5 Movie Plans That Weren't Such a Great Idea

Movies are awesome; I don’t care if it’s deep and many-layered like Inception, or completely retarded (like the Star Wars prequels) I love movies. As a result, I spend way, way (way) too much time thinking about them.

This has the unfortunate side effect of ruining some of my favorite movies for me, which is the case with most of this list. Often times in movies, in order to get themselves out of precarious situations, characters will concoct crazy plans to save the day and defeat the villains.  Sometimes the plan may not be the best plan, but it’s the only option the characters have left. Other times, though, the plan is something only the screenwriters think is a good idea, while the rest of us are left to wonder if that bus load of children really needed to explode in order to stop the bad guy from killing the hero’s one true love. The plan may create some great onscreen action, but it’s also the cause of some audience head scratching, as such concepts as logic, sanity, and overall intelligence seem to be thrown away.

This happens in all types of movies, but let’s start with some aliens, shall we?

5) The Fresh Prince and Brundlefly Blow Up the Alien Mother Ship

Let’s recap really quick; in Independence Day, Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith go up to the alien’s mother ship to not only make computer nerds shriek in impotent rage (over a late 90’s Macintosh Powerbook’s apparent ability to hack alien software), but to also insert a computer virus into their mainframe and shut down all their awesome glowing shields. So our less maneuverable, more lightly armed air forces can shoot them down.  Mankind shouts a collective “Booyah!” and high fives in a douchey, Roland Emmerich way.

Then our heroes fire off a nuke into the mother ship’s command center, are then released from certain death, and fly out of there before billions of aliens are instantly murdered in a nuclear blast. Sweet! The entire ship blows up, and we’re all set…

Except…

The alien mother ship was “one quarter the size of our moon”. After some quick googling and mathing, I found that would mean it was roughly 503,238,821,155,091.04 tons. In human speak, that is over 5 trillion tons. Guess what a single nuclear weapon will not evaporate into nothingness? I’ll answer for you: 5 trillion tons. So it was in the ship’s core and managed to explode the whole thing, I will grant them that. Awesome, so that is ¼ of the moon, in shrapnel form, exploded right next to Earth.

I will also assume that the ship somehow managed to not completely ruin the earth’s tides with it’s giant ass because of some awesome alien tech, but that still leaves is with chunks of alien moon raining down over the entire earth, kind of like Armageddon, if Micheal Bay decided to make a sequel with more asteroids. We would have been better off just surrendering.

Nice work, Assholes! You just killed everyone… We called like 3 times to tell you it was a bad idea once we did the math, don’t you dicks ever answer your phone?

4) Carmen Ibanez saves the day! And dooms a city of millions.

Much like picking on ID4, making fun of Starship Troopers is like punching an autistic kid; really easy and not terribly satisfying. But here I go anyway.

I’ll bring you up to speed in case you don’t remember the scene; we have just left Casper Van Dien getting his ass whipped, literally, because someone under his commend fucked up and accidentally blew someone else’s head off. The scene cuts over to his girlfriend, Denise Richards (Carmen Ibanez), sitting on a spaceship, drinking coffee and allowing co-pilot Chisel McStrongjaw (played by Hollywood Pretty Boy Filler number who-gives-a-shit) to charm his way into her pants. But there’s a problem! Those pesky bugs have launched a city-sized asteroid at earth!

My boyfriend? Oh, he’s dead. Or will be. He’s in the army.

It is drifting perilously close to the Roger Young (their ship), and the plucky pilots wait until they are sure they can miss it, and then fire the retro rockets, moving out of its way! Hooray!

Except…

What they should have done was put down their coffee and dodged the damn thing earlier. Instead, they collectively decide to wait until the absolute last second to fire the retros and avoid it. Keep in mind, we have already seen Carmen pull a maneuver in one of these ships where she avoided taking out half a space station by about 10 feet, so we know they can turn on a dime, sort of. At any rate, dodging a rock the size of several aircraft carriers was clearly well within the capabilities of the ship.

