multiple people in a short span of time has been known to leave him in a borderline comatose state in the comics. Storm and Iceman probably could have done something though, especially since they are two of the most powerful (omega level) mutants.
        • None of this changes the fact that if Jean could stop the water from outside the plane, she could've stopped it from inside too.
  • The plane wallbanger is actually lampshaded. During his talk with Professor X, Wolverine can't understand why she left the plane when there was another way, so even he seems to think he death was entirely unnecessary. This carries with it the implication that Jean's stupidity is actually a conscious decision to let herself be hit with the water, for whatever reason.
  • And changing Wolverine's Character Development arc from "amnesiac loner with a Dark and Troubled Past discovers his own humanity" to "amnesiac loner with a Dark and Troubled Past discovers the value of teamwork" was inexcusable.
  • Does anyone buy that mutants would suddenly be accepted by the rest of human society and not actively hunted down after an army of them attack soldiers, show just one can move the entire golden gate bridge and another that can create a massive vortex of sheer vaporizing power? Honestly? Just because one group of mutants fought another group of mutants, all mutants are good until proven otherwise?
    • This was acknowledged in one scene, in which the president tells Beast that he's trying to do his best to keep things smooth, but that he worries about how the world will survive with mutants "who can lift cities with their minds".
  • 3 was just one long Wallbanger. Magneto simply abandoning a close friend who incidentally knows all of his plans? Maybe he'd treat her as needing to be cured of not being a mutant, but simply leaving her there was ludicrously out of character.
    • Except that it was apparently deliberate. Mystique was "abandoned" so that she could turn state's evidence on Magneto by revealing the location of his secret base... his FAKE secret base, inhabited entirely by Multiple Man.... keeping the military busy while he assembled his army elsewhere. Presumably she VOLUNTEERED for this gambit.
      • If I remember correctly however Multiple Man was freed during her breakout but still Magneto abandoning her is stupid.
    • And then there's the whole idea of the mobile prisons. This was apparently Executive Meddling (the Alcatraz sequence was supposed to be the jailbreak, but Magneto moving the Golden Gate was the big effect shot, so it got shunted illogically to the end of the movie and the script made approximately three times as idiotic to compensate) but this doesn't excuse the utter stupidity of trying to keep someone away from Magneto by putting them in a convoy of poorly defended metal things, or the logistics of keeping a convoy of vehicles in constant motion.
    • And then there's the Alcatraz scene itself. Soooooo, let's get this straight: Magneto has lifted the Golden Gate Bridge. Magneto wants to kill someone in an exposed cell on the top floor of the complex. Magneto for some reason doesn't think to either drop the bridge on the building or just crush the whole reinforced concrete structure using its own rebars. Idiot Ball, anyone?
    • Even more simpler than that Alcatraz was built with a combination of concrete and metal. He could have just used all the metal turn the place into a death trap or better than that rip the entire prison from the foundation throw it into the horizon. He wouldn't even need the army.
    • Plus Magneto's Character Drailment doesn't end with abandoning Mystique not only does he care about the fact his plan to destroy the cure is a defenseless mutant child despite being about portrayed Pro-Mutant in all other movies but Kick the Dog moment gets stupider when he doesn't actually do anything during the fight until Wolverine attacks him. Keep in mind the movies have a Running Gag out of Magneto throwing Wolvie around like a rag doll due to the hole metal skeleton thing but there is also Colossus among the team in this fight so could have taken out the X-Men's two heavy hitters no problems.

X Men Origins: Wolverine

  • The final villain is Deadpool. Yes, Deadpool. Oh, and he can now shoot lasers concussive force blasts(!) from his eyes and teleport without a device, and his katanas are retractable just like Wolverine's claws (which led fans to call him Barakapool).
  • The next question: didn't his new wristanas look a bit longer than his forearms were? So he can't have had them fully sheathed and bent his arms at the same time?
    • Lady Deathstrike's claws were significantly longer than her fingers, likely the same deal.
      • Yes, but wouldn't her claws be able to go past the wrist?
      • I remember looking at the X2 website a long time ago, and I remember this opening animation of LD's claws coming out as segments. It's silly but maybe that's how she can move her fingers; the claws are only in her fingertips.
  • Also, his mouth was stitched shut. Yes, that's right, The Merc With the Mouth was gagged. Unleash Nerd Rage!
    • The Stinger shows the mouth is free again for random babbling in the spin-off.
  • And then there's the whole Adamantium bullets thing. Ok, so you've got bullets that can kill/memory wipe Wolverine (somehow) and you don't think of giving them to Agent Zero. You know, the guy who could hit him from a mile away blindfolded! I mean, maybe Stryker wanted to do it personally, but it's a stupid thing not to do.
    • Wait a minute: Wouldn't you need a barrel made from even harder alloy to even fire those?
      • No, you just need to lubricate the bullets to minimize damage to the barrel. Armour piercing rounds are made from in tungsten and that's much harder than the barrel's steel.
    • And it's not as if his skull was vaporized/replaced by molten adamantium 30 minutes earlier with no harmful side effects. Oh wait...
    • Even more to the point: bullets do not work that way! Bullets have to be made from soft metal or they don't catch the rifling in the barrel, won't spin, and will fire like a musket, even from a sniper rifle.
      • The bullets are probably an adamantium penetrator jacketed in something softer, like copper or cupronickel. The same kind of thing that jackets an FMJ round. That's how they make armour piercing bullets now.
  • Stryker has a revolver. This revolver has a six-bullet capacity. He fires all six bullets at Wolverine, causing the amnesia present in the later films. Then, seconds later, Stryker points the gun at Kayla, preparing to blast her away, and she mind-controls him to point the gun at himself. But it's an empty gun, making what would be a tense moment (if you hadn't seen X2) into one that's kind of funny.
  • What I simply don't get is how does an adamantium bullet penetrate a skull coated with the same material?! It would have made sense if he had shot him through the eyes or up the nose, which has been shown in the comics, or even if Wolverine had slowly lost his memory as a side effect of the bonding process. But somehow the toughest material in the universe is able to penetrate itself.
    • Well, diamonds can cut each other. Maybe the same principle would work for Adamantium.
    • You can't * cut* something with something else made of the same material, but you can penetrate a sheet of one material with a projectile of the same material, as long as it has enough mass and kinetic energy. Actually, it's more like tearing through the sheet rather than penetrating it outright, but the end result is the same, it goes through. In this case, the sheet would be Wolverine's skull. After all, lead bullets can penetrate steel plates even if lead is softer than steel.
      • Given enough kinetic force, you are right. But Adamantium is stated to be impenetrable, so it should be at least much more strong than any real world alloy. You should not be able to break it with a bullet, not even an adamantium one, more than steel arrows fired by a bow could penetrate a tank. Stryker should have used some sort of juiced-up rifle to keep some tenuous verisimilitude.
  • Continuing from this line of thought—shooting an adamantium skull with an adamantium bullet only causes a little dint that makes you lose your memory, but you can cut a guy's adamantium neck off with adamantium claws? A bullet would travel somewhat faster than a roundhouse, one would have thought.
    • Deadpool didn't have adamantium in his skeleton. The one doc points out they haven't done the grafting yet when Striker wants him activated.
  • Oh, and Deadpool has these continuously firing broad-range eyebeams that can destroy entire concrete structures (that you discover after his death), but doesn't think to just leave them on the whole time he's fighting Sabretooth and Wolverine? It's almost as if the movie gave Deadpool too much power and the script relies on a continuing Deus Ex Machina to resolve the fight in the designated hero's favour.
  • The entire Gambit scene is a giant Wall Banger. Gambit hates Creed. Logan shows up and tells him he's going to kill Creed. Remy suspects Logan is working with him and attacks. Creed randomly shows up for no apparent reason and fights with Logan. Gambit then, after seeing Creed (a man he knows is his enemy) fighting Logan (a man he only suspects to be his enemy only because of his possible affiliation with Creed) decides to attack Logan and allow Creed to escape. And then he displays random Spider-Man agility. And Logan takes out a fire escape in a manner befitting Looney Tunes. Then, Gambit declares "You really do want to kill him!" and decides to help Logan after all. One imagines how an idiot of this magnitude escaped the island.
  • "He has no way of getting that jacket back!"
  • The same female character getting fridged twice for the sake of Wolverine's "character development".
    • The most baffling part of his girlfriend's "death" to anyone familiar with the comics (or the first 3 movies...or the cartoon) is that one of Wolverine's PRIMARY powers is his sense of smell, how the hell did he not realise that the blood covering his girlfriend wasn't hers? Not to mention he's pretty damn good at figuring out if someone is really dead from yards away; in a recent comic he enters a large research facility that he'd never been in before and is able to discern that there is a "female, dead" somewhere within...and that was a girl he didn't know and therefore was unfamiliar with her scent.
      • Or heck, why he didn't notice that there weren't large gashes all over her body? Seriously, for that much blood to be all over a corpse, one would imagine that the wounds would be visible.
      • Let's pretend for a moment that Wolverine's super senses weren't enough to realize she wasn't really dead. Why didn't he take her to a hospital? It would've taken a doctor five minutes to realize she had no wounds and she was, in fact, alive.
    • If Wolvie thinks she's dead, getting her to a hospital isn't going to do much. Also, Wolverine's a major rage case. He finds his lover dead, he's not going to be thinking anything other than "Kill the SOB who did it."
  • Okay, seriously people, are Wolverine's brother Victor Creed and Sabretooth from the X-Men Trilogy meant to be the same character or not? Or have they just adapted to film the same character twice?
    • To be fair, Victor Creed is never called Sabertooth in Wolverine's movie. And Sabertooth never gives his real name in the first X-Men.
  • Wolverine is named after a small, vicious animal. Sabretooth is named after one of the largest cats that ever lived. In the comics and cartoons, Wolverine is a short, hairy guy, and Sabretooth is gigantic, and calls Wolverine "shorty" all the time. In the original X-Men movie, Wolverine is too damn tall, but at least Tyler Mane's Sabretooth is even larger. So what do we do for the prequel? We recast Sabretooth as Liev Schreiber, who is in fact shorter than Hugh Jackman. So Wolverine is now taller than Sabretooth, thus ruining the entire dynamic between the two characters. That's like making Sam Gamgee physically larger than Shelob.
    • Actually, according to IMDB, Schreiber is half an inch taller than Jackman. Of course this makes them about equal.
    • The explanation most people are having is "he gets animalistic" over the movies (although not even Dr. Manhattan understands how).
    • One assumes Stryker eventually subjected him to a lot of genetic testing.
  • Wolverine's girlfriend turns out to have the ability to mind-control anyone through physical contact. We find this out in a climactic scene where she tearfully confesses that she's been playing Logan in order to get the evil general to release her sister. Said general is very much within arm's reach. How hard would it been, over the years of their 'working together,' to just get a hand on him?
    • To the movie's credit, she said that Stryker was always very careful. Still doesn't justify the plot hole.
      • Stryker had a large number of mutants locked up, almost all of which had been kidnapped, were quite powerful, and would have loved to hurt him badly. Chances are, he took a good many precautions and prep work to keep himself safe in case a mutant did try to off him.
  • How the hell could Wolverine block Deadpool's eyebeams with his claws? Yes, adamantium is incredibly durable, but why didn't the eyebeams go through the gaps between the claws?
    • Not only that, but just because you block something doesn't mean it's harmless. You can block a missile with a suit of armor, but that doesn't mean you're going to stand there unharmed. The real question is how was Wolverine just standing there without being thrown a mile away?
      • This is Wolverine, people. He's just that awesome.
