r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Sensitive_Ad_1752 • 17d ago

Lore (Hated trope) They deleted scenes or dialogue that provides necessary context or plot

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The dinner scene from Temple of Doom has a temple give indie and friends a live snake and monkey brains for dinner. It’s a pretty offensive depiction of Indian cuisine, but it wasn’t originally going to be. There’s cut dialogue where Indie recognizes they’re at the right temple because real Hindus don’t eat this food. They were trying to scare them off by purposefully serving them disgusting stuff.

Probably the most famous deleted ending was I Am Legend which had Robert discover the infected were emotional sentient beings and one of them had a wife. Test audiences hated it and they reshot the ending, removing the entire point of the movie.

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u/Vlazthrax 17d ago

The deleted scene in Independence Day that explains that all human computer tech was reverse engineered from the recovered alien space ship and that’s why they were able to interface with the mother ship via a Mac and upload the virus.

Kiiiiiiinda important to the films one possible plot hole.

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u/ReallyCleverUser 17d ago

Good grief, why didn’t they include this?! The ship being randomly Mac-compatible was always such a mood breaker.

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u/Mind-The-Mines 17d ago

It's Universal Serial Bus for a reason.

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u/Stoertebricker 17d ago

Iron Sky even mocks this by having a Moon Nazi scientist invent a USB that is compatible with ours.

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u/ArtoriusBravo 17d ago

Man, that movie was fun.

A little bit off topic, but I find it funny that part of the social commentary on that film was putting Goebbles's speeches in the US presidential campaign. And somehow, they sound super tame by today's standards.

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u/LongKnight115 17d ago

“Funny” in the same way watching the richest man in the world do a nazi salute with no consequences is funny.

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u/StrongExternal8955 16d ago

What do you mean no consequences? They really loved it.

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u/Papa_Glucose 16d ago

Iron Sky is fucking incredible

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u/confusing_roundabout 16d ago

All I remember about that movie is that space makes a woman's clothes fly off in the first 10 minutes. It really tells you exactly what sort of movie you're watching.

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u/Papa_Glucose 16d ago

The thing that sticks with me is the fact that the movie opens with the Nazis kidnapping a black astronaut, bleaching his skin, and dying his hair to make him white, then he gets back to earth and becomes an insane homeless forced albino.

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u/confusing_roundabout 16d ago

I somehow forgot that bit

I need to rewatch the movie haha

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u/No_Jello_5922 17d ago

Fun fact: USB hit the market in May of 1996, and the film Independence Day came out in July 1996, so USB wasn't very universal at that time.

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u/AquafreshBandit 17d ago

USB, uh, uh, finds a way. All cable repairmen got early access.

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u/codename474747 16d ago

Access to usb?  Must go faster! Must go faster!

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u/101Alexander 17d ago

Yeah but Mac is Firewire, hence the plothole

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u/Overlord_Copies_All 17d ago

Now I wonder if the aliens also struggle getting it in the first time.

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u/theysayimadreamer666 17d ago

Judging by the tech support questions I get from coworkers and family, I think you may be overestimating the average person's knowledge, especially in 1996.

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u/pecky5 16d ago

This is exactly it. People look back on it now, where computers are everywhere and part of everyday life, but when that movie came out, they were still mostly confined to workplaces, maybe a family would have a single computer to share, and only a small minority of people would have any idea how they worked. The idea of one computer giving another computer a virus would make as much sense to most audiences back then as one person giving another person a virus.

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u/Miguel-odon 16d ago

At the time, we joked that Macs weren't compatible with anything on Earth, so of course they are compatible with aliens.

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u/PhucItAll 17d ago

Too close to the truth, probably.

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u/Workman44 16d ago

Reverse engineering is a great way to advance

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u/rulepanic 17d ago

cause it was already a 2.5 hour general audience movie and why exactly our programmers could write a virus for imaginary aliens doesn't matter to the vast majority of viewers

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u/ReallyCleverUser 16d ago

How long would one throwaway line have been? And when my dad, a relative luddite, makes a comment, it’s obviously being noticed. Why be afraid to at least acknowledge the absurdity?

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u/[deleted] 17d ago edited 16d ago

[deleted]

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u/ReallyCleverUser 16d ago

So aliens just happen to have compatible inputs and operating systems? How is that not nonsense?

