“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.
Probably one of the most famous examples, but the robots in The Matrix originally kept humans around as wetware CPUs using their spare brainpower. Studio execs forced the Wachowskis to change it to them using humans as batteries, even though that makes no sense. Agent Smith possessing someone in the real world in the sequels would have made a ton more sense with the original explanation.
Man that does work so much better…
Also instead of Neo Jesus, when he kills the squiddies outside of the matrix, that should’ve been because they were still in there but Zion and co didn’t realise there was another layer to go.
Instead we got Revolutions.
This is what I thought was going to happen at the end of 2 and was so excited I had to watch 3 right away. I was disappointed.
Disagree, the “another layer” thing would be extremely lazy writing.
Depends on how it’s done. What little EU there was for The Matrix does have it as a thing that a small percentage of redpills go crazy, thinking that Zion is just another layer of the matrix. The Oracle being another part of the system of control would also be on brand for the machines and would work well with the Architect’s bit about how if he’s the father of the matrix then she is its mother.
I kinda just assumed that was how it was meant to be interpreted and the other stuff was just crappy writing. The mention that Zion had been destroyed multiple times kinda implied it was just another matrix.
It’s easier to explain, he had WiFi connection to the matrix/machines.
That doesn’t really work either. Human brains are not great at computing unless you are looking for “good enough,” results, and only on some pretty narrow fields, facial/speech recognition, some physics interactions, etc. But worse than that… we’re kind of using them. If they wanted us to compute, the whole function of the Matrix is just taking up run cycles. And you can’t just coopt them during sleep, we need the rest periods ,or we literally die. Only one answer makes sense to me, it’s a nature preserve. They didn’t want to be responsible for destroying their creators, and the only other sapient species known to exist. So they build the Matrix to keep us docile. Then, the energy reclamation actually makes some sense. They’re never going to be net positive, but assuming they are having difficulty keeping their society powered, they would be incentivesed to reclaim every watt of power they could from us to reduce our burden on their grid.
Humans are great computers, we’re just not digital. Our brains are definitely analogue computers, where closer neurons or stronger synapse connections can mean higher voltage signals from one cell to another. This is a very powerful and nuanced form of computing. It’s not great for exact calculation of numbers, but it is great for interpreting data, even extremely large data sets. Human brains (many animal brains really) are also really fantastic at image processing in particular.
If it’s worthwhile to have a dedicated video card in your pc, then likewise, it would probably be worthwhile to have human brains in your evil robot hivemind. It would make some kids of processing much more efficient.
Human brains are excellent at computing certain things that are almost impossible for a regular computer. Having worked for years on computer vision I can tell you how hard it is to make computers realize simple stuff, heck, you need massive server farms just to do a basic object recognition that any 3 years old can already do. Sure, you can train a simple AI to recognize some objects, but it will never (currently) be as many objects or as precise as a person can instantly recognize.
The truth is human brains are excellent at what they evolved to do, i.e. pattern recognition. So much so that when trying to figure out data it’s usually easier to plot the data in many different ways to see if something shows up. In fact usually when you try to do cluster analysis the first machine result is, let’s say not great, but you can see that things are wrong and adjust the parameters.
As for your other point your brain does this automatically, they can just put a billboard with the thing they want analyzed and your brain (and millions of others) will give them the answer. Or they could use our dreams, even during sleep our brains are still active, and they could run any scenarios then. There are many other ideas, e.g. people playing videogames inside the matrix are actually controlling robots, or people working in forklifts are actually piloting construction robots in the real world, etc.
The original CPU idea was excellent, but computers weren’t so ubiquitous back then, and the producers thought that the audience wouldn’t understand it.
What was the reason for the change?
The execs thought audiences wouldn’t understand using human brains for processing power.
Same kind of change was made in the Three Body Problem series. Instead of the cosmic microwave background radiation flickering for a character who is viewing it through a device, all the stars in the night sky flickered for all of humanity. Lots of yadda yaddaing the science as well in that show.
I, uh… Okay? Admittedly I was already using PCs at the time that movie came out, but I feel that’s still easier to understand than using humans as batteries. I think both concepts are somewhat abstract but the brain as a bio processor is still something I can grasp more easily than trying to think of where exactly we even store out “energy” and how they’d use that. I would’ve been curious how normies from that time period would’ve seen this though.
