I work in IT, don't get me started on things that don't make sense. I was genuinely shocked when I watched Mr. Robot and thought omg they actually tried!
I count bullets. If someone with a revolver fires off 20 rounds in a row without a pause, the show/movie lost credibility and I'm taken out of it. Extra bad if they later try to use ammo as a plot device to raise drama, ugh.
The most egregious example of this that I can think of is in the final shootout of Commando, where Schwarzenegger's character fires hundreds of rounds without ever reloading once
Do any modern movies use revolvers? The only reason i can see for using a revolver is if the movie is set in the past or if there's a plot reason to be using an old gun like e.g. it was his grandfather's
That was true until about the late 90's. There are quite a few modern pistols that are equally reliable, and require little maintenance. I've fired thousands of rounds through my Glock 21 and although I clean it after every time, I certainly don't have to. And I've never had a malfunction of any kind. Not one. Some guys I know clean theirs two or three times a year.
Now there are some rather unreliable brands out there still, so I imagine that's why the cliche still exists.
What? Revolvers are really common. They're incredibly reliable, in a way that a semi auto mag fed pistol isn't.
A revolver rotates the cylinder and the hammer falls on each individual round. If the ammo is bad (incredibly rare but it happens) then nothing happens, but just pull the trigger again and you're not jammed or anything.
A mag-fed semi auto, while higher capacity, has WAY more complicated moving parts. There's tons of ways it can jam up or malfunction, and since all the ammo is stacked in the same spring-tensioned magazine, if there's a problem you have to clear the jam in order to fire anything else.
If you're in a position where you are actually pulling the trigger your fine motor skills are gone because of adrenaline. Clearing a jam like that isn't something you'll be able to do effectively without a ton of training, and most people don't have that kind of training.
So a lot of people prefer a revolver. It's only 6 shots instead of 11, 17, whatever, but you KNOW you'll get six shots, and the thinking is if that's not enough then 17 probably isn't either. It's personal preference.
You're buying the wrong pistols then. You can throw a Glock in mid then run 800 rounds through it without cleaning, without jamming. And reloading a pistol is much easier than reloading a revolver. They also don't kick nearly as much as a revolver, making them far more accurate.
I shoot an average of 4000 rounds a month. I would bet a whole lot of money that I'm far more familiar with "pistols" in all types than you are.
Revolvers are pistols.
Their recoil is often less than a semi auto. It depends on so many factors that saying they have more or less recoil is a nonsense claim; it depends on your ammo and the mass of the gun, primarily.
Accuracy is the same. Sights matter. Build quality matters. Length of your barrel matters. It all matters.
You can throw a Ruger GP100 in the mud and I'd trust it any day over a Glock covered in mud. It's foolish to claim otherwise.
Glocks are great handguns. But they have malfunctions just the same, especially when you have mags with worn out springs like a lot of daily carry guns do because people pack the mags full and then leave them that way for years on end.
I'm not saying revolvers are better, I'm saying they have pros and cons and it's personal preference. Many people who obviously know more than you do think they're the best guns to carry when you need them most. I won't say I agree or disagree, just that I acknowledge the points, and I'm sharing them here because firearm knowledge is generally abysmal, even in countries where they're readily available.
I hate when an actor clearly doesn't even understand how to hold and aim a gun and their character is supposed to be competent at it.
Cate Blanchet's character in Borderlands is a recent and particularly obvious example. In the movie's trailer she is shown holding and aiming a rifle like someone who clearly never held a gun before and my understanding is that her character was supposed to be a highly competent gunslinger.
Or when people in a gunfight clearly aren't hearing the apocalyptically loud sound gunshots would make in their situation - like in a small room or in a car.
I love the scene in (a movie, just realized I can talk about it without spoiling if I don't say what movie, those who have seen it will know), where there's an attempt to do a romance scam where they rob you when you get naked to have sex with the bait woman. He takes the other guy's gun, at which point the guy laughs and says it's only loaded with blanks. MC pauses for a second then shoots him in the face point blank anyways because blanks still release a ton of energy, they just don't put half of it in to a small projectile, and the guy ends up rolling on the floor in agony, blinded.
Though that shot is fired inside and I don't recall if they even acknowledge that aspect of it.
I find it kind of cool that they portrayed blanks correctly, or at least more accurately than usual. The public has a misconception that shooting blanks is like shooting a cap gun.
I think the problem is that Cate Blanchett has too big an ego to be taught/learn anything, including how to act. But that's just my humble opinion.
I don't know enough to notice bad gunplay but anachronistic makeup/hair styling can bother me. Costumes I give some slack because it could be a budget issue.
Yeah I saw a still frame from what appeared to be some sort of post-apocalyptic movie with a grungy super-spy/bounty-hunter type woman as the protagonist. Dirty torn clothes, nappy dreadlocks, the whole works. Clearly hadn't showered in months. And her pits were clean-shaven. I was like "wat."