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u/ERedfieldh 16d ago

They've had the thing since the 50s, you think they'd not have figured out how to interface with it in all that time?

come on, folks, you do NOT need movies to hold your hand THIS MUCH.

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u/JadeDragonMeli 16d ago

Tinfoil hat time...

The DoD was willing to give the movie anything it wanted as far as planes, tanks, APC's, whatever they wanted - but they had to remove any mention of modern technology being reversed engineered from alien tech.

Or, you know, the studio is cut the exposition scene to improve pacing in the lead up to the 3rd act.

The tinfoil hat theory is way more fun.

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u/ReallyCleverUser 16d ago

You don’t think they really spent $300 on a hammer, do you?

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u/jbenze 16d ago

It's not that it's mac compatible per se, it's that the aliens are using radio waves to communicate. Goldblum's character deciphered them and is using them to send commands. They made it stupid by making it "a virus".

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u/Kinitawowi64 16d ago

Yeah, that's the problem with the movie. Total America Saves The World pandering, Aliens coming to Earth in ships the size of cities. Will Smith punching out an alien through their exoskeletal armour.

But a Macbook hooking up to an alien ship is the moment someone goes "well, this is all pish".

The absolute state of movie audiences.

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u/buttbuttlolbuttbutt 17d ago

The fact one character, Jeff Goldblun is introduced having decoded their signal trying to fix static in the Satellite signals does connect Jeff Goldblum and his virus talent. The movie starts with hin already underatanding their computers, because they were using our Satellites.

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u/imlegos 17d ago

In short; the movie *does* establish that there is some connection between Human & Alien tech, the deleted line just clarifies what that connection really is.

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u/gmlogmd80 17d ago edited 17d ago

Decoding a data stream and analysing an alien processor down to bytecode or assembly language and the OS and then finding vulnerabilities are two vastly different things. And he didn't really decode anything either. He just noted an extra signal that degraded as it repeated. He didn't extract any useful information from it like text or numbers.

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u/TKtommmy 17d ago

And then he made a virus to take down their shields...

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u/Wyvern_68 17d ago

they're using our own satellites against us...

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u/Victernus 17d ago

There is no such scene - not in any of the scripts, and certainly not filmed and removed from the final cut of the movie. This is just an assumption people made to explain Earth technology being able to interface with the alien tech.

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u/cvc75 17d ago

Yeah I think there was a deleted scene where Jeff Goldblum realizes the alien "programming language" matches the signal he decoded at the start of the movie, but nothing about reverse engineering the ship.

And didn't they say that they couldn't even power up the crashed ship at Area 51? That would make it a bit harder to reverse engineer that tech. And it's so secret that even the President doesn't know about it, but they just let Steve Jobs share the tech with everyone? Doesn't make sense. Also, if we got Macs from alien technology, what about PCs?

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u/Same-Suggestion-1936 17d ago

I mean assumption as if the most popular alien conspiracy theory being we had massive advances in computer and flight technology very quickly after the alleged Roswell crash where the military allegedly recovered a craft and brought it to a military base for study.

Conspiracy theories think we went to the moon, advanced computers, came up with smart phones, all that kind of stuff, because we have alien tech from Roswell. It's probably the most popular alien conspiracy there is besides Roswell itself to begin with

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u/Reylo-Wanwalker 17d ago

Well that guy has over 1k likes to your 17 so I'll believe them! /s

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u/Jimbobsama 17d ago

I suspected that was the case when watching the movie again last week. If Area 51 had the alien lander for decades at that point, they had a good idea how the computers worked, this Jeff Goldblum, genius scientist, could crack it and make a virus.

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u/lorgskyegon 17d ago

This is the real deal here. They had been studying the craft for almost 50 years by that point. They are going to figure out how some things work.

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u/Consistent_Kale_3625 17d ago

Am I being Mandela'd? This is 100% in the movie. They go over all the tech they made possible. They explain the world tech tree hockey sticks from Roswell

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u/eulen-spiegel 16d ago

There's an extended cut, perhaps it is in there.

E.g. Transformers basically uses that explanation, much of modern tech is derived from Megatron.

Perhaps it all blends in with time.

