“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.
I kinda think that if you can imagine a one-line fix to a plot hole, it isn’t really a plot hole.
I remember someone insisting to me that there was this huge plot hole in the film of the Fellowship of the Ring, because Merry and Pippin don’t get told about what Frodo and Sam are actually doing until the Council of Elrond, but still willingly run around risking life and limb to help them. Now, not only is this not a plot hole in itself (I’m pretty sure I’d help anyone fleeing a demonic horseman, just on principle, never mind if that person was my lifelong friend/cousin), it’s also quite obvious that they could have been told everything offscreen. The audience didn’t need to hear all that explanation again, five minutes after we first heard it.
A lot of plot holes people like to complain about are basically of this nature. ‘Can you imagine a fix?’ Yep, easily. ‘Did the audience need to hear it?’ Nope, because I could easily imagine it. ‘Well, there you go, then.’
Yeah, 90% of the time someone says pothole and I hear “The story didn’t spoon feed me the answer and I’m inexplicably mad about it.”
In another thread just today I was pointing out that this is the result of the Cinema Sins school of criticism taking over the average person’s relationship with media. People seem to genuinely think that how good or bad something is comes down to tallying up “plot holes” to come up with a sin score and calling it a day.
Plot holes are fine. Even legitimate plot holes are fine; if a story actually captures your attention and holds your emotional engagement, you won’t be thinking about plot holes because you’ll be too busy enjoying the story. This is Hitchcock described as Fridge Logic; problems that only occur to you hours after the movie is over and you’re staring into the refrigerator trying to decide what snack to make (yes, that’s the actual origin of the term). And he was very much of the opinion that this was absolutely fine; as long as any apparent inconsistency wasn’t so egregious as to break suspension of disbelief right there in the moment, it could be safely ignored.
When people fixate on minor plot holes it’s either because a) fundamentally the story sucks, so their mind is wandering, or b) they’ve trained themselves to constantly find or invent logic holes instead of actually trying to engage with what the storytelling is doing.