From arrogant emperors failing miserably, to seemingly successful rebellions gone wrong, there are many twists and turns in the story of mankind. This list recounts just 10 of the greatest and most bizarre plot twists ever to happen in human history.

10 Real Tales Of Prejudice With Unbelievable Twists

10 An Imposter German Ship Meets Its Real British Counterpart

During the First World War, the Germans disguised one of their ships, the SMS Cap Trafalgar, as the British liner RMS Carmania. However, by an unlucky stroke of irony, the first ship they encountered near the Island of Trinidade, off the coast of Brazil, (Note: Not Trinidad) was the real RMS Carmania, whose Captain, Noel Grant, immediately recognized their attempt to trick British ships, and launched a surprise attack early in the morning, ultimately leading to the sinking of the SMS Cap Trafalgar. Nice try, Germans.^[1]

9 An Enraged Emperor Turns An Island Into A Peninsula

At the height of the war between the empires, (of Rome and Persia) Alexander the Great decided that he wanted to worship at a temple on the Island of Tyre. The island’s leaders refused, because they wanted to remain neutral in the war against Persia, and allowing the emperor to worship there would send a message to the Persians that Tyre took the side of their enemy. They told the emperor to pray at a temple in Old Tyre, which was located on the mainland, instead.

Alexander, angered by this show of disrespect, saw this as a declaration of war, occupied Old Tyre and spent 6 months building a bridge to the island, using logs and stones from the ruins of Old Tyre. When he reached Tyre, he crucified almost everyone in the city, and sold the rest into slavery.

Tyre is still a peninsula today, and technically, it is now part of the mainland.

Never say no to a world-conquering Emperor.^[2]

8 A Rude Welcome Costs An Empire

During the reign of the Mongol Empire, Genghis Khan sent a large trading caravan to Khwarezmia, an empire in the Middle East, hoping to start an alliance. However, the local Governor did not welcome these travellers, and arrested them and sentenced them to death.

Genghis responded to this by sending a few of his ambassadors to ask the Shah to release his men, and to explain his intent to create an alliance. Instead of hearing what they had to say, the Shah beheaded one of the ambassadors, and sent the others back with their heads shaved, which was a big insult to the Khan. Genghis Khan began to plan his revenge. He invaded the empire with force, and the Shah was forced to escape to an island off the Caspian coast to die.

Two years later, there was no Khwarezmian Empire.^[3]

7 A Paranoid King Who’s Immune To Poison

Mithridates VI ruled the Kingdom of Pontus around 100 BC. He was extremely paranoid that someone would try to assassinate him with poison, and so he took small doses of poison each day to build up his tolerance. Unfortunately, when he tried to kill himself after being captured by Romans (The more honorable path than being sold as a Roman slave), he was unable to as he was immune. Perhaps he should’ve channelled his paranoia into building a better army instead.^[4]

6 Twice The Bad Luck For Kublai Khan

Kublai Khan was the 5th Khagan of the Mongol Empire. It was 1274 and Kublai Khan had run out of China to conquer, so now he decided that he was going to conquer Japan. His first attack fleet was fended off by Japanese Samurai, so they began their return to China to recuperate and plan a stronger follow up attack. Unfortunately for them however, on the way back to China, the fleet was sunk by a typhoon.

It was 1281 and Kublai Khan was back, and he still had his eyes set on Japan. He launched the 2nd biggest naval invasion the world would ever see (Biggest: D-Day), and when they arrived at the shores of Japan, they discovered that the Japanese had blocked off their beaches with seawalls. The fleet trawled around the coast of Japan, searching for a place to land, and continued to search, right up until the day that the fleet was destroyed by a second typhoon.^[5]

The name of these two typhoons? Kamikaze; “God-Wind”.

10 Viral Stories With Unexpected Twist Endings

5 The Statesman Who Wasn’t Bluffing

When Julius Caesar was captured by pirates who didn’t know who he was, they demanded 20 talents of silver for his freedom. Caesar was offended by this small amount, laughed, and told them to ask for at least 50, which they got. Caesar seemed to enjoy their company whilst he waited for his men to bring the silver the pirates had asked for, joining in with their games, and acting almost like he was of them. He often joked that he was going to have them arrested and crucified after they let him go, which they all found very funny and laughed with him—until they were arrested and crucified after they let him go.^[6]