  • The fact that he had fairly large hunks of metal tearing the already formed neural pathways in his brain apart and suffers severe amnesia as a result isn't too hard to believe if you take into account that Logan's healing factor probably didn't have an exact map of the original pathways handy when it started reconstruction, but then try to factor in the fact that he never seems to have had those bullets removed. So...how does that work out? He just walks around with big honking bullets in his gray matter like it's no big deal? For that matter, his healing factor has never been seen to include the adamantium so how does he even heal that? Without someone like Magneto on hand to a) remove the bullets for him and b) reshape the adamantium in his skull in order to fix the gaping holes there's not a lot he can do there.

X-Men: First Class

  • The mutants have just saved the world from the Omnicidal Maniac and prevented the Third World War, so the grateful humanity (ok, the US and USSR leaders), as a token of appreciation, decides to wipe them out with a Macross Missile Massacre. Magneto stops the missiles and then directs them back at the battleships that fired them. Xavier, naturally tries to dissuade him from this act of cruelty by reminding Eric that there are thousands of sailors on the ships who were... Just Following Orders. He says this to Eric. The Holocaust survivor. *Face Palm*
  • Young Eric witnesses his mother shot right before his eyes by the Big Bad, and lets loose his powers in shock and hate against... the two hapless mooks standing behind him. Why didn't Eric just kill the person who killed his mother who is also sitting right in front of him?
    • Probably because the man in question could absorb all energy (including kinetic, we'd assume - nullifying all projectiles). Let's not forget that he had to be telekinetically frozen before he could finally be killed.
    • How, and with what control? He couldn't even really turn his powers on consciously yet; the two mooks died due to misfortune rather than intent. And even if he tried, it still wouldn't have done anything to Shaw.

Other Films

  • A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Most of the movie is okay; then there's the ending. He discovers he isn't unique and seems to commit suicide by falling into the water. The End. Wait, no, he gets rescued, but then he finds a Blue Fairy statue in the bottom of the sea and stays there forever wishing to be a real boy. The End. Wait, no, a bunch of futuristic robots find him and say that he's very special and the last trace of intelligence left on the planet. The End. WWaitIT, a holographic blue fairy comes to him and says he can never be a real boy. The End. Wait, but they can bring back his mother for one day and celebrate his birthday. The End. Wait, then the mother dies. The End.
    • The above description of the end is executed perfectly here.
  • Angels & Demons. In the very beginning, the thief who steals the antimatter from CERN uses the torn out eye of the priest/doctor to open the retinal lock to the lab which contains the antimatter. But the doctor was inside the lab at the time. How did he get inside the lab to kill the doc and steal the eye which he used as the key to get inside the lab?
    • The assassin starting an unnecessary gun battle with the policemen trying to save the third cardinal from being burned, instead of just leaving.
  • Many people, including Roger Ebert, have viewed the Gambit Roulette from Arlington Road as being incredibly suspension of disbelief-stretching.
  • Armageddon is so loaded with Hollywood Science that it has become something of a Running Gag on the Bad Astronomy website.
    • Apparently, NASA has the same opinion and sometimes shows it to managers to see how many errors they can spot.
  • Deep Impact was supposed to be serious, which might make its inaccuracies worse. For instance, the four nuclear devices causing a clean cut in the comet (as shown in a graphic in the movie) is impossible on several levels.
  • Dante's Peak is sometimes praised for being more scientific than its opponent Volcano, but it jumps between being terribly inconsistent with the effects of a volcanic eruption or ignoring them outright. The lake near Ruth's cabin becomes acidic and starts corroding their boat, yet somehow leaves the fish (dead, but whole) floating on the surface. Then Ruth jumps into the lake and pushes their boat to the pier - but they were almost there anyway, and were even moving faster than before by wrapping up their arms to paddle. And an elderly woman isn't exactly as acid-resistant as a metal boat. Then she ignores her family, who are trying to help her out of the water, and slooowly wades up onto the shore. Of course, none of them would've been in that situation if Ruth had listened to the evacuation warnings in the first place, or if she and the children (who somehow drove a rescue vehicle up to her cabin during the eruption) hadn't put off evacuating later to go after her dog. The dog that the family was completely willing to sacrifice if it hadn't been able to jump into their jeep at the end.
    • Oh, and they're driving the jeep through a lava flow, but aside from the tires bursting into flames, this has no ill effects. Finally, the family gets stuck in a collapsed tunnel, but are able to use the experimental drone the doctor had brought along to contact help. However, they aren't rescued until a few days later, because apparently the scientists didn't think a distress signal being given off by their expensive prototype in a disaster area was worth noticing. And the characters have no difficulty breathing on the mountainside, even when they're walking through a forest where all the trees have been coated with volcanic ash!
  • In Bruce Almighty, God allows Bruce to accidentally kill, injure, and render homeless hundreds of innocent South East Asians, just to teach him a lesson. Even if this really happens, we don't necessarily want to see it in secular fiction.
    • No, he didn't. He explicitly states to Bruce when Bruce finally asks for help, "That wasn't the world, that was New York, between 15th and 20th," or something to that effect. The 'effects' to the world were there only to make sure Bruce learned his lesson. Bruce didn't affect anything but his own life, really.
      • Not true. When Bruce asks for help, it's because of all the prayers, and the prayers are just from the Buffalo area. Bruce pulling the fucking moon out of its normal orbit has some knock-on effect.
      • It seemed more like God was telling Bruce the only time he helped was when dealing with the thugs.
    • The huge Wall Banger in the movie is that with the power of God, you can stop time and operate normally within it, catching up on every prayer in femtoseconds, figuring out consequences, etc.
      • Money says Bruce still didn't have the patience for that.
      • Better still, with the power of God, he could snap his fingers and grant all the prayers in a second. Remember, the god whose powers he received is said to be omnipotent—there shouldn't be any limits to how quickly he can grant prayers.
    • The sequel, Evan Almighty, has Morgan Freeman doing a bad job of being God again. In order to teach Evan the value of a Act of Random Kindness and punish the corrupt politician played by John Goodman, God allows (or forces) a dam to break, flooding Washington D.C. under a veritable tidal wave. Now, not only is it doubtful that everyone was evacuated in time (we're spared the sight of people in the cars swept up by the wave), but Washington D.C. is also built on marshy and unstable ground. It's possible that the resulting property damage would cost billions to repair. Yes, that's billions of dollars in damage to the capital city of the United States, just to teach An Aesop to two people.
      • Yeah, because God never flooded the shit out of something before...
        • Or that He promised to never do it again afterwards. Oh, wait, that's exactly what He did, so this is the biggest Wall Banger of all! Although "The Flood was a love story, because all those people on the Ark, they stood for each other."
      • It seems likely that in the first case, God hit a Reset Button to undo all the damage Bruce did and in the sequel, he prevented massive damage beyond a bunch of stuff getting wet. Although, this doesn't justify any of it, as surely there's a better way to teach Bruce than to let him accidentally wipe out cities and a better way to teach Evan than to terrify the shit out of all of Washington DC.
  • Event Horizon: The fact that no one at NASA or the NSA could recognize, let alone translate a few words of Latin.
  • George Romero's Land of the Dead ends on a big one. After the (somewhat sympathetic) zombie Big Daddy appears to the Dead Reckoning crew, one of the crew members moves to fire at him and his horde until Riley stops her saying, "They're just looking for a place to go, just like us." Never mind that a Zombie Apocalypse just destroyed more than 99% of the world's population (leaving them with plenty of places to "go") or that Big Daddy's forces just decimated one of the last bastions of human civilization on the planet.
    • Romero speaks frequently about the "evolution" of the zombies from film to film. In the original, they just wanted food. In Dawn, they just want to shop and eat people. In Day, it's revealed their need to eat is purely instinctual, and they can get by just fine without eating. Land shows the zombies becoming aware of their abilities (you don't need to breathe underwater when you're already dead) and trying to live their unlives (Big Daddy tends to his service station, the band plays on in the gazebo) until the humans show up to bring unwelcome discomfort. They retaliate, not out of need for food, but because of lack of respect for their boundaries. The dead were clearly the victors in the man vs. zombie war.
    • The military's reaction to the invading horde. Don't they teach these people to aim for the head? It takes that one soldier in the beginning so much ammo to kill one immobile zombie you wonder if she can see straight. One guard, safe in a watchtower, looks down, sees the zombies surrounding the tower, and jumps down, getting eaten almost instantly.
      • They do not teach these people to aim for the head. They teach them to aim for the larger target, that being the chest. Alas, that only works for living creatures.
      • The movie takes place several years after zombies have become a fact of every day life. They see zombies every day, and every survivor by now knows that you have to shoot them in the head. If they're not teaching soldiers to shoot for the head at this point, that's just Too Dumb to Live.
  • Planet of the Apes was a great movie, with a surprising understanding, love, and respect of science. But there was an inconsistency early on: Taylor says that he will travel 500 years into the future, then 2,000. We then see displays saying both 500 and 2,000 years. What?
  • The ending of Tim Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes is maddening if you enjoyed the rest of the film, and still manages to be a mental stretch even if you know the Word of God explanation.
  • Signs. The ending! The aliens were defeated by the use of water. The standard defense is that the water is not just symbolic; it's used by a priest who gets this as perhaps literal Word of God by the director M. Night Shyamalan. Shyamalan has stated repeatedly to anyone who will listen that the aliens were not aliens, but demons. That's right. Not an alien movie at all, but a deeply religious movie. The water? As stated above: holy water and thus effective against demons. So those 'space ships' were apparently not spaceships. And... that must mean that demons don't know how to operate doors...
    • Word of God, however, does not explain how water is described as anti-alien by Shyamalan's own Author Avatar and is instrumental in pushing the aliens off Earth entirely. There is moisture in the air of this planet. All the white puffy clouds are water vapor. The surface of the planet is 75% water. The atmosphere contains water. Whatever you are, if water melts you, then going anywhere near a planet with so much water is suicidal.
      • Not to mention running apparently unscathed through a cornfield in the middle of the night, which any farm kid can tell you would leave you soaked in dew on the other end.
      • To quote Cracked magazine: "It's like humans landing on a planet where 70 percent of the surface is covered in molten lava, and the inhabitants are basically just moving sacks of lava. Even the atmosphere is so dense with lava vapor that often lava just rains from the sky with little to no warning. So what's your plan of attack? If you say anything other than "Jump out of the spaceship completely naked, your junk proudly flopping about, and engage the lava monsters in hand-to-hand combat," then congratulations — you are smarter than the aliens in Signs."
    • And if it's all holy water -- how did they drive the aliens out of countries that don't believe in holy water?
    • Earlier in the movie, the son picks up a book from his local bookstore about aliens and uses that to predict that the aliens aren't going to launch huge conventional attacks on the planet for fear of nuclear retaliation. Even ignoring that they are treating a book on a hypothetical alien invasion that was probably written by a hack as the best source of advice -- how can anyone could be sure that these aliens couldn't counter a nuclear weapon?
      • Pretty sure that was explained as "aliens" wouldn't be personally threatened by the nukes, but the use of nukes would do so much damage to the planet that they'd no longer have any use for it.
  • In the Prince Caspian movie, the attack on the castle, start to finish. Peter deciding it was a good plan, Caspian's men agreeing to it, Caspian getting sidetracked by sudden vengeance on Miraz, Peter and Susan getting sidetracked by Caspian, not securing the gate before attacking guards, going on with the attack after the castle garrison was alerted... There is a reason that "storming the castle" didn't get past the discussion stage in the book.
    • Caspian, who was willing to wreck the castle assault to kill Miraz, has Peter challenge Miraz to a battle. Peter defeats him but then decides not to kill him, instead offering his life to Caspian. In a move which is supposed to represent his maturing, Caspian also decides not to kill him - which leaves the way open for Sopesian to stab Miraz with one of Susan's arrows, cry treachery, and force a huge battle between the Telmarines and the Old Narnians. Since Caspian is a Telmarine who is on the side of the Old Narnians, this could have been a no-win situation for him in the long run; one of Peter or Caspian killing Miraz would've been more sensible. (The book doesn't have this situation - the henchman kills Miraz and cries treachery before the one-on-one between Miraz and Peter has finished, and so Caspian doesn't bear any responsibility there.)
