2014 wasn’t exactly the smartest year for movies: we had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles AND Transformers 4 from Michael Bay, a leak that proved Sony really don’t care who they internally bash, and a film character named Cooper after his grandfather, despite his surname already being Cooper. Cooper Cooper. Smart.
Inevitably with the end of the year in sight and obligatory run-downs of the best, the worst and the most under-appreciated everything of the year, there has to be some accounting for the cynics of the world. Not everything should be a vacant celebration of what has been, and film-makers need to be shown where they made mistakes so they don’t do it again. In that respect they’re very much like dogs, perpetually locked in the battle of wits that is toilet training.

So what follows is a look back at the silliest and most unnecessary plot-holes that helped ruin – or at least distract from – some of the best and biggest films of the year. Call it rubbing their noses in it for the betterment of future cinematic generations if you like…

Inevitably plot points are up for firm and frank discussion, including The Hobbit: The Battle Of Five Armies, so there’s a top level SPOILER ALERT in full flow.



12. Godzilla Soldiers Are All Idiots

Though it was a triumphant return to form (and bankability) for Godzilla as a movie character, Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla reboot was far from unflawed. Aaron Taylor-Johnson was mercilessly bland, there were a few too many knowing hero shots and the writing at times was a little wrong-headed, including a moment where one MUTO genuinely seems to give the other one a intimacy gadget covered in monster ejaculate.
That last point rings particularly true when you consider the US Army’s plan to take down the MUTOs by luring them away from all the vulnerable people and cities and blowing them to smithereens using nuclear weapons. This would have been a reasonable plan if it weren’t for the fact that the very thing that the plan hinged on – the MUTOs’ love of delicious nuclear material – wasn’t the thing that was also entirely ignored in the logistics stage.
Instead of hiding the bombs to transport across country where they could be taken out to sea, the Army instead mounts the warheads on the back of a flatbed on a slow train – considerably less manoeuvrable than a MUTO – somehow ignoring the fact that the MUTOs have an incredible ability to sniff out nuclear things from miles away. Smart move.




11. Richard Parker Clearly Hated Peter – The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Marc Webb’s decision to reinvent the Spider-Man origin story to include some genetic nonsense about him being the key to the experiments – because he was clearly the worst scientist of all time – at least offered some freshness to the tale, but it made Parker Snr look like an awful person.
Not content with tying his infant child to the experiments, and fundamentally ensuring that his life would never be normal, Parker then fled with his life at threat leaving Peter at home in the “safety” of extended family. But wouldn’t Oscorp be committed enough to tie up all loose ends? Wouldn’t Peter represent an almighty loose end who wouldn’t simply be ignored entirely because his parents ran away?
And even more importantly, Richard knew that Peter was the key to the experiments: did he simply assume that Oscorp’s team of mega-scientists would simply fail to connect the dots entirely? Shouldn’t he have hidden his child away at least? Perhaps he actually wanted Peter’s life to be ruined all along?


10. Mine Field Morons – Fury

Despite its dubious grasp of real history, Fury was actually a very entertaining film – and good evidence that David Ayer might well be a great choice for Suicide Squad – praise-worthy for its visual style and an engaging story that piles on the pressure and doesn’t seek to add a clinical gloss to war.
Unfortunately, it also includes yet another example of stunning stupid decisions by the people who have been chosen to protect all of the normal folk at home thanking their lucky stars they weren’t called up. As the film heads to its finale and Fury is the only remaining tank, it is immobilised by an anti-tank mine, at which point most of the crew decide to initially abandon the prone vehicle before Wardaddy’s stubbornness convinces them all to stay put. Though he basically makes sure everyone dies, Wardaddy was actually the only sensible member of the crew.
Instead of worrying that the chances of a single mine being placed on a key road would be slim at best, two of the crew jump off and go to check a barn, as well as Norman scouting the road. Did nobody train the soldiers to be wary of minefields? Should they not have been more concerned of being blown up? Or were the Germans really frugal with their mines?