As a result, the communications tower is ripped off the ship and they lose all connection to the outside world. This unfortunately means they can’t let anyone know that a giant hunk of space debris is flying straight toward home.

On the plus side, the com-tower is usually staffed by custodians and minorities.

If they had fired the retros when they saw the thing, it would have missed them by probably the length of the ship and they could have said “Earth, get ready, a giant rock is going to kill a major city!” Earth could have then blown it up, or evacuated the city, or something like that.  Instead, they get a pat on the back from their captain, despite the fact that a few million people, plus whatever poor suckers were in the communication tower, are now dead because of their showboating.

The one time a movie’s “loose cannons” should have gotten their asses chewed, they practically got medals.

3) Ripley and Winona Ryder crash “Father” into the Earth

Alien: Resurrection is an unholy clusterfuck of a movie. It’s what happened when the greatest movie monster ever was inseminated with ideas from the guy who brought us Buffy the Vampire Slayer and gestated inside the camera of the guy who made City of Lost Children. It could have been awesome, and it totally wasn’t.

Again, to summarize; Ripley has been dead for 200 years, but thanks to a blood sample taken in Alien 3, she is reborn as a part-alien clone with all of Ripley’s memories from the other movies. I forgive Sigourney Weaver for being involved in this because she promised to never do a nude scene again. Anyway, predictably, the aliens get loose on the research ship, Whedonly called “Father” (because the first Alien movie, the ship’s computer was “Mother.” That’s creativity, there, Joss.) For some completely short-sighted and retarded reason, it is programmed to return immediately home to Earth should something go wrong.

Shown: Enough evidence to know better.

Now, keep in mind, this was a ship that was apparently custom built to study the aliens, a creature they knew enough about to acquire people to impregnate with them, and built facilities to hold them. And in case they had a problem with this horrifically invasive species, they designed it to send the whole mess to the human race’s homeworld. Nice job, future Army.

So what do the heroes do? Well, crash it of course! That is actually a great idea; they reset the navigation so instead of landing on Earth, it collides with it. Alien monsters are vaporized, and Earth is safe!

Except…

When the ship crashes, it appears to leave an Australia-sized crater in Africa. An impact event large enough to blow up the middle of the world’s second largest continent has to be arguably just as bad as the planet being overrun by alien monster bugs. I suppose we could assume that future Africa is overrun with every species infected with AIDS, so no one goes there anyway. Or conversely, and just as likely, it has managed to pull itself up by its bootstraps and is now the new Europe. Either way, blowing it up would screw everyone on earth, probably killing most living things in the process.

That killed the last white rhino. And mosquito. And African.

I have 9 alternative targets for our “heroes”, from first to last: Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Moon, Venus, Mercury and the Sun. And that is discounting the 30 some odd other moons in our solar system. And the entire asteroid belt. If you can reset the navigation to crash into Earth instead of landing, you could redirect it to another heavenly body. Let’s not be stupid, people.

2) Waking up everyone in The Matrix

It’s the ultimate goal of humankind in all 3 of the movies, aside from “let’s not be murdered by machines.” Morpheus spends roughly 6 hours of our lives trying to get Keanu Reeves to kick so much Agent ass that they can free everyone who is plugged into the Matrix.

If you have not been trapped in a gulag since the Cold War, odds are pretty good you know how it all ends, but if you don’t then it’s about to be ruined for you; Neo dies, and the machines agree to let out everyone who wants to get out. That is so super way cool! That is exactly what Morpheus, The Oracle, and all the other jump kicky super people were trying to do, and the machines just agree to it because Neo runs Norton on the Matrix with updated virus definitions. The world is saved!

Except…

Remember what happened to Neo when they woke him up? He was unplugged and summarily flushed like a pale fleshy turd. Then they spent what appeared to be days or weeks getting his eyes to function properly, and had to manually insert hundreds of electrified needles into his muscles just so he could use his limbs. Then, they had to hand-remove some of the Matrix feeding tube junk from him. And then, they had to remove all of those needles from him.

