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10 Ridiculous Movie Plots That Just Don’t Add Up

by Gregory Myers
fact checked by Jamie Frater

Everyone loves movies, but many of the movies they love have flaws they either put up with, or often just didn’t even realize that they have. Many classic movies have managed to pull the wool over our eyes, by giving us extremely entertaining side plots or other larger plot-lines, that really don’t make much sense when you hold them up to proper examination. If a director or writer knows how to keep their audience distracted by the right things, they can keep them from noticing, but many of these plots made no sense at all, and some were entirely unnecessary.

See Also: 10 Things You Never Knew About Famous Movie Plot Twists

10 The Entire Subplot In The Last Jedi With Rose And Finn Did More Harm Than Good

Star Wars: The Last Jedi Trailer (Official)

In The Last Jedi, the main plot-line was that the heroes were being tracked through hyperspace with some new technology so they could not escape at all. Two main characters, Rose and Fin, forge a plan to sneak aboard the enemy ship, and use the help of a skilled codebreaker to reroute the enemy tracking technology and confuse it long enough for them to escape.

They spent a huge portion of the movie on this, and in the end were betrayed by the codebreaker they ended up hiring. He betrayed them so much, that the enemy was able to find ships the rebels had been hiding, and kill countless more rebels than if Finn and Rose had simply done nothing at all and stayed on the ship. Their entire adventure not only didn’t save anyone, it actually cost lives, and they did it without consulting leadership, right after Rose made a big deal about how everyone needed to be a good soldier and follow rules.

9 Captain America: Civil War Makes Tony Stark Look Small, Petty, Mean And Stupid

Captain America: Civil War Official Trailer #1 (2016) – Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson Movie HD

In Captain America Civil War, we have a contrived plot where some heroes agree to stop using their powers without proper world permission, and some refuse. The plot goes further south when Bucky, Caps longtime friend is suspected of killing Tony Stark’s parents and Black Panthers father as well. They want to immediately punish him, but Bucky maintains his innocence and runs away with the help of Captain America in the hopes of proving his innocence. Despite supposedly not being supposed to use superpowers anymore, Tony Stark and several others suit up for a very anticlimactic duel between two sides of superheros at an airport, in what is a very weak battle after all the buildup, and all the sacrifices they made when it came to a decent plot.

After the fight, Captain America does manage to prove that Bucky was truly hypnotized beyond his will when he killed Stark’s parents, but this does not sate Tony’s anger at all. Instead, he turns into a crazy rage monster, and tries to straight up murder both Bucky and Captain America, and continues being a complete jerk even after he is defeated utterly, showing he still hasn’t learned anything at all. After several movies building up his character, it is disappointing to see a plot that is so interested in making a fight between superheroes, that is is willing to throw all of his development away.


8The Rage Zombies In The 28 Franchise Make Even Less Sense Than Regular Zombies

28 Days Later (2002) Official Trailer

28 Days is a well known zombie franchise, and was quite popular during the height of the zombie craze, but by trying to be too realistic it sometimes backed itself into a corner leaving you with questions, where most zombie movies don’t bother so hard with a “logical” explanation. Trying to get more scientific, they say their zombies are infected by the “rage” virus, which just makes people super angry and they attack, bite up and infect others. Eventually, these zombies start to starve to death. Despite being incredibly fast zombies with a lot of energy, they cannot seem to hunt down animals, and when they find other humans, they turn them instead of eating them, despite starving and being filled with rage. Their behavior is supposed to be berserk, but they are almost too logical — working perfectly within the plot to create more and more, while still leaving a way for heroes to beat them.

Now, the fact they don’t eat each other could make sense, as they perhaps smell some sort of disease on those with the rage virus that turns them off. However, it beggars belief that what is basically a berserk animal, would only carefully bite up, and not eat or mutilate a fresh human, when they are half mad and starving to death with hunger.

7The Movie Signs Is Blisteringly Idiotic And Horribly Explained When You Examine It

Signs (2002) Official Trailer

The movie Signs starts out with some children finding crop circles and acting weird, then they hear noises, and see strange intruders. Before long, the crop circles are popping up all over the world, and people are sure they are seeing strange beings everywhere — many people start preparing for an alien invasion. And, sure enough, at the climax of the movie, the aliens come and attack the family and almost kill one of the children. However, it turns out the reason we were able to beat them, was because they were weak to water and baseball bats. The aliens brings no weapons, no armor or advanced technology despite being able to cross interstellar distances, and gets taken out by a baseball bat.