      • Actually that part is justified; Caspian was originally just going to rescue his tutor but then the tutor said too much and Caspian went into a bit of a Heroic BSOD, which Peter called him out on, and as for suggesting to keep battling despite being doomed, it's called pride.
    • There is also the end, after the dust has settled, where Prince Caspian returns triumphant to his kingdom... after having slaughtered the town guards several days previous. Not unheard of in movies, but the townspeople are practically throwing a party before their husbands/neighbors are even cold in the ground. Then again, both sides are.
  • In New Jack City, drug lord Nino Brown, in a last ditch effort to save his own hide, fingers one of his lieutenants as the real head of the Cash Money Brothers and promises that if he goes down, he's dragging a lot of people with him. Apparently, the D.A. on the case left her brain at home; not only does she take Nino (who they know was responsible for several high profile murders, including a cop) at his word, but she also cuts him a deal on the spot for five years in return for testimony. The idea that the D.A. would even consider this deal was insulting enough; when we find out that this was all just to set up Nino's Karmic Death, it leaves a bad taste all around.
    • It should be noted that Darryl Whiting, the Boston drug lord Nino was based on, tried the same thing during his trial. Neither the prosecutor nor the jury bought it: he got life.
  • The Apocalypse scenario in the 2002 film version of The Time Machine. It had the world be devastated when the nuclear excavation charges used for a moon colony shifted the Moon out of orbit. The Moon is not some little asteroid that can be shifted around with a few nuclear blasts; it's a world with an appreciable fraction of Earth's mass. The energy requirements to shift the orbit of something like that are enormous, more than the entire present nuclear stockpile of the world, even using the most unrealistically large assumptions. The Bad Astronomer once guesstimated it to be a similar order of magnitude to the atomisation energy of the moon.
    • They state clearly that the nuclear explosions triggered unexpected tectonic reactions in the Moon that eventually caused the whole thing to split apart. It's the not nukes alone, they're just the catalyst.
      • They must have been very unexpected, since the Moon does not have a liquid core and thus cannot have tectonic reactions.
        • Any scientific explanation that we could come up with now for the destruction of the moon would have prevented the project from occurring in the first place. The moon could only be destroyed by something we don't know about now.
    • Later in the film, Jeremy Irons' character, the head of an underground cannibalistic race, is hanging out of the time machine with only his hands inside the time traveling bubble. Guy Pierce starts to travel forward in time very quickly. Thus, he ages quickly (from Guy Pierce's viewpoint inside the fast-time-traveling bubble) except for his hands inside the time machine.... No, no, no! He would have lost sensation in his hands due to a complete difference in timestreams and let go, or else he would have died of thirst within a couple of days from his perspective, or else he would have had his hands cut off and then fallen to his death, since nobody can see the time machine while it's time-travelling (according to events earlier in the film).
    • The apocalypse wasn't because the moon moved, it was because the nuclear excavation blasted half the moon into dust and sent thousands of chunks of moon raining down upon Earth hard enough to leave the surface nigh uninhabitable for thousands of years.
  • A little more Ryan Reynolds: Blade: Trinity. Combat playlist. Why not just go in wearing a blindfold?
    • Also from Blade: Trinity. Blade can beat up vampires, for he is a half-vampire superman. Fair enough. Ryan Reynolds can't beat up vampires despite looking even bigger and stronger than Blade, being a former vampire (and therefore older than he looks) and knowing martial arts. So why the hell can Jessica Biel kick them around the room with awkward-looking roundhouse kicks?
    • They also make a big deal about Blade being hunted by the authorities, yet after he escapes from jail he's whuppin' Familiars in broad daylight! Subtle.
    • Don't forget how Blade is framed for murdering a Familiar disguised as a vampire, even though in the first film it's established Blade can distinguish the subtle nuances between humans and vampires. *headdesk*
      • Being fair, that was a familiar deliberately trying to be mistaken for a vampire, and doing so with the assistance of other vampires. Cues can be faked.
  • Sex and the City: The Movie. Why the fuck didn't Carrie just go back to the wedding and marry Big? He had thirty seconds of doubt, immediately realized he was being a prick and turned back, and she treats it like he stood her up at the altar. The wedding hadn't even begun yet, and having cold feet is so common it's its own trope. Made a billion times worse because she has Heroic BSOD about it in Mexico (Samantha has to spoon feed her at one point to get her to eat anything) and doesn't really get over it for the better part of a year. And no one treats this as overreacting. Jerkass Sue ahoy.
    • The stupid, stupid ways she was prevented from answering Big's calls on her cell phone. And how we're supposed to believe that her getting married at the end in a label-less dress is somehow a moral of not letting labels run your life, despite the whole rest of the movie being a love letter to designer labels.
      • Especially since she was wearing blue Manolo Blahnik shoes.
    • The implication that Miranda's one stressed-out, angry, off-the-cuff remark to Big about how marriage sucks, somehow contributed to him getting cold feet. I'm sorry, how old is Big?
    • For me, the entire premise of the film's ending is a wallbanger. Sex and the City was supposed to be about female empowerment and liberation, and yet Carrie forgives Big for standing her up at the altar. It's okay, because he just needed a bit of reassurance! Like a child! So it's completely okay that he broke her heart and humiliated her in front of half of New York. When they do finally end up getting married, it's in a depressingly small, unglamorous ceremony - the direct opposite of everything her party-, style- and society-obsessed character would want. And this is supposed to be a happy ending?? We're supposed to find this thrilling romantic? Jesus.
      • The assertion that "Sex and the City was supposed to be about female empowerment and liberation" when the entire series has been nothing but female gender stereotype after female gender stereotype gives me a headache
  • The creeper from Jeepers Creepers slaughters an entire police precinct, but there's no major development of law enforcement in the sequel looking for this creature. Or at least no developments that follow the Rule of Perception.
    • The sequel even had a conversation heard over a police scanner about two abduction reports that sounded "out there".
      • The previous posts have apparently forgotten that the sequel takes place at least 20 or 30 years before the original. There's no way they would change the way the precinct is run for something that happens in the future. So your walls can rest easy.
      • The sequel takes place in the same week as the first. The end of the movie is 23 years after the rest of the movie, but that's all. The lack of police is most definitely a Wall Banger, even if the highway both movies were set around were massive (which was repeatedly mentioned). Then again, he wiped out almost the entire precinct, right? Who would be left to start a state-wide manhunt from a mostly unmanned police station in the middle of no where only four days later?
      • Federal Agents for one. There would be a small army looking for that creature in less than four days. Killing a whole police precinct is a very big deal, no matter how rural the area. Surviving policemen saw the thing as well. There's just no excuse as to why there isn't a sizable force combing the highways and skies.
      • Considering its a 23 year gap, maybe there was a massive search for some creepy serial killer who slaughtered the police. The investigation could have lasted years and never have noticed a strange looking scarecrow, which is pretty much what the creeper is when he's sleeping.
      • Accept there wasn't a 20+ year gap after the first film. The time skip doesn't happen till the creeper gets caught by that guy and his son.
    • Here's one good question. If the farmer got his hands on the Creeper while it was in its stasis/hibernation, why tie it to your wall and wait for it to wake up to try and kill it? Why not just have the thing cremated or something similar? It's practically immortal, but come on.
  • How in the hell can Michael Meyers avoid being sought by a huge manhunt? Most authorities seem apathetic and indifferent towards hunting him down.
    • "I'm sorry, ma'am, but your serial-killer brother escaped a couple of days ago, and he probably knows where you are. Thought you'd like to know. What, police? Oh, no need to bother them, I'm sure you can just call us when you see him kthx bye."
    • It finally happened in Halloween 4, in which a posse gets together to kill Michael Meyers after he kills everyone at the Haddonfield Police Headquarters. Michael does manage to kill several vigilantes, but he is eventually "killed" when a whole mob of them empty everything they've got into him. It's about one-and-a-half movies late, but still...
    • In Halloween 5, Myers is revealed to have survived the mob shooting and fell through a mine shaft and ended up on the floor of a hermit's shack where he became comatose before reviving next Halloween and killing the hermit. This, of course, means that Myers laid on the floor of this shack for a year and the hermit did absolutely nothing about it. He didn't inform paramedics or cops, he didn't get rid of the body, or even move the body out of the shack. If a movie character was ever Too Dumb to Live, this hermit was it.
    • John Carpenter has consistently said that Michael Myers is not a physical creature capable of being killed, but the visual personification of unbridled evil. That is, while you can see him and he can do things to you, he's not actually there physically, and can appear and disappear as it sees fit. But then, the cops don't know that...
    • Also he was supposed to die in Halloween 2.
  • Pet Sematary 2 never specifically explains what happened to Louis and Rachel Creed.
    • The resurrected baby in the original ruined the movie. Even if he is evil, how is he smart enough to plot murder? How is he strong and skilled enough to be any match for his victims, both of whom were awake and alert when he killed them? How did he carry his mother's body into the attic and hang her from there?
      • The book makes it clearer that he's not just an evil version of himself, he's possessed by evil spirits from the woods. So yeah, more intelligence, and presumably strength. The first draft of the screenplay made this clearer as well, being written by King himself.
        • By that logic, maybe the cat should have started killing people, too.
          • The cat did start killing people. It never got past one though.
      • The sequel completely ruins the let-the-dead-be-dead moral of the first book. Not only that, did they follow the first movie? Did the resurrected sheriff go on a violent rampage? No, he actually acts quite normal, if not for being rather disgusting at some parts. Not only that, but when Jeff resurrects his dead mother, she and the sheriff seem to be under Jeff's command. Did Mary Lambert even pay attention to the plot of the first movie? That. Doesn't. Happen. The zombies do not act civilized or anything. They're wrong. You spent a whole movie/book explaining that.
  • Micah in Paranormal Activity is quite possibly the physical embodiment of this trope. The psychic at the beginning of the movie tells Micah to not antagonize the demon; what does he do? He antagonizes it almost every night that something happens. The psychic tells Micah to, under any circumstances, never, ever use a Ouija board to communicate with the demon because doing so would invite the demon into their home; what does he do? He borrows a Ouija board. The situation becomes progressively worse as time passes; does Micah listen to Katie and call a demonologist? Hell no; he thinks he can solve the problem himself. Once the demon has already dragged Katie out of her bed in the middle of the night, Micah decides that they should leave the house and stay in a hotel. He's about to leave, until, suddenly, Katie forgoes the notion and tells him to stay in the house for the night, despite the fact that she's been absolutely terrified the last week. Guess what happens in the middle of the night? Possessed-Katie kills Micah.
      • This, and the fact Micah only started taking this seriously when Katie got physically hurt. Until then, the demon was just full of parlor tricks. It fascinated him more than scared him. He wanted to solve everything by himself, because he thought he could outsmart it. He couldn't, and was a giant Batman Gambit on the demon's part. He was fucking with Micah the entire time.
      • I actually attributed it to Micah being a skeptic to many things paranormal. This is why a lot of what he does can be argued that he's using the scientific method.
      • Micah being a skeptic using the scientific method kinda stops being a justifiable reaction when this shit is happening right in front of him.
      • Post-sequel, much of this goes out the window. Once we see the demon's motivation, we learn that ignoring it doesn't help at all, and finding out what it's up to and confronting it with magic is the only real way to protect yourself. Ultimately, Micah was going about it the right way by trying to figure out its methods and motivations. Their only real mistakes were listening to the psychic at all, and not calling the demonologist instead. Hardly Wall Banger material.
  • Suspect Zero. While the movie is worth a rental just to see Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley, they expect us to believe that the so-called "Suspect Zero" was able to abduct and kill hundreds of children, dumping them thousands of miles apart, without getting caught because his methods had specific MO. Putting aside the question of why no one ever tracked him down with traditional methods of investigation, this suspect drove the same 18-wheeler the entire time, abducted only children, transported them around in the truck, tortured them all, and apparently had dozens buried under rather obvious mounds of dirt on his private property.