Then, there was the realization that everything he knew was a lie, and the world was actually 180 degrees different from anything he ever knew. Do you remember what he did then? He puked and passed out.

Just imagine: the population of China waking up to find out they have been giving head to a robotic feeder-dong.

Now, I imagine the human race at this point is maybe a few million, up to a billion or so, all grown in vats and fed their dead ancestors and siblings. Imagine millions of people, all waking up at once. What if they all get unhooked and flushed at once? Do the machines even care at this point? That would be one smelly-ass clogged toilet in a day or two.

But let’s assume the machines already have something in place for when the orgy of adult fetuses that gets dumped through their plumbing; they did “lose entire crops” after all. Now you have millions of adults fumbling around in sewage, and the resistance had what? Six of those hover ships left? Oh, wait, Keanu Christ crashed it. Or was it the bitchy chick from Memento? Does it matter? Basically, they don’t have the resources necessary to deal with the sudden population surge that just dropped on their metaphorical doorstep.

Even if they had contingencies for all of those things, and they were all set to collect the throngs of helpless people, how do they clothe, feed and shelter all of them? The people that had escaped already lived in virtual squalor. Zion was a bit of a shithole, if you remember. I wonder how many people would very quickly decide they would rather be a “slave” with a warm bed and something other than what Tank called a “bowl of snot” in the first movie to eat.

Cypher wasn’t evil, just not retarded.

1) Some prehistoric dude fucks civilization by a few thousand years

Okay, so there are a couple of relative steamers in the rest of the list, but all of them made bank when they came out, so in Hollywood’s eyes, they kicked ass. On the other hand, literally no one on Earth liked 10,000 BC. The best even the most retarded person could say about it was “That bamboo scene kinda kicked ass…”

But the oversight in this pile of monkey-plop definitely earns the number 1 spot, which I will explain shortly. The movie follows the journey of D’leh (Pronounced “Delay.” This is a rather ironic choice, as you will soon see) from ineffectual pussy to the destroyer of all things good. He starts off failing his rights to become a man because he is afraid to play chicken with a mammoth or some shit. I don’t remember, it was awful and I watched it a couple years back. (edit: he apparently kills a mammoth accidentally, so he is a fuck-up as well)

“D’Leh”? More like “D’Homo”… Er… “Queer”. He sucks is what I am getting at.

Anyway, the only woman with blue eyes to evolve ever likes him for some ungodly reason, and she gets kidnapped, so he goes on some journey with mammoths, and a saber-tooth (not the cool kind played by Liev Schriber, either. Sorry), some big birds, and a bunch of other shit that does not belong together. But because the filmmaker and script writers were idiots, they didn’t even bother to Wiki if any of the species in their movie ever coexisted. (For the record, by 10,000 BC, the saber tooths had been gone for 2,000 years, and the giant murder bird for 60 million)

But at any rate, he follows the trail of his lady friend to this city, where a new civilization is building a ziggurat (really ancient pyramid) and starts a slave revolt and mammoth stampede. He also nails their leader with an arrow. He effectively kills the civilization, who were bad and nasty because they used slave labor, like every single early civilization, ever. Booo civilization! Yay stinky cave people!

Except…

The first recorded civilization started 5,000 years ago, the Sumerians. And the first ziggurat in recorded history was from 3,000 years ago. So these people had created boats, monuments and cities 5,000 years before the first civilization our history book are aware of. And guess, what? The Sumerians were assholes, too! So aside from setting the clock back on progress by 5 millennia, all he accomplished was bagging a woman with a birth defect and delaying the inevitable.

They had ziggurats, slaves, mammoths… Everything a civilization needs to start murdering other civilizations. Oh, and to progress.

So thanks to “Delay”, our technology, science, religion, everything about us, was set back 5,000 years. Imagine what it would be like today if that had transpired, but was then stopped; the world of Star Trek would be ancient history. We would all be immortal supermen playing video games on planet sized screens. Or maybe we would have self cleaning toilets, but either way, D’Leh fucked us but good. Hope you enjoyed blue-eyes, fucktard.