To be fair, armpits are pretty quick to shave and I could see some people sticking with some personal hygiene habits in times like that just to feel a bit more normal. Also, if they don't have time for showering, shaving armpits might be one of the most effective ways to keep the smells lower, like the difference between needing to scrub a lot with a sponge or just give it a wipe.
Personally, I shave my face because once it gets to a certain length, it annoys me. Same with my head. Now I do use an electric razor for both of those and don't go down to the skin for either, so whether I kept up with that or went all mountain man would depend on access to electricity, but if I had that access, I would absolutely spend a bit of time managing that because it starts to be a distraction if I don't.
I don't know if this is exactly "anachronistic" since the movie is set 20,000 years in the future and who knows, but there's a scene in the second installment of the new Dune where the emperor is surrounded by his Sardaukar soldiers and they all have LA hipster haircuts.
Yes I think anything that is specifically recognizable like that counts. 80s permed hair is especially noticeable.
I also sometimes notice "old lady hairstyles" in the old movies that those old ladies watched in their teens, copied their style, and kept doing it for several decades, but that's different.
That's a subtle one. If a revolver fires 7 or 9, unforgivable. If it fires 20, they knew damn well what they were doing and it's a Machete Kills style comedy, we're back to acceptable.
Honestly it depends on the revolver. Different revolvers do hold different amounts of ammo. I have seen heavier revolvers like .357 or .44 that hold anywhere from 5 to 6 shots. I have also seen light caliber revolvers like a .38 or .32 that holds 8 to even 12 shots. Of course, a 12 shot revolver is typically only a very light weight like the .32, and they tend to be very small guns. Thay being said, most movies don't show that. They show a guy with a huge ass gun that probably only hold 5 to 6 shots at best. Then again, very few shows or movies ever show guns accurately. The sound from shooting even a light caliber gun can deafening in an open space. The sound of a .357 is so loud its unbelievable.
Guns are absurd in almost all movies anyway. Zero reaction to firing in enclosed spaces, powering through a gunshot wound by using muscles that basically no longer exist because a bullet ripped through them, etc. And it's not even just action movies, it happens all the time.
My pet peeve is the reactionless guns with unlimited kinetic energy bullets. The shooter's hand barely twitches but the target flies as if they were hit by a cannonball. Newton would be spinning in his grave.
I think Newton would be the first to say that being appalled by things doesn't cause a torque force on corpses. Well, he would be if he wasn't dead. I guess it's really just me saying that but trying to add Newton's weight to it.
That's a bad script supervisor. A script supervisor is responsible for scene continuity between takes. Guaranteed the shooting schedule had a dozen days of frequent high intensity filming and the script supervisor was tired from making sure really busy scenes lined up within the time allowed.
Was watching the latest season of slow horses. Great show, I fully recommend. However... a couple of assassins that kept firing their pistols while chasing someone annoyed me. Sure, there was time to reload and it's plausible that they simply didn't show that. But what are the odds that they were carrying 3-4 spare clips with them? Especially since they weren't wearing tactical gear anything of the sort.
I'll accept whatever the premise of the thing asks of me to enjoy the story; that dragons exist, the main character finds a real spellbook, there's a secret community of shapeshifters, or that there's a long-lost secret artifact with magical properties. It's not a documentary.
But breaking internal logic is different. Unless someone's mentioned time travel, it's still a huge issue that it was Sunday in one scene and Friday in another on the same day.
Some people hate 'The Hulk' because they can buy genetic mutation that turns him giant and green, sure... But where the fuck is the extra body mass coming from? You can't just gain weight from nothing. Yes, magic does exist in the MCU, but he didn't get his powers from magic, did he?!
I mean... Marvel has clearly shown that in their world mutations just unlock some sort of magic. None of the X-Men powers make any sense in a world where conservation of mass / energy is a thing, the only possible explanation is that those genes unlock magic potential, so it's not breaking internal logic, that a specific mutation unlocked some kind of anger-magic in Dr. Banner.
True, though I didn’t mean I had a problem with it.
Just that a supposed scientist finding there’s a gene that just lets you break physics and nobody of authority in-universe really commenting on entire branches of modern science being scrapped is too much of a stretch in logic for some.
Marvel has clearly shown that in their world mutations just unlock some sort of magic.
This never gets mentioned, but I wonder what responsibility Marvel bears for the generally low level of comprehension in our society of how evolution by natural selection actually works.
Some people hate 'The Hulk' because they can buy genetic mutation that turns him giant and green, sure... But where the fuck is the extra body mass coming from? You can't just gain weight from nothing. Yes, magic does exist in the MCU, but he didn't get his powers from magic, did he?!
My understanding is that hulk gets his strength (and size/mass) from his anger. So in the universe, anger must have energy that hulk converts to mass
Perhaps its pulled from another dimension, like Cyclop's laser from the DCU, or maybe it's another force of the universe, like the speed force also from the DCU. There's endless ways to explain it.
Sunlight only contains so much energy. Even if he's managing to metabolise every bit with no loss, there's not nearly enough light hitting him at any one moment for that to really make sense. If he's always photosynthesising and his body storing it for later somehow... he'd put on a huge amount of weight in his non-Hulk form.
