Cinephiles love movies, we love watching them, talking about them, and getting involved in blood feuds with strangers on the Internet about who would win in a Kylo-Ren vs Darth Maul knock-down-drag-out battle. We love taking to message boards and linking together films that were never meant to share a universe, but so obviously do, (I’m looking at you, Pandorum and Event Horizon). But – if there is one thing we love more than glorifying films – it’s dissecting them and sniffing out inconsistencies, cock-ups and blunders made by the film makers or screen writers, except, sometimes we cry ‘plot hole!’ when the truth is, we just weren’t paying attention.

So, here is my list of ten things that we originally thought were plot holes, but actually have perfectly reasonable explanations.

(For the love of Kubrick, don’t post in the comments that I forgot about Jack and Rose on the door in the ocean, I didn’t forget about it, I just don’t care about that one.)

The Matrix. 1999

The plot hole: Why doesn’t Cypher need an operator?

The explanation: He is a programmer.

In the late Nineties we liked our action heroes to dress like recruitment posters for nihilist edgelords, and at the pinnacle of ‘edgy and badass trench coat cool’ was the Wachowski siblings pop-philosophical master work, The Matrix, were Neo finds out the ‘real world’ is a lie, and everyone is really plugged into the titular Matrix, a computer simulated world.

When Neo is finding his feet and just wandering the Nebuchadnezzar at night, unable to sleep, he comes across Cypher, who is doing… something. If you watch the scene again it is obvious that he is up to something suspect, but when Neo reveals he has no idea what the screens say, Cypher makes a crack about only seeing ‘Blonde, brunette, redhead’; the inference being that he is just on whatever passes for sites you would need to clear your history after visiting. But he wasn’t. He was writing a program, separate from the Matrix, that would let him go into something similar to the training programs without an operator. Which is why he looked so startled when Neo snuck up on him, if Neo had known what he was looking at, he would have rumbled Cypher as being a sneaky Judas in a moment. As for physically plugging himself in. He likely used an automated rig to jack in, awkward but doable. All the program had to do was act as a chat room that booted the user after a certain amount of time and self-delete.

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

The plot hole: Andy’s magic poster.

The explanation: Gravity.

Sitting comfortably near the top of many cinema aficionados’ lists of ‘best films ever’, in fact, it currently holds the number one slot on IMDb’s list of top 250 movies, voted for by fans. Shawshank sees Andy Dufresne wrongly convicted for the murder of his lover, strikes up friendships with his fellow prisoners, and avoids being murdered by Clancy Brown. Amid the harrowing sexual assaults, bonds of friendship, and tales of how you can’t imprison the human spirit, Andy plays the long game, inch by inch, digging a tunnel out of his cell, the hole camouflaged by a large poster. When Andy decides that it is time to leave, he moves the poster and crawls his way to freedom… but how did he put the poster back? He didn’t, gravity did. It was only pinned at the top; once he was in, gravity did the rest, and the poster just settled down normally. You can see this when the warden pulls down the poster, it was only held up by its top two corners. It’s a good job that Andy didn’t use Blu-tac.

Taken (2008)

The plot hole: No one cares about Amanda.

The explanation: It just wasn’t spelt out.

Bryan Mills has a very particular set of skills, none of which seem to involve checking in on his daughter’s friend. He wants to demonstrate to the swarthy, sinister kidnappers who abducted his daughter, Kim, in this suspense thriller/dad power fantasy.  Bryan kills 31 people in pursuit of getting his daughter back, exposes a human trafficking ring, and tortures saturnine goons with a zeal that would make Guantanamo Bay interrogators stage an intervention; until finally rescuing Kim and swaggering off into sequels of diminishing quality. A nice happy ending where our super dad saves the day and everyone is happy, except… what about Kim’s friend, who was taken by the kidnappers at the same time? The film just seems to forget all about her. Well, no, it doesn’t. In the scene where Bryan is looking for his daughter in a seedy drug den, he finds Amanda’s body, dead from an apparent overdose.  Considering that Bryan is not shown to address this, other than looking sad for a few seconds, it’s easy to assume the dead girl is just a nameless victim of the trafficking ring, but it is Amanda.

The Terminator (1984)

The plot hole: Sarah Connor’s hydraulic press skills.

The explanation: The power of memory and pattern recognition.

