“We’ve almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!” The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
“Senator Amidala is in a coma. Even if she recovers, she will never be the same and may not live long.” But no… George had to have his god-damned funeral scene, even if it demanded Simone Biles levels of mental gymnastics to save Carrie Fisher’s most emotionally resonant moment from ROTJ, as well as one of the more intriguing OT lore dumps.
Bonus points if a scene was scripted or filmed and got cut.
Probably one of the most famous examples, but the robots in The Matrix originally kept humans around as wetware CPUs using their spare brainpower. Studio execs forced the Wachowskis to change it to them using humans as batteries, even though that makes no sense. Agent Smith possessing someone in the real world in the sequels would have made a ton more sense with the original explanation.
Also instead of Neo Jesus, when he kills the squiddies outside of the matrix, that should’ve been because they were still in there but Zion and co didn’t realise there was another layer to go.
Instead we got Revolutions.
This is what I thought was going to happen at the end of 2 and was so excited I had to watch 3 right away. I was disappointed.
That doesn’t really work either. Human brains are not great at computing unless you are looking for “good enough,” results, and only on some pretty narrow fields, facial/speech recognition, some physics interactions, etc. But worse than that… we’re kind of using them. If they wanted us to compute, the whole function of the Matrix is just taking up run cycles. And you can’t just coopt them during sleep, we need the rest periods ,or we literally die. Only one answer makes sense to me, it’s a nature preserve. They didn’t want to be responsible for destroying their creators, and the only other sapient species known to exist. So they build the Matrix to keep us docile. Then, the energy reclamation actually makes some sense. They’re never going to be net positive, but assuming they are having difficulty keeping their society powered, they would be incentivesed to reclaim every watt of power they could from us to reduce our burden on their grid.
Humans are great computers, we’re just not digital. Our brains are definitely analogue computers, where closer neurons or stronger synapse connections can mean higher voltage signals from one cell to another. This is a very powerful and nuanced form of computing. It’s not great for exact calculation of numbers, but it is great for interpreting data, even extremely large data sets. Human brains (many animal brains really) are also really fantastic at image processing in particular.
If it’s worthwhile to have a dedicated video card in your pc, then likewise, it would probably be worthwhile to have human brains in your evil robot hivemind. It would make some kids of processing much more efficient.
Human brains are excellent at computing certain things that are almost impossible for a regular computer. Having worked for years on computer vision I can tell you how hard it is to make computers realize simple stuff, heck, you need massive server farms just to do a basic object recognition that any 3 years old can already do. Sure, you can train a simple AI to recognize some objects, but it will never (currently) be as many objects or as precise as a person can instantly recognize.
The truth is human brains are excellent at what they evolved to do, i.e. pattern recognition. So much so that when trying to figure out data it’s usually easier to plot the data in many different ways to see if something shows up. In fact usually when you try to do cluster analysis the first machine result is, let’s say not great, but you can see that things are wrong and adjust the parameters.
As for your other point your brain does this automatically, they can just put a billboard with the thing they want analyzed and your brain (and millions of others) will give them the answer. Or they could use our dreams, even during sleep our brains are still active, and they could run any scenarios then. There are many other ideas, e.g. people playing videogames inside the matrix are actually controlling robots, or people working in forklifts are actually piloting construction robots in the real world, etc.
The original CPU idea was excellent, but computers weren’t so ubiquitous back then, and the producers thought that the audience wouldn’t understand it.
Well, they could co-opt our brains in various ways.
That asinine stuff at an office? Maybe it’s work the computers weren’t good at.
Doing manual labor? Maybe it’s controlling some robot doing a real world analog.
Some unskippable ad that you passively thought about? Maybe it represented work being done.
Maybe it is intruding on “spare” brainpower and if the balance glitches in some weird way? Reset you with “just a dream”.
I think there’s enough room for a “wetware” computing explanation. However I could see it being more than audiences were really prepared to think through. I think your “we need the humans safely out of the way of harming us, but we don’t hate them and we’ll keep them alive and engaged in a safe way” probably would have worked well, but they wanted the AIs to be cartoonishly bad in the first movie, and that would have been “too nice”.
