The biggest movie plot holes of 2013

Imagine the elation a screenwriter feels when he finally types 'THE END' at the end of his or her screenplay. A whole film, finished! Flash-forward to the movie's release, and hordes of internet nit-pickers flood their favourite forums, listing the various illogical inconsistencies they've found. Great.

[When movie franchises jumped the shark]

In truth, you'll find plot holes in even the most beloved cinematic classics, and most (but not all) of the films on this list are so entertaining you can forgive them the odd logic fart, but they remain errors, so we're duty bound to point them out. Forgive us, Hollywood screenwriters. It's a sickness.

[Warning: There are spoilers in this article. Look away now if you don't want to see]

Pacific Rim – Suspicious swordplay
Guillermo del Toro's monster epic features plenty of jaw-dropping moments, but there's one 'last resort' scene that rings a little hollow. When the Kaiju known as Otachi unexpectedly sprouts wings and whisks killer mech Gipsy Danger up into space, it seems all is lost. Except it isn't: out comes Gipsy's sword, slicing the Kaiju in two, sending the robot plummeting back to Earth. The question is, why has it taken the Jaeger pilots so long to figure out that a long, sharp blade is the most effective weapon against the Kaiju? Why weren't they using the sword all along? And now we've really started digging... explain why humans can't control Jaegers remotely again? Hmm.

World War Z – Flight of the living dead
Let's not get too carried away with accuracy in a movie about swarming zombies: we can accept that 'Zeke' is a credible threat and that the world is in danger. What we can't accept, however, is some of the shoddy plotting left over from previous drafts, that leads to one of the most unlikely conveniences in the film. I'm talking of course about the scene in which Brad Pitt boards a plane at Tel Aviv airport in Israel and winds up getting diverted to... Cardiff, Wales? That's not exactly the most sensible or likely flightplan in the case of an emergency: it's a 2,330 mile trip and one that flies over mainland Europe to boot. But no. Wales it is. Thanks, Damon Lindelof. Thanks for that.

Man Of Steel – It's always sunny in Metropolis
We can forgive Clark Kent's rubbish disguise of a pair of glasses. We can forgive CGI whales chilling out near an oil rig fire. We can even forgive Kevin Costner's totally unnecessary death for reasons of Extreme Drama. But the laws of the universe cannot be ignored. So when Superman flies to the Indian Ocean to do battle with the tentacled CGI terraforma thingy, it is daytime – yet the sun is also shining on the other side of the globe in Metropolis. Similarly, when Zod broadcasts his alien message to all of humanity, every city that receives it around the world gets it at night. Message to Zack Snyder: PLANETS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY.

Texas Chainsaw 3D – Timeline massacre
This is a big one. This 3D follow-up to the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre made bold claims about being a 'true sequel' to Tobe Hooper's 1974 classic, and the new movie does indeed begin immediately after the old movie ends. The Leatherface household is burned to the ground and little baby Heather is saved – but when the movie resumes in the present day (hint: everyone uses an iPhone), Heather seems to be around 20 years old. She should be almost 40. That's the kind of plot hole you'd think would be astonishingly obvious from the outset: someone needed to set a chainsaw on this script.

Star Trek Into Darkness – Giver of life
Another Damon Lindelof special, here, as Captain Kirk 'dies' after nobly sacrificing himself to save the Enterprise. However, while randomly injecting a Tribble with Khan's blood sample – as you do – Bones discovers that said plasma is a life-giving elixir and has Spock hunt down his dangerous and elusive enemy in order to secure more of his claret.

[Ridiculous movie resurrections]

Never mind Khan's 72 mates, who are currently lying prone in the Enterprise's storage bay, full of equally delicious blood. And never mind that Bones has basically just found the secret to eternal life. And never mind that oh dear I've gone crosseyed.

Fast & Furious 6 – The endless runway
Do not try and bring logic to a Fast & Furious party: you will be turned away at the door. Physics? Pah. Vin Diesel cares not for physics: you'll find more realistic car chases in Mario Kart. Even bearing that in mind, surely even the most souped-up petrol sniffers must have wondered exactly how long that runway in the final scene at the airport was. The 12-minute sequence sees Vin and friends bombing after an Antonov cargo plan at top speed, yet they never seem to be in danger of running out of asphalt. Empire worked out that the runway would have to be 28 miles long to accommodate the vehicular horseplay. FYI, the world's longest paved runway is only 3.4 miles long.

Iron Man 3 – Suit up
Putting Tony Stark in peril is difficult when he's encased in armour, so writers Drew Pearce and Shane Black made the smart move of divorcing Robert Downey Jr from his Iron Man get-up to increase the tension. It works brilliantly, forcing Tony to use his smarts instead of his suit, until the final act when he summons literally dozens of amazing and highly deadly prototype Iron Man models that have just been sitting under his Malibu mansion this whole time, gathering dust. Did he forget they were there? Were they awaiting a system upgrade? Whatever Tony's excuse, it feels a tad cheeky to overplay the importance of his knackered Mark 42 suit when Stark had such a fully stocked wardrobe back home all along.

The Wolverine – Random access memories
Audiences tried as hard as humanly possible to forget execrable prequel dirge X-Men Origins: Wolverine, botching the birth of cinema's most badass superhero with some nonsense involving Ryan Reynolds, government experiments and, er, Will.i.am. Fittingly, there was also the small matter of adamantium amnesia bullets: the crappy plot device that conveniently wiped Wolvie's memory, returning him to the blank, angry slate we met in the original X-Men. Fast-forward to 2013's canonical prequel/sequel though, and Wolverine clearly still remembers old man Yashida from his World War II days. Cuh. If you can't trust an amnesia bullet to do the job, what can you trust?

Thor: The Dark World – You and whose army?
We'll forgive the early fumble by Christopher Ecclestone's angry elf Malekith when he resolutely fails to end the universe (despite standing right next to the macguffin that would allow him to do so) and we'll even ignore the magic non-existent Tube train that takes Thor from Charing Cross to Greenwich in three stops. But the real headscratcher in The Dark World is why in the final showdown, when the galaxy is facing imminent extinction, Thor is left to fight Malekith all by himself, despite the fact that Asgard has a huge and mighty army just waiting to be teleported into action? Maybe they were on strike.

Olympus Has Fallen – Lax security
It's impossible to watch Olympus Has Fallen with all of your critical faculties fully engaged, because – well, it's ridiculous. Case in point: after saving the President's life but failing to save the First Lady in a bridge accident, Gerard Butler's US Army Ranger doesn't set foot in the White House for a year and a half, only returning once terrorists take over. The Americans take national security super-seriously, right? So it's a little strange that no one changed any of the lock codes at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in his 18-month absence. We bet the codes were 1-2-3-4 as well.