Someone explained to me that apparently in later comics it has been revealed that the gamma radiation that his anger resonates with is drawn from something called the green door which is created by a character known as the one below it all who is more or less Satan (gods nasty alter ego).
And apparently this is limitless so if he gets pissed enough he could destroy the universe as we know it.
If you think the Hulk is bad, don't even try to work out Ant-Man. Even if you use the "it's magic" argument (which IIRC Ant-Man's powers are not described that way), it still contradicts its own logic constantly.
I don't know the official MCU explanation for the Hulk, but in the comics the lore goes to absolutely insane places and him gaining mass is incredibly tame in the grand scheme of things.
This is called verisimilitude. Self consistency. If you present the setting as Our World + Premise, then we are forgiving of the premise part but not so much of the unrelated things that don't match what we were told to expect.
Its this apparently baffling concept that even a fictional world has to be coherent and consistent within or as itself, otherwise, it seems cheesy or schlocky, obviously fake and contrived.
The one that gets me. In all the crazy wild stuff in The Fast and the Furious franchise.
I can't handle the safe drag scene in the 5th movie. There is no way those Chargers could drag a safe full of money with any sort of speed, if at all. I don't care how reinforced the frame is, or how much NOS they throw at it. Even if the thing happened to have wheels on it.
I can accept shit like, cars parachuting from a plane, and cars on ice battling a giant submarine, but not that stupid safe drag chase.
Yeah, that scene soured me on the franchise too. The first few were kinda stupid, but you could make an argument that the things they were doing was just regular car shit, albeit pushed the very, very extreme.
Then they yoinked a safe out a reinforced concrete wall with a car, and didn't just tear the fucking towing hitch off? Nah mate.
What gets me, is they had The Rock with his little tank truck that would ALMOST believable be able to drag it around maybe, but still probably not very fast. Hell at one point they || Swap the real safe to a garbage truck || and I would find it more plausible that they put some huge engine in the back of that and sped it around more easily.
Like its honestly one of more believable situations. Look at Home Alone, those parents saw Kevin not once yet decided to leave the driveway. They got on a bloody plane without him
I think a lot of sitcoms rely on it because it's a way to create conflict without needing to create a bad guy.
Malcolm in the Middle is an example of a show that didn't rely on miscommunication for every plot and I realized during my first streaming watch through that there isn't a single recurring character on the show that I'd consider a decent person.
Yeah, I'm watching the show Below right now, and they're faking into the "we can't advance the plot without a failure to properly communicate" rhythm, as expected with Netflix, and so much modern TV in general.
I just want a movie where somebody "says turn on the TV", and the main character does, and it's just halfway through an episode of The Big Bang Theory or something because who's tuned to the news channel.
There's a scene in Community about this, where Abed is narrating a story, and when a story character turns on the radio, and its just playing conventional chill music instead of anything notable. Abed then points out that it's unlikely the radio would have anything notable right as they turned it on.
I agree this is rare, but my TV happened to be tuned to CNN on 9/11 when I turned it on around 10:30. I was playing hooky from work and getting high while playing bridge on my computer and nobody had called me. The screen showed a pillar of smoke and the caption said "second World Trade Center tower collapses" and I was like "what fucking movie is this?" Took a while for me to process what was happening.
They are not only on the news channel, but they always switch on the TV just in time to get the exact information they needed to hear at that specific moment. All while not tuning in in the middle of a sentence, just perfect timing from start to finish.
To be fair, if it was a zombie apocalypse scenario in the states, the national network news would have cut in on the local broadcast and the talking heads would be yapping 24/7 for the ratings. Every channel. There's be a good chance that you'd turn on your TV right to a newscast about the zombies.
Now something like an insane killer escaped from a mental institution would be at most a ticker across the bottom of the local broadcast after a brief local cut in when the story broke.
This is hilarious because it would also resolve that part where the person saying to turn on the TV basically needs to be psychic because they almost always tune in at the start of the presentation where it isn't even clear yet what the presentation is about.
If you click a link, then the video starts from the beginning but it also makes sense that the person that sent the link already knows what it's talking about.
Though this wouldn't really help when that same "needs to see the future to be able to point something interesting out because it hasn't started happening yet and thus wouldn't yet be worth pointing out" gets applied to events about to happen nearby.
I wish shows would have some people just confused and not really understanding what's happening, and not just for "the helpless civilians that need to be saved" but incorporating the whole "it can take time for individuals involved in something unexpected to even understand what is going on or what they are responding to". It's kinda funny how much some fiction ignores things like the fog of war, especially ones where they have a sniper that can somehow just see everything and always has a shot (often also sitting way out in the open where they'd get counter sniped pretty quickly, like hanging from a crane, which also begs some more questions).
I disagree. But that’s OK. I like simple, family friendly (for the most part) jokes. If I want raunchy, doubled over laughing, I watch Dave Chappell. The difference is I can watch one with my kids present. Different strokes, bro, and that’s A OK.