I thought this was partially coveref when neo asks for a physics book, and they tell him one doesn’t exist.
“So, we started using teleportation now.”
- Everyone in Game of Thrones from season 6 onward.
Did you just win the thread? I think you just won the thread.
I’m digging deep in my memory here so I can’t provide any details, but there was one episode from a very early season of Grey’s Anatomy where I got to the end of the episode and thought, “wait, did they ever solve this episode’s medical mystery?” There was a lot of doctor-plot that episode and the patient plot just kinda got dropped. Well I watched the deleted scenes for that episode, and low and behold there’s a line where they explain exactly what was going on with the patient. It wasn’t the real highlight/purpose of the scene, but I’m still shocked they would cut it because it left an entire plotline (albeit just for that episode) completely dangling.
I haven’t watched any Grey’s Anatomy to speak of, but I suppose that sounds about right from what I’ve heard.
I haven’t watched the series in over a decade so I have no idea how it’s aged (or how my tastes have changed as I’ve aged) but I remember the early seasons being quite good. Gray’s Anatomy was really popular the first few years that it aired, and at least at the time I thought it was deservedly so. I think I dropped the show around season six? It was getting too soapy/ridiculous and the plot was starting to go in circles. They ratchet up the tension really high pretty early on (both on the medical drama and doctor-relationship drama sides) so the writers inevitably set themselves up for failure, because this isn’t a shonen power fantasy, you can’t just keep driving things up to higher and higher stakes and still remain within the confines of reality.
For instance, in a very early season there’s a really bad train crash where a bunch of patients flood into the hospital and I remember it being a huge climatic thing with some fantastic episodes. Then in a later season they have a bad ferry crash plotline that falls flat because they already did the train crash, and the emotional impact of this huge public transportation disaster was significantly diminished by a sense of “didn’t we go through this already?”
I cannot believe that the show is still going, mostly because I’m amazed they have any audience left.
I cannot believe that the show is still going, mostly because I’m amazed they have any audience left.
Looks like it has eroded significantly over time, but I guess with a sticky core audience and a shrinking expectations for network TV, it’s got its niche.
While I haven’t seen it personally from what I can recall. There apparently exists an episode of Midsomer Murders where the motiv of the killings got cut before airing.
Fun to hear Gray’s also managed to do that blunder. Wonder if any other similar shows have do the same. Feels kinda easy to accidentally do in that type of shows, if you do a very character focused episode.
“Eagles can’t fly us to Mt. Doom because of a magic curse or some shit”- Gandalf to the council in Lord of the Rings
In the books it’s explained that the eagles were involved in a war of their own during the first two books and couldn’t send help without risking their own destruction. There’s actually a part in the books where frodo is like “why didn’t the eagles just fly us” lol.
I think that one’s pretty well explained (albeit not explicitly) by the presence of the Nazgul and the eye of Sauron, which were either destroyed or otherwise occupied when the eagles made their rescue. People pretend Mordor had no airborne defenses for the bit, but it doesn’t really make sense
The Eye was proven to not be all-seeing or all-knowing. Same with the Ring Wraiths. And Orcs were shown numerous times to be inept guards.
So have an eagle fly Frodo to Mt. Doom on a night with a new moon, above the clouds. There is no way they would be spotted. A curse, while stupid, is the only explanation that really puts this plot hole to rest IMO.
Doesn’t have to be all seeing to spot a fucking eagle lol. This is akin to “Gandalf should’ve teleported the ring to Mordor, it never explicitly said he couldn’t”
I saw something maybe yesterday that was like, Samwise could carry frodo without being affected by the ring, so why didn’t they just tape the ring to a small animal and put it in a bag, and carry the bag to Mordor?
I’ll tell you that council didn’t think very hard before concluding “one of us must physically carry it all the way there.”
That only applies to the movie, and anyway it’s easily explained by the The Ring not wanting to switch to Sam in that moment. In the book Sam totally puts on the ring to trick some orcs and it tries to tempt him with the power of gardening really well.
