Dumb Things We Just Ignored About These '90s Movies

Ah, the '90s. It was the era of Spice Girls and slap bracelets. But as much as this decade may fill you with nostalgia, some of the movies you watched during that era may not be nearly as perfect as you remember. In fact, certain '90s movies had moments that were downright stupid.

Some of these moments are considered dumb as a result of glaring plot holes. Others look dumb due to visual effects that have aged poorly. A few movie scenes have earned "dumb" status simply because the whole scenario is absurd. In spite of this, plenty of viewers were willing to ignore these flaws. Many of these films did well at the box office,– sometimes spectacularly so — and quite a few of them even won Oscars. Funnily enough, we're sorry to say that not one but two Bruce Willis movies made it onto this list — a dubious achievement, but no more dubious than the dumb things we just ignored about these '90s movies.

James Cameron's epic blockbuster may have shattered records, but some scenes from "Titanic" make no sense – namely, the notorious door scene, where Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) dies in the freezing water to make sure Rose (Kate Winslet) can stay afloat on her makeshift raft. Countless fans have called the whole scenario dumb. After all, there appears to be room enough for both of them on the door, which has of course sparked the age-old debate: could they both have survived?

Multiple sources — including "Mythbusters" and James Cameron himself – have tested this to see if it would have been possible. Most studies agree that it's not as simple as Jack being safe the moment he climbs onto the door. With both of their weight on the door, it might have sunk low enough to expose both of their bodies to freezing water, meaning they wouldn't have survived long enough to get rescued. However, if they played their cards just right (and they had the presence of mind to stick Rose's life vest under the door to help lift it out of the water), then there was at least a chance both of them could have lived.

Of course, just because it's theoretically possible, it doesn't mean two exhausted and traumatized characters could have pulled it off. In any event, this is all beside the point, according to James Cameron. The director told "Mythbusters," "The script says Jack died. He has to die. So maybe we screwed up and the board should have been a little tiny bit smaller, but the dude's goin' down."

The 1996 blockbuster "Independence Day" is good fun so long as you don't examine the plot too closely. The movie's ending hinges on the heroes destroying the alien fleet by hacking them with a human-made computer virus that David (Jeff Goldblum) creates on a Mac PowerBook. Nobody stops to think about how absurd it is that an alien ship would be compatible with a Mac computer – much less how one person could learn sophisticated alien technology so quickly that he could slip through their defenses with a virus.

To be fair, the filmmakers at least made an effort to explain this plot hole. They wrote and began shooting a scene that laid out the groundwork for how David could possibly learn an alien programming language. In this scene, David discovers that the aliens' code operates according to the same patterns as the countdown signal he deciphers at the start of the film. 

This scene was ultimately deleted from the final cut of the movie, but even if they had kept it, it would have left a lot of unanswered questions — like how could a '90s model of a Mac PowerBook possibly have the processing power to take down an entire alien fleet with technology centuries ahead of anything seen on Earth? Some computer programming experts, however, argue that it's at least theoretically plausible, depending on how long the scientists have already been studying the spacecraft and how arrogant the aliens are.

"Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace" has no shortage of moments that fans consider dumb: the podrace sequence, the notorious midi-chlorians scene, and basically any scene with Jar-Jar. Yet many of these have already been discussed at length. However, there's one dumb thing from "The Phantom Menace" that may not get as much attention, despite it playing a huge role in the 1999 movie's climax.

When young Anakin (Jake Lloyd) blows up the droid control ship in the final battle, it is only thanks to an astounding number of coincidences. Anakin just so happens to find a spaceship with a helmet the perfect size for a kid, then starts randomly hitting buttons until he takes out the attacking droids. By some miracle, the ship's autopilot takes him exactly where he needs to go to save the day. And when he fires the shot that destroys the reactor of the droid control ship, he's not even aiming for it.

Fans were infuriated by this sequence because his victory feels completely unearned. At one point, Anakin shouts "This is tense!" but the scene is anything but. Everything comes too easily to Anakin here, and he barely even needs to try, which undermines the stakes of the battle. It's a far cry from the sequence in "Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope" where Luke (Mark Hamill) destroys the Death Star.

Okay, we get that the whole point of the 1997 animated musical "Anastasia" is to imagine an alternate history where Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov (Meg Ryan) actually survived. If that had been the only way that "Anastasia" strayed from the true story, then we could totally get on board with that. However, the movie takes some other creative liberties that are a little harder to buy.

