2. The Whole Opening Plane Sequence, The Dark Knight Rises
The first big plot hole in the last (and arguably least) of Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy occurs during the opening sequence: in fact, it could be said to BE the opening sequence. It starts off pretty brilliantly with the CIA flying a captured nuclear physicist, Leonid Pavel, out of a conflict zone somewhere in Eastern Europe; along with Pavel, they also have some hooded mercenaries whom the lead operative interrogates for information on a mysterious mercenary named Bane. To cut a long story short, one of the mercenaries is revealed to be Bane himself  and he claims that being captured was all part of his plan (isn’t it always?), and he then proceeds with a daring aerial kidnapping.
A second plane, a C-130 Hercules transport, descends. Bane’s men exit it, attaching cables to the CIA’s smaller Bandeirante turboprop. That done, the villain’s Hercules pulls up, tearing the wings from the Bainderante and leaving it dangling, nose-down. Inside the CIA plane, Bane wreaks havoc on his captors; meanwhile, his men on the outside blow off the plane’s tail section, creating a vertical chute. Bane grasps Pavel to him as one of his fellow mercenaries is pumped full of the physicist’s blood and left to make sure the number of dead tallies with the plane’s manifest. The Hercules releases the Bainderante as Bane and Pavel are hauled up and free of the wreckage, which falls to the ground far below some distance away from the tail and wings.
And therein lies the problem.
What happened to the CIA plane is obviously not an accident but a carefully coordinated attack, and you’d assume any crash examiner would pretty quickly be able to determine that. Furthermore, the fanatic they leave behind as a substitute for Pavel shouldn’t hold up under scrutiny: he still, after all, contains quite a lot of his own blood, which would presumably contaminate Pavel’s infusion, not to mention a different set of teeth, with The Agency’s file on Pavel presumably containing dental records. The whole plan is contingent on making the CIA believe Pavel is dead: the mercenaries already have him in their custody, they’ve got no reason to hand Pavel over to The Agency other than to fake his death. Pavel is apparently a high value target, so presumably the CIA would want to make completely sure that he’s dead, especially given that he was apparently killed along with a whole Agency team in a terrorist attack by unknown forces. You’d think someone might’ve put the pieces together.
However, later in the film when Pavel appears as a captive during Bane’s address from Gotham Stadium, the US military seem pretty surprised to learn Pavel’s still alive (well, till Bane snaps his neck). Which begs the question, why fake his death at all if you’re just going to actually kill him a few months later on national television?
It’s hard to say who comes off as more incompetent when all is said and done: Bane and his mercenaries or the US Intelligence Service.
