Plot holes


Help me count the plot holes in the film.

1. Grace claims she can't swim, yet she said she and her "friends" were supposed to leave some other girl behind by swimming away.
b) Falling down a cliff immediately taught her how to swim?

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1 and b? Interesting choice.

The girls had a boat. You saw it going away from the island as the boys boat approached the island.

She did not learn how to swim. She treaded water for a second or two, then Howie grabbed her and carried her to shore.

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I would be more on the side of the OP in that usually you only learn to tread water when you have swimming lessons. Perhaps she had enough to tread but not to swim, but that's kind of unlikely since they don't usually teach you treading before breathing, floating, and then strokes. I was surprised she was able to tread water or even knew how.


I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.

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"...and carried her to shore."

Whereupon, moments later, their clothes are completely dry!

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She does end up unconscious on beach. Best explanation is that she drowned the first night and the boy died trying to save her: the story is from the perspective of their oxygen-starved brains desperate to have had a life

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iii) They fell into the water with the camera but still got perfect pictures

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[deleted]

Actually, they weren't perfect at all. Set in 1984, these would have been photos from color negatives. And the prints show exactly the kind of water-marking and discoloration and other artifacts that would result from a dunking. I thought it was a "well done" bit of attention to detail to dummy-down the photos.

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These are potential nitpicks only of the movie; the whole escape-into-the-water scene wasn't in the book at all, just the part about the kids realizing the creepy deputy had left his keys in the ignition, and then the mother hearing from the police woman that the kids stole the vehicle and ran over the guy's foot.

The book includes no mention of any camera either; the kids just kept an inventory of things borrowed and taken on that notepad. I would also note that the old analogue cameras of the 1980s were built a bit tougher and had fewer delicate mechanisms than the digital cameras nowadays with all their circuitry and preview screens. How well the film roll would survive the camera's being dunked I don't know; I'm not familiar with the make and model of the camera they were using. I do know of a particular disposable camera made in the 1990s that was capable of taking pictures underwater without ruining the film, however. It may be that while the camera itself was a dead loss (rusted out soon after their little dip), they were able to salvage the film roll. It's also possible somebody had taught the boy that he should keep a camera wrapped up in a plastic bag in his pocket when he wasn't using it, especially if he'd been given a camera to use when he first went to camp. (He did seem to know how to use and care for that camera he found in the cottage right from the start.)

As for the girl who didn't know how to swim treading water... the pond at the bottom of the cliff didn't look all that deep, and though the girl didn't know any proper techniques, it doesn't generally take much intelligence to figure out that thrashing around tends to keep you afloat. She had the boy to help her find her footing too. As for how her friends ditched her in the first place, it's fair to assume that when they went skinny-dipping, she merely went wading wherever they were swimming. In fact, that might be how they ditched her: by swimming across the deeper part of a pond and taking off with all the clothes and things before she could make her way around the shallow parts to them.

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[deleted]

They were gonna use a boat and she actually never learned how to swim as far as we saw. When they were in the woods at the end she actually asked himnagain if he would teach her how to swim

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