Awesome But Impractical / Film

"A "cool" tool with severe drawbacks that limit widespread use."

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Films — Animation

• Arthur Christmas: Grandsanta's old sleigh Evie is equipped with many great-looking gadgets. However, it is also outdated and too difficult to handle in the modern era.
  • Steve's ship, the S1, is a rare aversion as while it's very high tech, the many layers of technology prove to be very useful.
• A lot of Flint Lockwood's inventions from the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs films fall into this category, including but not limited to:
  • Spray-On-Shoes: A can of whatever that can create shoes on your feet and never have to worry about them being untied. The impracticality? There's no known way of trying to get them off.
  • Rat Birds: Interesting looking creatures with a rat body and bird wings. The fact that both creatures can be troublesome for humans makes them probably more trouble than they're worth.
• The Incredibles: One of the more well-known lines from the first movie: "NO CAPES!" While the capes look impressive and add a distinctive flair to heroics, every hero shown in the montage never thought about having detachable capes and were swiftly dragged to their deaths and neither did Syndrome.
• Emmet's plan for a double-decker couch in The LEGO Movie. It's a cool idea and lets six buddies hang out and watch the game. But if the guy on top center wants to get down, how do they do it without climbing over the guys next to him? And do the people on the bottom couch get a clear view, or do they just watch three pairs of dangling legs?^note However, the latter isn't of a problem for most characters made out of LEGO. It's Played for Laughs, of course, and the last comment by Lord Business foreshadows that there are humans, i.e. people whose legs dangle over the edge of a couch when they sit on it, in the film.
• Ratatouille shows that packing a shotgun for home invaders will prove that you're not someone to take lightly. However, if said invaders happen to be rats, then you're just going to cause more harm than good.
• In The Road to El Dorado, the giant stone jaguar remotely controlled by Tzekel-Kan certainly looks terrifying. But when the evil priest deploys it against our heroes, it can't fit through the tight spaces they can and proves remarkably fragile, plus its sheer weight is ultimately its downfall.
• The Sea Beast: The royal monster-hunting ship, the Imperator. It's a grand, extravagant vessel packed to the brim with cannons, but as Captain Crow points out, the immobility of the cannons and its low build make her ill-equipped to deal with sea monsters. As expected, Red makes short work of it when it finally encounters her, and splits it in half with a single ramming charge.
• In Turning Red, the panda forms of Mei's grandma and aunties are impressive but being the size of houses they are impractical within the cities where they live making it understandable when they choose to give them up.

Films — Live-Action:

• The war rhino in 300 is certainly quite impressive, but it gets killed by a well thrown spear before it even has a chance to reach the Spartan front line. Furthermore, the war elephants, which the Spartans manage to push off the cliff. ^note A scene maybe inspired by this◊ picture, concerning another war in Antiquity.
• Assassin's Creed (2016): As amazing as the Crane-style Animus might be, the Templar Elders consider it too expensive to continue funding for the results they have received so far.
• Batman (1989) has the Batwing. Looks like another cool addition to Batman's arsenal; a modified stealth jet complete with Gatling guns, missiles and a price tag that had to be somewhere north of $2 billion back in 1989. Has an utterly god-awful targeting system (it's completely unable to hit a man-sized target under ideal conditions) and goes down in one shot from a pistol (which is by itself a pretty silly piece of equipment: having a barrel nearly as long as an arm made it awfully hazardous to draw).
• Batman Returns has Bruce's entrance to the Batcave: it involves reaching into a fish tank to open an iron maiden, which retracts its spikes and dumps him into a slide that carries him to said cave. It gets him there slightly faster than his elderly butler who just takes the stairs.
• In Chappie, there's the Moose: an impressively armed mech, capable of taking out aircraft and enemy bunkers. Moore, its creator, wants to sell it to... the South-African police. Who proceed to point out that such a thing is overpowered and and unwieldy compared to the Scout police robots, especially considering that most of the crime in the city is stuff like mugging and carjacking. In addition, when the Moose does get deployed, sure, it's powerful, but it's very poorly armored, its cameras are susceptible to normal gunfire, it's slow moving in both land and air, and it only takes a few hits from a grenade launcher and a grenade before it's destroyed.