4 A Diplomat Slip-Up At The Berlin Wall

On the night the Berlin Wall came down, an East German diplomat named Gunter Schabowski had just returned back from a tiring trip to Poland, and was due to read an announcement about travel rules changing for a live press conference. Since he had just returned from Poland, he hadn’t been fully briefed on the new rules, one of which was that East Berliners could apply for Visas to go to the West for short trips, and wait until a couple of days after the announcement to apply and be accepted. The announcement was rushed and unclear, and started by saying things like “Liberalization of travel rules…blah blah…can now visit the West…blah blah.” Schabowski hadn’t read his speech before going live on air, and so he was reading this information for the first time. One journalist asked when these new rules would come into effect, and wanting to look prepared, Schabowski replied, “Uh…immediately, now.”

This spread fast and caused people to gather at the Wall, asking to be let out. There had been important protests before, but nothing as big as this. By coincidence, a border guard at the wall was preoccupied because had recently been tested for cancer, and was waiting for his results. So, he didn’t care enough about his job to stop the mass of people and opened the first gate, leading to the liberation of the people of East Berlin.^[7]

3 Darius The Wizard Slayer

Darius the Great had a very interesting ascension to the throne of Persia, when he was caught red-handed standing over his dead predecessor with a knife. Of course, the magi who discovered him began to call for the guards, as Darius had clearly just murdered the Emperor. However, Darius claimed that he had not killed the emperor, as the man who he has just killed was a shapeshifting wizard. He claimed that this was not the real Emperor, but an imposter who had done away with the Emperor and took the throne for himself.

The magi consulted, and decided that Darius was telling the truth, because why would anyone lie about something like that?

They unanimously decided to raise Darius the Wizard Slayer to the throne of Persia. He became one of the greatest rulers of the Achaemenid Dynasty, and was famous for his genius. This may have been due to the fact that everyone else was stupid enough to believe in shapeshifting wizards…^[8]

2 D’Eon’s Double Cross

Chevalier d’Eon was a French diplomat and spy in England and Russia. Once d’Eon retired it was revealed to the public that they had been a woman the entire time. They were then made to wear female clothing because of societal expectations of women. They went on to write some books and support the American Revolution. But here’s the kicker. When d’Eon died, the woman who was dressing the body for burial discovered that d’Eon was, in fact, biologically male, and had been a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man.^[9]

1 The British Revolution – Or Not

When the people of England rebelled against their king, Charles I, they were successful, had him beheaded, and put a new leader in charge, Oliver Cromwell. However, once Cromwell was given the position of ruler, the power got to his head and he became exactly the same as the kings who had come before him, perhaps even worse. He was more controlling, committed genocide in Ireland, outlawed Christmas celebrations and all fun, and declared his son as his heir. What was meant to be a new beginning for the country was turned into a brutal dictatorship. And so the people of England rebelled once again, were successful, and shortly after, Cromwell died of malaria. The original heir of Charles I, Charles II, was appointed as king, restoring the monarchy. Despite already being dead, Cromwell was then beheaded himself for the beheading of Charles I, and his head was displayed on a pike (and is pictured above). Charles II became one of the most popular monarchs in British history.^[10]

10 Mysteries Resolved By Unbelievable Surprise Twists

About The Author: I am a college student studying English Language and Linguistics, who is particularly interested in ancient languages and civilizations.

At this point, writing a script for a film or an episode of television should be down to an exact science. Even people with a passing interest in scripts know about phrases such as inciting incidents, peaks and valleys, and denouncements, and even without popular webpages like IMDb goofs or the endless ranks of video essayists on YouTube, we can sniff out a hole in a plot.

So knowing audiences have that level of savvy, how can filmmakers that have to devote months, if not years to these projects think that they can get away with having holes in stories that seem like they would take a conscious effort to ignore? On top of that, how do they sometimes not only get away with it but make movies and episodes that audiences cherish for generations? Perhaps we can gain some insight into that by looking at the stories below. All 10 examples are, we should mention, movies and episodes that we love enough to have watched multiple times. Still, you can’t really love something until you accept its flaws.

(By the way, if you’re expecting Citizen Kane and its infamous supposed plot hole to be on here, check this page for why it isn’t. Also, SPOILERS ahead!)

10. Avengers: Infinity War

In the fourth movie in world history to gross over two billion dollars at the box office, the villain Thanos wants to become so powerful that he can, at a stroke, kill half the universe’s population to provide more resources for the other half. Aside from how nonsensical that is (think how many systems of producing and distributing the needed resources would be practically wiped out, how traumatized many of the survivors would be, etc.) considering he can do whatever he wants with time, space, reality, and so on, it also means that he can provide infinite resources to everyone. So why would he kill half the population to deal with alleged shortages?