Yeah, when the story got out (true or not) a few years after release the general consensus was that it was a bad call.
Probably also a matter of agency. Being used as a battery where you’re still in control of your mind goes over better than “we’re gonna hijack this persons mind and constantly make use of it”. It also then makes things like agents taking over people in the matrix or Smith getting out that much more impactful.
From my view, I feel it would’ve kinda made more sense in explaining the Matrix itself even. If it was computed by our brains, then a good portion of how we perceive it would likely just be part of our own brain processes. Like a dream. It’s often weird but when we’re dreaming we usually don’t perceive it as weird. They wouldn’t have to recreate a complete digital simulation, they just would have to hook up into our brains and let it do the world building.
Using brainpower to power the matrix makes sense, but it sounded like OP was initially just saying for spare computing period, whether for the matrix or anything else even if it wasn’t related.
“Using their spare brainpower” sounds more like them using the remaining parts of someone’s brain that is not used for whatever they do use to run their consciousness within the Matrix.
I guess they’ve never hard of the borg…
I’ve seen this posted a few times but I could never find a source. I think this is just what people want to believe!
I thought this was partially coveref when neo asks for a physics book, and they tell him one doesn’t exist.
A little bit more emphasis during Star Wars that Vader wanted the Storm Troopers to aim poorly and let them get away. It would have solved decades of jokes and arguments about Storm Trooper weapon accuracy.
It was right there all along:
Grand Moff Tarkin : Are they away?
Darth Vader : They’ve just made the jump into hyperspace.
Grand Moff Tarkin : You’re sure the homing beacon is secure aboard their ship? I’m taking an awful risk, Vader. This had better work.
Evidently most of the fandom needs to have it beaten over their heads a bit more blatantly than that.
Another thing that would have been helpful is if it was made clearer just how monstrous the Ewoks actually are. There wouldn’t be as much shame to the Imperials for losing against them if people had only internalized a bit better that:
- Ewoks are strong enough that they can haul Redwood-sized logs up into the canopy to build deadfalls, using only crude vine ropes and muscles, and do it quietly enough that the nearby Imperial garrison didn’t notice.
- They are stealthy enough that an ordinary hunting party can sneak up on an elite Rebel strike force (including a Jedi).
- That hunting party was hunting a 3-meter-tall boar-wolf, by the way. Ewoks hunt these routinely.
- Endor is full of predators like that, and despite that the Ewoks let their children wander the forest on their own. Upon being confronted with an armor-clad alien wielding a blaster weapon and riding a flying machine, one of those lone children thought to himself: “guess I’d better kill him.” Leia helped, of course, but the Ewok couldn’t have known she would.
- One of their literal gods, personified in the form of a physical avatar before them, ordered the Ewoks not to burn some people alive and devour their flesh. The Ewoks hesitated for half a second and then resumed piling the firewood with a jaunty song. Gods are spiffy and all, but don’t get in between Ewoks and their cannibalism.
Is it cannibalism? It feels more like a (talking) bear eating a human.
I do feel like the Stormtooper point got lost on Lucas too by RotJ honestly. In Empire they do pretty good except when they’re, again, explicitly trying to lure the hero into a trap. RotJ has the most weirdness of the originals and probably the most EU ‘redemptions’/revisions. With stuff like “here’s what was really up with the Ewoks”, Boba not dying, etc.
“Long pig”
Replace some of the stormtroopers in ROTJ with regular army forces and it might have helped the stormtroopers’ reputation.
“Not to mention how many troopers we lost under orders to not shoot to hit.”
I think Lucas thought he had it covered with Obi-Wan’s, “These blast points are too accurate for Sandpeople. Only Imperial Stormtroopers are that accurate” line. You are correct though, that is one change that was needed.
I’m digging deep in my memory here so I can’t provide any details, but there was one episode from a very early season of Grey’s Anatomy where I got to the end of the episode and thought, “wait, did they ever solve this episode’s medical mystery?” There was a lot of doctor-plot that episode and the patient plot just kinda got dropped. Well I watched the deleted scenes for that episode, and low and behold there’s a line where they explain exactly what was going on with the patient. It wasn’t the real highlight/purpose of the scene, but I’m still shocked they would cut it because it left an entire plotline (albeit just for that episode) completely dangling.