• How Bruce is able to acquire his gear in The Dark Knight Trilogy: The military developed incredible technology for one man to effectively wield — as Batman would illustrate — but were too costly to mass-produce, leaving Wayne Enterprises to stockpile the prototypes under Lucius Fox's watch at R&D. One example from Batman Begins is the advanced body armor that Bruce turned into the Batsuit. Reinforced joints, tough enough to stop a knife, but:
  Lucius Fox: Bean counters didn't think a soldier's life was worth 300 grand.
  • The whole suit is an example of this trope, when you consider that a $300,000 high tech armor suit is unable to stop a bullet, but a standard $500 bulletproof vest with arm and leg additions, like the Improved Outer Tactical Vest, not only will protect from all of that, but also will stop pistol bullets and small caliber rifle rounds. Which explains a lot regarding why the military was not interested in it.
• Superhero landings, according to Deadpool. As cool as they may look, they're "really hard on your knees". It should hardly be a surprise that he knows that.
• The powered suits from G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, as demonstrated in the Paris chase scene. They can't catch up with a vehicle that is weaving through heavy traffic. After the chase, they can't even properly catch up with two people on foot.
• The dock to billionaire Miles Bron's private island in Glass Onion is a piece made by the artist Banksy made of ocean blue material, with statues of women on each side that comes out of the water at low tide. It is an utterly gorgeous sight to behold. Unfortunately, because it's only visible at low tide, it means no boats can get on the island without beaching until low tide comes in again. This leaves the characters trapped when the murder actually happens. Boat operators explicitly call the dock a piece of shit, and it serves as a hint to how much of a braindead idiot Miles actually is.
• Kiryu from Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla and Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S.. On the one hand, he's a giant cyborg version of the original 1954 Godzilla complete with missiles, Arm Blade, and an "absolute-zero" cannon. On the other hand, he can only be used for a few hours before he needs to recharge, his "absolute-zero" cannon is so outrageously expensive that they can't afford to replace it if it's destroyed, and he will start acting like his flesh-and-blood counterpart if he hears Godzilla's roar. Having a battery life of two hours would put it here as well, much less if the absolute zero cannon is fired. It can be recharged but it requires all of Tokyo's power to do so.
• Hook: Captain Hook's heavy jeweled rapier, which certainly looks glamorous but is more decorative than actually practical in a duel. Hook isn't ignorant of that, and trades it immediately for a slender, simple sword when fighting Rufio (with deadly results).
• Into the Storm (2009). The idea of turning ships into icebergs to disguise them sounds brilliant at first, but then...
  Ismay: Icebergs travelling in formation, sir? At a steady eight knots?
  Winston: We'd have to work on the details...
  Ismay: ...And with smoke coming out of a funnel?
• Iron Man Films:
  • Believe it or not, the titular character's armor is like this for a while in the first film. One montage shows Tony Stark repeatedly testing the armor and correcting various design flaws that crop up. Among these problems are the fact that the suit tends to freeze up when Tony flies too high into the sky. This serves as Foreshadowing for the final battle, when Tony — who has already experienced and solved the problem of his armor freezing — lures Obadiah Stane, whose armor is reverse-engineered from one of Tony's earlier models, to that very same height.
  • Whiplash's initial suit in Iron Man 2. The energy whips are incredibly deadly and badass, but the suit itself offers virtually no protection to any part of the body other than the the torso, and has no long-range weaponry. Had the battle with Tony not started with the two men in close proximity to one another, Tony could've just flown out of Whiplash's range and then blasted him into submission.
  • While it isn't initially evident in the film itself, the War Machine Mark I armor is also this. "Iron Man but with More Dakka" is a pretty kickass premise, but the suit itself is just Tony's outdated Iron Man Mark II prototype with a new paint job and some guns grafted on. Worse, the redesign was done by the shoddy Hammer Industries, meaning that some of the weapons (like the "Ex-Wife" smart missile) don't even work properly. A comic Interquel reveals that Tony confiscated the suit from Rhodey shortly after Iron Man 2, noting that in addition to being an obsolete prototype, the suit wasn't even calibrated for Rhodey's body, meaning that prolonged usage could've caused serious internal injuries or brain damage. There's a reason why in the subsequent movies, the new War Machine armors are always new suits that Tony has personally designed for Rhodey. This could be a Mythology Gag to the comics; Rhodey took over the role of Iron Man from Tony while he was on a drinking binge. Since the suit hadn't been calibrated to Rhodey's brain, he started to get unstable and a recovered Tony had to take him down with an inferior suit he was working on as part of his recovery.