Not exactly the same, but the only time I've seen Cloverfield, my dad was watching it. He fast-forwarded through everything that wasn't giant monsters. The movie was about 40 minutes long, and I think it's my preferred cut.
I absolutely love the Sherlock & Co. podcast, the conceit of which is that Watson is a podcaster who records the adventures of Sherlock and releases them as a podcast. He's apparently always recording everything, at every moment, on a little portable recorder that's small enough to pass essentially unnoticed in almost any situation--and yet there's been only one time that I can remember in which this recorder has failed, and it has never run out of battery power, including when the investigation unexpectedly took them to rural southeast India for several days in The Sign of Four.
I just looked. There is an Andhra Pradesh and a Tamil Nadu that very squarely fall in the south-east category. Just like the Philippines is the South East of South East asia.
I'mma about to ruin medical shows/scenes for y'all. And once you see this, you cannot unsee it. the source for all this is the 15 years I spent riding in the back of the bus as a medic.
When you see a scene in the ER and a critical patient arrives, all the doctors go rushing into the exam room and start doing things and arguing about what to do. If we put this stupidity aside for a moment and roll back the scene to the beginning we will see the mistakes the show makes every time.
First, doctors don't rush into the exam room the moment the patient arrives. The doctor, just one and not a whole squad of them, will wait for a moment or two to let the medics and nurses get the patient on to a bed and the triage nurse gets the medic's report.
When the Medics and the cot leaves the room, the doctor will walk to the doorway and stop. Most of them will actually lean against the door jam and just look for a minute or so. They are making their first assessment of the patient from that distance and begin to formulate a treatment plan. Doctors are ACTUALLY TAUGHT to do this medical school. And they practice it because it's hard to remember in an oh shit moment and hard to do. Even us medics are taught the same thing. If the TV doctor does NOT do this, this is your first warning that this a bullshit medical show no matter what the producers and actors claim about realism. This is basic and fundamental to ER medicine and would be soooo easy to do. This is the point where I'm out and ne'er to be seen again.
The second mistake that gets made is that the doctors themselves do very little of the actual treatment of the patient. They stand off to the side and tell the nurses what they want them to do. The nurses do most of the work. The doctor observes and directs. Only if a procedure that requires a doctors skill and knowledge to do, do they get hands on. So that's the second bullshit thing in these shows.
And finally, doctors do not consult in the patient's room unless it absolutely can't be avoided. Which is very rare. They have a room, generally behind the nurses station where they go for that. I have been in there with doctors on occasions when I asked for a teaching moment to further my skills as a medic from one of them. And no matter what hospital, that's where we would go.
I was amazed how Stargate Atlantis got one medical procedure right over so many medical dramas I've seen.
Patient is in defib, so they get the defibrillator. Doesn't work, patient's heart stops. They take away the defibrillator and start doing chest compressions.
I was just... Woaw. This series plays so fast and loose with science. Didn't expect that.
That's pretty close, but no cigar. You never remove the defib. Then you do 2 minutes more of compressions and then you re-analyze again. Wash rinse and repeat until you are relieved or someone with the authority to decide tells you to stop.
Now, if one of the characters is a medical doctor or the idiot script writer in this case, they were quasi military right, then those people can make a decision to stop CPR. But it would have been a more accurate scene if they just shown them starting CPR, doing a cut scene to everyone being exhausted and done. Or checking the body and seeing an obvious sign of death like lividity and not even starting. So still pretty poor writing.
The worst part is that it's so easy to get this stuff right. It's just simple things. not rocket surgery.
I stopped watching Stranger Things because in a show about demons from a parallel universe invading a small town, I couldn't get over a soccer mom breaking her friend out of a Russian prison camp.
I stopped before that, I think around the time the guy in the cool car banged some soccer mom. It was just a sign that we weren't exploring the human condition wither otherworldly tropes, but just throwing shit at the plot wall.
I mean, he doesn't actually bang her. But those scenes always grossed me out. I don't want to see adults even almost fucking high school kids in my kids-on-bikes sci-fi show. Maybe the Duffer brothers would say they were lampshading an older sexist trope by gender-flipping it, but that doesn't make it less repulsive.
Season 1 is goat level of good. Goes off the rails from there. The whole 11 going wild thing and then the Russian thing were just not needed.
Not to mention the 76 years or whatever it took them to film it all. Those kids in the last season all looked like mid 20 year olds with a shit corpo job. Not high school age kids.
I'd like to see a cop show that applies that level of writing to guns.
A: What can you tell me about the bullet you recovered from the victim?
B: It's a handgun round, caliber 9x19 inch, solid steel frangible hollow-point. Fired with a muzzle velocity of 100 joules, one of these can punch through an inch of hardened RHA like wet toilet paper.
A: 100 joules?! Jesus Christ, that's enough to kill someone!
B: Exactly. This is the kind of bullet only a professional would use. Thankfully the firing pin left an imprint on the bullet; if we can find the shop that sold the gun they can tell us who fired it.
