10 Basic Mistakes That Ruin Movies

These simple mistakes totally tank these films.

By Jack Pooley /

Mistakes are an unavoidable part of any movie - filmmaking is really, really hard, and it's simply impossible for a film worked on by probably hundreds of people to make it through the production process error-free. There are just way too many cooks in the kitchen for that.

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These gaffes rarely sink a movie outright, yet every so often there's a basic mistake so revealing, so unconscionable, so unforgivable, that it basically causes the film as a whole to unravel within itself.

And so, inspired by this recent Reddit thread on the very subject, here are 10 dead basic mistakes that ended up doing the most unexpected of things - totally ruining their respective films once you noticed them. A bit dramatic? Maybe, but you get the idea.

These mistakes, from creative oversights in the scripting process to the most simple continuity and editing errors imaginable, all tank these movies if you lend them more than a few moments' thought.

You'll probably wish you never found out about these mistakes, honestly, because for as straightforward and even "insignificant" as they might seem, they ultimately corrupt the logical throughline of each story, ensuring they don't quite make sense.

So yeah, you've been warned before we get started...

10. Five Years To Go Backwards - Ready Player One

In Ready Player One, Wade aka Parzival (Tye Sheridan) manages to beat the first OASIS challenge by doing the one thing nobody else had thought of - running the treacherous race backwards, resulting in him receiving the coveted Copper Key.

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Now, it's stated that this challenge remained unbeaten for five years before Wade pulled it off, and so we're led to believe that for an entire five years, nobody tried driving backwards at the start of the race? C'mon.

If you know anything about gamers, they're an inquisitive bunch and will try anything and everything to test the bounds of a video game's limitations. 

With that in mind, it would've taken mere minutes for somebody to figure out that driving backwards was the key to victory here.

That it took the collective player-base five years to figure out something so howlingly obvious is all the proof you need that this story was written by someone who isn't actually well-versed in gaming culture at all.

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