I haven’t watched any Grey’s Anatomy to speak of, but I suppose that sounds about right from what I’ve heard.
I haven’t watched the series in over a decade so I have no idea how it’s aged (or how my tastes have changed as I’ve aged) but I remember the early seasons being quite good. Gray’s Anatomy was really popular the first few years that it aired, and at least at the time I thought it was deservedly so. I think I dropped the show around season six? It was getting too soapy/ridiculous and the plot was starting to go in circles. They ratchet up the tension really high pretty early on (both on the medical drama and doctor-relationship drama sides) so the writers inevitably set themselves up for failure, because this isn’t a shonen power fantasy, you can’t just keep driving things up to higher and higher stakes and still remain within the confines of reality.
For instance, in a very early season there’s a really bad train crash where a bunch of patients flood into the hospital and I remember it being a huge climatic thing with some fantastic episodes. Then in a later season they have a bad ferry crash plotline that falls flat because they already did the train crash, and the emotional impact of this huge public transportation disaster was significantly diminished by a sense of “didn’t we go through this already?”
I cannot believe that the show is still going, mostly because I’m amazed they have any audience left.
I cannot believe that the show is still going, mostly because I’m amazed they have any audience left.
Looks like it has eroded significantly over time, but I guess with a sticky core audience and a shrinking expectations for network TV, it’s got its niche.
Yeah, my wife wanted to watch it together and we got burned out on the repeated catastrophes. At some point they move onto dramatic plot disasters that include a bunch of the hospital staff, to make it more exciting. The show went on for a ton of seasons after we dropped it, so presumably they found some way to make it even more dramatic than a disaster that kills a 3rd of the hospital every season finale.
Watching the show on netflix was also bad for emotional whiplash. They would build all season up to two doctors confessing their love in the season finale, and then immediately in the next episode (new season) they would be broken up again. I suspect it felt more natural with the delay between seasons in-between episodes, but watching them back to back like that felt jarring.
While I haven’t seen it personally from what I can recall. There apparently exists an episode of Midsomer Murders where the motiv of the killings got cut before airing.
Fun to hear Gray’s also managed to do that blunder. Wonder if any other similar shows have do the same. Feels kinda easy to accidentally do in that type of shows, if you do a very character focused episode.
The Martian when the main airlock blows up.
He ends up taping a plastic sheet over the hole with what I assume is super strong space tape and plastic and then continues to live in the station for 550 more days.
We spend the first half of the movie learning how unforgiving the environment is, and how delicate his ecosystem for life is, but you can also blow half the place up and just tape some plastic over the hole.
They did a much better job of explaining it in the book, but the movie literally went “just tape that bitch up with plastic, then we’ll throw a wind storm at it to prove it’s good forever”
At least they threw the wind storm at it, LOL.
Another big plot hole in the Martian, also present in the book, is that messages are encoded in hexadecimal. But then why did he have a separate question mark card, when all punctuation can be encoded in ASCII/hex? Also both him and NASA wrote in all caps. Again they have a full ascii set. Makes no sense.
The only explanation for the wind storm and the tape is that the atmosphere had already been teraformed to be much much thicker, to the point that its at a survivable pressure for breathing, the only problem is lack of oxygen and too cold.
They did a much better job of explaining it in the book
How did the book handle it?
Space age hyper-tough epoxy.
IIRC, the same canvas material the rest of the habitation was made out of.
I believe that is correct.
In the book, they also took pains to point out the steps he took to try to avoid it happening to the other airlocks after that point too - by actually balancing out their usage a bit more, instead of just always using the same one.
[What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments?] (https://lemmy.ml/post/15152684)
It’s a delusion that including that link on your posts carries additional power of copyright on the content of the post under the terms of the linked license and will somehow stop any commercial entity from harvesting that data.
Strong aging Facebook user vibes from that kind of tag on all their posts.
Strong aging Facebook user vibes from that kind of tag on all their posts.
Dear astroturfers, are we going to do this each and every day?
People calling you out for being wrong isn’t astroturfing. It’s not an anti-AI licence and by definition does not restrict use (including AI-related) more than standard automatic copyright.
People calling you out for being wrong isn’t astroturfing.