However, some might try to dismiss that by claiming it’s part of his insanity. In terms of sheer plot mechanics, there’s a less high-falutin example near the end of the movie. The hero Doctor Strange possesses a green stone which allows him to, among other things, reset time for at least a short period. This was demonstrated quite memorably in the climax of Doctor Strange. Yet after a confrontation with Thanos late in the movie, he allows himself and his associates to be defeated without employing this power at all, despite the loss being an extremely near-run matter. There’s a common trope among superhero stories of the heroes “forgetting” their powers, but rarely does it go that far.   

9. Get Out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJd2sPSVKVg

While the meticulous plotting of Get Out‘s screenplay required twenty drafts and resulted in Jordan Peele receiving the Academy Award for Best Screenplay, he left an unfortunate hole in the story that’s as much unnecessary as it’s a cheat.   

The basic plot of the film is that Chris goes with his girlfriend Rose to visit her parents’ home. While there, he encounters a person from his neighborhood who is now in a relationship with a much older woman. Since he and other black people that Chris has encountered have been acting weirdly, he is deeply suspicious, even before he receives confirmation from his friend Rod that, indeed, the person he just met has been listed as a missing person, just as numerous other black people in that neighborhood have been. Shortly after, Chris discovers a box in the closet of the bedroom he and Rose have been sleeping in. It is full of photos of Rose with a large number of black boyfriends and girlfriends, including the person Chris knew was missing, revealing that something profoundly wrong is happening.

The issue is this: Why does Rose have that very incriminating box of evidence where Chris could find it? In the following scenes, it’s revealed that Rose is a willing participant in the disappearances and feels no remorse. Indeed, we see her casually looking through photos of up and coming athletes shortly after, indicating that she’s already moving on from the harm she’s going to inflict on Chris, so it’s not as if she’d subconsciously be sabotaging the crime. They’re also printed photos even though the movie is set in contemporary times when surely she would be inclined through social conditioning to take digital photographs. Even the best screenplays can’t seem to escape these missteps.  

8. Black Mirror: National Anthem

Often hailed as The Twilight Zone for the internet age, Charlie Brooker’s science fiction anthology struck a chord with audiences from its pilot episode, which premiered in December 2011. In the episode, Princess Susannah is kidnapped by an unknown person who will only release her alive on the condition that the prime minister do something by that late afternoon that the prime minister very much does not want to do, with the full understanding of the public. One of his subordinates makes arrangements to cheat the arrangement in the event Princess Susannah is not rescued in time. Word of the attempted cheat gets out, so the kidnapper releases a video of him removing one of the Susannah’s fingers, and he sends a finger to the press. Learning about this cheat and the harm inflicted on the Princess turns the public against the prime minister, forcing him to go through with the deal. In the end, it’s revealed that the princess is released unharmed and that the kidnapper was an old performance artist who cut off one of his own fingers.

The issue with that is that the performance artist is revealed to be an aged man with a generally working class body while Princess Susannah looks like she’s a model in lower middle age, at the oldest. There’s no way their fingers could plausibly be mistaken for each other, even in the heat of the moment. Even if the extent of the news that leaked was that a finger was sent to a media outlet after the video of the supposed finger removal (which is staged so that the injury itself does not happen in the camera’s line of sight), word would just as quickly get out that it wasn’t her finger, which would massively undercut the public pressure for the prime minister to meet the kidnapper’s demands.    

7. Cinderella

While it is a tale as old as time, most viewers today are probably familiar with it through either the 1951 animated Disney adaptation or the 2014 live action Disney adaptation. Or maybe the 2014 deconstruction in Into the Woods by… uh, Disney again. Our readers very likely don’t need the plot synopsized, but in brief: There’s a hardworking stepdaughter/maid who sneaks to a royal dance after her fairy godmother gives her a dress, carriage, and slippers made of her old clothes, a pumpkin, and magic respectively. She dances with the prince, they fall in love but she has to leave at midnight, leaving her slipper behind. He hunts her down by having every woman in the kingdom try on the slipper until it fits her.