There is literally nothing that I can write about this franchise that you haven’t already read a million times before (apart from maybe trying to reframe it as a Marxist video essay on the evils of consumer culture), so let us just assume you know the setup.  Arnie is one of the best bad guys of the 80s as a cyborg who systematically annihilates everyone in the Phone Book with the name Sarah Conner, trying to terminate the future mother of the resistance before he is born. Kyle Reese travels back, conceives the future resistance leader, gets killed, and Sarah crushes the T800 in a conveniently placed hydraulic press, ‘there’s a storm coming’, followed by probably the best sequel of all time, etc. However, how did a waitress know how to operate the machine that crushes the T800 cyborg? Well, apart from the fact that it is literally a big red button, Sarah had accidentally triggered the machine when she and Reese first got to the factory floor.  It’s not that she secretly took a level in ‘Operate Heavy Machinery’, she just remembered something useful from when she accidentally triggered the machine, and used it to dispatch the T800 to digital hell along with all the Tamagotchis and bricked iPods.

Superman (1978)

The plot hole: The world spinning backwards to time travel.

The explanation: Special effects limitations.

Before we get into the meat and potatoes of this one, I just want to be clear that we are clarifying a supposed scientific inaccuracy in a film about a god-like, infinitely strong man, who acts like a boy-scout and dresses like a rodeo clown on meth. With that elephant in the room addressed, before we had CGI fights with giant blue sky beams, Richard Donner’s Superman showed us what is considered by many to be one of the best comic book movies of all time. Most fans of the property consider Christopher Reeve’s portrayal of Krypton’s last son to be the definitive version of the character.  In the film, the villainous Lex Luthor is trying to cause a massive earthquake along the San Andreas fault line to push up the price of his real estate.  Superman foils the plan, but is moments too late to save Lois Lane, Supes lets out a howl of anguish and flies counterclockwise around the earth faster and faster to reverse time, at least that’s what it looks like. According to Donner himself, what we are seeing is supes flying around and around, faster and faster, speeding up until he goes faster than light, and time-travelling that way. Still a dumb plot hole, just a different one. Yes, Superman breaks the laws of physics—but if you’re cool with a man flying because the sun gives him powers, this shouldn’t be your breaking point.

Back to the Future (1985)

The plot hole: Why don’t Marty’s parents recognise him?

The explanation: They didn’t have a photo.

Marty McFly crashes his time-travelling DeLorean in a barn back in 1955, and after some antics, he prevents his parents from having a pivotal meeting, thus meaning that he may never be born. Basically, Marty has to act as his own Dad’s wing man/dating coach, while trying to avoid the advances of his horny mum to be, so he can continue to exist. Marty bungles into getting his mom and dad together, accidently making it so his dad stands up to his bully, inspires Chuck Berry, revolutionising music, and still had enough time to warn Doc Brown that some pissed off Libyans will want to shoot him back in 1985. Except, as he grew up, why didn’t his parents recognise that Marty was the spitting image of their friend, Calvin Klein, from high school? Well, for his parents, it has been more than 20 years since they last saw him, and they only knew ‘Calvin’ for around a week at most. With no photograph for reference, an average person can recall around 5,000 faces without special training, so it’s almost certain that they would not recognise him. Marty didn’t exactly become a lifelong friend—he was a week-long anomaly with a weird name and a borrowed vest.

Home Alone (1990)

The plot hole: Why didn’t Kevin call the Cops?

The explanation: the phone lines are down, and Kevin thinks he is God now.

After the power gets knocked out and the alarm clocks fail to go off, the McCalister family makes a mad dash to get to the airport for a massive family holiday to Paris. The family makes the flight, and only when they are a good portion of the way across the Atlantic does Mrs McCallister realise that they have left Kevin back in the States.  At the McCallister house, the most incompetent thieves in the history of cat burglary are trying to rob the place. Harry and Marv, having already cased the house, figure that there will be little to no resistance put up by young Kevin. They were quite wrong. Kevin unleashes hell on the hapless duo. Harry and Marv get beaten, bludgeoned, burnt, and abused in a myriad of ways that would make Quentin Tarantino blush, until they finally turn the tables; and at the last moment, the day is saved by an old man with a beard on Christmas Eve. But why didn’t Kevin just call the cops? First of all the phonelines were knocked out at the same time as the power, also Harry wore a police uniform when he checked the house out – in the novelisation by Todd Strasser, Kevin is shown to believe that even if he could call the cops it wouldn’t help because he thinks they are in on it – and lastly Kevin, under the impression that he wished his family out of existence, is having a whale of a time and doesn’t want a cop showing up and spoiling what has been a really good time for him. Why call the cops when you can set up a micro-warzone and become the God of Yuletide Vengeance?