  • The Mark 42 armor in Iron Man 3 is Tony's most advanced suit to date, but it never leaves an unfinished prototype stage, and its ability to deploy piece-by-piece and assemble on the wearer makes it alarmingly easy to break apart. The assembly part was also clearly not well thought out, as at one point Tony gets effectively punched in the jewels by his own codpiece. Invoked, as it's heavily implied this is the end result of Tony throwing himself into making new armors to try and unsuccessfully cope with PTSD from the events of The Avengers (2012), and as a result of being heavily sleep-deprived Tony's ideas are getting worse but he isn't recognizing this.
  • Also displayed in Iron Man 3 is Extremis. Besides healing abilities and regenerating entire limbs, the artificial virus grants superhuman strength and Playing with Fire powers. It can also make its host explode due to unstable programming.
• The Götterdämmerung in Iron Sky. The Moon Nazis' (It Makes Sense in Context) flagship is several orders of magnitude larger than any other ship in their arsenal. Its cannons (firing Depleted Phlebotinum Shells) are capable of tearing enormous chunks of the Moon with a single volley. It doesn't appear to have any other weapons to defend itself from smaller attackers (and its main gun's targeting system is too slow). The Bridge is exposed. To top it off, it's way too complex for the primitive Nazi computers to run. Luckily, a single smartphone can succeed where a room-sized ENIAC clone will fail. The Moon Nazis' goal is to conquer Earth, not render it uninhabitable. So why build a weapon that can do the latter but not the former instead of using those same resources to double the size of their fleet?^note  Like in Real Life, the whole schtick of the Nazi’s was an arsenal of Awesome, but Impractical weapons to demonstrate the might of the Third Reich
• The Jackhammer Massacre; it's cool and certainly mangles well, but is shown to be heavy and awkward to wield, and is severely limited by its need for an extension cord (the killer is basically beaten when it's unplugged).
• Jungle Cruise: Prince Joachim shows up to the Amazon in a U-Boat. Cool as hell and far better armed than Frank's tiny steamboat, but U-boats were not designed for river travel. Even the world's largest river can barely fit the thing, and that's saying nothing about the various rapids, shallows, and waterfalls that Frank can traverse or avoid with relative ease. The sub does not contribute to the climax because it ends up beached when Lily lowers the water level in the basin it was in, while Frank's boat floats down with ease.
  Frank: Who brings a submarine to the Amazon?
• In Jurassic World, Hoskins plans to militarize the I. rex, a vicious, Nigh-Invulnerable creature that's destroying everything in her path. The idea of militant dinosaurs may sound cool, but they're also wild and difficult to control, making them useless in combat, and a danger to everyone around them. Basically, they come with all of the drawbacks that using living animals in war already comes with (they need to be fed, housed, bred, grown, and socialized; they require regular activity and their waste needs to be disposed of; and, unlike a gun, they have a mind of their own and can panic or turn against the person who's supposed to be in charge; hence why most armies don't use animals anymore now that we have guns, cars, and planes), plus about a hundred new problems on account of being dinosaurs.
  • This gets revisited in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom with the I. Rex “successor” the Indo Raptor. The “improvement?” All you have to do to control it is pointing a gun with a laser pointer at what you want the Indo Raptor to kill and using a sonic frequency to trigger it to do just that. Genius!
• Looper Features a number of examples:
  • About 10% of the population are "TK", or telekinetic. It sounds cool, but in practice most of them can't do any more than move small objects with their hands. Joe lampshades the subversion of usefulness, noting that when it was first discovered, everybody thought there would be superheroes and stuff like that, only for it to amount to nothing but idiots who think they're blowing your mind by floating a quarter an inch in the air. However, the future Big Bad, The Rainmaker has the power to do this on a large scale, so the trope is subverted.
  • The Blunderbusses, the signature weapon for Loopers, are big and badass looking shotguns that can kill with a single shot easy and have awesome accuracy... as long as you're about five feet or so away from the target. Any further and the accuracy turns to shit, making it almost impossible to aim. Plus, it's so big that it's unwieldy as hell. Contrast that with the Gat, which has pretty much all of the Blunderbuss's strengths with none of the flaws. (it's a lot easier to aim and can be carried with one hand). Kid Blue even points out how much smarter of a choice the Gat is. Both sides of this are shown at the end, Joe is able to kill Kid Blue with a blind shot once he gets close enough (whereas Kid Blue needs to aim) but can't shoot Old!Joe who is out of range.