But this story, whether it be the original French version, the German version by the Brothers Grimm, and every film adaptation, has a major problem related to the character of the prince. It doesn’t even make sense by fairy tale logic that the prince loves someone without even knowing what she looks like. Even the star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet knew each other’s faces! While fairy tales naturally get deconstructed a lot despite being wish fulfillment fantasies for children, everyone always seems to get too hung up on how impractical glass slippers would be as an article of clothing to observe this problem with the plot.   

6. Raiders of the Lost Ark

This 1981 film was both a tribute to 1930s movie serials (even though creators George Lucas and Steven Spielberg admitted they didn’t actually like those when they screened a few for each other during pre-production) and one of the films that codified Hollywood’s blockbuster era. Indiana Jones was instantly iconic as a tomb raiding academic who goes on an adventure to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant  in a race against his old rival Belloq and his Nazi collaborators.

It probably helped that in Lawrence Kasdan’s acclaimed screenplay, Indiana Jones is more relatable because he so often fails on the way to the climax, including said climax beginning with him in captivity.

This is where the trouble with the story emerges. As Indiana and his fellow captive Marion Ravenwood look on, the Nazis open the Ark. Ominous light emenates from the Ark, and out of the blue, Indiana Jones tells Marion to shut her eyes. As they do, angels that seem more like demons emerge and kill all of their captors. Never mind the moral issues that they indiscriminately kill everyone solely on the basis of looking at them. How does Indiana know that shutting their eyes is the way for him and Marion to save themselves? The only thing he’s said about it before this scene was when, back at the university, he sees an image of the Ark and blithely guesses that the light emerging from it is the “power of God.” It’s a very puzzling oversight.

Except it actually isn’t. Kasdan included a scene in the original screenplay where the means of surviving was explained to Dr. Jones, but it was cut during editing. Which just goes to show that even a perfect script can be undone during the production process.

5. Black Mirror: USS Callister

After six years and a move from BBC to Netflix, the premiere for Black Mirror’s fourth season once again left audiences in awe and slightly disturbed. In brief, the episode is about the creator of a virtual reality online video game named Robert Daly. Instead of merely playing his game (which is modeled in large part on a fictional equivalent of the original Star Trek series) as a light adventure as originally intended, Daly makes artificially intelligent copies of coworkers and tortures them into treating him as essentially a god. Part of Black Mirror’s conceit was well-established by that time that AI simulations of people have the equivalents of physical sensations and emotions, thus making the AI in this show as sympathetic as any human beings would be and their existences just as Hellish.

Still, a problem with the story is revealed almost immediately. To properly map out the memories and emotions of his coworkers to make the simulations as accurate as possible, Daly sneaks samples of their DNA home from work from such things as discarded styrofoam cups. The issue of that is that while Daly would indeed have good DNA samples to make clones, in real life he wouldn’t be able to make replicas required by the narrative because our DNA does not contain our memories. It’s a testament to the execution of the episode that this did not seem to take many viewers out of the experience.

4. A Quiet Place

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh-trhU24sI

A Quiet Place, the directorial debut from John Krasinski, is a commercial and critical darling. However, its suspenseful pace and limited dialogue left audiences with plenty of time to nitpick the details of its story about monsters that rely on sound to hunt down a family. The biggest issue is really a nail that is sticking up from the middle of a step to the basement that Evelyn Abbott steps on. Now, the nail is sticking up right from the middle of the step, and the staircase is in good condition, so this is not a matter of rushed or improvised repair after the apocalypse. It also is not joining two pieces of wood together. So why in the world is it there? Perhaps the deaf daughter Regan Abbott put it there because she’s subconsciously becoming suicidal (that’s extrapolating from how she blames herself for the death of her young brother and wants to stop experimenting with hearing aids). That still leaves a nagging question: How did it get pounded in without an immediate monster attack?

The producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form were questioned about the nail and the best they came up with was saying that the family couldn’t risk the noise of removing a nail. Which… Fine. But why, or even how, did they get it there in the first place?!

3. Hereditary

While there are many that are contemptuous of this horror hit (hence the fact the influential audience test score called Cinemascore gave it a D+), those that view it favorably tend to be passionate about it. It is deliberate in its pacing and unpredictability, and its art design is as subtly creepy as it is beautiful. Near the beginning, a family learns that a recently departed grandmother’s grave has been desecrated and things… well, they get even more grisly and disturbing from there, including the death of of the main character’s young daughter, Charlie, which culminates in a truly horrifying ending.