The Ring would reach out and influence people around the bag. The Ring would tempt whichever eagle carried Frodo. It had to be a being that had enough control to keep hold of The Ring but not enough ambition to be controlled by it. And even then IIRC it wasn’t actually possible to destroy it willingly, Eru Ilúvatar stepped in and gave Gollum a tiny nudge off the cliff.
That tactic might actually work on me. Imagine being that good at gardening, it would be amazing.
The Martian when the main airlock blows up.
He ends up taping a plastic sheet over the hole with what I assume is super strong space tape and plastic and then continues to live in the station for 550 more days.
We spend the first half of the movie learning how unforgiving the environment is, and how delicate his ecosystem for life is, but you can also blow half the place up and just tape some plastic over the hole.
They did a much better job of explaining it in the book, but the movie literally went “just tape that bitch up with plastic, then we’ll throw a wind storm at it to prove it’s good forever”
At least they threw the wind storm at it, LOL.
They did a much better job of explaining it in the book
How did the book handle it?
Space age hyper-tough epoxy.
IIRC, the same canvas material the rest of the habitation was made out of.
I believe that is correct.
In the book, they also took pains to point out the steps he took to try to avoid it happening to the other airlocks after that point too - by actually balancing out their usage a bit more, instead of just always using the same one.
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Isn’t there something like the gravity on Mars is so low that even though there are massive dust storms with fast winds, they feel like a gentle breeze, and would never be able to topple a solid object, let alone a space ship.
Yeah, but it’s air pressure, not gravity.
How did Inigo know the Man in Black was in love with Buttercup? It’s an easy one to fix, because there are several points where Grandpa skips parts of the story, but it could have been a single throwaway line.
“We’ve almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!” The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
It was explained in a deleted scene. In Independence Day, our computers are based on reverse engineering their crashed ship. That and why would a hivemind alien race ever even need cyber security? Up to that point, they probably never encountered a scenario where a planet they were harvesting had an intelligent race on it, said intelligent race recovered a crashed ship of theirs, and said race was advanced enough reverse engineer it.
I might humbly suggest that whatever pacing issues the scene introduced would have been worth it in this case.
Roland Emmerich is a very dumb man with a very low opinion of his audience.
In Frozen 2, the elemental spirits have trapped a kingdom in a magical barrier for many years as punishment for building a dam to stop a river. The day is “saved” by an earth spirit incidentally destroying the dam and freeing the river. There was this whole thing about the spirits calling out to Elsa to come and save them, but apparently the spirits had the ability the whole time to break the dam. The whole plot was basically pointless. Maybe instead they needed Elsa to break the dam, or needed to combine their powers.
I don’t think the spirits are trapped in that scenario though are they? I mean they’re not trying to escape. It’s more like a restitution thing. Like they want you to come clean up the mess.
“Oh man, look how far down the track the T-Rex pushed our car!”
DBZ fan. Lots of things:
- SSJ4 could be canon. It just requires a full moon and a tail. When all the Saiyans in-universe don’t have them, it’s kinda impossible…
- Becoming SSJ easily (Goten and Trunks) is easily explained by saying that because their fathers already were SSJ by the time of conception, it had become a natural reflex to them, rather than a barrier that needed to be broken.
- They’ve been able to blow up planets since the days of 9000 power levels, probably even with 1000, yet with power levels of 1B the fights are largely the same. Explain this as some sort of ki concentration, where your energy has…more energy per energy, or something?
- Goku’s “telepathy” was always just him feeling someone’s energy, and feeling how flustered and overwhelmed they are. He does a similar thing to Future Trunks, but it wasn’t called telepathy, it was “searching his emotions” - another BS way of saying “shit, you don’t look good, what’s up!”.
- The Dragon Balls take a year to charge, but are often usable pretty much right away - the RR army get them 8 months after they were used, and despite being used to revive Goku the Earth balls are used basically a month later because Kami is revived. Maybe just explain it as Kami needing time to revive them as they’re intrinsically linked? It Kami goes on bed rest, you’ll have Dragon Balls in a few weeks…
- Launch didn’t disappear. She married Tien, they have kids, and she stays at home to raise them.
