These Movies Wouldn't Exist If The Heroes Were Smart
Many great stories begin with a hero wanting to right a wrong... but plenty of other heroes are thrust into adventure because they royally donked something up and need to fix their epic mistake. If heroes were a little smarter, we'd have a lot fewer stories to tell. Here are ten movies that wouldn't exist if heroes were a little brainier.
The Wizard Of Oz (1939)
A young girl gets smacked in the head during a tornado and finds herself in Oz, but, spoiler alert, the whole thing was a dream. Dorothy had every tornado warning that 1939 could offer, which mostly involved looking at the sky and seeing that a tornado was coming. Instead, she gets concussed and the audience is lied to for an hour.
The Lord Of The Rings (2001-2003)
"Why didn't they just fly the One Ring to Mordor on their giant eagles?" is a question about which Middle Earth devotees will argue fiercely. Giving the Ring to an unassuming Hobbit was an interesting stealth strategy, and maybe the dark forces could control lightning and shoot down the giant birds... but there had to be a shortcut in there somewhere that didn't involve short legs.
Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985)
Pee-Wee's journey across America begins when his beloved bicycle is stolen and a psychic tells him that it's in the basement of the Alamo, which is a lie that could be disproved by making a quick phone call to the Alamo, a popular tourist destination which surely has an information line. Or maybe filing a police report against arch-man-child Francis Buxton instead of going all vigilante.
Avengers: Age Of Ultron (2015)
When Tony Stark discovers an AI program that sounds like James Spader inside Loki's staff, he decides to use it to power his anti-bad-guy robots instead of just maybe not touching it. Stark's arrogance sets off a chain of events that nearly destroys the world, divides the Avengers, and creates new talking action figures that say stuff like, "I'm living vibranium!" So, while The Avengers lose, we kinda win.
Jurassic World (2015)
There are plot holes in Jurassic World that you could fit a dinosaur through... and that's exactly what happens. Convinced that the Indominus rex has escaped its pen because it's no longer giving off a heat signature, our dinosaur expert heroes stride into the pen, not thinking that this mystery mutant dinosaur is maybe just modulating its own body temperature. And that's when all dino-hell breaks dino-loose.
E.T. (1982)
E.T. is left behind when his spaceship takes off without him, like that kid at Six Flags who never made it back to the bus because he needed one more paper plate full of fried dough. Somehow, every other alien makes it back to the ship okay, and E.T. forgets that he can levitate over to the ship instead of having his stump-legs being tripped up by logs and stuff.
The Matrix (1999)
Neo is given a choice to take the blue pill and return to his normal, imaginary life, or take the red pill and learn the truth. Neo takes the red pill, choosing to fight a bunch of robots and ruin everyone's comparatively peaceful existence in fantasyland, instead of allowing everyone to maintain a divine, machine-assisted mental unity with all of mankind. Don't we get a vote?
Spider-Man (2002)
Spider-Man's origin is a series of mistakes. Peter Parker is too busy ogling Mary Jane to notice a giant, bitey, genetically modified spider crawling on him. While a quick swat could have completely avoided the film, Parker also decides to be petty and let a criminal escape who then goes on to kill his uncle, setting his heroism into action just a little too late.
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Even though he successfully rules over an entire world of monsters, Jack Skellington engineers a kidnapping and a hostile takeover of another world because he's feeling a little bored. Of course, he knows nothing about what he's doing, ruins Christmas for millions of kids, and generally becomes hated by everyone but his adoring sycophants. But Santa saves the day by remembering he's magic.
Gremlins (1984)
This is why you don't buy pets as gifts, and why you don't buy pets with three weird rules at all, and then give that pet to your dumb kid. Kids can't even turn off the TV when they leave a room, so how can one be expected to not leave a glass of water right next to a pet that will basically pop out a litter if it gets wet? For an inventor, Billy's dad sure is dumb.