It should hopefully go without saying that there is a clear divide between movies and reality. Though some movies obviously venture far closer to the established laws of society and reality that our real lives are bound by, there are those who exist further away from those constraints. Genres like sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, in particular, need worry far less about how logic affects their respective stories.
However, even with that in mind, there are movies which don’t subscribe to traditional logic. When this occurs, more often than not, a plot hole appears. These plot holes are never good, although some are far worse than others. Some provide small nagging continuity issues that subtly break immersion, while others are so huge and glaring that they actually undermine the entire movie. Some, of course, exist somewhere between the two.
Exactly what causes a plot hole varies from case to case. Usually, though, a plot hole is the result of an oversight in the writing process, or the bending of a movie’s established rules for the service of a plot point (or, worse, for a single joke). Regardless of the reasons, here are eight of the most annoying movie plot holes of all time.
8. Ant-Man (2015) – Mass Doesn’t Change (Except When It Does)
The MCU is treated as something far less sacred now than it once was, suddenly making it okay to level open criticisms at the franchise without fear of being ostracized. 2015’s Ant-Man is actually one of the MCU’s stronger offerings, but that still doesn’t mean it isn’t riddled with plot holes. Though they all essentially boil down to the movie defining its own rules and then ignoring them, they do break the film once considered carefully.
Early in the film, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) explicitly explains to Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) how his Pym particles work: they compress the space between atoms, reducing size but not mass. This means that once shrunk, Ant-Man is supposedly still subject to the same laws of physics he would be at his normal size. However, this rule is then immediately forgotten literally every time the Pym particles are used, resulting in multiple glaring plot holes.
The most notorious of these is the reveal that Hank Pym has been carrying around an actual tank on his keychain, but there are some that are even more pressing. Like, every time Scott Lang rides an ant, his mass should make him slice clean through its body, and every time he punches a person, the force of his weight concentrated into such a tiny area should equate to a pinprick. Ant-Man establishing rules only to disregard them is frustrating and results in such gaping plot holes that it’s a wonder the film is coherent at all.
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