  • The Miracle on 34th Street remake's conclusion. The original made some sense: the post office informally decided to recognize Kris Kringle as Santa Claus, and the court formally decided to agree with the decision. The remake plays hell with the federal legal system. The "logic" is that "'In God We Trust' is on the dollar bill; therefore, the US agrees God exists; therefore this man must be Santa Claus". Not only is it a very long stretch of reasoning, but it tears apart all sorts of things. The court has just officially recognized Christianity as a state-sponsored religion and officially recognized the citizenship of two of its deities (or its main deity and a related demigod). Not only that, but the court's ruling opens the door for everyone claiming to be the Easter Bunny or Vishnu or Xenu to be officially recognized by the state as religious entities - totally breaking apart the separation of church and state and setting an insane precedent where the state recognizes supernaturally religious entities which may or may not exist as possessing a factual existence.
      • The resultant ending, out of context, sounded more like in argument for atheism than anything; a kind of If Jesus then Santa.
    • If you want to get technical, the proof went like this: 1) The U.S. government puts its trust in God based on the faith of its people 2) The people of New York have put their faith in Kris being Santa (as evidenced by that "we believe" Montage) 3) Therefore, the State of New York can recognize Kris as Santa
    • In fairness, the real legal system has produced its own share of such Wall Bangers. There was a 1991 Supreme Court case which basically acknowledged the existence of ghosts.
      • Well, not exactly. What the court said was that since the seller of the house had been publicizing the house as haunted all over the place, and then conveniently forgetting to mention that to prospective buyers, that the people who started to buy the house that did not want it upon learning about said reputation should get their deposit back.
    • The alternative, keeping Kris in care for the insane, would have been even worse for public morale, especially since the U.S court system does allow bending the law for certain cases. The judge jumped on this as a way out of making a call he and everyone else really wanted to avoid, while not leaving an opening for those who did want good ol' Kris put away to object (since they were the minority). Now, how Kris got there in the remake is even more infuriating: he basically turned himself in after clobbering someone, and he deliberately failed a psych test. <thunk>
      • What do you mean, in the remake? In the original, he clubs someone and then deliberately fails a psych eval as well ("I told them Calvin Coolidge was the first president.") The real Wall Banger in both movies is the entire "Is he or isn't he Santa Claus" is a specious argument, especially if the new version is in fact set in the real now. Instead of arguing whether or not Santa exists (something the prosecutor should have called Kris's lawyer out on) the state had to show he was not only mentally unstable but a real and present danger to others. It should not have, in either movie, taken much testimony to show that both 'victims' were intentionally or unintentionally provoking him, and Kris could easily have passed a genuine evaluation. The judge only had to say the court found he acted under severe emotional distress, was not mentally ill in a way that posed a clear danger to others, and was not a candidate for involuntary committal. At that point, if the prosecution wanted him locked away, they'd have to file criminal charges. There's no granting of dubious legal opinion to the postal service, no practical begging of any random atheist to help file an appeal and turn it into a case about state and church and at the bare minimum waste a lot of a higher court's time having to throw everything out, just a basic "He's unlikely to harm anyone else, request for committal denied, everybody go home."
  • From The Film of the Book The Scarlet Letter starring Demi Moore, Mituba and the Native Americans saving the leads. The film was almost glorifying slavery with the devoted, submissive black woman who literally could not speak. And never mind all the serious crap the Native Americans went through - it seemed their only purpose here was to cause tension and eventually save the three white 'heroes'.
    • And then Hester Prynne walked out onto the scaffold...with a golden letter stitched to her chest.
    • Quoth Demi Moore:

"Well, hardly anyone has read the book!"

      • She clearly went to a very different High School than the majority of people in her generation...
    • Not to mention that Mituba's name is blatantly Tituba from The Crucible with one letter changed. "Hey, about this lone female slave we've decided to insert into the story about white Puritans in colonial Massachusetts -- what kind of name would a character like that have?" "I don't know, but whatever you settle on, make sure not to put any thought into it. We want to be crystal clear about her status as a completely dehumanized stock character."
  • In Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie) is searching for the second of two halves that make up The Eye of The Illuminati. She has already found one half in a secret storage room in her house, left by her father. Soon after, she is forced to chase members of the Illuminati across the globe for the better part of the film and stop them from using the talisman to find a time-altering device. Lara could have saved a lot of time had she destroyed her half of the key in the first place. That way, the Illuminati would have been denied the device forever. Or, better yet, if her father had destroyed that half when he realized what it was capable of uncovering. Like father, like daughter.
  • In Silent Hill, they genderbend Harry and then needlessly insert another male character because there were now too many chicks. Are men somehow not capable of being nurturing, loving Action Dads who would go to hell and back for their daughters? Did they think that Harry, a complete stranger, proving a better parent than Cheryl's biological mother would raise too many Unfortunate Implications? ARGH!
    • An interview with the director about this only adds to the wall banging. He explained that he reworked Harry as Rose because, in his view, Harry was acting like a mother and a woman (he was clearly afraid of the situation but overcoming it to rescue Cheryl); he thinks that the audience would never accept a male lead who's not an action hero. That the original game, with its non-stereotypical treatment of Harry as an ordinary father, was a big enough hit that it led to an ongoing series and to the movie he's directing apparently never crossed his mind.
      • Back to Cheryl's biological mother: her Character Derailment in the film was, for lack of a more sensitive term, completely fucking retarded. One of the nastiest characters from the game series got turned into a saintly old woman just so the filmmakers could take yet another tired, overwrought cheap shot at organized religion. You know, the sort that stopped being daring or edgy years ago.
    • Besides the idiocy of character changes, why would Rose ever bring Cheryl to Silent Hill? Two things are made very clear very early on in the movie. The first is that Cheryl is in no condition to be going on long trips anywhere without easy access to expert medical care, and the second is that everyone knows how dangerous Silent Hill is. They don't know about the who hell dimension thing but they do clearly know that the town had to be evacuated because of dangerous coal fires that are still burning years later. What sane parent would ever bring their child to the town?
  • While all of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is somewhat off, the inclusion of Tom Sawyer as a young man stands out. The movie is set in 1899. The original Tom Sawyer was a young teen in pre-Civil War Missouri; the latest that "Huck Finn" could have been set was early 1861. Assuming Tom was 14 in '61, he would have been 52 years old at the time of the LXG movie.
    • Maybe it was Tom Sawyer Jr. in the film?
    • They only really added Tom to the movie to appeal to American audiences. Of course, that's why films with no Americans do so badly!
    • Dorian Gray being an immortal who can only die if he sees his own picture. No. No. No.
      • The fact that it, until recently, seems to have been hanging on his wall, only adds more questions.
        • And also the fact that if he hadn't ever seen it for himself, how would he know for sure that it was aging for him? It seems like the scriptwriters just skimmed the original novel but missed the point; it makes a lot more sense as Wilde wrote it, that Dorian could look at the picture but simply found it unpleasant to do so.
      • The fact that it would have been just as effective, fit with the original story, and makes sense if they changed it so that he died if the picture was destroyed. (A kick through the canvas would do it quite nicely.
  • In the David Mamet film Redbelt, the ersatz UFC portrayed in the film decides to use a marketing gimmick in which, before every bout, each fighter picks a colored marble from a bowl to determine who will fight with one arm tied behind his back, which basically ensures that he will lose. Ignoring that MMA seems to have no safety regulations in the film's world - this gimmick would defeat the whole point of the competition, reducing it to luck. Imagine if the Superbowl coin toss determined which team could only field five players to the other team's eleven. No one would bother watching. On top of that, it turns out that the masked bearer of the marbles is (surprise!) a stage magician who rigs which fighter gets the handicap, thus deliberately fixing each fight. The fixes would be so obvious that they would never get past even the dimmest bookie.
  • Constantine, the less than loyal adaptation of Hellblazer, makes a big deal about following Catholic dogma. In particular, it's about the title character's inability to go to heaven because of his suicide attempt and his attempts to redeem himself by battling the minions of Hell. Constantine knows Catholic dogma is true but does not believe all of it, and that makes him a bit of an Idiot Hero. Did it never occur to him to go to confession, or was he just unwilling to admit he was wrong? This one was so obvious that Roger Ebert pointed it out in his review:

"Three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, and he's outta there."

    • The film does have a fundamental misunderstanding about Roman Catholic dogma as regards suicide. A successful suicide is considered an unforgivable sin because, by definition, if it's successful, you can't confess it. But Constantine's suicide wasn't successful; he was revived, therefore penance and forgiveness is possible. Out of character, given the large chip on his shoulder re: the Church, but possible.
      • Alternately, the error is deliberate. After all, Constantine deliberately went to the length of directly asking the archangel Gabriel what the theological implications of his attempted suicide were, presumably because he wanted to be absolutely sure about the question rather than rely upon possibly-fallible human opinions of theology. Unfortunately for Constantine Gabriel is actually the villain, and is entirely capable of lying to him in order to try and get him to quit fighting.


  • High Tension/Haute Tension is an enjoyable thriller about a college student named Marie trying to rescue her best friend Alexia, whom she's in love with, from a deranged killer. She was highly sympathetic, she kicks the killer's arse, and - Oh, wait a minute! Cliche Twist Ending time! Marie is a Psycho Lesbian with Multiple Personality Disorder. A killer is she. The twist leaves about 40 different plot holes and invalidates most of the movie. It doesn't even try to explain the split personality, so the only reason appears to be "'cause she's a lesbian."
    • Marie is an Unreliable Narrator with Sympathetic POV. The 40 different plot holes are caused by her outright lying.
    • Then how about this: Marie looks to be about 90 pounds soaking wet. How does someone so tiny manage to overpower a grown man and snap his head off with a gigantic hutch like it was made of porcelain?
      • Even if we accept this, we run into some major problems. In her own flashback, she reveals herself as the killer, a fact that she isn't supposed to know about. Hell, she was apparently foreshadowing the twist in her own narrative. She would also be explaining scenes in which she was not present, including the cops witnessing the killer and Marie as separate people.
  • 40 Days and 40 Nights is about a guy who gives up sex for Lent. Then he meets a girl he falls in love with. On the last day, he has his roommate chain him to the bed—so he won't masturbate or something—and then leave. Then his ex-girlfriend gets in, and rapes him. Just to win a bet. She leaves, and his current girlfriend walks in and assumes the chastity thing was BS. He then has to apologize to her, and the ex gets off scot-free. There's not even the All Men Are Perverts or Double Standard Rape (Female on Male) defenses, since the dude, y'know, chained himself down.
  • This review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a literal wallbanger.
  • Equilibrium. Gun Kata. The concept of how it operates is unrealistic, stupid, and just plain wrong. Being able to statistically predict your opponents' positions in a gunfight and then also statistically predict where they will shoot to allow you to dodge their bullets (because, you know, there's no such thing as adjusting one's aim) is retarded; how did this make the film? It would have been better if they hadn't bothered coming up with it and said the Clerics can dodge bullets because they're just that Badass. Instead Kurt Wimmer tried to bypass Willing Suspension of Disbelief and Rule of Cool by providing an explanation, when those two things are all that keep physics-defying stunts from looking stupid rather than awesome.
    • At the beginning of the film, they show the Mona Lisa being burned so that even the Lowest Common Denominator knows the government is against all art. The Mona Lisa is about a tenth of the size of the painting in the film and is painted on wood, not canvas—and yet, when they take out the Instant-Art-Verifier, it confirms that it's real. Fridge Logic bonus: Why does it matter? Wasn't the point to destroy anything that could evoke emotions?
      • Which evokes more emotion—the real Mona Lisa, or a replica? They'd have burned a replica too, but verifying that it's the real one means they can rest assured that a major emotional source is now removed. As for the part where its painted on wood and not canvas, yes, that's just them getting it wrong.
