History Headscratchers / Holes

* It's possible that after Kate robbed him and he got to Gods Thumb, a posse (possibly Trout and his cronies) who were tracking Kate found him afterwards; he might've even been the one to tell Trout what direction she was heading last he saw her.
* The book states that Stanley I "survived for seventeen days, before he was rescued by a couple of rattlesnake hunters." Also, he was said to be "insane" when they found him, spending more than a month in hospital, and not even he really knew what he meant by "finding refuge on God's thumb," so it's unlikely he would've been very helpful to Trout or his cronies.

** Zero being rejected by the group also means Pendanski not having to worry that picking on Zero would elicit a negative response from the others. If he's mean to someone like Armpit or Squid, the entire group is liable to turn on him, but they don't care if he picks on Zero, so he can use Zero as an outlet for his less benevolent impulses while maintaining a relatively good relationship with the others through his fake-nice persona.

** It's just too much ground to cover; you can't dig up the whole lake. Using machinery would only be useful if she knew ''where'' to look, and that's the bigger issue.

** Keep in mind there used to be a lake there. What Stanley and Zero were climbing was not just the part that Sam would have encountered, but also everything that was underwater before the lake dried up. It's entirely possible that the difficult part of the climb was in the part that was submurged, rather than something Sam had to contend with.

** Stanley and Zero had a much harder climb than Sam would have, because Sam was going out there while there was still a lake, so he would have been first arriving at the water level. Stanley and Zero, meanwhile, were essentially starting from the bottom of the lake and therefore had to climb up the part that would have been submerged in the lake, which Sam didn't have to do.

* It's possible that after Kate robbed him and he got to Gods Thumb, a posse (possibly Trout and his cronies),who were tracking Kate found him afterwards, he might of even been the one to tell Trout what direction she was heading last he saw her.

** Most likely it never occurred to her. A simple metal detector could help, but there is still a lot of ground to cover. Covering the entire desert with imaging technology would take a lot of resources,and would make people wonder what she was up to. Also, she had no way of knowing what exactly was in the box or what the box made of.

** Zero being rejected by the group also means Pendanski not having to worry that picking on Zero would elicit a negative response from the others. If he's mean to someone like Armpit or Squid, the entire group is liable to turn on him, but they don't care if he picks on Zero, so he can use Zero as an outlet for his less benevolent impulses and still stay in the good graces of the others.

*** Stanley didn't know about Kate Barlow having lived in the area yet. He only put it together that she might have buried treasure in this desert after he started teaching Zero. As for telling X-Ray to not reveal the tube until tomorrow, it's more ambiguous in the book, but in the film, it reads like he starts to object to X-Ray getting the day off when "your hole's already dug", and then when X-Ray reacts, he covers it with "why not wait until tomorrow" because he doesn't want X-Ray to realize what he was ''actually'' about to say. (Either that or he figured he could earn more social capital by giving X-Ray the additional tip.)

*** Stanley didn't know about Kate Barlow having lived in the area yet. He only put it together that she might have buried treasure in this desert after he started teaching Zero. As for telling X-Ray to not reveal the tube until tomorrow, it's more ambiguous in the book, but in the film, it reads like he starts to object to X-Ray getting the day off when "your hole's already dug", and then when X-Ray reacts, he covers it with "why not wait until tomorrow" because he doesn't want X-Ray to realize what he was ''actually'' about to say.

[[folder:Richard Kelly script]]
* What was he thinking with this thing? He changes Stanley's name to Stanley Kramer, makes the Warden a man, apparently there was some big nuclear weapon blast, they dug up dozens of human bones from the lake including Pendanski's dead wife, Stanley has a sister. He got rid of the family name altogether, naming his father Joe Kramer, and killing him and - seriously this troper is still stuck on the whole "nuclear weapon" thing. What about Holes says nuclear weapon?
** Okay, more things - there is a ton of God talk. Ampit is deeply religious and the Warden seems to be as well. Months pass. There's a narrator I can't tell who it is. Maybe Zero? Stanley becomes fastest digger at Camp Green Lake. The boys leave at one point because apparently it's a thing to sneak out on the supply truck, and like four of them go to a bar. Oh my god they're getting drunk, this troper is not okay. Oh my god Zero just said he's not a virgin, and Pendanski is hiring sex workers. There is a sex scene. That's - that's not what the title meant by "Holes".
** Zero killed someone. I repeat, Zero killed someone in self-defense. Stanley did something, too, but it hasn't said what yet. Camp Green Lake is run by the military. Instead of finding Kate's lipstick tube, they find a metal hammer-looking thing, and then eventually hit a gas tank of what used to be a gas station. They are burying Theo alive right now - and they just shot him! I think Stanley killed his sister, who was sick with... radiation poisoning?
** Now they're in a buried underground parking garage. This is kind of confusing actually. X-Ray might be dying. Stanley totally mercy killed his sister. X-Ray just died. Apparently the thing Stanley found started the war. The Warden was the reason Stanley went to Camp Green Lake. They throw the thingies in the ocean and it ends.
** There's no curse, no flashbacks, no Kate. I have never been so confused.
*** Whoa, whoa, sorry, what are you talking about? What is all of this? What script?
*** I just checked Trivia. A man named Richard Kelly was going to be the one to handle the movie's script but he made a metric ton of bizarre changes so the script writer was changed.
*** Upon some reading up on this, I see what you mean. But it seems to happen with quite a few adaptions, trying to make drastic changes so they seem darker or grittier - just look at films like ''Percy Jackson'' or the ''Super Mario Bros.'' movie. It's just a case of getting a clueless writer who wanted to change too many things. Just be thankful they realized this mistake and got rid of him.
*** Richard Kelly is a OneHitWonder who keeps trying to make the ''Film/DonnieDarko'' script over and over again. It's the same with ''Film/SouthlandTales''.
** He wanted to make his own version of the story; this isn't really a bad thing, as even though Holes did get a quality movie adaptation, most books won't, and in those cases it's much more interesting to see a new version of the story than a bad attempt at the same version. I know a lot of people like the Holes movie, but if it didn't exist, the book would still have the same story there, so it's not like anything is lost by an alternate version. Though, the amount of kids who would have watched the movie would have been a disaster.
[[/folder]]

*** Stanley didn't know about that about Kate Barlow having lived in the area yet. He only put it together that she might have buried treasure in this desert after he started teaching Zero. As for telling X-Ray to not reveal the tube until tomorrow, it's more ambiguous in the book, but in the film, it reads like he starts to object to X-Ray getting the day off when "your hole's already dug", and then when X-Ray reacts, he covers it with "why not wait until tomorrow" because he doesn't want X-Ray to realize what he was ''actually'' about to say.

** Stanley didn't know about that about Kate Barlow having lived in the area yet. He only put it together that she might have buried treasure in this desert after he started teaching Zero. As for telling X-Ray to not reveal the tube until tomorrow, he starts to object to X-Ray getting the day off when "your hole's already dug", and then pulls out "why not wait until tomorrow" because he doesn't want X-Ray to realize what he was ''actually'' about to say. (The movie makes this more explicit.)

[[folder: Rights to the money]]

** It's not waived, but time in the hospital would most likely still count as time served on his sentence, so it's a reprieve. Plus, he probably figured (correctly) that Camp Green Lake wouldn't keep a spot open for him indefinitely, so when he does get out, he probably wouldn't be able to be sent back (unless they happened to have an opening at that exact moment, which is unlikely given that "vacancies don't last long at Camp Green Lake") and would have to go to another facility instead; he may have gambled on the hope that he'd end up somewhere at least marginally better than Camp Green Lake.