Worse yet, the water weakness just makes no sense at all. The movie has a character say that “they came for us, to harvest us”, but they never explain for what reason. The most abundant thing in humans you could harvest from us is water, but certainly they aren’t interested in what to them is literally poison. And of all the planets they could have chosen, they chose one that is mostly toxic to them, and don’t bring any protection from the elements at all. The only thing that really makes sense is if no aliens actually invaded and the entire thing was just global mass hysteria.


6The Plot Of Sixth Sense Only Works If All Authority Figures Are Incredibly Stupid

The Sixth Sense (1999) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers

The movie Sixth Sense was almost an instant classic, and people will never forget the haunting line “I see dead people”, however, the movie really didn’t age as well as it could have, and when you hold it up to scrutiny, the whole movie falls apart. The movie follows a psychologist named Bruce Willis, who rarely talks to his wife anymore, is troubled about failing an old patient, and soon ends up working as a therapist for a kid played by Haley Joel Osment. He talks to the kid a lot, spends time in the family’s house, and even sits across from the kids mother at length for different times and never says anything to her.

As the movie progresses, the kid reveals that he can see dead people and talk to them, and the psychologist, while skeptical at first, starts to believe there could actually be something going on. At the end of the movie, we discover that not only can the kid talk to ghosts, but that Bruce Willis was a ghost the entire time and didn’t realize it. Now, the part where all this breaks down is the idea that Bruce Willis could have simply not realized he was dead without an incredible amount of delusion.

He has somehow never had a conversation with the mom of the child he is giving therapy too, does this not strike him as odd? He never interacts with anyone, he couldn’t possibly need to go to the bathroom, and trying to eat would just send it right through him — does he think he has a weird disease where he somehow doesn’t need to eat anymore? It seems Bruce Willis should have very obviously realized what was going on early in the movie, but then it would have been over very quickly and there wouldn’t have been much of a story to tell.

5 Killmonger’s Amazing Plan In Black Panther Is Not So Amazing At All

Marvel Studios’ Black Panther – Official Trailer

In the hit movie Black Panther, Eric Killmonger is an African American, originally from the secret country of Wakanda, who returns to challenge the current king for the throne. He has fought since a young age to create a new world where black people will not be oppressed, and has setup revolutionaries around the globe. His goal is to get Wakandan technology in their hands, and then they will lead a violent revolution that will takeover the whole world — he will then rule the world from Wakanda as king, and make sure black people are properly respected.

However, there are two major problems with this: For one, his enemies are living in a world with the Avengers, so they are used to dealing with all sorts of crazy tech and powers already — the moment they captured anyone, they would take the Wakandan technology, reverse engineer it against them, and use their own vibranium against them. And you are still talking about trying to take over the entire world. Which leads us to the second and bigger problem: This is the same world with the avengers and all of the X-Men, does he expect them to simply allow the world order to change to the point of one dictator bent on taking over with violence? Plus there were like a handful of ships leaving Wakanda with equipment, so this was hardly a world ending amount of weaponry.


4 Peter Quill’s Father Could Have Had All He Wanted, And He Completely Blew It

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy – Trailer 1 (OFFICIAL)

Peter Quill AKA Star Lord is a main character of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, and has been ably played by Chris Pratt, who helped uplift the Guardians franchise into something that would be taken as seriously as the rest of the Marvel universe. For those not entirely familiar with the plot, Peter Quill loses his mother at a young age and ends up going on space adventures with an alien named Yondu, who takes on the role of father figure.

However, his real father was a being in the Marvel Universe known as a celestial, who had incredible powers, and wanted someone else to share his powers with so they could basically seed himself all over and make the universe all extensions of him. He could not do this alone, so he went to many planets impregnating women and trying to find an heir who could contain his powers, and killing any mothers or children who did not live up to what he wanted. Peter Quill, despite having his mother killed, did not know understand that his father had killed her, and had borderline escaped his father’s purge.