I could probably write a book to “fix” the show, but these fixes just tend to annoy fans because they want a “canon” answer to a show that is hilariously broken.
“We’ve almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!” The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
Wasn’t the in-movie explanation for that that all modern tech was secretly based on reverse engineered alien tech?
I’m not sure this counts as a single shot, but I’ve always felt that I could fix “Raya and the last dragon” with one flashback right after Sisu shows Raya her petrified brothers and sisters.
Context: Sisu’s plans up until this point have always revolved around ‘give the bad guy a present’ which never works, while Raya is ‘action girl’ and all her plans are fighting or running. The last shard of the dragon crystal to ‘save the world’ is in the hands of ‘evil girl’ who caused the ‘magic apocalypse’. After this scene, Sisu convinces Raya to go with the give ‘evil girl’ a gift plan, which get Sisu killed, then later after Raya and ‘evil girl’ fight, she does a 180 and gives up all the dragon shards to her and ‘evil girl’ saves the day. So the gift thing has no resolution, and the 180 is weird. How do you fix it?
Flashback: Sisu loves giving gifts to humans. One time she gives a gift and humans fight over it. This causes the evil greed clouds to attack for the first time. Other dragons make gem, entrust Sisu with it “because the one who caused it should be the one to fix it”. Flashback over, Sisu says “and I will, even if I die trying.” Bam, death foreshadowing, ‘evil girl’ saves the day foreshadowing, reason WHY Raya does a 180 at the end, and also lore on evil greed cloud things.
I always thought Raya and the Last Dragon would best have been fixed by being a series. They clearly put a lot of care and detail into the world building, and a post-apocalyptic riff on ATLA with Disney money could have been really, really good. Instead, we got a movie that was just kind of okay.
The Usual Suspects
Spoilers below:
At one point a character (I think it was Giancarlo Esposito, but not certain) mentions an English lawyer, to which another (Chazz Palminteri, I think) says >!“Kobayashi?”!<
!GE nods. But since Kobayashi is not Pete Postlethwaite’s character’s real name, just the name on the bottom of a coffee cup, this makes no sense.!<
!Could have been fixed by GE saying, “Probably” or “Yeah, maybe” or whatever.!<
The black liquid was never a bioweapon it was made as an insecticide. Why, what did you people do with it?
Honestly that entire movie was a plothole given the origins of the xenomorphs is already established.
I hate it when storytelling pulls me out of the story, and back into the theater.
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It’s a balancing act though, isn’t it?
Sure, you can’t have it be too clunky, but you also have to lay some foundation for the characters’ actions to make sense. Screwing it up either way will pull a percentage of the audience out of the story.
Perhaps some sort of establishing shot in the lab with OS9 or whatever they had in Independence Day would work better than dialogue, but the specificity of the solution called for something. Handwavium is best when a bit higher level, IMHO.
I hate it when storytelling pulls me out of the story, and back into the theater.
It’s a balancing act though, isn’t it?
Don’t mean to be argumentative, but generally speaking? No, it’s not.
Either you’re in the story, and enjoying it, or you’re in the theater, noticing the seat you’re sitting in, and not paying so much attention to the movie being shown you.
A good Storyteller keeps you in the story, and doesn’t let you escape until the end credits.
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Okay, I guess I see that, but allowing that the storyteller fucked it up, some failures of storytelling stick in my craw worse than others.
Okay, I guess I see that, but allowing that the storyteller fucked it up, some failures of storytelling stick in my craw worse than others.
Me as well. For some you just smirk negatively at, others you cringe at, and others you get pissed off at.
But all of those can pull you out of the story, and back into the movie theater. They’re all bad, just in varying degrees.
Fair enough. I think we could use more discussion around here that jumps off from the original queries and prompts. :-)
I think we could use more discussion around here that jumps off from the original queries and prompts. :-)
That socializing technique works at parties too! 😇🙂
What you want is “show” without the “tell”. Always works better.
What you want is “show” without the “tell”. Always works better.
Actually I was speaking more about the plot holes and non sequiturs, but you also have a valid point.
