8 Ways Modern Blockbusters Trick You Into Ignoring Plot Holes

2. Quality Moviemaking

Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises is full of plot holes, but nobody seemed to notice/mind when they were watching the film due to the fact that it was such a grand, handsomely-mounted epic. Inexplicableness abounds: broken-spined Bruce Wayne gets punched back to health, escapes from a near-inescapable prison with crippling leg and back problems, travels back to Gotham from some unknown desert locale with no money or passport in no time at all, and then infiltrates Gotham unnoticed when it's on lockdown. But who cares about all that - look it's Bane! The Avengers is another great comic book movie of our time, but it's no stranger to plot holes. The final battle for New York is stirring stuff, but how exactly does Iron Man not simply float around space €“ a zero-gravity environment €“ once he's entered the portal and delivered the bomb, instead of falling conveniently back through the portal and down to Earth? The same thinking could obviously also be applied to the likes of Skyfall (Silva's intentional capture plan relies on events entirely out of his control) and MI4 (villain Hendricks doesn't need to be attached to the suitcase he drops tens of storeys at the end of the film). We expect plot holes from our blockbusters now, but genuinely impressive filmmaking is expected less, so when a competent one comes along with one or two threads left dangling, we tend to give them a free pass.