While it could be fairly said that writer-director Ari Aster attempted a much more grounded form of occult horror, he still left some substantial holes in the story. Staci Wilson of At Home in Hollywood pointed out that the cemetery calls the family to inform them of the desecration. However, later in the movie Charlie’s remains are also seen, and the movie devotes time to seeing her burial. So how is the family not being told about this desecration? How are the police not being informed of it? With a clear connection between the two desecrated graves, why are the police not investigating the family? Aster has to really fill the runtime with unsettling imagery to keep the viewer’s mind off matters like that.

2. The Dark Knight Rises

While it might not have achieved the heights of critical hype and commercial success of 2008’s The Dark Knight, this 2012 film still made quite an impression with its story of how Bane practically paralyzes the billionaire vigilante Bruce Wayne and conquers the city of Gotham. It makes Bruce’s eventual recovery and triumph all the more compelling, especially with how costly it was in the end. And for this entry, we’re going to go ahead and ignore the well-established plot hole of how Bruce somehow got halfway around the world and snuck into Gotham despite being, at this point, a former billionaire with no resources.

However, one of the greatest problems with the story was that Bruce Wayne recovering from his injury and going through the spiritual journey that allows him to go confront Bane again on more favorable terms takes five months. Can you imagine any administration allowing a city to fall into the hands of criminals to such an extent that people physically cannot enter the city? We can just see some commenters saying something like “sure, look at Chicago, New Orleans, etc,” but you know what we mean. Even in a series where urban crime is to an extent decided by costumed heroes and villains having fistfights, that’s just silly. Silly in a way that the movies directed by Christopher Nolan have tried their hardest not to be. 

1. The Sixth Sense

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y8SlYqBOX8

One of the biggest hits of 1999 and the possessor of perhaps the most famous twist in modern cinema history, this film had members of entertainment media predicting that M. Night Shyamalan would be the next Steven Spielberg. We’ll see if his recent hit Split will put him back on course to achieving that honor, but we can always appreciate his story of a child who could see the many ghosts that walk among us. One or two oft-parodied scenes dominate most people’s memories of this film, but there’s a particularly touching scene where Cole Sear conquers his fear of ghosts by helping bring closure to the ghost of Kyra Collins.

Problem with it is that Kyra’s sequence brings with it all sorts of problems. For one thing, it’s said of the ghosts that “they see what they want to see,” so why is she the only one who’s aware she’s dead? There’s also the fact that the way she imparts the truth to Cole for him to pass on to her father is by pushing a VHS tape out from under her bed when he goes to her house during the funeral. But if Collins is aware she’s dead, and has apparently already watched the tape (otherwise she wouldn’t know that it has the information that would identify her murderer on it), then she must be able to move the tape around considerably. So what’s to stop her from just showing it to her father herself without seeking out Cole Sear? Like the rest of these, it’s hardly a movie ruining problem, but it’s enough to make you wonder how such inconsistency was never picked up by critics or harped on during the years-long Shyamalan backlash.

Dustin & Adam Koski also wrote the urban fantasy novel Not Meant to Know. It probably has plot holes in it, but you’ll have to read it to find them!

Posthumous monolith of science fiction Philip K. Dick said that he wrote in that genre because there was “more latitude for the expression of truer ideas.” The focus on exploring ideas that serves as much of the appeal of science fiction means that, often, writers can get themselves into trouble. They can litter their stories with all sorts of logical lapses by focusing more on a metaphor than logical consistency, either in terms of the characters or the aspects of the technology.

Not that this is unique to science fiction at all, but when a storyteller is making up whole new technologies and worlds, there’s a lot more latitude to screw up in ways more literary fiction doesn’t usually have to worry about. Furthermore, none of these plot holes are in anyway ruinous for their stories. It’s just, well… it’s sometimes surprising what writers can get away with while the audience is distracted by the lasers and other wonders of the future.    

As always, be ready for spoilers!

10. Avatar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDh1knYpnmc

Avatar isn’t just the most successful science fiction story but the highest grossing film of all-time (worldwide–The Force Awakens bumped it from the top spot domestically), to the surprise of many. In 2009 it was as much the novelty of the gorgeously rendered environments as the story that drove it to gross $2.7 billion. The story, about how disabled soldier Jake Sully’s consciousness is connected to a bioengineered alien body to serve as ambassador for humanity to the Na’vi on Planet Pandora, seemed practically like an afterthought. Nowhere is this more obvious that in writer-director James Cameron’s blatantly slipshod plotting.