  • Seth's bike. It's a sweet-looking hoverbike that's fast and fancy, but it's also a pretty old fixer-upper so it keeps stalling and malfunctioning when you try to start it. It's also a little too fast for its own good; Kid Blue ends up using it in the climax to catch up to Joe and Old Joe, and is killed because he was going so fast that he couldn't aim to hit Joe and couldn't stop in time to keep from ending up in the range of Joe's Blunderbuss.
• Mad Max: Fury Road:
  • Subverted by the infamous Doof Warrior◊. The guy does look absolutely ridiculous, but it turns out he actually works as a sort of war drummer for the Warboys, playing inspiring music and even allowing Joe to give his boys orders in a world with no radio communication equipment.
  • The refinery on the back of the Gastown rig gives it a very distinctive appearance and allows the People Eater to refuel other vehicles while charging about, but it's revealed during the final battle that carrying around massive quantities of highly flammable substances in a world full of things that explode is decidedly unhelpful when it comes to not catching fire in spectacular fashion.
  • Immortan Joe's large water distribution pipes are an impressive sight to behold, but they are ridiculously wasteful, as they dump out huge quantities of water onto the ground just to allow his people to collect small amounts of it. Justified by being part of the way Joe maintains his hold on his people: by giving the illusion of generously dispensing fresh water to the thirsty crowd below in amounts that turn out to never be enough.^note As for the quantity spilled, the comics reveal that Joe is sitting on twenty thousand cubic kilometers of groundwater, enough to fill 8 million Olympic pools, so he can actually afford the waste. This Tumblr post claims that Joe is actually using a discharge pipe normally used for testing the aquifer.
• The infamous Noisy Cricket of Men in Black, a pocket-sized laser pistol that fires a very powerful round. Which is exactly the problem; the round it fires is so powerful that it will send the user flying. It's also tricky to aim because of how tiny it is. Expanded universe sources suggest that it's meant as an Emergency Weapon and isn't normally that powerful, but the veterans like to give it to recruits with its settings cranked up way too high as a kind of hazing ritual.
• In The Men Who Stare at Goats: A man lifting bags of sand on hooks hung through his scrotum is asked by a witness:
  "Uh, sir, what is the practical application of this?"
• In Operation Lovebirds, Frede's pistol can fire both forwards and backwards. However, he has a difficult time telling which setting is which.
• Phantom of the Paradise has Swan's giant desk. It's perfectly round and looks exactly like a massive gold record, with Swan's seat in the middle. But there doesn't appear to be any way to get to the inside seat without crawling across the top of the desk.
• The Enforcement Droid (ED) 209 from RoboCop (1987). It's a badass-looking walking mech with machine guns for hands, and one of the most awesome-looking things in the movie. But it was rushed out and unfinished in-universe, leaving it with a lot of design flaws, including the inability to use stairs, the inability to right itself when it's fallen down, and a programming flaw that keeps it from realizing when a suspect has surrendered, making it conclude that the suspect requires lethal force. ED-209's impracticality was what led to the creation of RoboCop. ED-209's model designer envisioned OCP's engineers focusing on making the robot look good/intimidating before making it work well, "just like an American car". Based on some dialogue from Dick Jones, it seems this was partly intentional. The plan was to make millions selling a defective machine, then make even more millions charging customers for frequent repairs. The sequels show that ED-209 was adopted with serious problems. A newscast in RoboCop 2 shows one getting stuck in an open manhole, noting that there have been problems with units deployed nationwide. In RoboCop 3, one is used to guard a police armoury, but it's easily hacked and hijacked by a child.
• In Sergeant Bilko's Hover Tank, a tank that goes anywhere a hovercraft can, but one shot from its cannon causes it to recoil wildly.
• Shaun of the Dead: Shaun's slacker friend Ed advocates this approach to surviving the Zombie Apocalypse, having fun in a world without rules. Like deliberately crashing Pete's car to drive Phillip's Jaguar. And using Molotov Cocktails to deal with the zombies outside the pub, only for Shaun to point out that the whole pub could go up (Ed gets a chance to use them after the zombies begin breaking in en masse but he's bitten before he has a chance to throw any).