A: Only one shop in LA carries weapons that powerful. Let's go.
With scenes like that and the 'two characters typing on the same keyboard to hack faster' one, I'm 90% sure it's just the writers having fun and seeing what they can get away with. Long-running formulaic shows must be boring as hell to write for, so I can understand the impulse.
It's just about the easiest language to create a GUI in, too. It's like saying "I'll write a quick Hello World in Python, and then we've got this case in the bag!"
Dude I'm all for suspending disbelief but I feel this so hard. Like, sure, there's werewolves and you have silver bullets which in this universe don't melt and tumble, but that's a Beretta 92FS, you have 15+1 silver shots before a reload, not infinite, and you can't use your infinite Berettas to cut a hole in the floor.
It didn't stop me from finishing Prometheus, but what grinds my gears is when the supposedly biologist was trying to pet the alien and it attacked him. Any trained biologist would know not to try to pet animals which you don't know if it's timid or not.
I find it unrealistic for any movie involving contact with aliens to not even consider how our and their microbial life would interact with each other. There should be a default rule of "oh you touched the alien? Ok, you will be the quarantine subject that we will monitor to make sure you haven't caught some slow developing disease that will inevitably kill any earth life in your vicinity because we haven't developed any kind of resistance to it".
Except instead of "touched the alien" it would really have to be "entered their atmosphere with your ship" because the ship itself could bring back contaminants that would eventually destroy all life on our planet. And maybe even entering the atmosphere isn't needed if microbial life occasionally gets swept into space by extreme weather, meteor interactions with the atmosphere, maybe solar ones also. Including this because it's plausible that earth life originated elsewhere and was just seeded here by some event that allowed life to escape some other location and survive to come here. We've also had ships return to earth with life detectable on their outside--because someone on earth sneezed on it before it was launched and the microbial life wasn't destroyed by being in space.
Similar line of thought when they go on the alien planet and just breathe the atmosphere because they detect oxygen.
Ironically it's canon in even Alien (1979) and even a truck driver / pilot knows it. "Oh you got in contact with an alien organism? Sorry can't let you on the ship."
For some reason the cowboy style of the Prometheus. The sad thing is they could have written around these bad tropes but chose not to.
The original script (ironically written by the screenwriter who did the Catwoman script) was a much better movie. You can blame this on Executive Fuckery.
I walked out of Total Recall(the original) in the final minutes when people got thrown out into the Martian landscape unprotected and their faces blew up like those little stress heads that you squeeze and the eyeballs pop out.
Once you kill my suspension of disbelief, that's it, I'm done.
This is also why I never liked Blade Runner. There were too many violations of known science for me to enjoy the movie.
I will say that scene in Blade Runner where Tyrell is trying to explain why they can’t extend a lifespan and basically just says “all these things create deadly viruses” instead of literally anything more accurate like disrupting the immune system or causing cancer etc. that scene really does piss me off.
Why the hell would repressing a human gene create a virus in the first place?
Also checking “pupillary dilation” and “blush response” but no “it won’t affect the test” if you’re smoking despite the fact nicotine would probably mess with those metrics as well as basically any other biometric like heart-rate or blood pressure.
That being said, I do actually kinda like watching it (or just having it play in the background while I’m doing something else) just for the vibe of the environment. Cyberpunk megastructures? Cassette futurism? Dense but partly abandoned urban infrastructure? Synth jazz playing over shots of a rainy city night? Hell yeah.
(Tbf I’ve only watched the director’s cut so I dont know if the version with Harrison Ford’s voice over makes any glaring mistakes; it definitely ruins the vibe of the movie imo)
I think there are probably about three people who use the expression "begs the question" as it's defined in books. Through misuse it has evolved to mean, "brings up the question," just as "based off" has come to mean the same as "based on".
I rarely do that, but i did once with 28 Weeks Later where the army when they found out someone is infected inside the colony, just made everyone come out of their own room that is safe and isolated, and wait inside a huge room, which inevitably caused everyone to just get nibbled and infected. They also ordered personel to station at the place where they're unprotected from sprinter, and inevitably got nibbled and turned. I just give up. The series never recovered after that from what i've heard.
I saw 28 Years Later on a plane. I could have just slept instead. It wasn't terrible, but it was certainly more artistic than I expected. Soooooo close to morbidly charming, but ended up just short of the line.
Keep in mind that I saw it when it came out and it was my introduction to fast zombies. They were not popular before that movie, although DDG says a movie in 1980 had fast undead. Also it was artistic in a time when all movies were leaning toward "independent film" asthetics, despite being big budget films. And the opening with the Godspeed You Black Emperor song playing was freaking great.
I don't know how the movie will come across having decades of films in between. Will it still seem fantastic to an early 20s kid? No clue. But I thought it was fantastic back then.
It's honestly still pretty good, they were the first fast zombies I remember as well. Good tone throughout, good pacing, good sound I don't know much more you could ask for in a zombie movie.
