RoboCop plot hole?


This movie is great and I always forget about the stairwell issue, but upon my recent rewatch I instantly remembered it.

When RoboCop heads up to perhaps the 80th or 90th floor of OCP tower to arrest Dick Jones, Directive 4 swings into action, ED-209 shows up, and RoboCop is forced to flee. ED-209 chases RoboCop to the emergency stairwell which is located off to the side of Dick's office.

Now this is where it gets really crazy. Somehow, RoboCop goes down only a handful of stairs and suddenly he is back on the ground level. ED-209 has fallen and starts to squeal away. I thought okay, for the sake of time, maybe they just didn't show RoboCop going down nearly 100 floors of stairs to get down to the sublevel parking garage, however:

As RoboCop opens the parking garage door, he walks through, and it begins to close, you can still hear ED-209 squealing away, ED-209 wasn't able to go down any stairs and fell on the first flight some 80 or 90 floors up.

Dick Jones office level is not only 1 or 2 floors up from the parking garage... he's the Number Two at OCP, his office is on the 80th or 90th~ floors, we even see RoboCop taking the glass elevator up there on his way to arrest Dick.

So how on earth did they make such a wacked out mistake by having RoboCop get back down to the parking garage so quickly?

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Yep, that is a mistake in the movie.

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Good point, but that’s not a "plot hole", more a continuity error.

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Yep, a continuity error.
Nearly every movie seems to have a couple, it’s no big deal.

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To help your troubled mind, imagine there being an executive parking garage not on the main floor or below it but close to the floor of Dick's office. Now mind you, he'd have to drive his fancy car down a lot of floors and it probably made for a lot of wasted office space but it's possible.

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It's a giant robot in an empty hallway. Of course that sound will travel down the stairwell.

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Yeah but 80 or 90 floors up? Back when I worked in a 32 floor building I remember it was tough to hear someone even 2 floors down in the stairwell, echoes would drown out any noise usually, but that depends on the siding of the walls too. Fortunately the continuity error is not really a big deal, the movie is excellent.

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