The biggest movie plot holes of 2017

Movies try to distract you with big explosions and fancy costumes, but we are the internet, and we don’t let plot holes go that easily. Did you spot these logic craters in the year’s biggest movies?

Spoilers ahead!

Alien: Covenant – David’s chinjury

As is per custom, any time you have actors playing multiple roles in a movie, there’s always a chance of a twist where Character A is actually Character B. So it is in Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant, where Michael Fassbender’s placid android Walter reboards the ship in the final reel, having apparently defeated his demented doppelgänger David in combat, the final nail in his coffin being a spike jammed through his chin. Faux shock horror: it’s revealed in the film’s last scenes that it was actually David who came out on top… but with no sign of the gaping hole in his chin, you’d be forgiven for being fooled. Unless David carries around a top notch puncture repair kit and some killer concealer at all times, this is plot hole polyfilla in action.

Transformers: The Last Knight – Sing like a ‘bee

Can a movie with no plot technically have a plot hole? Transformers is really more hole than anything else at this point. All the same, Michael Bay took a particularly haphazard approach to The Last Knight’s final reel, particularly with the resolution of Bumblebee’s ongoing voice saga. As we know, the canary yellow Camaro has had speech problems from movie one; there’s even a scene in The Last Knight where his new voice box fails to work. When it really matters, however, Bumblebee is able to pipe up and speak sense to Evil Optimus Prime just before he slaughters the Autobots. It’s a great hero moment… except it’s never explained how Bumblebee can suddenly talk in his own voice, having gone five movies without it. It’s not even referenced. Does anyone care? Is anyone even watching? Hello?

Logan – The claws in his contract

The X-Men series is so tied in knots it’s a wonder Wolverine doesn’t trip over errant plotlines like tied-together shoelaces – isn’t anyone keeping track of this stuff? Logan is the third standalone Wolverine movie and the eighth of his X-Men adventures in 17 years, but rather than attempt to weave all the stories into one perfect tapestry, Hugh Jackman’s last hurrah basically ignores almost everything that’s come before in order to enjoy a dignified send-off. For example: how come Wolverine has his adamantium claws back? If you remember the last standalone Wolverine movie in 2013, Logan was rocking bone claws by the end of the film. Did they just… grow… back? We know adamantium isn’t actually real, but even so, we’re pretty sure that’s not how they work. Oh well. Thanks for the memories, Hugh.

Justice League – Clark Kent: Resurrection

We could spend all day talking about what went wrong with Justice League (hours one to four will be spent discussing Henry Cavill’s facial hair) but there’s one small scene right at the end of the movie that is way more problematic than Superman’s phantom moustache. We establish that Superman is brought back from the dead via a highly logical and not at all dubious method involving Mother Boxes and primordial goop, and we establish that after waking up a little grumpy, Superman reverts back to his good old self. However, one shot during the movie’s final montage shows Clark Kent returning back to work at the Daily Planet. Clark Kent who died. He had a funeral. People noticed. Clark, mate, you can’t just write this one off as ‘fake news’.

War For The Planet Of The Apes – Sign language out loud

The level of suspension to uphold disbelief in the Apes franchise is strong enough to keep bridges from collapsing, but sometimes it’s the simple goofs that you notice. Talking apes? Sure! Monkeys with machine guns? Why not! Psychic apes who can hear sign language? Uhhh. Wait, what? Check out the scene where Caesar is scoping out the camp through a pair of binoculars and asks his gorilla chum Luca if he’s seen the Colonel. Luca signs his answer silently but Caesar responds, despite the fact he didn’t once put down the binoculars so therefore couldn’t possibly have known what he was saying. Pedantic? Yes. That’s what makes us human. Apes can never take that away from us.

Blade Runner 2049 – Is K superhuman or not?

It’s a small point among the towering genius of Denis Villeneuve’s sensational Blade Runner sequel, but it nags at us all the same. We learn very early in the movie that Ryan Gosling’s Agent K is a replicant, but the movie seems to be unsure if he’s made of tougher stuff than your average man. On the surface, K appears to feel pain like any other: he’s battered and beaten by Sapper (aka ex-wrestler Dave Bautista), loses blood when stabbed and has to close his wounds for them to heal. Then in a later scene, instead of following Deckard through a door while on the run, K smashes through a solid brick wall. Are replicants perfect copies of humans or aren’t they? The movie never lets on.

Wonder Woman – Diana’s uneventful century

This is as pure an example of a plot hole as you could possibly find: literally one hundred years of plot that’s left unexplained. By the movie’s end, and the defeat of Ares at the climax of World War I, we know that Diana decides to stay to help mankind. We also know that she emerged from semi-retirement for Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League. Which kind of begs the question: what has she been doing for the last century? Did Wonder Woman not crack out the lasso of truth to fight the Nazis in World War II? Could it be that there’s no trace of her heroism recorded in that 100 year interim other than that one photograph found by Bruce Wayne? You’d think seeing an Amazon warrior woman in leather pants killing bad guys with a sexy whip would be the kind of thing historians would remember. You had one job, guys. One job.

The Mummy – Mummy always knows best

With the Dark Universe lying in tatters, it’s time to pick through the bones of the one movie it produced – and The Mummy does not leave a pretty corpse. For starters, it’s full of inconsistencies and plot holes – like how Ahmunet knows exactly where to crash Tom Cruise’s plane in London to retrieve her mystical dagger, despite the fact it was put there several thousand years after she was banged up. If Ahmunet has some sort of cosmic connection with the dagger, you’d think that might also extend to the fact that its stone was missing all along. Alas, the Dark Universe was blind to these issues, wrapped up in too many bandages to care.

Spider-Man Homecoming – Breaking the MCU’s timeline

The common consensus is that Marvel has perfected the superhero formula and DC is a bunch of mad scientists hellbent on making freaks and mutants until they can replicate it. Marvel, however, are not perfect, and dropped a clanger in this year’s Spider-Man: Homecoming – one it really didn’t need to make. The timeline is now horrendously convoluted, due to one simple caption: “Eight Years Later”. That’s the time we’re told passes between Michael Keaton’s Toomes losing the contract to clean up after The Avengers – universally accepted to take place in 2012 – and the events of Homecoming… which would make this movie set in 2020. Which would be fine, it it didn’t completely throw out the timeline established by all the other movies in the MCU to date, including Captain America: Civil War, in which Tom Holland’s Spider-Man appeared. Marvel will probably blame Sony. Sony will probably blame Marvel. Let’s just blame DC and leave it at that.

The Dark Tower – How does Roland know what a propane tank is?

Although it feels a bit like criticising someone’s clutch control after they’ve just ploughed their car into ongoing traffic, we shouldn’t shy away from picking at The Dark Tower’s many plot holes. For example, the movie goes to great lengths to pitch gunslinger Roland as a fish out of water, completely unaware of even basic Earth objects and rituals. However, when Roland launches a propane canister towards a bunch of bad guys and blows it up with a bullet, he seems pretty darn knowledgeable about propane and propane accessories – if he doesn’t even know what a damn hot dog is, how would he know what a propane tank is, and that it’s flammable? No wonder this movie bombed! (*nerd snort*)

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