Prometheus (2012)

The plot hole: How did they get lost?

The explanation: They are dumb, really, really dumb.

The result of a glut of budget but with a dearth of new ideas, although it has been said to ‘share DNA’ with the venerable franchise, there really isn’t that much to tie it to the Alien quadrilogy, save for a CGI thing that kind of looks like a xenomorph. In the film, a scientific expedition is sent to LV-223 in search of the meaning of a star map that has been found across dozens of archaeological sites that the scientists who are heading up the expedition (Shaw and Holloway) think could point to the creators of humankind.  Funded by the Wayland Corporation, the scientist couple are given a ship and a crew and told to go get their answers.  The plot holes arise with the behaviour of the crew once they land on LV-223.  It’s pretty much a smorgasbord of how to get killed on an alien planet, with the 1^st place trophy going to Millburn and Fifield.  After getting lost despite having billions of dollars’ worth of tracking kit.  Well, the thing is, they were dumb. Wayland had to cut corners with various aspects of the mission, and when it came to the crew it’s fair to say that the scientists who are at the top of their field will not be ready to drop everything to go to a far flung planet on what amounts to the gut feeling of Dr Shaw. Fifield makes no bones about the fact that he is only there for the money and the idiot hides a bong in his respirator. I wouldn’t trust him to read a cereal packet, let alone a map.

Star Wars (1978)

The plot hole: Vader couldn’t sense Leia

The explanation: He wasn’t looking for a force user.

The Jedi can do amazing things with the Force, a mystical energy field that controls everything. The Star Wars Universe is the most comprehensively documented creation in the history of fiction, with battles between the Jedi and their dark counterparts, the Sith, spanning back for literally thousands of years within the canon. Even for people who have never seen Star Wars they know of course that Luke is Vader’s son, now if you have seen all of the Original Trilogy, you will know that the spunky spitfire – princess Leia – is actually Luke’s sister, and since Luke is Darth Vader’s son, that means that Leia must be Vader’s daughter. Except… in A New Hope, Vader is standing centimetres away from Leia (herself unaware that she is a latent force user), and he has literally no clue that the woman he has captured is his own daughter. Shouldn’t a Dark Lord of the Sith be able to pick up on this kind of thing? Well, why would he? At the time of their encounter Leia thinks Vader is an imperial bully boy and thug, she doesn’t know she is connected to him in any way so even if Vader did think to check if she is connected to him, all he would pick up on is “I hope like hell that this big goth sod doesn’t realise I put the plans into a droid” and not “Gee, I hope he doesn’t randomly find out I’m related to him by blood”.  Even if Leia knew, and even if that thought was foremost in her mind, Vader would never have thought to check, because as far as he knows, Padmé died in childbirth and his children were stillborn; you miss 100% of the things that you are not looking for. Even Jedi mind-readers have blind spots—especially when they think their kids are dead.

Armageddon (1998)

The plot hole: Why teach the drillers how to be astronauts, and not the other way around?

The explanation: They didn’t, they just taught them how not to die.

Michael Bay, a man who knows how to turn money into a shit-ton of money by the process of filming explosions, car chases and boobs. In the late 90s, he was at the very top of his game, and in fact, in ’98 Armageddon made $553 million against a budget of $140 million, making it that year’s highest-grossing movie. The man makes money, what he does not make is thoughtful, well scripted, character dramas and this is very much evident in Armageddon; a film in which an asteroid the size of Texas is hurtling towards earth and the last, best hope of humanity is to send a drill crew up, make a hole in the gargantuan space rock and blow it to hell with a nuke. Except, why didn’t the drillers just teach the astronauts how to drill? Well, the Astronauts didn’t teach the drillers how to be astronauts; they taught them how not to die almost instantly in the vacuum of space. Assuming that drilling a deep bore hole on hostile ground would be something you could teach to even highly trained astronaut’s in just a couple of weeks is doing a disservice to just how hard that job is, it’s not like digging holes for a new fence, and even then it’s not like they just sent the drillers up with no back up there was a completely different team that was sent up at the same time whose craft was damaged on the approach, and its just by sheer luck, and the power of Bay, that only the blue collar guys survived.

So, there you have it, my friends, my quick and dirty guide to all-purpose plot Polyfilla, sound off in the comments if you think I have missed something and remember, next time someone yells ‘plot hole!’—tell them it’s just story grout.