  • Jaws the Revenge is the trope namer for Voodoo Shark, but that's not where the wall-banging ends by a long shot. To try to escape from a shark, the protagonist takes a flight to the Bahamas. Granted, it's a distance from her original home (Massachusetts), but so is Utah. Richard Jeni filled an entire bit at Just For Laughs with wall bangers from this movie.
    • Let's not forget that the shark follows her there, as if it knows exactly where she's going. Somehow, it's able to get there in a matter of days. What? Did Bruce discover warp drive?
    • In fact, the shark is implied to be smart - so smart that it knows and accounts for things it should have no way of knowing. For example, it is pretty evident that the shark not only killed Sean, but ambushed him. Ken Begg's review had a particular bone to pick with this very frank example of Gambit Roulette.
  • Knowing. The ending: so a freak solar flare destroys the Earth, but don't worry - angelic aliens saved a bunch of kids so they can start the human race over on another planet. Never mind that the aliens knew about the flare fifty years earlier and never bothered to warn anyone who wasn't special. Never mind they probably could have taken millions aboard their spaceships and yet deemed less than 1% of the whole human race worthy of survival; which may cause one to wonder what gave them the right to decide to begin with. Also, within a few generations, those kids' descendants will be mad inbred.
    • You could've just put the whole movie in. Highlights include running directly into the flaming wreckage of a recently-crashed plane.
    • On the point of them knowing so far in advance they obviously had the time to help move people away if space on the ship was the issue.
      • Speaking of knowing in advance, why did they entrust the prophecies to a mentally unstable little girl who would allow them to be locked away for the next fifty years, only to be unearthed far too late to be of any use? Why not a scientist who would not only know how to decode them but also work with the aliens to rescue as many people as possible instead of just two per ship?
    • Also, the idea that any kind of solar flare could literally incinerate the Earth. Even a massive solar flare wouldn't do much more than hose up any electronics. That's a disaster scenario in itself, though obviously not as cool as the surface of the planet being consumed in a massive inferno. Hollywood Science, indeed.
    • We've also got the aliens choosing two pre-pubescent kids who, while certainly intelligent, probably don't have the skills to survive on their own and therefore probably wouldn't survive until puberty. I hope those other ships contained a few doctors, teachers, childcare experts or at least experienced adults.
      • This film is only kind of worth mentioning because it was one big Scientology metaphor.
        • Not even remotely Scientology, though, pretty much standard Christian, complete with Professor Doctor Nick Cage espousing Intelligent Design and a child-only Rapture at the very end. Also, solar flares don't fucking work that way.
    • The two main characters constantly leaving their children alone in the car despite the fact that the aliens are always close by. It eventually leads to the kids getting kidnapped by the aliens.
  • The Well-Intentioned Extremist in The Lost World: Jurassic Park is an eco-activist who's so much against the exploitation of the free-range dinosaurs that he sabotages the capture-team's equipment and gets a lot of people killed. Somehow, the fact that these dinosaurs are introduced species, and are no doubt wreaking havoc with the island's own indigenous ecosystem, never crosses his mind (or anyone else's). And it's doubtful that there's any place on Earth that they could be introduced to, since all these dinosaurs have been dead for tens (if not hundreds) of millions of years. But what the heck, who's going to miss another pristine neotropical rain forest?
    • Well A) the island's ecosystem is likely beyond repair, and B) the other guys were talking about taking them to the mainland, so maybe he guesses that someone would stuff up eventually, and releasing a bunch of big dinos 'in the middle of a city' is going to generate a lot more casualties than happened on the island.
      • The island had been specifically designed to be a home for the dinosaurs, which would face major dietary problems anywhere else on the planet, which the company knew about because they had designed it. As for releasing a bunch of big dinos in the city, the original plan had them sticking entirely to small and medium sized herbivores. The only guys chasing a predator was the hunter who wanted to bring a Rex skull home as a trophy. The only reason they took the T-rexes home instead was because the nature lover let all the other dinos go, and they needed something to recoup the losses they were looking at after the stampede and carnivore attacks. Otherwise, bringing the dinos back to the mainland would have been no more dangerous than bringing elephants, cape buffalo, rhinos, and hippos over from Africa.
    • In the process of streamlining the plot of the original book for the movie, they removed all references to Malcolm's logic justifying why he knew the animals had to be breeding, which made sense for a mathematician to be able to figure out. Instead they simply made Malcolm into an insufferable wiseass who's only justification for why an entirely female population of animals would breed was "life will find a way." You Fail Biology Forever. In the book, they had the very important detail that dinosaurs had already escaped to the mainland, yet the island was still showing the correct number of animals there. This makes the deduction that they are breeding somehow quite plausible. In the movie, it just happened so Malcolm could prove Hammond wrong.
      • Uh, that's missing the whole point. The whole "Life finds a way" quote is not about the dinosaurs breeding, but rather in general that In-Gen cannot control everything that happens on the island. That by trying to recreate a prehistoric environment without knowing much about it, something in inevitably going to go wrong. It's like telling someone they're playing with a ticking time bomb. The real Wall Banger regarding the dinosaurs breeding is the fact that Hammond and the scientists never once considered simply making the dinosaurs infertile. That way, male or female, they wouldn't be able to breed, even if they could change sex. Plus, apparently no one at Jurassic Park ever heard of Parthenogenesis (IE: A female organism being able to breed without the need of a male to fertilize the eggs).
  • The trailer for 2012 begins by proclaiming the Mayas to be "the world's oldest civilization." So, it's not even out, and we already know that they Did Not Do the Research.
  • Making sense is not The Mummy Trilogy‍'‍s strong point. But a real wall banger came in The Mummy Returns. So there are these guys who want to dig up Imhotep, right? And it's very explicitly Ardeth Bey's job to stop people from raising Imhotep. He says in the first movie that it even justifies killing innocent people, let alone people who are deliberately trying to raise Imhotep. So maybe he wasn't able to stop them from digging him up because oh noes, reincarnated Anck-Su-Namun is with them and she's a royal bitch who throws snakes at people. But he goes all the way to England, to the British Museum, comes in when the ritual is not actually over, has a line of sight to the person performing the ritual and doesn't even try to shoot him. He just stands there with Rick until Imhotep is brought back to life. Of course, someone else would had to have taken over or there'd be no movie, but how is it in character for him to not do everything in his power—especially a very obvious thing—to keep Imhotep dead?
    • Evie was being held prisoner during the ritual to bring back Imhotep. While Ardeth might not have cared about killing her to stop Imhotep in the first movie, now they were friends and he didn't want her dead. Having her armed husband standing right next to him probably helped convince him that doing something to endanger Evie was pretty stupid.
    • Another one that questions the competence and capability of Ardeth Bey AKA the Guardian of the Lost City. Right at the start of the first film he avoids gunning down a helpless retreating Rick because, and I quote, "The desert will get him." Your job and sole purpose in life is to stop the planet-destroying monster from escaping this secret magical city. Just because it was unlikely Rick would have survived the trek across the desert to the nearest city without supplies doesn't mean he couldn't. As a direct result of this decision Rick escapes and leads one half of an expedition that frees the monster under his care. Speaking of which; why didn't he kill Benny? surely he must have left his hiding place and returned to civilization on foot at some point? did Ardeth just decide the desert would get him too?
  • 9 was a good movie; however, some major plot points were contrived as hell to justify having a story. Namely, the instructions to using the soul transference talisman. 5 people get killed in 9's quest to go back to the room he should have stayed in and examined in the first place to find his purpose (though to be fair, he was just born and all that). Then we're treated to a detailed cinematic of the origin of the machine that destroyed the world, and how 9 must stop it. Wonderful, but wouldn't it have been simpler to just write it down, and put it in 9's chest. "Take this here, press this, this, and this, remaining world is saved, no muss, no fuss." Everyone proceeds to rock out to Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
    • Could be partly justified as the Scientist did just have pieces of his soul sucked out, which, as it being his life source, probably made him tired, therefore more stupid. Though why he didn't think of that before, however . . .
      • 9 only left the room without bothering to search it because he overheard 2 moving around outside. Can you really claim the Scientist was stupid for not anticipating that one of just ten mobile entities left on the entire planet would come strolling by that particular window, at precisely the wrong moment?
    • Why does the original robot need the scientist's soul to be brought back? The scientist specifically state that "the robot lacked the human soul." Thus, said robot wouldn't have had the little slot for the talisman in the first place, meaning once it was dead, it was dead. No real sense here.
      • When the Machine was first built, it was clear that it had no slot. However, in the Scientist's study, some plans with a design of a slot with the talisman in it was seen. Maybe the Scientist realized his mistake and built a slot for it in its body, not knowing that it was too late and that the souls wouldn't actually be absorbed into the Machine, and would just be stuck in the talisman.
    • As we see at the ending, the souls released into the sky cause it to rain small souls. It is entirely possible that some of the automatons had to die to allow the souls to multiply, and thus for any remaining automatons to build new ones.
  • Disney's Chicken Little (as opposed to the original aesop) ran about 30 minutes too long due to a Wall Banger halfway through the movie: originally CL is ostracized by the entire town after alarming it to a threat that sounds incredulous, that of a piece of the sky literally falling on his head, which isn't helped when he cannot find the evidence to present to the angry townspeople. A year later, CL is finally starting to live this down, when said "piece of the sky" hits him in the head again. He calls up his friends, but doesn't tell his father, because he doesn't want his father to be disappointed in him again, even going out of the way to hide the evidence from his father to avoid looking crazy. HELLO! Can you say "vindication?" The entire plot of the movie was that nobody believed CL because of the crazy, unsubstantiated things he would say. Now he has _hard evidence_ of his claims in his hand. Wouldn't this be the perfect time for him to say "Look, I'm not crazy, here's the same thing that fell on me a year ago, and this is how it managed to look invisible last time?"
  • In Battle for Terra, we are introduced to a species of alien that can fly... or is that hover? The film never really can decide which. The whole race has multiple flying craft that would seem to suggest they just hover, yet in one scene, an alien saved a human being by flying hundreds of feet down to catch him, and then hundreds of feet back. Then why, when she fell out of a spacecraft while returning to her planet in a later scene, did she plummet all those feet to the ground?
  • Under Fire: How do you join a Maoist terrorist organisation without knowing it?
  • Disney's Blank Check. The main character's whole family is pretty much always on his back, scolding him for being lazy because he isn't trying to get a job or make money in any way. The kid is about seven years old. These people expect a seven-year-old to become an entrepreneur?!
    • That's assuming people didn't already find fault with the plot for its piling of ridiculous circumstance after circumstance onto the main character (his brothers bully him, his first check gets stolen, his birthday is a washout, and he has his bike run over by the film's villain) or the notion that anyone in their right mind would clear a $1,000,000 check deposited by a kid who says he's an assistant to a big computer tycoon. Plus, an undercover FBI agent takes him at his word that his boss is a legitimate person, and willingly goes on a date with him. Then she kisses him at the end, before promising that she'll go on a date with him when he turns 17. NOOOOOO!!!
    • Let's not forget the scene where the parents ground the main character for wrecking his bike (a car ran over it) rather than praising God that it was not their son that got wrecked.
    • Keep in mind the obvious... the main character gets a million dollars. Now, no one is saying that's not a lot of money, but it's nowhere near enough for all the cool looking stuff he gets in the movie, including a freaking castle with built-in water slide, virtual reality-like video games, go-karts, a limo with driver and well, enough stuff to make many real life billionaires look modest.
    • To be (somewhat) fair, he is more likely ten or eleven rather than seven. Despite this, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that he is too young to legally work in any job, or at least any job that would appease his father.
    • When one of the characters asks the kid why the person he's working for is sending a kid to buy all this stuff for him he answered by telling him how his "boss" never had a childhood and is doing all this stuff now because he's rich. How exactly does this answer the question?