During the end of the second act of the movie, the Earth military destroys the main Na’vi habitat, the Home Tree. Pilot Trudy, played by Michelle Rodriguez, decides she doesn’t want to take part. So in dereliction of duty she conspicuously flies away from the bombing. And yet, she not only isn’t promptly arrested for disobeying a direct order in an environment where bombing a native population is the order of the day, but she’s able help Jake Sully and company escape from the brig with relatively little trouble. Seems as though few characters would be in a worse position to launch a rescue than conspicuous insubordinates.      

Right now there’s a lot of uncertainty how interested audiences will be in Cameron’s upcoming sequels to his megahit. Hopefully, he’s had enough time to remove holes like these from his follow up scripts.

9. Blade Runner 2049

Although it failed at the box office during its 2017 theatrical run, the fact it was the 17th bestselling title on home video in 2018 indicated Blade Runner 2049 is gradually developing its own following. Serving as one of the most belated sequels in film history, it both attempted to have firm, direct connections to the 1982 original and go its own way. These dueling interests unsurprisingly got in each other’s way a bit.

The biggest hole in the plot concerns the villainous business mogul, Wallace, and his relationship with the bioengineered clones called Replicants. In 2049, it’s explicitly stated that they’ve been designed to all be infertile as well as being outlawed in the wake of a devastating terrorist attack that destroyed all digitally stored records around the world. Wallace is of the belief that bringing back replicants is the future of humanity’s spread through the stars, and to that end is both engineering some of his own and on the hunt for a replicant that supposedly reproduced in defiance of her genetic programming.

But as DenofGeek.com pointed out, Wallace himself says the inability of replicants to reproduce was one of the things that allowed people to reassure themselves that replicants were subhuman. He also explicitly says that humanity “lost its taste for slavery.” So if he holds those beliefs in his head, keeping replicants with the ability to reproduce around, as well as the humans that bred with them–and their offspring–is the exact opposite of what he would want: destroying anything that could point to the existence of a fertile replicant if he hopes to sell people on accepting replicant slaves again. It’s the sort of inconsistency that’s particularly frustrating in a movie starring an ostensibly grounded villain.  

8. Star Trek (2009)

JJ Abrams’s reboot of the Star Trek films was a smash hit, although the series it launched seems to have stalled in 2016. Shamelessly emotional nearly to the point of being operatic, it was kinetic and action-packed enough that audiences didn’t have time to question the mechanics of the plot. However, the villain Nero’s story made so little sense that it required more effort not to think about it in the theater seats.

The primary setting for the movie is during the time when James T. Kirk ascends to be captain of the starship Enterprise. In the future, it turns out that the planet Romulus is going to be destroyed by a supernova. Also in the future Spock, another crew member of the Enterprise and essentially Kirk’s right-hand man, tries to stop the supernova and fails. A Romulan from that same future named Nero acquires both a ship and time-traveling ability and goes back in time to get revenge. This includes destroying Vulcan (Spock’s home planet) and Earth.

What never, ever, for any reason gets addressed in this plot is why Nero doesn’t use the fact he traveled back in time to save Romulus himself if that’s his motivation. With time travel technology he could make numerous attempts to save his planet and offset Spock’s eventual failure. But no, vengeance for something which hasn’t happened and which is no doubt on some level preventable is only viewed as a reason for him to be a one dimensional villain–which unfortunately, at the end of the day, he is. This goes to show that time travel should be avoided unless absolutely necessary if a movie’s story is going to hold up to repeat viewings.

7. Star Wars: The Last Jedi

If you’ve been on YouTube for the past year, you probably had some video recommended to you insisting the storytelling of this hit didn’t match real world logic very well. There were even seemingly erroneous reports that Russian troll farms were used to spread negative sentiments about it online. Whatever your feelings about that, there’s a particular point that many have used as the centerpiece of their arguments. For the dedicated nitpicker, there’s very little arguing with it.

At the end of the second act, our heroes are escaping their main vessel, unaware that the villains in pursuit of them have their escape shuttles dead in their sights instead of being distracted by the decoy vessel. Admiral Holdo, in a suicidal last ditch effort, turns the decoy vessel around and sets the ship to travel at hyperdrive (previous movies in the Star Wars series had portrayed how carefully ships would pre-program a route to avoid colliding with all sorts of space hazards) and rammed the villains’ flagship with devastating results.