9. Noah Isn’t Even Magic

Picking away at a religious epic is probably silly on two front: first, it’s a quick way to get an awful lot of angry comments (and possibly the wrath of God, obviously), and it’s folly to try and pick the logical from the fantastical in a film about giant stone golems, magical snakes and beans and people called Ham. But when the internal logic of a film is flawed, it’s flawed.
At the start of the film, Noah witnesses the death of his father as he’s trying to complete a special rite of passage that would confirm Noah as a man, and which would have had some sort of religious/magical undercurrent, or at least a spiritual one. In those terms, it makes no sense that at the end of the film Noah takes the snakeskin talisman up to bless his own family: after all, he wasn’t “blessed” in the same way, and if he is impregnating his grand-daughters with magic or Godliness or whatever it is, it’s a contradiction of his own incomplete ritual.
Presumably the decision to include the serpent – a Satanic symbol – went down really well with all the religious zealots out there. Also, how come Emma Watson didn’t pick up the accent of her new family, despite growing up with them from the age of six?


8. April Gets Fired For No Reason – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The Turtles remake was far and away the most stupid film of the year: it was horribly written, idiotically flawed and injected with so much false self-importance that it went beyond being a turkey straight back into a bankable property. Thanks Michael Bay.
The issues with the film are many and varied, but one of the earliest and stupidest concerned April O’Neill’s attempts to convince everyone that the Turtles actually do exist. When she comes face to face with them, they cleverly wipe her phone of incriminating photos, before handing it back and running away. She then takes some more photos because the Turtles are short-sighted idiots, and take ages to make their escape.
For some reason April then forgets that she took the picture and attempts to convince her boss that the Turtles exist by showing her a video she took of the not yet giant creatures when she was a child. Way to go, you’re basically the worst journalist ever.


7. Optimus Suddenly Remembers He Can Fly – Transformers: Age Of Extinction

Like in the original Superman movie franchise, the issue of suddenly remembered powers was a distracting point for box office winner Transformers 4. Just as Superman suddenly remembered that he could time travel and make people forget key points and facts by kissing them (never to be redone again), Optimus Prime waited until the end of the fourth movie to remember that he can actually fly.
So instead of using what is probably the most valuable combat power available to a robot locked in ground skirmishes with other mostly non-flying robots – which would have been handy in pretty much every one of the Transformers films – Optimus only uses it as the end credits are looming, so he can be a self-propelled spaceship and go and catch some Hell in space.
Why didn’t he use his power of flight to just take the Seed off into space in the first place without having to go through the entire silly plot?


6. The Problem With The Plan Of Attack – Guardians Of The Galaxy

James Gunn’s superhero sci-fi extravaganza was pretty close to being the perfect adaptation of the material and the film-makers did remarkably well not to leave too many unanswered questions or annoying paradoxes, to the extent that most of the complaints levelled at the film are just silly. Of course Star-Lord built a tape deck into the Milano.
There are some minor quibbles though that actually do hold weight: like the all powerful orb being almost entirely unguarded with supposedly the most powerful being in the galaxy after it (and seemingly incapable of just finding it himself), or Drax choosing to only take things literally when it serves the plot. And then there’s the issue of the Guardians’ plan to take down Ronan, which comes with something of a flaw.
The whole plan hinges on Gamora opening a door for the other Guardians to shoot Ronan with their BFG, which holds them up almost fatally. Frustratingly, Gamora proves twice that the door doesn’t actually need to be so much of an issue: first after Drax shoots Nebula, she reforms to stop Gamora from pressing the button to open the door, meaning the switch was pretty much within Drax’s reach too, so there was no need to send Gamora off to open the door at all. And then, when she opens the door, she herself just shoots a hole in the ceiling and jumps through it to where the team are, circumventing the oh-so important door altogether.


5. So… Tauriel Just Sort Of Goes Away?

The question of what would happen to Tauriel at the end of the third Hobbit film was always somewhat over-shadowed by the fact that she wasn’t actually in The Lord Of The Rings, despite being an immortal elf. It was always assumed that the heroic creation by Peter Jackson would meet the same fate as her beloved dwarf Kili, and we’d get to see a redo of the Tonks/Lupin heroic sacrifice in the final Harry Potter film.
In truth, that’s what actually should have happened, but instead Tauriel actually makes it to the end of the film alive – though predictably Kili doesn’t get a reprieve – having spent the majority of the film with wet cheeks and very little to actually do. Because Jackson chose to add in so many new strands and expanded sequences, he ended up having too many loose ends to satisfyingly tie up: so seemingly important characters – like Beorn and Tauriel and indeed most of the dwarf company – are sort of forgotten about.
So that leaves the question of what actually happens to Tauriel? Does she just not come back to help her friend Legolas in the sequels because she’s so sad? Is she killed – and if so why wasn’t any of it deemed important enough to actually see?