      • Tell any real adult that an eccentric millionaire who refuses to show himself is palling around with a ten year old boy, buying him expensive toys, and employing him under mysterious circumstances that the boy seems hesitant to clarify, and they will freak out. It's a wonder the cops weren't called as soon as he explained the arrangement.
  • Cloverfield: When the dudes are finally picked up by helicopters near the end of the movie, which direction do you think the rescue choppers would take? The most logical direction would be to simply fly in a straight line away from the creature (as it seems the other chopper does). Is this what they do? No, of course they take a flight path that almost circles the monster (so much so that Hud can just lean over and film it!), so that when the monster is hit by missiles from the Stealth Bombers flying overhead (causing a premature celebration of the monsters death), all it has to do is reach up and knock the helicopter out of the sky, dooming everyone in the chopper and wasting an entire movie of emotional investment devoted to the rescue of these dumbasses.
  • Daredevil... oh my.
    • Matt Murdock fights Elektra for absolutely no reason at all despite having just met her, having no idea that she has any martial arts ability, in a playground just off a main street, in broad daylight, sans costumes, in front of 50+ kids, and they are both supposed to have secret identities!
      • And she also attacks him without knowing of his martial arts ability, but she does already know he's blind. What a bitch!
      • Well, actually, there can be some justification there. Matt goes after her to try and learn her name, and likely picked up from the way she moved and reacted, that she knew how to handle herself in a fight. She on the other hand, has just had an apparently blind guy follow her, watch her movements as though he could see, and react like a martial artist when she attempts to handlock him. By this time each has ascertained that the other can fight, and isn't afraid to do so, so they were probably very interested to see just what the other can do. Matt was sure he'd be fine, and Electra was sure that she'd be able to pull her punches to prevent the 'blind' guy (who from her point of view may have been faking it) from getting hurt.
      • Plus, blind or not, Matt was acting like a creep. She was just trying to show him (in the least harmful way possible) that he needs to leave her the fuck alone.
    • Elektra's dad is killed because even though he KNOWS he's a target (having been reliably informed just ten minutes before by the Kingpin), when his limo plows into a roadblock, he does precisely what a target shouldn't do and gets out of the bulletproof car, turns around to face the direction his assassin is approaching from, and stands upright, right next to the car for the next five minutes to see if Bullseye really can hit him while fighting Daredevil (which of course he does, with DD's billy club, right in the heart), when any sane target would stay low and get behind some cover (or maybe hightail it while one's nominated assassin is otherwise occupied). May be also an example of an Idiot Ball.
      • Might be justified by the fact that he's just been in a car crash, and understandably disoriented.
    • The fact that in the movie, apparently when Daredevil went blind and gained his extrasensory powers, the moviemakers also decided that it gave him superhuman jumping powers as well.
      • Actually that goes back to the comics: the fact that he's an excellent gymnast is due to the bones in his ears related to maintaining balance. Still questionable, but you can blame Stan Lee for that one.
        • Actually valid sense—Daredevil's superpower is that his nervous system is superhumanly efficient at both perceiving sensory impressions too faint for normal people and at rapidly processing those sense impressions to derive a complete picture of his environment. This would presumably include the sense of proprioception, or our body's awareness of exactly where all of our limbs are positioned and how they are moving in relation to what's around us. So he would have a superhuman sense of balance and agility, and also enhanced muscle memory (as the more aware you are of exactly how your body is moving, the more easily you learn physical skills).
  • In The Vampire's Assistant, Crepsley arranges for Darren's apparent death by breaking the kid's neck and tossing him off the roof. He promises to "fix" the broken neck later. But in most states, an autopsy is legally mandated if a healthy person dies unexpectedly. Even if it's apparent that the kid died in an accidental fall, the M.E. has to check the body for possible contributing factors, such as alcohol or drug use. Darren should've had his guts on a scale and his brain in a bowl, which is more than the film's vampires can recover from.
    • You just said it yourself. In most states. Did that happen in one of those states?
      • Even the states that do not absolutely require autopsies, such as Texas, still allow for the option of autopsies if the local police or judicial system have any reason to suspect foul play. Which brings us to a related problem with this scenario; the wrongful death of an adolescent would require some kind of police inquest to close out the scene and certify it as accident rather than homicide, and since Darren was thrown off of the roof any homicide detective who wasn't blind should have been able to tell from the position of the body that he didn't fall, he was launched, as that's basic forensics 101. At which point not only should there be an autopsy, but also a murder investigation.
  • In Repo Men, there are repeated references to people who have multiple artiforg kidneys, or one artificial kidney and one natural. But thousands of real-life organ donors and recipients are thriving with a single kidney, so why would anyone shell out a fortune for a second artiforg kidney—or risk winding up on Remy's collection list—if they already have one (real or otherwise) that works?
    • Single kidneys resort to hyperfiltration to compensate the missing one. This stress is not healthy for the organ, and in the long term can mean renal failure, (particularly if it's not in a prime state to begin with). Thus, in a way, buying a second kidney might be money saving in the long run. It's not unseen to have people with more than one kidney graft.
    • Repo Men is a diverse and impressive collection of Wall Bangers that at times seems almost intentional. First of all, where is this taking place? And why can people only hide in a city filled with Repo Men, as opposed to somewhere far off in the country. Why doesn't anyone own a gun? Even if they are illegal to own in the future, a lot of these people are living on the fringes of society anyway. If I work for someone and their broken defibrillator destroys my heart (why did it destroy his heart?) I'd expect my medical bills to be paid, as well as a generous settlement for my pain and emotional distress, or at least for them to not perform the organ replacement without my approval. But worst of all was that despite all of this the film still has entertaining sequences where Jude Law beats people with hammers, Forrest Whitaker finds redemption, and the bitch ex-wife gets knocked unconscious by Jude Law's son. They have a satisfying if somewhat sappy ending where the evil corporation is taken down and everyone's happy on the beach and then Retcons all of it! As it turns out, Jude Law had been hooked up to a simulation of his own personal fantasy and the second half of the movie wasAll Just a Dream Why? Did someone think anyone would leave this film happy with such a ridiculously ludicrous plot twist?
  • Normally, Remember Me would have been quickly forgotten after its release; the only real hook that it had was that it was a romance movie starring Robert "Edward Cullen" Pattinson. The ending, however, made it truly a moment of complete stupidity. The ending features Pattinson's character going to the World Trade Center where his father works and getting killed in the 9/11 attacks. Audiences were mostly angry at this ending because it not only came out of nowhere just to have a surprising ending, but because it was fricking offensive.
    • I'm pretty sure the statute of limitations for Too Soon runs out after nearly nine years.
    • Even if you grant it that, it's still the mother and father of all modern-day emotional cheap shots. It was a fanfic cliche for years before they filmed it.
    • It's not even so much that it's too soon, but that literally nothing about the movie hinted at this fact at all. It just came right out of nowhere and is just a very stupid ending. And to be blunt, arguing that ten years after 9/11 is no longer too soon is a little stupid. It's that kind of thing where, at least in the country where it happened, will probably always be something of a sore spot, even if it isn't completely Too Soon.
      • Even if you were to grant it as no longer being Too Soon, trying to sucker punch the audience like would still be a stupid ending no matter how far into the future this movie could have been filmed and released.
  • The scene in The Two Towers when the elves come to Helm's Deep. First, Lothlorien is at war; they wouldn't be able to spare the troops. Second, given that the founding of Rohan is the stuff of legend, what are the chances that the Rohirrim would know about the Last Alliance? Third, how on (Middle-)earth did they get there so fast? Fourth, doesn't this kind of go against the whole "elves are passing the torch to humans" theme?
    • First, while Lothlorien were at war in the book, there isn't any sign of it in the movie, and at least some of the troops were from Rivendell, not Lothlorien (Haldir says he came on behalf of both Galadriel and Elrond).
    • Second, the elves speaking of the Last Alliance are speaking to Aragorn as well as the Rohan, and Aragorn certainly knew about the Last Alliance.
    • Third, Elrond and Galadriel are pretty good at predicting the future. They likely sent their troops long before Saruman had sent the orcs. In fact there is a sequence earlier in the movie where they are presumably planning to do just that.
    • Fourth, it goes just fine, since the Elves only play a relatively minor role in the battle - primarily giving Theoden some measure of hope.
    • Five, we needed a pointless dramatic exit for one of the most beloved characters of the trilogy, Haldir, a.k.a. effeminate elf guy that uses too much make up, who probably is cronies with someone high up in the production team.
  • In the Jet Li movie Fearless, set in the early 20th century, he fights the representatives of four nations. An English boxer, a Spanish swordmaster, a Japanese judoka, and a German... spear fighter? This is the 20th century. When Germany modernised its military, it modernised. Besides which, there is no art of one-on-one spear-fighting; the pike was always a formation weapon.
    • Except that there is, and all the "research" you have to do is watch the special feature on the dvd. The actor playing the role of the spear-wielding man is himself a champion and student of the regional art. Not invented, student of. Therefore, the art exists, because otherwise he would have nothing to study. QED. Also, the Japanese fighter is not a judoka. Judo has no striking or weapon techniques. What he studied was (at least) karate, and the correct term for a practitioner is a "karateka".
    • The Spear Fighter claims proudly that the Germans were some of the first to invent a Spear Kata. There were martial techniques in Europe just as there were in the Orient, though many were left abandoned as guns came into play. Because explosions are cool. Lately, there's been something of a resurgence in these arts from old manuals.
    • There's also oriental individual spear-fighting styles as well. It's arguable whether they're an outgrowth of staff styles or the reverse.
  • Elizabeth is bursting with Did Not Do the Research. First the Duke of Norfolk called her "Princess Elizabeth." Sure, she's the Queen's sister, it makes sense...except when you remember that Elizabeth was stripped of her legitimacy years earlier and was never called anything but the Lady Elizabeth until she herself became Queen. Then after she became Queen came scenes of her having sex with her childhood best friend, Robert Dudley. The sex itself gets a pass because historians to this day can't agree on whether they did or not, but if they did, the affair was extremely discreet—not carried on in a room with an audience chamber for her ladies to watch them. Finally, her secretary William Cecil calls her out on the affair and drops the bombshell that Dudley is in fact married, which the film's Elizabeth heard with shock and horror. The real Elizabeth? She was a guest at the wedding.
    • As far as William Cecil, he remained one of Elizabeth's closest advisers until his death twenty years later. Making him "Lord Burghley" was not a retirement gift, it was a title to match his office.
  • Dragonball Evolution. For example, calling energy attacks Airbending, how pathetic the final fight was, Roshi's decision to wait until dark to get out of Yamcha's hole, despite the fact that they were on a tight timeframe...It just goes on and on.
    • And the writers picked the worst possible time to stay true to the source material: over the course of the movie, both Roshi and Goku's grandfather are killed. At the end, the heroes use the Dragonballs to resurrect Roshi... but not Goku's grandfather. Yes, this is parallel to the end of the original Piccolo Saga, but in that universe, Goku's grandfather had been dead for years and had already expressed contentment in being dead. In this movie, he died a violent, unexpected death, and he still doesn't get to come back with Roshi.
    • To say nothing of any other people Piccolo killed to get the Dragon Balls he had. They were people who most likely didn't know why they were killed, as it's implied people don't know the purpose of the Dragon Balls.
    • During their fight Goku tries to tell Roshi that he isn't a thief (despite sneaking into the house in search of a Dragon ball). Then at the moment when Roshi stops fighting and stands and looks at him Goku promptly launches his own attack. Way to peacefully end the fight kid.
    • Why exactly didn't Piccolo take Gohan with him or at least make sure he was dead? Instead of torturing the information about where the Dragon ball was or snapping Gohan's neck he simply crushes the building, leaving Gohan still alive to give one last message to Goku.