It was shot on an old Motorola phone, but there are some shots that are really awesome and it works well. It's been pretty emulated, so it may not have that novelty anymore. It's still one of my favorites.
I can't find anything about the Motorola Phone stuff. Do you have a source?
Here's what Wikipedia says, "The majority of the film (except for the final sequence when the military plane finds Jim, Selena, and Hannah, which was shot on 35mm film) was shot on Canon XL1 digital video (DV) cameras,[24][9] which were smaller and more manoeuvrable than traditional film cameras, which would have been impractical on such brief shoots. Boyle said the early London sequences avoided "litter[ing] the world with corpses", instead emphasising a more symbolic emptiness and atmosphere.[25] The scenes of the empty M1 motorway were also filmed within limited periods; Boyle said police created a "rolling block" in both directions to produce a temporary corridor of empty road, giving the crew seven or eight minutes to shoot using multiple cameras.[26]"
Those opening scenes in an empty London were amazing. It's a zombie movie, and if I try I can remember scenes with zombies. But, I mostly remember the opening, the buckets on the roof, travelling in the cab, etc.
Like all good zombie movies, it's really about how people cope with the changes to the world.
28 Weeks Later is such an incredibly stupid, and also unnecessary, sequel.
The sequel turned the infected into regular zombies. The 28 Days Later, nobody was a zombie. They could actually die from getting shot, needed to eat to survive, and by the end they all starved to death.
None of the characters were monumentally stupid either. So many incredibly fucking stupid characters in 28 Weeks Later. I watched it once when I was a teenager and I remember essentially asking "Why would he do that!?" every 5 or 10 minutes.
I have not seen that one, but people taking a bad situation an making it much worse for the dumbest reasons possible actually sounds painfully realistic.
That's not "stupidly unrealistic though". Because the unrealistic part (everybody waiting together in the waiting room) actually plays a huge part in the plot moving forward. That's just bad writing.
Going the the post office on a sunday is something that can be easily tweaked without changing the rest of the plot.
I'm saying that OP's post is about unrealistic movie details that don't really affect the plot. Whereas root comment's example does significantly affect the plot.
But it's still stupidly unbelievable though, whether or not the plot hinge on this shouldn't matter imo. But i guess it's not minute enough in this case.
It's more that if the story is about human drama and adventure, and then suddenly you go from desert to tropical island, or if everyone changes clothes to Victorian era, not all people will pick up on it. But some will, and it's enough to go from an adventure story where the actions are the fiction, to "woah.... Hey, now it looks like you just don't care to tell the story right."
Whenever evil antagonist broadcasts his evil message on every major advertisement screen and TV in the world (and PC/mobile device), with full audio.
::: spoiler stupid rant
Ad screens don't have speakers you dolt
No one in times square looks at the ad acreens except the tourists when taking a picture
Not all ad screens can handle a live stream connection and you'd need to hack into each one to play your message.
It is literally impossible for everyone to be conveniently watching the TV at the same time as everyone else across the globe
Overriding every TV broadcast channel with your message requires an RF array an order of magnitude more powerful than Russia's massive Murmansk-BN electronic warfare system.
No one watches broadcast TV anymore in most developed countries
The internet cannot handle a simultaneous stream of video to every digital device in the world without the use of multicast or broadcast, which means evil antangonist is either rolling in with hacking the entire internet backbone to enable multicast traffic or magically broadcasting a signal to devices that don't support receiving a broadcast signal.
Evil antagonist has to use multiple zero day CVEs just to force stream his evil message on PC/mobile devices for a whopping 30 seconds.
My personal favorite was in Batman and Robin where they cut open the city's water main and the water just keeps flowing along in a cylindrical shape... Come ON
The snakes were not even dangerous in any way, they were mostly ball pythons if I remember correctly, those are neither venomous, nor eager to bite, their usual reaction is to curl into a ball. Oooh so dangerous! The common theme is to use non-venomous species (for obvious reasons) and people do not notice, since they usually know jackshit about reptiles, and ooh aaah snakes! Scary!
I also laugh, when there is some "super dangerous spider" or something, and then it is always of one of the slowest moving, least venomous, most docile tarantula species. The worst thing with those species is, they might kick itchy hairs on you, and the fangs make a small wound, if you manage to somehow make them bite. But aaah! Spiders! Scary!
Also hilarious when they use goddamn show bred huskies for wolves. Oh come on.
In every scene in The North in Game of Thrones I was yelling at the characters to PUT ON A HAT! Also bacteria don't seem to exist in that universe. No wound ever gets infected despite medieval levels of health care.
I'm very forgiving in this regard, as long as the movie is entertaining, I'll go along for the ride.
I did have a related weird thing happen once, though. I don't remember what movie I was watching, but about halfway through I suddenly realized everyone in the movie was acting and I couldn't watch anymore. It was a weird feeling, like they were all just lying to me, which of course they always are, but I was suddenly offended--"WTF? This is all bullshit!"
