2018 is ending, and we've all seen our share of great movies this year.
But no movie is perfect, and 2018's top movies are no exceptions when it comes to dumb things.
Here are the dumb things we all ignored in these 2018 movies.
Solo: A Star Wars Story was actually kind of fun.
It told a relatively self-contained story with minimal fan service, plus we finally
got to see what Chewie looks like on days when he doesn't use conditioner.
For all the hate it got, its main crime was calling fans' bluff when they said "we're
getting tired of Star Wars movies."
Now, on to its second biggest crime: making Han boring.
When we meet Han in A New Hope, he's a force for moral ambiguity.
He's clear about one thing: he's just in it for the money.
So when he turns the Millennium Falcon around and saves the day at the eleventh hour, it's
a genuine win for the good guys.
Then along comes Solo and we find out that Han has been figuratively turning the Falcon
around his whole life.
Suddenly, his transformation from no-good rogue to gold-hearted hero isn't a transformation,
it's another in a long series of Han going back on a promise that he'll leave when he
gets paid.
"I don't have people.
I'm alone."
"Uh...Solo."
A Quiet Place did its job well enough that we were totally engrossed the whole time.
That's generally the best thing you can ask for from a horror movie: a strong enough execution
that you don't think twice about it until after you've left the theater.
So after you left the theater, you probably noticed that A Quiet Place was kind of dumb.
It featured, and we can't overstress this point, the most easily manageable movie monsters
since aliens started getting taken down by sprinklers in Signs.
They're drawn to any sound at all, and thus easily distracted.
How they toppled human civilization is a genuine mystery.
Humanity should've just put an Amazon Echo on top of a flag pole, set it to play "Mambo
No. 5" on repeat, and quietly watched the monsters scramble until they figured out how
to defeat them.
By the time 2018 rolled around, Marvel fans had already been put through a lot.
And yet, like the gluttons for emotional punishment that we are, we all came back for more.
And Avengers: Infinity War was right there to satisfy our appetites.
Nobody's arguing that Infinity War wasn't a great movie.
It juggled two dozen character storylines masterfully, giving everybody exactly the
right amount of screen time.
Where it stumbled, though, was in ignoring the stories about those characters that had
already been told.
For example, Thor had just learned in Ragnarok that the magic was never inside the hammer,
but within himself all along.
But then he spends most of Infinity War trying to find a magical weapon.
True, Stormbreaker was designed to defeat the Infinity Gauntlet, so it's justified within
the movie.
But this is still an example of screenwriters relying too much on the trope of a hero seeking
a magical weapon.
Also, why didn't Doctor Strange just open and close a Sling Ring portal around Thanos'
arm?
Maybe that was the plan in one of the failed futures he checked out.
The path to making a Venom movie was long and tumultuous.
Fans had been hearing for decades that it would be coming out any day now.
And finally in October 2018, we got the big screen symbiote we'd all been champing at
the bit for.
The final assessment after the long wait was: not bad, though it could've been better.
But there's one big plot hole that won't stop nagging at you once you see it.
Riot, a fellow symbiote to Venom and the movie's antagonist, can't stay with a host for too
long since it feeds on its host's life force.
But we see Riot latch onto an old lady at the beginning of the movie, and after a six-month
time jump, she's still carrying it around with no problems.
Director Ruben Fleischer actually owned up to this lapse in logic in an interview with
Gamespot.
A dumb mistake can be easier to handle when the director admits the mistake, but it's
still dumb nonetheless.
After the success of 2015's nostalgia-blasting Jurassic World, a sequel was an inevitability.
True, the franchise has a checkered past when it comes to sequels, but like the entrepreneurs
who decided to make yet another dinosaur theme park, the studio swore it wouldn't make the
same mistakes twice.
Fallen Kingdom, weirdly, hits a lot of the same notes as 1997's critically maligned The
Lost World.
The tone is nearly identical, plot holes and all.
The worst of these is the reveal that John Hammond, the mastermind behind the first park,
poured billions of dollars into building it without checking to see whether the island
he just bought was a freaking volcano.
That's not exactly a formula for longevity, yet somehow these movies keep getting made.
"We don't conceive of sudden, radical irrational change as woven into the very fabric of existence,
yet I can assure it most assuredly is."
Deadpool 2 was, without a doubt, one of the two most anticipated Josh Brolin comic book
adaptations of the year.
It promised bigger action, better quips, and best of all, a heaping scoop of Cable, the
time-traveling yang to Wade Wilson's yin.
For Cable's part, he travels back from the future, intent upon acting out that ol' "would
you kill baby Hitler?"
philosophical quandary.
Upping the drama: he only has enough time travel juice for two jumps, one back and one
forward.
Except that at the end of the movie, Negasonic Teenage Warhead manages to recharge Cable's
time travel device, thus hamstringing all the dramatic tension from earlier in the film.
Sure, it's a ridiculous post-credits gag in a movie with a bunch of dumb poop jokes.
But come on.
"You're welcome, Canada."