    • So after Gohan died Goku just buried him and left? In the movie he's supposedly a modern teenager brought up in a lawful society. Shouldn't Goku's first action be to call the police? The police could be easily forgiven if they had come to the conclusion that Goku was responsible.
  • Battlefield Earth is full of Wall Bangers. One that stands out is how the Psychlos have had 1000 years to strip mine Earth for gold, and didn't notice Fort Knox.
    • Additionally the 'science' is just plain awful. How exactly they managed to avoid nuking themselves before they knew what it would do is a mystery.
    • The biggest wallbanger in the movie is the fact that the Psychlos are called what they are have somehow, in over a thousand years, never decided to try to use the "man animals" as slave labor. Travolta's character brags that the Psychlo military defeated the combined militaries of Earth in a day. This means they were aware that the "man animals" had a military, meaning they are intelligent. Furthermore, who the fuck do they think built all those ruins all over the place? The "man animals" obviously are intelligent, even if you can't understand them (because you never used the machine that instantly makes them understand you), so no, the idea that the "man animals" could never be trained to mine your gold for you is not a valid one.
      • It isn't even made clear in the movie exactly why they've kept humans around for over the past thousand years. They just seem to keep a few dozen of them in pens for no apparent reason.
    • There's also the problem of how the man animals discover jet aircraft that have been sitting around for a few hundred years, but are still somehow fully functional and the man animals learn to fly them in just a few days.
  • In the 2005 version of |The War of the Worlds, the alien tripods emerge from underground rather than arriving from space. The assumption is that the invaders had hidden their vehicles in various locations on Earth, long before anyone was living there. But if these same aliens visited Earth in prehistoric times, why didn't they subjugate humanity's ancestors way back when, instead of waiting until we became advanced enough to actually put up a fight? How did thousands of buried tripods go unnoticed by miners, seismologists, and spelunkers, and undisturbed by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and landslides, for all of human history? And most of all, why didn't the aliens know that Earth's native microbes were lethal, if they'd been here already?
  • In the film version of Lost in Space, the mutated spider version of Dr. Smith at one point says, "Within these eggsacks lives a monster race of SPIIIDERS!" So...the venom from space spiders not only causes humans to transform into mutant spider creatures, they also change the victim's gender?
    • They're nonhumanoid aliens, there's no reason to assume they even have a gender. Even if they do, a female spider-alien isn't that much further from a male human than a male spider-alien is.
    • How's about "Joey"'s decision to blow up the enemy ship. Yes, it was a good idea. When you're right next to it? Not so much. He's the moron responsible for their predicament in the fourth act.
    • In the movie, how exactly did they manage to end up in the exact same location as the Proteus? They could have been sent literally anywhere in the universe and as we find out any time in the universe and they just happen to go there? For that matter why was a rescue ship sent out to find them when they could literally be anywhere in the universe?
  • Superman Returns has several wallbanger-iffic moments. Of note:
    • Lex Luthor is released at the beginning of the film (off screen) because Superman failed to show up to Lex's appeal hearing. The only problem is that Superman had (by the time the movie begins) already been gone for close to 5 years. What kind of court relies on the testimony of a superhero who hasn't been seen by anyone in years? And when did an appeals court suddenly require witnesses to come forward?
      • For those who don't know civil procedure, just about all the evidence seen by an appeals court was already introduced at the trial level, and new evidence is actually inadmissible except under extraordinary circumstances after the initial trial.
    • After deciding to sneak aboard Lex Luthor's boat to find out what caused the blackout in Metropolis, Lois Lane not only takes her child along with her, but doesn't bother to take her cell phone in case she's in danger. What an Idiot!.
  • Tommy Wisseau's The Room. Lisa is cheating on Johnny with his friend, Mark. When she throws Johnny a birthday party, everyone goes up to the roof at some point, and Lisa gets the brilliant idea to make out with Mark right there on the cough. With dozens of people just outside, including the guy she's cheating on, who could walk in at any second.
  • The Last Airbender had a lot, but everyone knows this one: The Earthbenders. On the show they were being held captive on a metal oil rig, far from any earth they could control. In the film, they were held captive in a hole in the ground. There was nothing whatsoever to stop them fighting back (Aang even points this out). What, were they on the honor system?
    • You could say that they just needed Aang to give them a speech. Of course that raises other disturbing implications[3] of the Caucasian Avatar being needed to encourage the Asian Earthbenders.
    • An even bigger Wallbanger is that the Fire Benders needed FIRE to use their ability. The only source of fire is an iddy biddy torch in the center of the camp. A torch sitting on a very flimsy stand. To top it off, apparently the Earth benders also had a weapons cache nearby.
      • This is even worse when you consider that at a few points, Zuko firebends without a source of fire anyway. At one point he does this underwater.
      • When the Firebenders show up at the north pole, they're told to put out all the torches in town so they can't weaponize them. When the Firebenders reach land, it doesn't look like they bothered doing this, as pretty much every torch is still lit. Either have the characters be Too Dumb to Live to not do anything about the fire or Genre Savvy enough to come up with the plan and execute it. The middle ground should not be to be smart enough to come up with the plan and then too stupid to actually do it.
    • A rather awful one shows up when they're discussing Aang's reasons for running away. It was changed from not wanting to deal with the responsibilities of being an Avatar to a rule that Avatar's aren't allowed families. Shyamalan, were you aware that Zuko and Azula are descendants of the previous Avatar, Roku? For that matter, why would a child raised by monks find that rule to be so horrific?
    • In the movie, there was no Koizilla, which might have been able to save the movie if it had been rendered in otherwise fairly good 3D. Instead, the fire nation's navy is scared off by Aang, or as he's called in this movie, Ong, creating a massive wave, in which no one dies. Also Zhao, instead of being killed in the wave, is drowned by four nameless waterbenders after putting up virtually no offense.
    • The movie tends to treat the female characters pretty badly. Everything a female character does is either completely removed or is done by a male. For instance, in the cartoon, Yue decides all on her own that her Heroic Sacrifice in becoming the Moon Spirit is the only way to fix the damage Zhao did. In the movie, Iroh basically tells her to do it. Considering that the plotline of Yue and Sokka "becoming fast friends" was completely summarized instead of shown, it basically reduced Yue to a Living Prop with funny hair.
  • Predators has Laurence Fishburne in the role of Former U.S. Air Cavalryman Noland. A Crazy Survivalist and Shell Shocked Senior who has survived for years in the titular Predators' hunting grounds. He's got plenty of experience plus some weapons and equipment he got from the Predators so, now that he has teamed up with the other survivors, he's bound to open a big can of kickass for the Predators, right? Well, no. The only three things he does is provide a lot of exposition, try to kill the other characters in a rather lame way and getting unceremoniously blown up. Good job wasting a perfectly good character...
    • Perfectly good actor, you mean. Noland clearly went clownshit-crazy years before, and only survived afterward by looting from other humans dropped onto the planet - humans that he likely murdered himself.
  • In the Swedish movie version of the second book from The Millennium Trilogy, a character near the end is incapacitated in the middle of the night, and buried alive. Morning rolls around and you assume this character to be dead, until the shot pans to around where they were buried, and you see them digging their way out despite having been buried alive for hours without oxygen. What. This isn't counting the multiple gunshots said character sustained just shortly before being buried either...
    • To be fair, the book says that the position the character fell into the grave allowed free space, thus providing enough air. Not bleeding to death from gunshot wounds is another matter entirely.
  • In Con Air, Nicolas Cage's character, an Army Ranger kills a drunk who attacked him and his wife while he is in full uniform. Not only does his idiot attorney counsel him to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter despite it being an open and shut case of self-defense, the judge decides to ignore the plea-bargain and give the maximum sentence because Army training made him a lethal weapon.
    • The second part is illegal. A judge cannot disregard the terms of a plea bargain while keeping the guilty plea or any statements made as part of that plea in the record.
    • This was a glorified bar fight, how does Cage end up in a federal prison? The Feds would have no jurisdiction in this situation, it's strictly a local case and it should have been handled by a state court. Even if he was somehow given a military court-martial it still doesn't work—an Army court-martial would obviously not have used his military training against him, the judge would have been a panel of senior officers and not a civilian judge, and if somehow still found guilty he would have been sent to Leavenworth, not an ordinary federal prison.
  • The Korean movie Singles. One of the main characters has a one night stand with her male friend and ends up pregnant. She decides to keep the baby but for no reason at all, refuses to tell her friend that he will have a son or daughter, going so far as to plead with her female friend not to tell him. This is despite the fact that he is a caring person, is responsible, and is wealthy. Meanwhile, she has a low paying job, is known to be flighty and disorganized, and doesn't seem capable of raising a baby on her own. Obviously, the two characters don't have to get married or even live with each other but if a person is going to raise a child, it's always a good idea to get support from a father who would obviously be willing. That's to say nothing of the fact that the man was her friend and it just comes off as mean spirited not to tell him he has a child. This is all played up as if it's a happy ending somehow.
  • The Butterfly Effect spends much of the film setting up its "time travel" rules, namely that when Evan travels back to his own past and changes something, only he can remember the alternate timelines, and from the perspective of everyone else the events had always taken place that way. This internal consistency is then promptly thrown out of the window in a scene where, finding himself the target of prison rapists, Evan convinces a fellow prisoner to help him by briefly travelling back to his childhood and scarring the palms of his hands so that "stigmata" spontaneously appear before the prisoner's eyes. Not only does this break the established continuity rules, but it also makes a mockery of the film's entire premise, that even minor changes to the past can drastically change the course of one's life; we are now meant to accept that while all the other changes Evan made sent his life down wildly different paths, deliberately driving spikes through both his hands (in the middle of a classroom, no less) didn't change anything beyond giving him scars.
    • This is less of a wallbanger than it appears on its face. In an earlier scene, Evan discovers that the effects of injuries that occur exactly at the end of a flashback carry over into his current timeline on his current body. The prisoner didn't see the scars form, because from his perspective they were always present, what he saw was the scars suddenly became fresh wounds on Evan's palms. Still a wallbanger in the sense that this idea of things from the flashbacks coming through to the present is applied inconsistently throughout the movie.
  • Mein Führer - the truly truest Truth about Adolf Hitler. Plot: Hitler is too depressed to speak, so a Jewish acting coach (in fact, the same one who taught Hitler how to be a great orator) is called in to tutor him. While the general idea was good (another movie like Life Is Beautiful, or The Producers, or The Great Dictator, by a Jewish director - why not?), as was casting German comedian Helge Schneider as Hitler, the finished movie indecisively changes from parody to serious and back. Besides, the premise breaks Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Why should the biggest antisemite in history hire a Jewish acting coach, and why should a Jew willingly help a big antisemite?
    • First, he probably helped Hitler because he was afraid of being deported. Second, the thing about Hitler hiring jews is truth in television. His mothers doctor, Eduard Bloch, was a jew, and decades after her death, Hitler offered him protection until he emigrated to the United States.
      • In fact, in real life, when he was called out on one of several incidents of revisionism of the Judaism of a person or artistic work he happened to like, a frustrated Hitler replied, "I decide who is a Jew!" He was never particularly consistent about this point historically, so what is portrayed in the movie isn't really out of character; Hitler himself was just a hypocrite as well as a mass-murdering monster.
  • Oscar's plan to steal the Vanderville gem collection in Short Circuit 2 is nonsensical:
    • He's a bank teller at the bank the jewels are stored in. He has access to a computer scam artist. Hasn't this guy ever heard of embezzlement? He and his computer flunky could swipe ten times the worth of the jewels that way. Instead, he has the guy tunneling under the vault to get to the jewels, which is convoluted and time-consuming.
    • He plans to smuggle them out of the country in plastic dinosaurs. Even his lackeys question the idea, and with reason:
      1. Hard rocks + plastic container = tons of loud rattling that would tip off customs.
      2. Loud rattling + hard rocks = scratched up and damaged rocks. Yes, risk damaging the goods before you can sell them, risk devaluing them beyond a reasonable price drop. Good one, Oscar.