There’s been plenty of astroturfing going on in the last week. Not all comments are, but some are, and they have been repeating daily (can almost set a watch to it). In fact, they’ve been kind of sloppy and over the top in some cases. Didn’t think a Creative Commons license would trigger some astroturfer so badly, but apparently they really fear people using a license with their content/comments.
And as far as calling me out, constantly doing so over and over again, repeating the same points endlessly, is not something that is just ‘calling me out for being wrong’, that’s harassment/bullying. I’ve heard/talked to the people who disagree with me, so there’s no reason for them to repeat themselves to me endlessly and following me around from community to community, on a daily basis. Especially when by them following me they derail conversations in posts I’ve commented on (unless you want to explain to me how using a Creative Commons license is related to “What plot holes could be adequately explained away with a single shot or line of dialogue?”).
The place to discuss this issue is here: https://lemmy.world/post/14942506
It’s not an anti-AI licence and by definition does not restrict use (including AI-related) more than standard automatic copyright.
It talks about non vs commercial usage right in the license, so you are incorrect (and I’m betting not a lawyer also). Also, I got that name from someone else who also uses the license, so at least one other person agrees with me. Finally, it has restrictions in it that are not mentioned in the standard automatic copyright.
Besides all that, WTF is it to you? What business of this is yours? Are you some kind of ‘commercial’ police making sure commercialism is not slandered or something? Its a weird thing to get hung up on, let alone try to abolish/remove.
“So, we started using teleportation now.”
- Everyone in Game of Thrones from season 6 onward.
Did you just win the thread? I think you just won the thread.
“Eagles can’t fly us to Mt. Doom because of a magic curse or some shit”- Gandalf to the council in Lord of the Rings
I think that one’s pretty well explained (albeit not explicitly) by the presence of the Nazgul and the eye of Sauron, which were either destroyed or otherwise occupied when the eagles made their rescue. People pretend Mordor had no airborne defenses for the bit, but it doesn’t really make sense
Mordor probably had some javelins too.
The Eye was proven to not be all-seeing or all-knowing. Same with the Ring Wraiths. And Orcs were shown numerous times to be inept guards.
So have an eagle fly Frodo to Mt. Doom on a night with a new moon, above the clouds. There is no way they would be spotted. A curse, while stupid, is the only explanation that really puts this plot hole to rest IMO.
The best explanation would be the actual one - they don’t give a shit about Middle-Earth.
Doesn’t have to be all seeing to spot a fucking eagle lol. This is akin to “Gandalf should’ve teleported the ring to Mordor, it never explicitly said he couldn’t”
I mean… Why didn’t he? 🤔
In the books it’s explained that the eagles were involved in a war of their own during the first two books and couldn’t send help without risking their own destruction. There’s actually a part in the books where frodo is like “why didn’t the eagles just fly us” lol.
Kinda the inverse of your question (or an example of this being done poorly) but in the latest or (second to latest) star wars, after being accused of recycling the old trilogy plot over again, the writers attempted to deflect away from the obvious similarities to Hoth by having one of the characters taste what appeared to be snow on a frigid planet resembling Hoth by exclaiming “It’s salt”
“They fly now” is a similarly atrocious example given that they’ve been flying for decades, just not in any of the main trilogy movies yet.
They fly now??
As a dedicated TLJ fan, I recuse myself.
“Oh man, look how far down the track the T-Rex pushed our car!”
Christopher Reeve Superman. How come he’s fast enough to go back in time, but not fast enough to save Lois in the first place?
Scene needed is Jor-El explaining that Clark is as strong as he believes himself to be. He can literally focus the entire power of the Sun if he’s strong enough.
Do you think he was flying around the earth for kicks? No, he was using a gravitational slingshot to build speed. Granted, they could have explained it better, so I guess a line like “we need to use the turn of the world to speed up our satilites, and we still can’t match his velocity. Imagine how fast he’d be.” But less clunky, of course.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist
That’s not how gravity assist works. You need relative differences in speed.
Someone once explained it that watching the earth spin backward was not him flying so fast that he literally dragged the Earth in reverse but rather that the Earth spinning backward was a byproduct of our third party view watching time go in reverse because Superman was traveling back in time.
But he would have to literally be stronger than the sun to do that because the only way you can travel backwards in time is to travel faster than the speed of light.