Maybe it was terrible chemistry. Maybe I subconsciously noticed all the subtle clues that the actors hated each other, but were pretending to be friends.
I suppose the one thing I can't forgive is a complete lack of chemistry between the actors, and that killing their performances.
What I enjoy is watching poorly directed/acted shows or movies and stopping right after a cut. Pay attention, if they’re not the best actors, you can see them starting their lines or getting the gears going. This is especially apparent when there’s no sound. It’s ruined syndicated shows for me.
I can relate to this. A movie asks for suspension of disbelief, and I am happy to grant that. But then it has to present a coherent world for which I suspended my disbelief. If it doesn't then I wasted my suspended disbelief and that's annoying.
The one that gets me is people flying backwards when hit by a bullet / shotgun blast.
I can accept it in movies that aren't going for realism, even though it annoys me. But, I've seen it in movies that are trying for a gritty realism aesthetic, and after that I just can't enjoy the movie. Add to that movies where silencers go "pfft", or someone uses a pillow as a silencer, or people shoot guns without ear protection or hearing damage.
Physics wasn't my best science, but wouldn't the recoil have to be equivalent? So if the bad guy gets thrown back 3 feet, the protagonist would also get thrown back about that amount?
Yeah, exactly. Newton's third law. If the person who was hit goes flying, an equivalent force had to be acting on the shooter. If that shooter is shooting a handgun, imagine just how much force is acting on their wrist.
What kills me. The smart person, call them a leader in molecular biology. That can suddenly fly a space ship. Operate everything in said space ship. Write a computer program, in excel, to translate an alien species. Like come on dawg. I get it. You’re smart and make a fun movie. But the whole 1 person that is a fucking the expert in literally everything that happens is just getting old.
Yeah. That was the last movie I saw like this. Keep in mind, I love the book and movie. But watching the movie, I keep going “oh come on” how does he know how to program a translator in excel. Still a great movie.
Rocky, the alien, was doing the vast majority of the work in their communication - being careful to only use words already in the list recognised by the laptop, except when absolutely necessary to introduce a new word, and also saying the words in an order suitable for English grammar. The laptop was only doing single-word speech synthesis from Rocky's sounds, a fairly simple task.
I only saw the movie, but I thought the same stuff for the most part. It would have helped if they were training him, but from what I remember he was only teaching his specific area and then thrown into having to do it with like almost no time for training. Yeah definitely not going to happen lol.
I don't nitpick over really minor things, like the wrong snakes and such. I can understand unrealistic silly if it makes sense for the movie.
What I can't stand are plots or situations that can only exist because the writers don't know what the fuck they're writing about, or lack any imagination in making plot reasons happen.
Battlefield Los Angeles is one of those movies I just can't fucking stand because of this.
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler
The aliens invade Earth because it's the only planet in the solar system with liquid water, and that's apparently very valuable.
Excuse me, but are you telling me an interstellar capable alien civilisation cannot melt ice? Do you have any idea how much water there is in the Kuiper Belt!? There are chunks of ice floating over there the size of countries.
Any alien could be mining the Kuiper Belt for a thousand years and we'd never notice. Nobody would have to commit so many resources to cunduct such a wasteful invasion of an inhabited planet with an amount of water that is a knee high puddle compared to everything that's available in space!
The alien technology is somehow... Modern and not very futuristic, and eventually get beaten after just a day or two of intense fighting.
So... The alien species can cross the stars. The alien species apparently has the technology to analyse Earth from light years away. They can not only detect liquid water on Earth from that distance, but also that there is a civilisation living there.
They have some pretty fucking granular information about Earth for observations made several light years away, and... that is the best they could do!? A two day failed invasion with a pitiful amount of troops and no orbital support?
They have the technology to fly through the depths of space and get mind bogglingly detailed information from so far away, and they invade land tiny force equipped with crap that functions almost worse than what we currently have!?
This species is written too stupid to have even made it to an interstellar level.
I lost it during Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy stowed away on the outside of a U-boat and then rode it like a thousand miles across the Mediterranean or wherever they were. I guess they thought submarines just buttoned up when they left port and nobody ever went outside on the conning tower. And they never dove or anything.
It's been way too long since I watched Raiders, but I remember it being great so I'll have to watch it again.
That definitely sounds stupid. The only saving grace might be that U-boats, unlike modern submarines, very rarely went underwater. They had diesel engines that ran the engines on the surface and also charged batteries. They could use the batteries underwater, but they didn't last long. When they attacked they'd go underwater so they could ambush the ships they were attacking. But, to set up for that attack they'd race ahead of the ship while staying above the water, then go under for the ambush. Even a lot of the attacking happened above the water. Yes, they had torpedoes, but they also had deck guns. Since their targets were mostly commercial ships, they didn't have to worry about the ships shooting back.
On the other hand, the fact they were used on the surface meant that there was almost always a crew on the conning tower. Technically you could do everything without using the conning tower bridge. But, they almost never did. Even during storms they were up on the conning tower, not sheltering inside. It was awful being exposed to the elements like that, but the visibility through a periscope was awful compared to standing outside.
