Image © Twentieth Century Fox
I’ve been having a great deal of fun coming up with lists of plot holes, or “unanswered questions” as I’ve been euphemistically calling them, in geeky movies. Obviously I wasn’t the first person to write such a list, nor were my lists anywhere nearly comprehensive.
Just this morning, in fact, I came across an excellent list from the British newspaper The Telegraph, centering on scientific and technological errors. The author, Tom Chivers, came up with twenty errors for his list, and the only one that matches one of mine is the Independence Day computer virus. My favorites from his list:
2. Antigravity love songs Related to the above, with Star Trek again the main offender, although it happens everywhere. We find the idea of sex with our nearest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee, repellent. And yet we are quite happy with the idea of Captain Kirk doing his interplanetary swordsman thing with a variety of smokin’ hot space babes. He might as well try it on with a nematode worm: at least it has DNA.
Incidentally, Spock is half human, half Vulcan. We have no idea how that is supposed to work.
3. The Ice Storm Star Wars is guilty here. Young Luke grows up on Tatooine, a desert planet; by the start of The Empire Strikes Back, he’s found his way to Hoth, an ice planet. If those planets are able to support life as we know it, they will have warm bits at the equator and cold bits near the poles, like Earth.
His #3, in particular, has always bothered me. Now, of course, not all of the items on his list are really plot holes, since once it’s been established in the Star Wars universe that some people can move objects and manipulate others’ minds using some mystical “Force,” it’s difficult to hold that universe up to close scientific scrutiny.
Speaking of which, can anyone tell me why, in the Star Wars universe, Jedi Knights and Sith Lords don’t use the Force to manipulate enemy ships during battles in space? I mean, if Yoda can use the Force to lift Luke’s X-Wing out of the swamp and onto dry land, it ought to be a cake walk to use it to do stuff to ships out in space, where there’s no gravity or air to fight you. Right?
In case you missed my lists, by the way:
Top 10 Unanswered Questions in Geeky Movies
Top 10 Unanswered Questions in Geeky Movies II: The Sequel
