One thing that critics of the movie got wrong (probably because they didn’t watch the movie again in a while) is why didn’t they call the police or call Kevin to go to a neighbor’s place.
The reason is all there in the movie. A tree fell over and knocked over the phone cables, killing the phone connection. Also they DID call the police, but the police in this movie are highly inept jackasses who don’t even realize that a string of burglaries is happening in the neighborhood by the Wet Bandits. They do send a cop over, who just knocks on the door for a bit and then leaves. Kevin does hear the knocking, but he is scared and hides beneath his bed. When the cops doesn’t get a response, he doesn’t bother further.
But yes, cell phones would change everything.
This meme is so old that iPhone had physical home buttons.
Who tf holds a phone like that?
Me
Im literally holding my phone like that… How do you hold your phone?
Why would Kevin be the one contacting his mother? He thought he magically wished them away because he thought they hated him and treated him like scum. He never tries to contact them because he thinks they’d all just disappeared.
That’s why his Christmas wish is to see his family again… even Buzz.
To be fair, he did go around the house calling “Mom, Dad?” If he had a phone before assuming he had wished them away he would probably try texting.
They also didn’t realize he was missing until after the plane took off
Good point
This is one case where I don’t think the cell phone would drastically change the movie. He’d still be home alone dealing with the thieves as his mom worked her way back. He just wouldn’t be in the dark as to why he is alone.
The mom figured out he was missing almost immediately, but then it was hard to get back because the airport was overloaded due to the holiday rush. That part would still apply today and cell phones don’t change it.
The biggest change would be Kevin could call 911 when he first found out Harry and Marv were planning to rob the house.
Post-9/11 airport procedures would probably have changed things, though.
Also could have her turn flight mode on when they board the plane.
Yeah, when he woke up he thought his wish for the family to disappear had come true. His mom still would have figured it out first while on the plane and tried to text him.
if she reached him it would ruin his mindset of being on his own, but there could have been an easy way to make him miss the text messages/calls for the same reason she couldn’t call him in the movie.
Like a tree knocks out the power to the cell tower
The horror movie classic
Or he, like me, just forgets to charge his phone, because he’s, like, 8 years old, and they took the chargers with them, so now he CAN’T charge it.
If my experience with my step kid at 8 is true, he lost his phone 2 months ago and now has a smartwatch because “if it’s attached to him, he can’t lose it, right?”.
The charger will be under seat cushions within an hour, even though there’s no reason to ever move it from the spot in his room.
That’s how it starts, and after he picks up a charger at the store, then the tower is down!
Or he broke his phone while exploring Buzz’s room.
or accidentally dropped it in liquid or down something.
I read this as keven messaged before the flight took off unlike the movie where mum was already in the air when she twigged
Also her phone should have been on flight mode if already in the air
They’re rich. She’d get texts in flight.
Data-based messaging apps are generally now. Like iMessage and WhatsApp.
In Home Alone, didn’t something take out the phone lines?
I’m sure “something” would happen in a modern version of Home Alone.
Most likely, the parents would be arrested when they got home.
If we’re thinking about how a 2020s Home Alone would go, I think the easiest and most logical way to give an explanation for why he didn’t call or text them (or the other way around) would be that they’d have taken his phone away. It’s been a while since I last saw it, but didn’t Kevin’s mom make him sleep in the attic for causing the pizza incident? If so, it would be probably make sense that she’d have taken his phone away as well.
Oh yeah that’s like so obvious.
Kevin! I’m sick of these outbursts! Give me your phone! It’s going in my carry-on and you’ll get it back on the plane!
Home Alone: Final Destination
When good homes go bad.
Cell towers go down along with fiber and coax.
No cell phones or internet in a modern home with no VHS, DVD or Blu-Ray. Kids don’t know about broadcast television. Just that his Fortnite/Minecraft/Roblox doesn’t work.
Family would come home to a feral child and a destroyed home after the kid goes batshit without supervision.
Any storm big enough to knock out cell towers would probably ground all flights.
But if internet would have gone down, how would he have done that thing where he used gunshot sounds from the TV to scare the burglars away?
Idk man…if it happened with my youngest…it depends on which Nintendo Switch is still in the house and which one came on the plane.
If it’s the “primary switch”, he’d be fine without Internet. We could probably leave for like 2 days and we’d come back and he’d not even realize we were gone and say he was hungry (while surrounded by junk food wrappers).
If it wasn’t…and the internet was out…Lord help us.
A tree fell on some lines I think
He literally orders pizza on the phone at one point, then uses that black and white movie to scam the pizza guy.
I’m pretty sure there’s a scene of the utility company working on the junction box.
Most movies from prior to 2010 would be drastically different if you included cell phones. It’s like saying Robin Hood would be different if you gave him a gun. Technology changes the ways we resolve conflicts.
What’s your take on Cellular from 2004 that starred Kim Basinger, Jason Statham, Chris Evans and Eric Christian Olsen?
Never seen it, but after watching the preview it’s one of the few movies from that era that recognize the ubiquity of cell phones. There was a period of time where Hollywood ignored their existence with rare exceptions. Then a period of time where they had to come up with some excuse why cell phones don’t work. Then they finally started working them into the plot. My 2010 date was more about all movies after around that time acknowledged cell phones and don’t try to “break” them as a tool for characters to use. Disaster movies obviously the exception as it makes sense cell phone towers would be destroyed or circuits overloaded.
People miss notifications all the time, though, so some lack of communication can still be had.
you could still have the whole robin hood with modern day guns.
most stories can be adapted to different settings.
west side story is based on Romero and Juliet
the Matrix was heavily inspired by the jesus story
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Wasn’t Robin Hood more an archer than a swordsman?
