In books and film, a MacGuffin is a device, object, or even a person that exists solely to start the plot of a story and keep the plot in motion, even if the object ends up having no real significance. The term was originally coined by famed director Alfred Hitchcock circa 1939 and has since become recognized as an actual term by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. When done right, a MacGuffin can captivate an audience and keep viewers interested in the narrative, in the case of MacGuffins such as the Death Star plans in Star Wars or the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
However, not all MacGuffins can be perfectly written, and a lazy MacGuffin can seriously impact the quality of a movie. Why should someone care about a movie if the central plot device is terrible? Some of these central devices are so bad that they have gone down in infamy just for how useless they are. Here are ten of the most infamous movie MacGuffins of all time.
10 Missing Map Piece — Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Disney
On the surface, the search for the missing map piece to find where Luke Skywalker was hiding in The Force Awakens has nothing wrong with it. It moves the plot forward and helps to bring all of our characters, new and old alike, together to rally around one specific cause. However, when the missing piece is finally discovered, that’s where the significance behind the whole entire search falls apart.
Throughout the movie, everyone’s favorite droid R2D2 is in low-power mode, and doesn’t awaken until the end of the film. It is then revealed that R2 was the one with the missing piece the entire time, which makes all the searching for the missing piece just feel pointless. Just think of all the trouble that could have been avoided if R2 wasn’t in his low-power mode. The Force Awakens isn’t entirely ruined by this reveal, but it definitely hinders it.
9 The Aether — Thor: The Dark World
Marvel Studios
As viewers eventually learned, the Aether in Thor: The Dark World is actually the Reality Stone, which the main villain in the film, Malekith, uses to darken the universe. Yes, the entire plot of Thor: The Dark World is driven by a device that’s used to make everywhere eternally nighttime. That fact by itself is enough to make the Aether land on this list, let alone the forgettable villain behind it as well. A large amount of Marvel Cinematic Universes use an Infinity Stone as a MacGuffin, but the Aether is by far the worst offender of them all.
8 Loom of Fate — Wanted
Universal Pictures
For a movie that’s all about secret societies and assassins with incredible abilities, you would think that they would have some kind of high-tech way of finding their targets, right? Well, in Wanted, these assassins are given their targets from a giant, magical loom. These assassins use a machine that was invented all the way back in Ancient China to predict who they should hunt down, which is such a silly premise that the movie suffers from it. This MacGuffin in the form of a massive textile machine forces an assassin action/thriller movie to be dictated by a tool that just makes no sense to be using. Nearly any other tool or device could have been used to drive the plot of this film forward, but they went with something that will now live on in infamy, especially with a name as ridiculous as the Loom of Fate.
7 Dead Man’s Chest — Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
Walt Disney Studios
Despite being a wildly popular franchise that has spawned five movies over the course of its existence, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest still has one of the most infamous MacGuffins in recent memory. The titular Dead Man’s Chest is the centerpiece of the movie, with multiple people hunting it down to gain control of Davy Jones’s heart. Control the heart, and you control the Kraken. Control the Kraken, and you control the sea. Not only that, but the chest is the key to defeating Davy Jones while also somehow being the way to break the curse that Davy Jones has on him. There is just so much going on with the Dead Man’s Chest that it can be too much to keep up with, which is why it has made its way onto this list and why it will probably remain on this list for the forseeable future.
6 Bodhi Tree — A Thousand Words
DreamWorks Pictures Saturn
Taking away the voice of an iconic comedian such as Eddie Murphy can’t really help your movie in any way, and the Bodhi tree in A Thousand Words is to blame for that. Receiving a whopping zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes, A Thousand Words follows a smooth-talking literary agent Jack McCall, played by Eddie Murphy, when a Bodhi tree mysteriously appears in his backyard one night. Jack soon realizes that for every word he speaks, a leaf falls off of the tree.
The rest of the plot is driven by the tree and Jack trying to get through the rest of the film without losing the rest of the leaves on the tree. The plot is so ridiculous and the film was so poorly received that it makes the Bodhi tree in the film by far one of the worst MacGuffins to be put on film. A tree that’s magically linked with every word that Murphy’s character says, really?
5 Rabbit’s Foot — Mission: Impossible III
Paramount Pictures
One of the most obvious MacGuffins in the simplest sense of the word, we don’t even know what the Rabbit’s Foot does for most of Mission: Impossible III as it is only there to move the plot of the film along. All we know is that the villain of the film, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, wants it, and Ethan Hunt and company must do whatever they can to stop it from falling into the wrong hands. The film itself is entertaining enough, but the plot is carried along by such an obvious MacGuffin that it can seriously hurt a viewer’s enjoyment of the film. Luckily, the Mission: Impossible films were able to learn from their mistakes and have turned out some truly heart-racing action movies since the disappointment that was the Rabbit’s Foot.
4 Matrix of Leadership — Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
The Transformers series is no stranger to MacGuffins, but the Matrix of Leadership in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is the worst of them all by far. Not only does the Matrix of Leadership feel like a rehash of the Allspark from the movie before it, it has a pretty ridiculous name as well, even if that name was used in the old cartoons that the film was inspired by. The Matrix is an artifact passed from one Autobot leader to another and can even bring back Autobots from the dead. The only problem is that it was barely even used for that reason, but it was still made the focal point of the entire movie to push the plot along.
3 Crystal Skulls — Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Okay, we all know how bad Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was. Coming out nearly 20 years after a movie as great as The Last Crusade, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull had big shoes to fill both as a movie and with its MacGuffin, as the Holy Grail is one of the best and most iconic MacGuffins to make it onto the big screen. Unfortunately, the Crystal Skulls don’t even come close to the same level of impact as the Holy Grail, and the Indiana Jones franchise went from one of the best MacGuffins to one of the absolute worst. Regardless of everything else wrong with this movie, the Crystal Skulls don’t even make sense half the time with what they do or the kinds of powers they can grant. This MacGuffin would have been better off staying in the writer’s room.
2 Microwave Emitter — Batman Begins
Warner Bros.
Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is widely acclaimed for its grounded take on the Caped Crusader as well as for its various villains throughout each film. Joker, Scarecrow, Two-Face, Bane, Ra’s al Ghul, and more help bring this trilogy to life along with Christian Bale’s incredible performance as Bruce Wayne. While this trilogy is grounded in reality much more than any other Batman adaptation before it, that doesn’t mean it’s without any silly super villain weapons. Specifically, a crazy weapon that serves as the MacGuffin for Batman Begins is the microwave emitter that Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows use to terrorize Gotham City.
The emitter was used to evaporate all of Gotham’s water supply and spread fear throughout the city. But if the emitter evaporates all water, wouldn’t it kill everyone in its vicinity as well? The microwave emitter is a silly footnote in an otherwise excellent series of movies.
1 Mother Boxes — Justice League
Finally, another infamous MacGuffin that was used to push a film’s plot into motion, we have the Mother Boxes from Justice League. Despite the fact that the film claims the Mother Boxes are really dangerous and have the capability to destroy planets, it never really feels like it. They don’t really feel that important at all, and feel like they exist solely to move the plot along. It’s a lazy piece of writing that never really feels truly believable in the film.