If the real-life Anastasia did survive, it wasn't because she escaped through a secret passage in her family's palace before an angry mob of peasants raided it, like the movie depicts. Instead, Anastasia and her family were imprisoned for more than a year after the 1917 Revolution, before they were executed by firing squad in a basement. The only way she could have lived is if she survived the initial round of shots and one of the soldiers chose to spare her life. But DNA evidence confirms that Anastasia did indeed die with the rest of her family.

That's not the only thing the movie gets wrong. It also rearranges events from the historical timeline and portrays them as laughably simplistic. Rasputin (Christopher Lloyd) was indeed a friend of the Romanov family who likely took advantage of their trust, but he was not an evil sorcerer or a zombie. Perhaps the most cringe-worthy thing about "Anastasia" is its explanation for why the royal family was overthrown. To suggest that the revolution was caused by a curse from Rasputin – and not the czar's own cluelessness about what his people actually wanted — is a teensy bit tone-deaf.

If you want to see movie supervillains who were ruined by terrible CGI, look no further than the 1998 movie "Blade." Not only has the CGI aged terribly, but the whole final battle is so outlandish that it's almost comical. In this scene, Blade (Wesley Snipes) chops off Deacon Frost's (Stephen Dorff) right hand and then cleaves him in half. Yet what could have been a delightfully gory effect looks downright cartoony. His severed upper body floats weightlessly in the air, while his legs just stand there, waiting for the CGI stream of blood to pull the two halves of his body back together. When Frost's severed hand regenerates, his entire arm is engulfed in a cloud of plastic-y red liquid that looks like a cheap screen-saver.

The rest of the scene isn't much better. For one, the swordplay between Blade and Frost looks too staged. Reddit user u:/Procyon02 observed, "It looks like how a couple of six-year-olds would envision an intense sword fight." And when Blade flings a bunch of syringes at Frost, it plays out more like a scene from the 1966 "Batman" TV series. The movie doesn't show Blade throwing four syringes at once (not least because it's physically impossible); instead the film just cuts to Frost with a bunch of quivering syringes sticking out of his abdomen, which fans found hilarious. Worst of all, the big bad dies in a laughable way: Frost inflates like a grotesque balloon before popping in an unconvincing CGI explosion.

Hopes were high for Steven Spielberg's foray into Neverland, but the movie we actually got was a $70 million pirate shipwreck. In fact, even the director was not especially proud of "Hook."

If you rewatch this movie as an adult, it's hard not to see the scene where the Lost Boys fight the pirates as anything but cringeworthy. The boys manage to take on a ship full of pirates using nothing but marbles and a cartoony egg-chucking machine. A bunch of kids with squirt guns wouldn't stand a chance against a bunch of fully armed pirates, which kind of undermines the stakes and plausibility of what ought to be a thrilling final battle.

While the scene might appeal to young children eager to live out their fantasy of pelting grown-ups with eggs, we suspect this is probably not what most fans were hoping to see for the epic showdown between Hook (Dustin Hoffman) and Peter Pan (Robin Williams). Both critics and audiences agree that the final battle drags on for far too long, as if the filmmakers couldn't make up their minds on how they wanted to end it.

Disney's "Pocahontas" is one of the most laughably inaccurate historical films – and incidentally, the first time Walt Disney Animation Studios attempted to make a movie based on real historical events. Who exactly thought that the story of Pocahontas (Irene Bedard) — a young Powhatan girl who was kidnapped and raped – would make a good romantic musical? But one particular scene from the movie is especially cringe-inducing.

When John Smith (Mel Gibson) goes chasing after Pocahontas (which is totally not creepy), telling her he doesn't mean her any harm (which might be a stretch, seeing as he is here to invade her land, cut down her trees, and dig up her earth), she only stops running after the wind magically translates his words. Apparently if you listen with your heart, you can instantly become fluent in any language.

In a movie loaded with simplistic moments, this one takes the cake. It's an incredibly lazy plot device for which the filmmakers could have easily found a more creative workaround. Would it have killed Disney to just include a montage of Pocahontas and Smith taking the time to learn each other's languages? They could have even included the same song playing over the montage. Instead, the filmmakers came up with an explanation that is even more implausible than the plot hole it's trying to fix.

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"Die Hard 2" shows terrorists seizing control of an air traffic control tower, leaving multiple passenger planes stuck in the air and unable to land. Fans have pointed out that this makes no sense; if the planes have enough fuel to circle above the airport for hours, then they most certainly have enough fuel to fly to another nearby airport and land there. 