• Averted by James Bond in Skyfall in the final battle sequence. Yes, his father's hunting rifle is obscenely powerful, and an Ancestral Weapon besides, but come a gunfight with armed mercs with modern assault rifles, Bond fires it twice, kills two goons, and uses one of their guns for the rest of the sequence.
• Star Wars:
  • The Death Star is the ultimate example. It's enormous, cost an insane amount of funds and manpower to build and operate, and its only advantage over large capital ships like Star Destroyers is that it can wipe out entire planets (as opposed to putting down a rebellion while leaving the population and economic centers mostly undamaged), costing further quadrillions worth of economic damage with every shot, destroying another irreplaceable world in the Empire's territory, and in doing so, promote justified fury and rebellion against the Empire for such crimes against sentience. A battle station the size of a moon does have a massive intimidation factor, which Grand Moff Tarkin himself noted can be used to keep populations in line, but it's so costly that it could never be mass-produced, thus severely limiting its effectiveness (though it was also intended to be unique, or one of only two or three ever made, since that was considered all that would be needed to convince the galaxy to meekly submit to Imperial rule). It also has a very critical weakness in the form of an exhaust port big enough for a few warheads to go in. However, Rogue One reveals that last part was a very intentional form of sabotage on the architect, Galen Erso's part. Rogue One also revealed that the Death Star very nearly succeeded in its primary mission before it was even fully operational: once word of its construction leaked to the Rebel Alliance, the majority of the leaders were seriously considering surrendering to the Empire. Best summed up by Tagge after the Battle of Yavin:
    Grand General Tagge: I look at the state of the Empire and think, 'How many Super Star Destroyers could we have made with the resources we threw into Tarkin's folly?'
  • The Imperial Star Destroyer is a massive warship with enormous firepower and toughness and a wedge shape to help concentrating the fire of all guns in front of the ship... And its most powerful turbolaser turrets guns stuck in two rows at the side of the bridge, something that, as demonstrated in Rogue One, prevents six out of eight turrets from firing against a target in front of the ship and under its belly and only allows to concentrate a maximum of four in a broadside. Its Republic era predecessor, the Venator, has a similar flaw, only worse, because, as a carrier, its anti-ship firepower is concentrated only in the main battery, with no smaller turbolasers. Star Wars: The Clone Wars shows that both the Republic and the Separatists are aware of it, as both sides try and place their ships under the enemy (the Separatist ships having a better placement of their guns and no larger guns, they don't suffer from the problem nearly as much)... And, as shown in Revenge of the Sith, the Republic eventually placing one extremely powerful but short-ranged SPHA-T turbolaser gun in the lower hangar, forcing the Separatist ships to either deal with the massive guns on the top or get one-shot by the one on the belly.
  • Zigzagged by the Imperial Walkers, aka AT-ATs from The Empire Strikes Back.
    • On one hand, they're just huge sitting ducks for enemy weapons, and the Rebels manage to disable them just by wrapping cords around their legs and tripping them. What happens when the Rebels decide to arm themselves with some serious firepower, like the proton torpedoes they use to kill starships with? This article from Cracked.com points out some of its egregious design flaws. Unsurprisingly, in the EU, they're even bigger targets. Isard's Revenge has four X-wings take down four AT-ATs in as many minutes and take no damage at all.
    • On the other hand, the AT-ATs actually make highly quite effective portable gun turrets, able to be deployed in various environments and hit targets from quite a few miles away. This is, in fact, precisely how they are deployed in the movie: the Rebels need to deploy long-range fighters in order to engage them at all and had to use the esoteric tactic of trying to trip them with toe cables, which ended in a quick, decisive, and brutal victory for The Empire^note They managed to take down one Walker this way, and then the Walkers started returning fire instead of focusing on the shield generator: all of their fighter pilots save for one were killed, even the lone survivor Luke Skywalker was shot down and nearly died, and they didn't even slow the Walker assault down. The Empire took the base at Hoth by knocking out their energy deflector shield using this exact tactic. Thanks to a tactical blunder by the admiral revealing the attack far earlier than planned their deployment was rushed, and combined with said energy shield they were left completely without air support of their own.
