20 Movies Destroyed By Their Plot Holes

Here's a case of a movie inheriting its source material's problems.

John A. Boyne's novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has been incredibly successful and has frequently been used in schools for Holocaust education, but it's also been divisive over the years, with criticism aimed at its messages and especially its many plot holes and historical inaccuracies. Perhaps the most damaging one of all is that the main premise is built on something that's implausible for an extremely tragic reason.

2008's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which faithfully adapts the book, depicts a most unlikely friendship between Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a Jewish boy in a concentration camp, and Bruno (Asa Butterfield), the son of the Nazi who runs it. As many commentators have accurately pointed out, this friendship would never have occurred because, in the most sensitive way it can be put, Shmuel wouldn't have been there for Bruno to befriend. The heartbreaking truth is that children were nearly always killed as soon as they arrived at the camps, and it seems unlikely that Bruno would've been there on his own for so long. 

Essentially, this entire, divisive story is facilitated by a glaringly inaccurate set-up, and this gives the narrative at large an unfortunate air of inauthenticity.