Give him an automatic gun, then maybe.
Kevin was in trouble at the start of the film. They could have very easily had his mom take his phone away before sending him to his room.
After arriving in Paris, Kevin’s mom frantically calls his phone… only for a suitcase to start ringing. Oops!
Yes but they wouldn’t have slept in since their phones’ alarms would still work, and they wouldn’t have forgotten Kevin.
Mom forgot she turned her notifications to silent to watch a movie the night before. Mom got no sleep and hit snooze. Mom forgot to charge her phone and it died. Dad tripped over the charging cable and knocked it out. Power went out and the phone didn’t charge so it died. Heck, you could even have a carrier fuck up maintenance and knock out cell service across the country for their customers.
Unless everyone in the family has the same thing happen to all of their phones they’ll still wake up everyone else.
That family in particular would have banked everything on mom. I know families (plural) where mom will wake everyone up when it is their turn for the bathroom. And families share cell providers, so a major vendor shitting the bed would most likely take out all of them. That happens more than it should. Same with power and no charge. It seems like everyone’s phone is on empty by the end of the evening. This is at least as probable as nobody’s alarm clock having a battery backup. They all had them in the 90s, unless you were using a mechanical alarm clock, whick would have worked. At any rate, the alarm clock fail was just one of many problems here. This is a family who managed to not notice one of their kids miss an international flight.
The mom uses location data to confirm everyone is in the same place, and everyone is too busy staring at their phones to notice anything. The entire movie is now an allegory for the risks of doomscrolling.
They all were gifted bluetooth headsets for the trip, but the headsets never disconnect and the alarms went through the headsets which weren’t loud enough.
Or Kevin is eight years old and his parents reasonably assume he is too young to have a cell phone.
Sadly I’ve seen toddlers glued to phones these days
Usually parents handing over thier phone to shut the kid up while adults are talking/shopping.
Can you really call them parents if they outsource all the parenting to an iPad?
Just like our generation was raised by televisions they’re just smaller and portable. Now with brainrot!
So he calls the parents’ cell phones from the house phone.
What’s a house phone?
j/k
It’s what happens when you have a living house, and you buy it its own cell phone.
The house phone that didn’t work because the phone lines were down?
Oh yeah!
Get… THE FUCK… outta here…!
*stares angrily*
I don’t buy it. Kevin wakes up after his parents are already on the plane, after they’ve been told to put their device in airplane mode, so they still wouldn’t know until they touch down in Paris and turn their phones back on, to which everything else can be the same since they were stuck due to the weather.
He could however call the police. Only reason that wasn’t possible in the movie was because the phone lines were down (despite showing Kevin ordering a pizza over the phone, ignoring the fact they specifically pointed out the phone line problem at the beginning of the film).
Didn’t they show a repair crew fixing the lines between the outage at the beginning and when he orders pizza?
Maybe, but it still doesn’t really make sense since he could have called the police after the line was fixed.
Phones are irrelevant. No matter how rushed they are, and even though they’d probably have TSA PreCheck, they’d still be slowed down enough by post-911 security to count heads. And the very fact Kevin’s not getting into trouble would be a red flag for Mom.
Funny how I only realised that airports really were like that until 9/11 about two years ago. I always had dismissed it as typical movie unrealism.
They would have missed their flight if the story played out today.
Yep, no more reaching the airport at the last second and being hurried onto a plane.
“Sorry, you didn’t show up two hours early - there’s no way we’re letting you on”.
I don’t think I’ve ever actually turned on airplane mode, even before widespread in-plane WiFi
Can I enquire as to why not?
Because it’s pointless, every aircraft flying has everything important that is susceptible to interference, shielded to prevent exactly that. On top of that, every phone you buy in the US through “official” channels is intensively tested by the FCC before it can go to market to ensure its radios are operating within spec and won’t cause interference with other things, like airplane instruments.
Are you from Newark?
Lol nah
I know OP says “we just boarded”, so there would be signal. But, as soon a the plane gains altitude, there’s no more signal.
Some planes offer free wifi or free connection to messaging services now, so they could know before reaching their destination.
I think I saw something about this where he could have called a local number but not through to the police station if it was further away.
Remember that they were flying first class, today they would have inflight wifi, and looking at the messages, they have blue bubbles, meaning iMessage, which works over WiFi.
So they could get in touch, the mom could message a family friend to help out, and it would have been resolved easily.
Androids RCS and most apps also work over wifi.
Quite a few classic movies would not be a thing if cell phones were in the universe at the time.
Not to mention the vast majority of Seinfeld
Imagine if E.T. had a cell phone
Lands in Germany, no reception.
the restaurant scenes in Pulp Fiction and Falling Down.
I know they are rich and all, but I wouldn’t give an 8 year old a cell phone. With homes as they are today there probably wouldn’t be a land line. The movie is mostly the same, some of the boobie traps are slightly different is all.
I suppose once they get off the plane and turn off airplane mode they will get a doorbell notification about someone at the door and see it is Kevin looking around. Still the same though, can even have this be the moment they realize they left him behind.
the plot hole could be patched by him waking up after the plane takes off
You don’t get it, Home Alone is a prequel to Damian and The Omen movies. Kevin was trying to kill people, and the movie is about how his joy made him susceptible to human feelings. He’s like a failed demonic creature who couldn’t handle earths pleasures. It’s a commentary on Virgil.
Except that the alarm got killed by the phone’s battery optimizer. I am using a 2011 smartphone as an alarm because of this. But Poco and Ulefone are definitely not the highest quality brands.