  • The AT-ACTs from Rogue One are bigger than the AT-ATs and can send ground troops fleeing. However, they're huge targets and their open cargo spaces are major structural weakpoints. During the climactic battle, they are shown wiping out rebel infantry only to be easily blown up by the X-Wings and U-Wings. Then again, AT-ACTs are transports equipped to only fend off raiders and thus are not designed for frontline combat; the only reason they were used offensively is that the Imperials were caught off-guard by the Rebel strike teams and were scrambling to muster any firepower they could.
  • That droid missile from the beginning of Revenge of the Sith that targets Obi-Wan's craft. They fire a missile at a ship. It overtakes his ship and opens. Then Buzz Droids comes out of the missile and start dismantling the ship. This process takes several minutes, and gives Obi-Wan time to tell Anakin what's happened, who then tries two different strategies to successfully save him. The droids end up variously shot (though this blows part of Obi-wan's wing off), knocked off the ship, and taken out by R2. If the missile had just hit him and exploded like any sane design would have had it do, Obi-Wan would've been dead. Even if Anakin's stunt in saving Obi-Wan was far-fetched and a very unlikely scenario, it would certainly still have been cheaper to pack an explosive warhead into the missile rather than a bunch of saboteur droids. That said, the droid missile can be useful if trying to disable a ship for capture or weaken it over time, which has been demonstrated in The Clone Wars. However, the droid missile would still be too specialized and inefficient for flat-out destroying starfighters. In The Clone Wars episode "The Unknown", Fives lampshades this aspect of the Buzz Droids when observing the wreckage of a Republic medical shuttle that was torn apart by the droids, but then notes that it only makes sense if they wanted to capture the valuable patient onboard. In that instance, the gunship carrying the Buzz Droids initially used explosive warheads to knock out the shuttle's engines before sending the droids to go directly for the pilots, sabotage all other systems and having a squad of jetpack-equipped Super Battle Droids kill the rest of the crew.
  • Han Solo pointed out that the lightsabers are completely useless in a fight compared to blasters. That's because it has the range and limitations of a sword while a blaster can be used at range and from cover. This is true unless the wielder is a Jedi with Combat Clairvoyance, because then it can be used to block enemy fire or send it back where it came from, and the lightsaber itself is all the cover needed. And even then entries like Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith showcase that if the enemy has hefty amounts of More Dakka on their side they could still be swiftly overwhelmed (especially if the Jedi is surrounded, where they simply cannot deflect all the incoming fire). An In-Universe discussion even mentioned that while lightsabers are incredibly good at stopping blaster bolts, a big enough bullet won't be — the saber's plasma will just melt the bullet and force the wielder to deal with a high-velocity wad of molten steel splashing all over them like say a Tusken Raider’s slugthrower rifle, which fire “metal slugs” aka bullets as opposed to blaster bolts. And as Darth Vader demonstrates in The Empire Strikes Back, Force users can use telekinesis to take their enemies' weapons, making lightsabers unnecessary in a one-on-one fight with a regular person.
  • Darth Vader's iconic suit. Yeah it looks badass while also enhancing his strength and durability, and lets him move around and breathe properly. At the same time, it's horribly uncomfortable and heavy, making it difficult to move quickly like he could when he was younger. Plus the suit's cybernetic nature makes him vulnerable to electric overloads and prevents him from using Force Lightning. Vader's remaining physical strength and extremely strong Force connection is the only thing keeping the suit from rendering him a useless crippled invalid. At the same time, supplementary materials revealed that the constant frustrations imposed by his suit allowed Vader to tap into the Dark Side of the Force with greater ease than he would otherwise; eventually Vader came to appreciate his suit and refused Palpatine's offers to upgrade it.
  • The double-bladed rotating lightsabers the Imperial Inquisitors use. They're clearly built with intimidation in mind rather than practicality, meaning that they're very unwieldy compared to normal lightsabers. This is okay when dealing with most enemies of the time, who either have no Force power or are inexperienced Padawans, but against a trained Jedi Knight they're easily destroyed, leaving their wielders defenseless. This leads to the Grand Inquisitor's death; once Kanan overcomes his fear of the Inquisitor, he easily bashes him back before using standard sabers to slash the rotating saber in two. Another demonstration comes when the Third Sister tries to assassinate Vader, and he simply uses the Force to stop her spinning saber before she can touch him.