But it’s movie magic so what can you say?
Honestly my head canon is that just like how humans on a hell of an adrenaline rush can do superhuman feats like lift a car for someone trapped under it, superman has basically the equivalent, breaking his known limitations through sheer force of adrenaline.
Kind of like how in one of the early seasons of the CW Flash series, Barry accidentally travels back in time while pushing himself to stop a tidal wave from destroying Central City.
I like that idea.
In a similar vein, Supes could be much weaker if he were asleep or distracted. In the current iteration, if Clark Kent gets hit in the head by a ninja the weapon breaks; in the new one, he can be knocked out if he isn’t pumped up. Sort of like how Houdini was killed when he told a fan they could hit him as hard as they wanted; he meant after he’d had a moment to prepare.
Pirates of the Caribbean it was pointed out Bootstap was strapped to a cannon and dropped into the sea but the logical conclusion that by lifting the curse Will had to kill his own father was never a plot point. not exactly a plot hole just a missed opportunity.
By that point he had joined the Flying Dutchman’s crew and thus did not die when the curse was lifted. But Will didn’t know this, so your point stands.
How did Inigo know the Man in Black was in love with Buttercup? It’s an easy one to fix, because there are several points where Grandpa skips parts of the story, but it could have been a single throwaway line.
This is only a plot hole because you forgot part of the movie.
Inigo’s quest is to kill the six fingered man. He saves the man in black only to get his help towards this goal. But, there is exactly the kind of explanation line in the movie by Fezzik, who has not been in a drunken stupor for a month and has in fact gotten a job working closely with the castle’s security forces, explaining his insight on the topic. Fezzik has this line, interrupting Inigo talking about how he needs the skills of the Man in Black to execute his revenge:
“the rumors are that he was the Princess’ true love”.
The Kessel Run being measured in distance rather than time could have been solved with a closeup shot instead of wide angle.
The way it’s scripted, Han thinks he’s got two local yokels and is feeding them a line. Obi-Wan, of course, is not a yokel, and reacts to that info with a “come on, dude” kind of look. Alec Guinness does do it, but not in a noticeable way. If there was a closeup shot, it would have worked. The wider shot that went into the film makes his reaction barely noticeable.
This leads to decades of treating Han’s line as actual truth and trying to figure out what he meant. Legends and Disney canon provided basically the same answer. Kessel is surrounded by black holes, and skimming closer to the event horizon would mean taking a shorter distance. Wasn’t supposed to work that way, though.
It mostly always just bothered me that a parsec is a unit of distance that relies on the Earth’s specific orbital distance around the sun. The Faraway Galaxy of Star Wars would have no way to measure how far a parsec is.
but speaking English is fine …
I had a friend who was really annoyed that there was a Scottish accent in Force Awakens. I said that none of the characters are speaking English in-universe, so any and all accents are just analogies for how each character is heard. Nope. He was still annoyed because there’s no Scotland in the star wars galaxy.
Extra weird hang-up to have, because the films have always had English and American accents side-by-side, even though there’s clearly no England or America!
Anyway, it’s really no different to them calling their ships X-wings and Y-wings, even though they don’t use our alphabet.
Yes it does. I’m given to understand that they also translate the film into the primary language of the region when it is shown in other countries as well. Why do you ask?
Star Wars does that. Han mentions “I’ll see you in hell” just before running off to find Luke on Hoth, and now there’s a whole Wookiepedia entry on what “hell” is in that galaxy.
The silly thing is that they feel a need to justify it. They’re speaking English, every single word they say carries an incredible history of the world we live in from Rome to the speakers of Old Norse and otherwise. The simplest solution is a handwave: the creators translated everything out of Galactic Basic for you.
Maybe the same but Coruscant?
There’s a YouTube series called “how it should have ended” and 90% of them are basically answers to this question lol
“The red fabric attracts phaser fire and other dangers”
In Frozen 2, the elemental spirits have trapped a kingdom in a magical barrier for many years as punishment for building a dam to stop a river. The day is “saved” by an earth spirit incidentally destroying the dam and freeing the river. There was this whole thing about the spirits calling out to Elsa to come and save them, but apparently the spirits had the ability the whole time to break the dam. The whole plot was basically pointless. Maybe instead they needed Elsa to break the dam, or needed to combine their powers.
