Plot Holes

The end had some stuff that were illogical:
* how did Carl get in the building to come breaking through the ceiling when the building was crawling with armed guards
* in the very last 5 minutes it's silly how we don't see one single guard coming out from the building while they come in with a car and escape
* a smaller hole: a security guard notices the extra equipment attached to a camera, and rips the cable from it. I find it unlikely that an armed security guard knows how every camera looks like, and to be able to identify that some cabling shouldn't be there

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They go through this whole big rigamarole with the fake date and the recordings so that they can bypass the mantrap and get into Werner Brandeis' office and then in the end Carl is able to get into Cosmo's room through the ceiling.

"Unless Alpert's covered in bacon grease, I don't think Hugo can track anything."

I would say that, for me, the biggest plot hole is the McGuffin itself: when they get the "universal decrypter," what it actually seems to be is a universal password faker. Not the same by a long shot.

A couple of other points about motion detectors, very marginally relevant to some of the other posts in the thread:

My father had a motion-detector alarm in his house, and for a couple of weeks it was sending in false alarms, with security being called. Every time, the security-company techs would examine the detector and declare it in perfect shape. The last time, though, it was noticed that a foil helium balloon from an earlier birthday party, deflated to the point that it was flying around shoulder height, was lazily floating from room to room, triggering the alarm when it got within range.

A previous poster mentioned that ultrasonic sensors operated at 40 kHz or so. I'm sure that this is true for most of them. There was a period in the seventies and eighties or so when I would walk into certain stores and feel that I was being hit on the head through my ears. I would complain to the management and would be told that the stores indeed had ultrasonic motion detectors, but that they were turned off. Well, I can believe that the alarms were turned off, but my ears told me unquestionably that the ultrasonic sensors were still on. I believe that I subsequently learned that some ultrasonic motion sensors were indeed pitched very high (I don't claim ever to have been able to hear or notice 40 kHz), but others were pitched near 20 kHz or so, a frequency that the manufacturers presumably thought was too high for people (i.e., most people) to hear. (I do agree that it would be unlikely that an ordinary microphone or headphones would be able to pick up or play back 40 kHz, or even 20 kHz.)

You kids these days. When this movie came out, people enjoyed it. There were no such thing as "plot hole" threads in the 90s, and I wasn't at all surprised to see this one, dated 2004, buried at the bottom of the board here.

That said, of course there are issues. But I wouldn't call them plot holes. Fish in a tank vs. motion detectors is not a plot hole.

tinyurl.com/corinnaharney

I know this is an old post but I have not seen anyone else point it out so here goes.....


You need to learn just what a plot hole is.
You are incorrectly using the term plot hole as though it's simply another name for "Goof".

Actually it is a very specific type of goof, there are many. An actual plot hole goof is rather rare and very few films have them. Those you mentioned, even if they were a goof, (many were not) they would still not be a plot hole goof.

A digital watch on an actor in a set where the time is supposed to be before digital watches is not a plot hole, it is an Anachronism.

Luke Skywalker yelling "Carrie" (the actresses name) rather than Leia would be a revealing mistake, not a plot hole.

The Fish tank would be a Factual Error, not a plot hole, except it's not even that. It's not a goof at all, only your failure to understand the technology and how it works.

GOOFS:
Continuity
Plot Hole
Character errors
Anachronism
Revealing Mistake
Boom Mic
Crew/Equipment visible
Audio/Visual Mismatch
Error in Geography






I joined the Navy to see the world, only to discover the world is 2/3 water!

My favorite plot hole is the glaring fact that if Bishop has been on the run for twenty years, he doesn't need anyone to wipe his record clean, because the statute of limitations has long since expired on his youthful pranks. So the emotional hook for his ex and the others to help him is zero.