  • Darth Maul's and later Savage Oppress's iconic double lightsabers also function on the same principle as the rotating lightsabers, but without the rotating part. While useful for attacking multiple opponents and even if it's cut in half it can function as two separate sabers (a point that actually makes it more practical than the rotating version), it can risk cutting up its own user thanks to its design. The only reason Darth Maul didn't lose any body parts before getting sliced in half by Obi-Wan was because he was just that skilled at using it. Anyone else would have probably lost an arm in the process. Or their head. He also doesn't use the second blade in The Phantom Menace until the climactic final battle, where he's up against both Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan in close quarters. Savage gets by partially because he was being trained by Count Dooku and Asajj Ventress, both of whom had an invested interest in keeping him alive at the time, and later learned directly from Maul himself. He did eventually lose an arm, but because of Obi-Wan, not his saber.
  • Dual Wielding of lightsabers seems very cool the few times it's shown in the film canon, but it never works out for anyone trying it. Anakin does it during a duel with Count Dooku in Attack Of The Clones, but Dooku, being a Master Swordsman, quickly overcomes Anakin's attacks before disarming him, both figuratively and literally. Same goes for General Grevous in Revenge Of The Sith with his quad-wielding, though he's eventually done in by a blaster. Some expanded universe works note this as well, with Boc from Jedi Knight being stated to be one of the few who dual wield, and the Knights Of The Old Republic games applying penalties to dual wielding unless certain feats are taken.
  • See also the Star Wars Expanded Universe under Literature.
  • From The Force Awakens, we have Starkiller Base. Carved out of the surface of an entire planet that was the former pilgrimage site for the Jedi, it drains stars and uses them to destroy entire star systems. While the Death Star II could at least shoot repeatedly, Starkiller Base takes a ridiculous amount of time to charge up while it drains the sun's energy before it can fire. While its weak spot is at least fortified, it makes it evident that the First Order is ridiculously well funded, but instead of using those resources to build a massive amount of fleets and smaller superweapons that are more mobile, expendable, and capable of swarming the fleets of the Republic, all of this was used up on a planet that was once mined by the Empire for its vast amount of kyber crystals. Plus, the fact that it drains stars means that a system's sun must be killed, sacrificing potentially valuable planetary assets and causing potential unforeseen consequences from the removal of a sun; the Death Star and its successor were able to at least power up without killing a star. The worst part of Starkiller Base is that it was destroyed remarkably easily, after the shields are lowered by Phasma, Hux is unable to put the shields back on. Then Poe uses a few torpedoes to blow up a single reactor, causing the entire planet to implode. After Starkiller Base's destruction, it is not even referenced in The Last Jedi, and it is lampshaded in The Rise of Skywalker, where Allegiant General Enric Pryde notes that the entire thing was a complete waste of resources.
  • This is Orson Krennic's defining character trait in Rogue One. For instance, he opts to destroy the whole planet of Jedah when first testing the Death Star, which Tarkin decides is too much and instead has him aim for a smaller portion of the planet. He's partial to an antique, low-capacity blaster instead of a standard issue weapon, even in firefights. Krennic's uniform also qualifies; he wears a cool white cape, but it serves no real purpose aside from making him look different from other Imperial officers. And the Death Star is an example of this, as mentioned above.
  • In The Last Jedi, the Bombers that attack the Dreadnought. They can house 1048 proton bombs, look cool and were designed intentionally as a callback to World War II, but in actuality having slow-moving ships that have to be directly above a target to fire on it is extremely impractical, given a single lightweight X-Wing was able to deal a good amount of damage to the same target.
  • Subverted in The Rise of Skywalker, where the Final Order just slaps Planet Killer cannons onto regular Star Destroyers instead. Or just downplayed. These cannons become a weak point and these Star Destroyers are less durable, but the ease of their mass production makes this hardly an issue until their navigation is taken out.
  • Rise of Skywalker also explains why hyperspace ramming from The Last Jedi is rarely used, being both immensely costly (a ship large enough to deal substantial damage) and risky. Holdo managing to cripple the First Order fleet in a single strike was ridiculously lucky. This explanation is undercut by the victory montage, which shows a Star Destroyer above Endor having been hyperspace rammed.