4. The Crops – Interstellar
Warner Bros. Pictures/Paramount Pictures
Warner Bros. Pictures/Paramount Pictures
So, basically Interstellar’s whole plot hinges on the fact that the Earth is dying thanks to blight wiping out all of the crops and leaving only corn (a clever allegory about the enduring strength of popcorn movies? Probably not), which requires everyone to leave Earth to go and find a new place to live to ensure the survival of the species. Clearly, growing crops on Earth in another way, rather than just in fields isn’t an option, or the NASA geniuses would have thought of that…
Except then at the end of the film when they’re all in the O’Neill cylinder they’ve clearly grown crops in an artificial environment. So why couldn’t they just use greenhouses to grow crops on Earth instead of moving wholesale somewhere else. That way they could have invested all the money NASA were using up on trying to develop a cure for blight?
Interstellar is in fact riddled with plot holes: for instance, why did NASA wait until Coop found them to get him involved when he’s clearly the ONLY man on Earth qualified to pilot the mission? He lives like two fields away. And while he consulted James Cameron on the issue of time travel film-making, Chris Nolan still fell down the same plot hole that Cameron did with Terminator: if your future self would be dead without the intervention of your present self, they can’t come back in time to help said present self save the future. It just doesn’t bloody well work that way.


3. The Disappearing Pregnancy – Gone Girl

The pleasure of Gone Girl is clearly in the awful, under-the-fingernails pressure of how the plot unfolds, and Rosamund Pike’s spell-binding, horrifying performance as the woman scorned (though her motives seem iffy at best). It’s all about a feeling, and as such you could probably forgive some issues with story-telling or mistakes.
But the fact is, Gone Girl’s central logic is utterly flawed: Amy is supposed to be lauded as an arch-villain, conniving and brilliant whose plan is air-tight and thus there’s no way Nick will ever be able to escape his life with her, so he just sort of accepts it. But when you pick at the key points of her escape from Desi, it all falls apart, and requires massive incompetence from a police force who were clearly over-achieving in their investigation up to that point.
For instance, why wouldn’t the hospital who tested her for signs of rape to corroborate her story have noticed that she hadn’t recently been pregnant or miscarried? Surely that would have been enough to ask questions about her story.


2. Why The Hell Does Coop Sneak Away To Brand? – Interstellar

A film worthy of two separate mentions, so riddled with plotholes and paradoxes is it.
At the film’s finale, Coop is on Cooper Station, waiting patiently for his daughter to arrive, which will take a few weeks (where the hell is she? Why isn’t she on the same station? Did they suddenly build more of them?) so he goes and sits on his porch for a while and cements his odd couple relationship with TARS. When old lady Murphy arrives she says he should go and see Brand, who is all alone on Edmondson’s planet, which seems to suggest that the rest of humanity has forsaken her and are letting her grow a colony alone while they enjoy their spaceship with tasty crops.
And when he does decide to go and see Brand, why does he sneak away? Why does he have to steal a spaceship and hide his intent from everyone? Aren’t they all on the same team? Why would going to visit/rescue Brand be frowned upon?
Oh, and why didn’t the future humans – who couldn’t exist remember – help their past selves in a much easier way rather than making humanity fall to the brink of doom and requiring a ridiculous over-reaching mission that was destined to fail all along? They’re not nice people.


1. The Adaptable Sentinels – X-Men: Days Of Future Past

In Singer’s return to X-form, the dystopian future timeline is presented as a product of the timeline in which Mystique was captured and mined for her abilities, which allowed Trask to develop his new sentinels with their shape-shifting abilities taken from her mutation. That’s all fair enough, though clearly Mystique couldn’t just become a teapot if she wanted to, but there’s some allowance for creative licence.
What doesn’t work is the fact that the sentinels appear to have learned a different mutant’s abilities from her as well. Rather than just being able to adapt their shape, the key to the sentinel’s power and devastating impact is apparently their ability to steal powers from mutants they come into contact with. Which basically makes them Rogue, not Mystique.
Yes the extended scenes suggest that Rogue was imprisoned, and could have been used to help build the sentinels, but she’s not dead like the other mutants who had their mutations stolen (including Mystique) and it’s too much of a reach to suggest that the sentinels learned that from Rogue much later when they were already dominant, when their adaptability is suggested as the key to their successes.

Which other 2014 movie plotholes belong on this list? Share your points below in the comments thread.

Source: http://.com/2014/12/flaws-you-didnt-notice-in-2014s-biggest.html

Reading all this can flaw me