This begs a pretty obvious question: Why in eight Star Wars films was Holdo the first person to do this? If it allows such an outsized ship to take out its pursuer, why haven’t pilots in suicidal straits rammed the ships of the heros and villains time and again? We’ve been shown numerous pilots willing to give up their lives for the cause (the movie begins with a scene featuring a pilot doing just that). It seems as though screenwriter Rian Johnson thought he’d found a hole in the canon that he could cleverly exploit, but what many will do is insist he found a weakness in the design of the intellectual property that he should never have called attention to.

6. Star Wars: A New Hope/Return of the Jedi

Before a tag team of Steven Spielberg and James Cameron one-upped this film time and again, this 1977 smash hit was the most successful in world history. It made plot mechanics such as the mystical Force and the twist that its villain Darth Vader is the father of protagonist Luke Skywalker into household reference points.

In Star Wars: A New Hope, Darth Vader takes Princess Leia captive and interrogates her at length over the hiding place of the main rebel stronghold. Later, long after Leia and Luke have learned that they’re siblings, Darth Vader uses the force to learn that his son Luke has a sister so that he can antagonize Luke by threatening to capture and convert her. Which opens up a gigantic inconsistency for the first film regarding why Vader wasn’t able to use the Force to discover Leia was his daughter; or, if he was too concerned about the rebel base to care about that, why he didn’t use the Force to learn where the base was. By Return of the Jedi Luke is quite attuned to the Force but Leia has no such stated defenses in the first film. The only explanation for this is depressingly simple: The Force was largely an afterthought for George Lucas while writing the film, and he had no consistency in what it could do while concocting it by the seat of his pants.

We’re not going to get on any high horse about what people devote YouTube channels to. But anyone who acts as if plot/logic lapses in Disney’s new Star Wars films are some kind of ruinous new occurrence is in for a nasty shock: Plot holes have been prominent features of the series from its conception.  

5. The Thing

A critical punching bag and box office bomb when it was initially released, this adaptation of John W. Campbell’s 1938 Who Goes There? is now one of the most beloved horror-science fiction works in cinema history. Its story of a team of American Antarctic researchers stuck in Outpost #31, who have to deal with an organism that can infect and turn any member of the team into a deadly monster, is as scary now as it was unpleasant at the time of its release. It’s helped immeasurably by how tightly and believably constructed it is for a movie about dealing with an alien, except for one big cheat.

The problem with this otherwise tight as a drum story is the need to have a device of some kind that can handily convince the survey team that they’ve conclusively beaten the the alien. So, Carpenter wrote that the Antarctic team has flamethrowers. As critic Scott Ashlin asked, why would a research team have flamethrowers? If there’s some piece of equipment that needs to be thawed in the extreme cold, setting it on fire is about the worst approach, and the fires a flamethrower shoots are much too difficult to control in a survival situation. Fortunately, the scene where the flamethrowers are introduced is so harrowing that the audience probably won’t be stopping to ask many questions.    

4. Terminator 2: Judgement Day

Avatar showed that James Cameron was able to hit pay dirt despite his films having plot holes, but back in 1984 he practically required it of his work with his groundbreaking variation on the trendy slasher film model. A film wherein an artificial intelligence network sends an android assassin back in time to prevent the existence of a resistance leader while another soldier from the future tries to stop him? That’s such a complicated setup that it all but demands paradoxes and inconsistencies to be woven into the fabric of the film, but this has a pretty clear hole in the basic setup.

In the first film, the reason the T-800, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, has organic skin on him is basic: the time machine doesn’t send inorganic, robotic matter through without a layer of organic material to effectively trick the machine. But in the 1991 sequel, the artificial intelligence network sends through a “liquid metal” robot called T-1000, which is stronger than the T-800 unit and has the ability to shapeshift. So how can this robot have the vitally important organic layer if it’s entirely liquid metal? It’s a good thing no one actually mentions that rule in the second film, or audiences probably would have been asking that from the premiere on.

3. “Time Enough at Last”

Stepping away from movies for a moment, let’s talk about one of the most influential pieces of science fiction ever created: The Twilight Zone. In particular, one of the two most famous and beloved episodes of the original run, tied only with To Serve Man with it’s “It’s a cookbook!” reveal. This 1959 episode follows compulsive reader Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith) through his frustrating life, through the destruction of his known world and the rest of humanity, to the potential sanctum of a library, and then through a hydrogen bomb, and into the private hell of his glasses shattering just as he’s collected all the books he wants with all the time in the world to read them.