In fact, that is exactly what the pilots would have been trained to do, according to real air traffic controllers who have seen the film. Air traffic controller Dan Mooney told Mel magazine, "Without even being told, all of those other flights would have redirected themselves to another airport." Pilots always have a backup route lined up in case of emergencies just like this one.

Sure, the movie tries to sidestep this plot hole by suggesting that all the other nearby airports are out of commission due to the snowstorm. But that would mean a lot of airports. Besides, this raises its own set of questions. Clearly a terrorist attack like this would take weeks of planning, and yet it all hinges on a severe weather event happening on the exact day of the attack. There was no way the bad guys could have accounted for this, unless the entire terrorist cell waited on standby until they had a "snow day." Of course, this is just one of many dumb things in the "Die Hard" franchise.

The 1998 blockbuster "Armageddon" makes no sense. Countless scientists have pointed out its inaccuracies, from its lame explanation for why the asteroid's gravity seems no different from Earth's to the absurd plan to break the deadly space projectile into hundreds of smaller (but no less deadly) projectiles. In fact, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson told StarTalk Plus, "'Armageddon' violates more laws of physics per minute than any other film ever made." That's to say nothing of how the movie romanticizes oil drillers and makes NASA scientists seem like buffoons, sending an uneasy anti-intellectualism message.

But most importantly, the film's whole premise is fundamentally dumb. Why train oil drillers to become astronauts, when it would be much easier to have the oil drillers train the astronauts how to drill holes? It would take way more than 12 days to prepare oil drillers to become astronauts. Educating the astronauts on how to drill properly would probably take far less time. This plot hole was so glaring that one of the film's stars actually pointed it out to director Michael Bay. In the DVD commentary for "Armageddon," Ben Affleck recalled asking Bay this exact question. According to Affleck, the director replied, "You know, Ben, just shut up, okay?"

The only thing dumber than this is the moment where Colonel Sharp (William Fitchner) declares, "He's got space dementia." (Though we've got to give Fitchner credit, because it couldn't have been easy to say that with a straight face.)

"Meet Joe Black" could have possibly been a moving film if it hadn't been ruined by an awful death scene. The movie is meant to be whimsical and occasionally funny — just not necessarily this moment.

After a romantic goodbye, Susan (Claire Forlani) and Brad Pitt's character keep glancing at each other over their shoulders, and you expect that at any moment Pitt's character is going to tell Susan how much he loves her. Instead, he gets hit by a car (as one does when one's standing in the middle of the street). This was largely a practical effect, with a life-sized dummy standing in for Pitt. That may explain why Pitt looks strangely weightless as he bounces from one car to the next. Coming so close on the heels of such a sentimental scene, this death is unintentionally funny, and the moment makes it impossible to take the rest of the movie seriously.

When clips of this scene resurfaced on the web years later, it quickly went viral. On Reddit, u:/marbanasin wrote, "Holy s*** was that way more hilarious than I remember." Meanwhile, u:/CullenLX87 said, "The godd*** moron just standing in the street. What the f*** did he expect was going to happen?" Director Martin Brest probably hoped people would still be talking about his 1998 film more than 20 years later, but maybe not like this.

There are a plethora of reasons why this '90s movie hasn't aged well – from its creepy inappropriate relationship to its laughably dated perspective on the American Dream. But there's one scene from "American Beauty" that is not necessarily problematic, just plain dumb. In this notorious sequence, Ricky (Wes Bentley) shares a video of a plastic shopping bag he filmed on his camcorder. On its own, the image of a shopping bag drifting in the wind is actually quite memorable and haunting. However, "American Beauty" milks this moment dry, trying to wring every last drop of pseudo-spiritual melodrama from the scene. 

After introducing his video as "The most beautiful thing I've ever filmed," Ricky whispers in a hushed voice about how there is so much beauty in the world, while declaring that he spent 15 minutes filming this bag like that's something to be proud of. At one point he proclaims, "This bag was just dancing with me" (though thankfully we are not subject to the image of Ricky dancing alongside it). Not even Thomas Newman's haunting score can save the scene from becoming maudlin mush.

Before long, critics and the internet began to ridicule the scene. It was even parodied on "Family Guy." Fans have pointed out that the scene would have actually been quite beautiful if Ricky had just kept his mouth shut and let the image speak for itself.