10 Movie Franchises That Didn't Care About HUGE Plot Holes

5. Not Using The Time Turner To Stop Voldemort - Harry Potter

Hobbs Shaw Jason Statham Dwayne Johnson
Warner Bros.

As already evidenced by the X-Men films, time travel is a tough narrative nut to crack, and has proven to be the undoing of so many movies and TV shows.

Ill-advised it was, then, when the Harry Potter series introduced time travel in the Prisoner of Azkaban with the Time-Turner, as is briefly used by Hermione (Emma Watson).

This instantly raises the typical time travel question - why not use the time machine to travel back in time and kill the big bad, in this case Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), while he's a baby?

The books actually do a much better job of explaining the Time-Turner's limitations, that they don't allow the user to change the past but simply observe it, and in the Order of the Phoenix, the Ministry's entire stockpile of Time-Turners are destroyed during the Battle of the Department of Mysteries.

Convenient? Sure, but by J.K. Rowling's own admission, she wrote herself into a bit of a corner with the time travel shtick and had to basically dig her way out.

But none of this information is conveyed adequately if at all in the movies, and so to casual fans sticking to the films, it's a lapse in internal logic that's tough to ignore.

Contributor
Contributor

Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes). General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.