  • The Clone Army could count as one. Thanks to their heritage, genetic modifications and life-long training regiment, a single Clone Trooper is superior fighter to a ragtag guerilla, conscripted soldier or standard battle droid. However, each individual Clone Trooper takes ten years to reach full combat readiness under Kaminoan growth methods and can only be created in one facility in the galaxy. Additionally, the Republic only seemed to have one major rehabilitation facility for Clone soldiers rather that multiple hospitals in the field, which means clone production or healing could easily be disrupted by Separatist forces. Finally, Darth Sidious didn't care enough to have their rapid aging stopped once they reached maturity as long as they were ready for Order 66 when he wanted. The Bad Batch showed that after the Jedi Purge ended, the Empire quickly phased out the veteran Clone Troopers with regularly recruited and trained Imperial Stormtroopers due to the cost of making and training more not being favorable for the new Empire. Although some were used as guinea pigs for the Dark Trooper project where up to 70% of their bodies were replaced with cybernetics to bring them back up to fighting spec.
• The spaceship Excavator in Star Wreck. True, it can destroy a small planet on each shot, but aiming it is a pain, and recharging the energy required drains all the power of the ship, reboots the ship's main computer and takes several minutes.
• The Suicide Squad:
  • Javelin's signature weapon is very ornate and pretty to look at, but in a fight between a throwing spear and multiple firearms, the firearms win. Javelin doesn't even get the chance to throw his titular weapon before being riddled with bullets and left to die. Harley fares far better using it as a melee weapon.
  • King Shark is an even worse example; You'd think that having a hulking, nigh-unstoppable Shark Man as the team's muscle would come in handy; but in actual practice, he's more trouble than he's worth. His combat skills are rendered down to munching on a single mook at a time which means he can't take out enemies anywhere near as fast as his teammates, he gets distracted by just about everything, his animalistic behavior causes him to be tempted to eat everything in sight (including Ratcatcher early on), and most importantly, he has to stay in the van for most of the mission because his appearance would draw too much attention to the Squad.
• The Peugeot 605 "Project Cobra" in Taxi 2 is equipped with a voice-recognition ignition. It starts up when someone says, "Ninja", and it shuts down when someone says, "Nip." This becomes problematic (and hilarious at the same time) when these words are used in conversation.
  Commissaire Gibert: What happened? Where's the nip? [engine shuts down]
  Daniel: Some ninjas [engine starts up] came and the secretary went...
• Taxi Driver: The .44 Magnum revolver that Travis buys from arms dealer Easy Andy, who lampshades the .44 is far too big to conceal or use, and is ultimately proven right when Travis only manages to fire one shot and injure only one person before forced to drop it for smaller practical guns.
  Easy Andy: This might be a little too big for practical purposes...
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day: The T-1000 is an advanced prototype based on an entirely different type of technology than conventional Terminators or HK units, and boasts some pretty jaw-dropping and potentially very useful capabilities. However, its ultimate end (dissolved in molten steel) indicates that it's unlikely to be any less vulnerable than a conventional Terminator to the plasma weapons in common use during the future war, nor is it less detectable by the dogs used by the Resistance for that purpose (as shown when John's dog barks at it). In what proved to be the ultimate field test of new technology vs old, the T-1000 posed a stiff challenge but was eventually defeated by a single T-800, at the cost of crippling but potentially repairable damage to itself. Thus, despite its impressive capabilities, it's unclear at best that it boasts a significant advantage over conventional units — at least, not enough to replace them as the backbone of Skynet's forces if, as seems likely, they are time and resource intensive to produce.
  • Moreover, given that the unit shown in the film displayed a malevolent, psychopath-like personality more like a monstrous living being than the strictly program-bound T-800 machine mind and the T-1000 unit, Catherine Weaver, seen in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles displayed the capacity for making their own decisions contrary to Skynet's interests, it seems highly likely that the units are less controllable than conventional units and thus pose a potential risk of going rogue that would be unacceptable under most circumstances.
  • In fact the film’s novelization outright confirms that Skynet feared the T-1000 because it could potentially turn against it of its own will which is why in the film they had it set on "read-only" mode and used it as a last resort.
• Who Killed the Electric Car?:
  • Hydrogen cars are portrayed this way: an exciting new alternative, but one that is inefficient, costly, and distracting from more reasonable solutions to energy problems like better fuel economy standards.
  • The Sunraycer, a solar powered vehicle, was very awesome, winning a race across the Australian Outback, but very impractical, being a one-seater that could only work in a desert. But it inspired GM executives into producing a practical electric car.

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