    • There's also the issue with Ben in the second movie:
      1. First of all, the SAINT project he worked on was a top-secret military project. Wouldn't he get in trouble for selling toy versions of te robots, even if the project itself went belly-up?
      2. Why in the bloody hell is he selling toys on a street corner?! It's shown, when Fred tries selling off Johnny 5, that Ben's name is well-known in the cybernetics circuit, to the point where he'd no doubt be hired by them on the spot, had he actually applied. What, did the events of the first movie so taint his view of working for corporations that he thought working for himself was the safest bet? Apparently not, because in the unreleased third movie, he mopes about not being cut out to be a salesman and eventually gets a job at a California university's space division.
  • The 30 Days of Night sequel starts the same way as the first film, with no investigation into what happened to the small town. They just rebuilt and went on with their lives. Man, those people are stubborn.
  • The Fighter‍'‍s Dethroning Moment of Suck: Dickey is chased down and beaten up by the cops (they caught him and his girlfriend robbing johns by pretending to be a cop). Micky jumps in to try and protect his brother - after being told by pretty much his entire family not to go out there. The cops decide to teach Micky a lesson by holding him down and breaking his hand with a nightstick (they know he's a pro fighter). All of this, by the way is happening in front of a large crowd of people (at a time when the Rodney King beating was still fresh in people's minds). And as the brothers are being loaded up, Stage Mom Alice shows is shown screaming for Dickie. Despite the fact that all she saw was Micky being possibly crippled. Oh, is there any sort of follow up to this? Charges being filed? Ramifications to Micky's career? Nothing. Everyone acts like Micky busted up his hand in some sort of accident even when he runs into a group of cops at a diner. It would seem the movie makers didn't trust us - the audience - to understand the previous hour's worth of Dickey and Alice being Micky's personal millstones. It had to be made gratuitously explicit.
And it didn't even use his injury to include the surgery the real Micky Ward had to strengthen his weak right hand. Some anvils don't need to be dropped.
  • The Romantic Comedy Bride Wars: The whole "war" is because the two main characters Liv and Emma will be married at the same place at the same time. Considering how they fantasize about their perfect wedding and having a double-wedding could be a fun idea in the hand of a decent writer, I wonder how is it a bad thing. Maybe it's Truth in Television but that still makes no sense.
    • Doubly so, because their weddings were only on the same day and at different times. The flimsy Hand Wave this gets is that Liv is fed up with having shared everything with Emma for her entire life and wants a wedding day that's all to herself. So much for their friends forever bit.
    • Then there's Liv having her batchelorette party the day before an important meeting.
  • The Brave One has Jodie Foster taking revenge for her horrible beating and the death of her fiancee at the hands of a group of thugs by gunning down criminal types that so much as threaten her. She becomes close friends with the lead detective in her case, but he is also tracking down the one responsible for the recent shootings. He begins to realize that it is her, and steels himself against the idea of arresting her as he gathers evidence. Then he gets a copy of the cell phone recording one of the thugs made when they were beating Foster and her fiancee, and turns on a dime to help her. What the hell? He knew what had happened to her and sympathized, but the movie made it clear that he wasn't going to allow that to prevent him from bringing her in for murder. How does he go from saying to her that he would have to bring in a criminal, even if it was a loved one, to actively helping her commit and cover up a murder!? He even has her shoot him in the arm to make it look like he had shot the perp in self-defense. Absolutely ridiculous, the whole ending.
  • Paparazzi has one of the biggest wallbangers of all time. The protagonist decides to start murdering paparazzi because they had caused a car crash that left his son in a coma, and the movie plays this off as totally acceptable Pay Evil Unto Evil. Whatever. The absolutely unacceptable Dethroning Moment of Suck comes when the protagonist plants a bloody baseball bat in the final man's house, completely throwing the detective off of his trail even though he had overwhelming evidence that the actor was the murderer. Apparently, the idea that the actor could plant evidence never occurred to the detective, and despite the fact that evidence placed him at the scene of every other murder, he crosses him off of the suspect list and arrests the fourth paparazzi photographer.
  • The Neverending Story 3. There is so much to complain about here, but what stuck out most in my mind was the Character Derailment of the Fantasians. In particular, Falcor and the Rockbiter. Falcor was a noble bastion of wisdom in the original film. Here, he's a dim-witted coward. The Rockbiter was changed to the Rockchewer (WHY?!) and now lives on what appears to be the Dinosaurs set with his curler-and-apron-wearing wife, and his son who sounds like he's sniffing helium on the sly. And he rides a tricycle. While singing Born To Be Wild. The makers of this movie clearly neither watched the first two films nor read the original book.
  • CSA: Confederate States of America in its entirety. The Confederacy conquers the Union (no) by winning at Gettysburg (no) with British and French assistance (no) in the form of ground troops (not even in the most die-hard secessionists' wet dreams). The Confederacy then goes to burn down New York and Boston, America's best and largest ports, even though the only reason Britain and France had any sympathy to the CSA was as a result of the cotton trade; yet, the Republican Party somehow endures when you'd assume they would have been put down as abolitionist subversives. Slavery continues into the 21st century. The American middle class, indeed, practically the whole modern world, turns out nearly identical to our own despite the massive changes to the political and economic landscape. The (all-white) Confederate Army conquers all of Latin America and eventually parts of the Middle East, and the Europeans are cool with that. White people are essentially the devil incarnate who like slavery just For the Evulz. Einstein gets his own slave hacienda. American (that is, white) culture is sterile, whereas Canadian culture (influenced by its large free black population) is the trendsetter; in this film, ethnic diversity is an absolute necessity for any form of cultural development, and any population that has ethnic diversity will develop automatically.
    • The slavery bit is particularly irritating. In real life, by the time the Civil War broke out, slaves were extremely expensive (importation of slaves from Africa had been banned in the early 1800s, thus limiting supply; an adult male slave could go for $400 -- $12,250.70 in 2019 dollars -- on the low end), meaning slavery was the province entirely of the rich. As a result, even among those who were against abolition, support for slavery began to ebb as time went on, the working class viewing it as yet another privilege the wealthy had they never would; once the Emancipation Proclamation came out, Confederate morale collapsed, the soldiers famously coming to view the conflict as "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight". Many historians believe that had the Confederacy won, slavery would not have lasted indefinitely; before the Civil War, Lincoln had drafted plans for gradual and compensated cessation of slavery, which had received approval from Southern members of his cabinet, and it is not impossible to believe similar plans would happen in a successful CSA. In this movie, however, the CSA is basically Slaveryland - slaves are used for every possible purpose, slaves are sold on a site similar to eBay, and the only reason the Confederates don't approve of the Nazis is because they kill the Jews rather than enslave them. Talk about The Theme Park Version!
  • In Breach, what possible reason could the FBI have for not telling O'Neill that he was really investigating a man suspected of treason? They weren't trying to surprise the audience, everyone already knew about the real life events and the movie even starts by showing the news of Hanssen's arrest. They don't even use the clichéd line 'he'd have seen right through you', they just expect the audience to ignore the lack of logic. In real life the FBI certainly didn't do anything so stupid.
  • Rise of the Planet of the Apes is pretty much kicked off by a massive plot hole that just gets more ludicrous the more one thinks about it: How did no one notice that Bright Eyes had a baby? Even if you can swallow that dozens of scientists and professionals (including one brought in specifically for his expertise with primates) missed the pregnant ape, they were doing drug testing. One of the first things - if not the first thing - you do when testing experimental drugs is to do a full physical work-up on your test subjects; both to establish a physical baseline to compare effects to, and to make sure your subjects don't have any conditions that could skew the results of testing. One would think pregnancy would be one of the things you look for.
    • Another skullslammer: Will (the main human character) considers ALZ-112 a failure because his father eventually developed resistance to it and his Alzheimer's came back with a vengeance. "Eventually" in this case, is seven years. A drug that could not only stop Alzheimer's in its track but make the patient's brain functions better than new for years? The company that made such a drug could name their price.[4] And Will abandons it because it wasn't permanent. What an Idiot!!
    • The worst wallbanger in this film is a simple case of mathematics. Now not everyone reading this is a math whiz, but try to follow along anyway: a few hundred enhanced apes declare war on a few billion humans. And the humans have automatic weapons and helicopter gunships and tanks and bombs. Even if the apes were able to inflict 100:1 casualties (100 dead humans for each dead ape), they would lose through simple attrition long before the last human was conquered.
      • That is because, as is implied at both the end of the film and more or less stated in the original series, that the more aggressive ALZ-112 goes on to become a global pandemic and wipes out most of humanity, leaving whatever is left to be enslaved by the apes.
  • Good Luck Chuck is a pretty loathsome movie from start to finish, but it saves its biggest wallbanger to nail those who soldiered through to the end: Chuck (Dane Cook) has broken up with Cam (Jessica Alba), and realizes that the only way to get her back and keep her is to find the goth girl who cursed him originally. After finding her (now a pregnant housewife and mother), she tells Chuck that the curse can't be lifted, but if he was meant to be with a woman, the curse won't work. After the Race For Your Love, Airport-flavor climax, Chuck and Cam reunite, and we cut to Anisha (the goth girl)... removing a pin from a Chuck voodoo doll and putting it away - completely negating the "True Love Conquers All" message.
    • Maybe it's a subversion.
  • The Polar Express: The film gave us the name of the poor boy, Billy, but the credits still show him as "Lonely Boy"?!?
  • Back to The Future: The infamous problem with the Delorean reaching 88 miles per hour at the end of the second film which results in Doc being catapulted back to 1885. Now Word of God has it that the lightning strike caused the car to spin at such velocity that it hit the required speed - the reasoning for the otherwise inexplicable flame trails leaving a "99"-shaped trail after it disappears. Thing is... this is the perfect example of someone trying to solve a wallbanger by creating a wallbanger of equal size. If the Delorean spun at 88 miles an hour in mid-air and its stated in dialogue that the lightning strike shorted out the flying circuits there is no way in hell the Doc wouldn't have met an horrific fiery death crashing head first into the ground. Remember also that he wasn't even wearing a seat belt; an action that in real life kills people if they crash at 40 let alone 88.
  • Home Alone: Harry and Marv's vendetta against Kevin in the second film. The exact words Harry uses at the start are One big score. We will get ourselves some phony passports and hightail it to some foreign country in other words they are going to commit one last job so they can evade the authorities and retire. Trying to murder a boy is slightly counter-intuitive to that goal somewhat. Yes, he put you in prison and knocked out one of your teeth but guess what? you would have gotten away absolutely blissfully clean from your robbery of Duncan's Toy Chest if you had just showed some modesty and left the kid alone.
  • Ant-Man: The premise of the movie is that Scott Lang, after being released from prison on parole for grand larceny, is entirely unable to find any honest work even at the burger-flipping level and is forced by desperation to start stealing again. This requires several things to be true: a) that minimum-wage service jobs consider a nonviolent criminal record to be an absolute disqualifier (hint: they don't), b) that a man with a Master's degree in electronics who is willing to work at substantially below scale for a man of his qualifications cannot find one employer willing to take that deal (hint: while many places will not hire an ex-con no matter what, the chance to get someone overqualified for really cheap will eventually tempt someone), and most unbelievably of all, that a man who is on public record as having successfully subverted an "unbreakable" electronic security system and yet didn't actually keep any of the money he stole for himself but instead donated it all to charitable causes could not successfully find a career in security penetration testing, which is a job even the FBI willingly hires paroled felons for.
Back to Wall Banger
  1. ↑ The number of seconds between the first time the protagonists encounter a zombie and the first time they shoot it in the head (x) subtracted from 100. (100-x=Profit).
  2. ↑ which they clearly used at the start of the movie
  3. ↑ As if the movie didn't have enough
  4. ↑ Current Alzheimer's drugs can only slow the disease down.
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