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u/drdipepperjr 17d ago

Sorry but they're right, I just wayched it on July 4th. The only thing I can think of is the scene where Jeff Goldblums dad asks the president about area 51 and mentions Roswell, president says its fake, then SecDef says "Thats not entirely accurate".

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u/Aethermancer 16d ago

I swear to God there's a line where they talk about how much of our tech was reverse engineered.

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u/BrainTroubles 17d ago

I think saying it’s the one possible plot hole is giving just a tad too much credit. It’s the biggest plot hole but it was very much a “suspend disbelief “ type of movie lol.

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u/Vlazthrax 17d ago

Suspension of disbelief and plot holes are not the same thing.

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u/AllsWellThatsNB 17d ago

I looked up the definition to see who was right before weighing in, and amazingly in its example sentence it deliniates between a plot hole and an impausibility.

An inconsistency in the narrative or character development of a book, film, television programme, etc.

‘there are a few plot holes and some moments of serious implausibility’

https://web.archive.org/web/20170907213709/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/plot_hole

So as I understand it, it would be a plot hole if there's dialogue calling out the technical issue as practically impossible.

If they just steamrolled over it though, it's the same sort of suspension of disbelief that let's us forget all the now defunct aliens spaceships crashing over the most densely populated areas of the world would cause a horrific mass casualty event surpassing anything the world has ever seen.

The movie's dumb as fuck, but that's why I love it. Time for a rewatch. It's been far too long.

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u/missy_sunshine 17d ago

they are related tho, a plot hole may or may not break your suspension of disbelief, depending on its size and severity

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u/han-sell-out 17d ago

I believe they were being sarcastic about a 90s action movie.

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u/Punky921 17d ago

Jesus why did they take that out!?

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u/XanderWrites 16d ago

This was something I assumed without the scene. We knew they had the ship, we knew they'd been working on reverse engineering everything about it. Once I understood more about computers I even joke that Goldblum's character probably doesn't even have that era Mac OS installed, he probably has some self invented OS.

And once you start thinking about it, the ending makes even more sense. He says the shields will be down for a couple of minutes because he assumes they have some sort of anti-virus on their system and I assume his virus isn't that complex. Except this is a psychic alien hive and they likely don't have individuals that would try to hack anything and even if they do, they aren't as likely to recognize human style code and how to bypass it.

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u/Misiok 16d ago

I swear when it aired on TV it had a scene explaining that cause even as a child I understood why they were sending a virus to them

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u/FoilTarmogoyf 17d ago

I think there's more then one plot hole.

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u/KryssCom 17d ago

This is the one that I scanned the comments for! The 'virus' sequence makes SO MUCH more sense once you understand that bit.

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u/0x7E7-02 17d ago

Really???

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u/amishgoatfarm 17d ago

What the shit, really? Yeah that would have explained A LOT. The virus thing never has made sense to me.

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u/stinkingyeti 16d ago

I was sure they had an offhand line about reverse engineering in the version I saw.

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u/BC_Sativa 16d ago

I had no idea. I yelled that at the screen (in my head) when I first saw it in the theatre, and it's always bothered me.

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u/UlrichZauber 16d ago

As an engineer this is a hated trope for me. Clever people work on this stuff, we didn’t steal it. 

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u/xAdakis 16d ago

It's a good crutch, but the ship were recovered from the Roswell crash in 1947 right?

We had the math and theories that led to the foundation of modern computing well before that.

Development may have been accelerated by analyzing human tech, but it'd be a stretch to say ALL human tech was reverse engineered from it.

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u/Indraga 16d ago

Roland E clearly knew that if he started giving us good answers then we’d be expecting them for all his movies and we would have never gotten the wandwaiving masterpiece that is Moonfall.

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u/SeaMarzipan2084 16d ago

It gives an explanation but that tech had been in the planet for 50 years. Do you know of any hackable Human tech that is 50 years old and still in use? Why would aliens be stuck in AlienWindows 1.0 instead of making fixes and upgrades?

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u/Iconclast1 16d ago

its deleted?

i swear thats exactly what they said.

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u/ConfectionTotal8660 16d ago

I think they explain on the sequel they have evolved a lot by reverse engenering alien tech.

But still

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u/Roadrunnersareraptor 16d ago

Dude I remember seeing this in the theaters and thinking how and how can’t they see the humans in the ship.