When they meet at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2., Ego, Peter Quill’s father (who also happens to be a planet), could have had a chance at getting Star Lord to join him while he had him under hypnosis, and have everything he ever wanted. However, while explaining his crazy plan, he happened to casually admit to Star Lord that he had killed his mother and so many other countless mothers and children around the universe. This infuriated Peter, who decided he would not stand for his father or anything he stood for. All he had to do was not reveal such details, knowing they likely would upset a human being, but he chose to share them anyway and lost everything.

3 The Heroes In Super 8 May End Up In Prison For A Very Long Time

Super 8 | OFFICIAL full trailer US (2011) J.J. Abrams

Super 8 was a really popular movie the summer it came out, and really hit a sweet spot in the nostalgia for many people. It was reminiscent of movies like ET, or the Goonies, and starred a group of kids living in the 70s who made super 8 films and had a very strange alien event happen in their town. They were filming by a train station, and ended up barely escaping a huge train wreck. Before long, strange things started happening in their town, and it turned out that the huge train was transporting something that belonged to an alien being.

Eventually the town is evacuated as things get crazier. In the meantime, the main characters father, the town sheriff, decides that he has had enough of not getting answers of what is going on in his town, and takes matters into his own hands. He marches up to the officer in charge of the makeshift military base/Evacuation Shelter and demands answers, only to be put in a holding cell. Instead of taking matters like a man of the law normally would, he decides to force an escape by tricking and beating up a guard, and even leaving with his uniform, and later impersonating an officer to others on duty. In the end he is seen happily hugging his son, but once the military found out what he did, he would probably have a lot of answering to do and may spend many, many years in prison.


2The Timeline In Empire Strikes Back Is A Gigantic Mess If You Stop To Think About It

Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back – Trailer

In Empire Strikes Back, right after the escape from Hoth, Luke Skywalker heads to Dagobah, a supposedly distant planet, and Han Solo and the others try to run away in the Falcon, the hyperdrive fails, and they end up flying through an asteroid field to escape Darth Vader. They eventually make it to Cloud City on the nearby planet of Bespin, where Han’s old friend Lando betrays him, they get captured by Vader, and Luke gets a vision of their plight and cuts short his training to come rescue them.

Now, here is where the timeline starts to get confusing. We are given the impression that Luke Skywalker spent a significant amount of time on Dagobah, but Han and Leia seem to spend very little time in the asteroid field before making it to the next planet — Bespin is supposed to be really close, and with the hyperdrive out is was unlikely they had a lot of fuel to go far. So somehow Luke manages to pack in an incredible amount of jedi training in just a couple days, and still make it halfway across the galaxy to Bespin before lunch.

The only way this really works is if hyperspace travel is nearly instantaneous even when it comes to insanely long reaches of space, which we are usually led to believe is not the case, or something doesn’t make much sense. There is also the unanswered question of how Luke could expect to have gotten any kind of jedi training in such a short amount of time. Either Han and Leia spent way longer in that asteroid field than we realize, or Luke did the most efficient training montage in the history of movies.

1 The Dinosaur Military Subplot In Jurassic World Is Stomped On By Its Own Scenes

Jurassic World – Official Trailer (HD)

Jurassic World was a hugely successful movie that saw quite a successful sequel, despite so many people complaining about it.. People simply love dinosaur movies, and seeing the dino’s duking it out on the big screen will always hold a certain charm with the population. However, if you ask those who did complain, some will admit that overall it fit the same general plotline of most successful Jurassic movies, but it had a subplot that really didn’t work out too well and that was the main source of their ire.

In the movie, the company InGen, which had their hands in making dinosaurs back in the earlier movies, is heavily involved in investments for this new dino theme park. Their man at the park, a guy called Hoskins who is in charge of security for some reason, thinks that the key to huge money payouts and overall military domination are using trained dinosaurs they way we now use drones. The whole thing is invalidated by its own setup, as right before Hoskins gives his dino military pitch to Chris Pratt’s character, Chris Pratt is almost eaten alive by his own trained from birth dinosaurs and barely gets out with his life. It already should have been painfully obvious at that point that the whole thing was not going anywhere.

fact checked by Jamie Frater

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