It is a fun pulp adventure action movie, but if you expect realism you gotta stop there. As far as I know it was all inspired by old serial shows and pulp stories from magazines. Ya gotta just let certain stories be fun. Though as a geek it is fun to rag on their issues I know, have done that lots.
But yes seemed silly he hung on the uboat that long, I wondered about it growing up since was a regular watched movie, that was a long freaking trip to be hanging regardless of food service and comfort.
U-boats, unlike modern submarines, very rarely went underwater
I've read a lot of memoirs from WWII submariners (German, American and British - not sure if there are any Japanese memoirs in existence) and they always made test dives at the start of a trip, just to make sure everything was shipshape. Even if they somehow hadn't noticed Indy clinging desperately to the conning tower, he would have been left behind pretty early on. Unless he had gills like Kevin Costner in Waterworld.
Even a lot of the attacking happened above the water. Yes, they had torpedoes, but they also had deck guns.
Fun fact: the British experimented with subs that mounted a (fixed) 12" gun taken from a decommissioned battleship. The idea was that they would surface just enough to expose the gun and then blast enemy merchant ships. This actually sort of worked, except that the remote-firing mechanism tended to get water in it and the gun would shoot its own barrel off. And since the barrel was wire-wrapped (a technique the Brits loved) the blown-off part would stay attached and act as an anchor.
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to do a test dive right at the start.
A 12 inch gun on a sub is crazy. That's not just a gun from a battleship, that's one of the main guns from the battleship. That's a ridiculous amount of overkill for a merchant ship. If you wanted to ambush armoured enemy ships that's another matter. If you could successfully do that, it might not even matter if the gun only lasted a few shots. A sub is cheap compared to anything requiring a 12 inch gun. I'm surprised they got far enough with the program to actually test fire them.
Since the gun could only be loaded while the sub was surfaced, it had to sink its target in one shot, which was unlikely to be the case against warships, even something small and unarmored like a destroyer.
Good luck managing to hit a destroyer with a fixed gun.
I would imagine that if you did manage a hit though, it would be devastating. I don't think there were many ships that could shrug off hits from a 12 inch gun. Even if it didn't sink, it would probably be badly damaged, which might give the sub the opportunity to surface somewhere safe, reload, and shoot again.
The destroyers at the Battle off Samar took multiple hits from Yamato's 18.1" guns. The initial hits were armor-piercing rounds that passed right through without doing much of anything, but they took multiple hits before sinking even after the Japanese switched to high-explosive shells. I think a single hit on a destroyer from a 12" shell would certainly not sink it, and depending on where it hit it would probably not even be seriously disabled. Given the close range (less than 1000 yards), the destroyer's deck guns would still knock out the sub pretty quickly.
Also Pawnee is supposed to be a kinda folksy midwest town with like 30,000 population but the city hall is seemingly a modern $15mil building with floors and departments.
The actual Parks and Rec "department" of a town like that would be one haggard "Selma from the Simpsons" type character chainsmoking and sitting at a folding card table in some shitty repurposed storefront in a building from the 1950s across the square from the old courthouse.
We still laugh at the scale of their city council election. Our town is larger than Pawnee, and you're lucky if the people running spend money to make lawn signs.
Let alone run commercials and have a huge debate 😆
The TV show 24 killed me with how he was able to do much in an hour when it could easily have taken 30-1.5 hr just in travel time around cities like LA.
For anyone who doesn't know the show premise was each episode was 1 hr in a 24hr period where the main guy has to stop some kind of terrorist or otherwise crazy attack with dozens of sub plots and things he has to do per hour too. But somehow he travels across major cities in minutes.
It irks me when an actor who plays a character so is supposed to be a highly competent gunman doesn't even know the basics of how to hold a gun properly.
Or when they have ten-minute discussions while holding guns at one another's face. It's not a talking stick. It's not for intimidation. A basic rule of gun defense is that if you draw, you fire.
Or how Doakes stalked Dexter through a shipping yard completely unseen, no footsteps no arrousing suspicion from employees, nuthin just "Surprise Muthafucka!"
My favorite feat of IT wizardry in a movie is in Independence Day where Jeff Goldblum's character hacks into the onboard computer of an alien spaceship using nothing but his MacBook. Of course, entire generations of scientists have failed to get into that computer but the wizz just does it overnight. Does it even use a binary system? Does it use quantum computing? What security features do alien computers have? No matter.
Better yet, he manages to coax the computer on the alien space station (which he has never had physical access to!) into letting them dock without raising the alarm.
But the icing on the cake is the virus he manages to inject into this previously unknown IT system which not only grants him full access but also plays back a laughing skull animation on an operator console he has never seen, not even while developing his virus.
If that is a plot point in the movie then I completely missed it. I guess if the aliens were running Bonjour and their displays were VESA compatible it would make Jeff Goldblum's job a lot easier...
Haha I remember watching independence day for the first time and thinking "oh damn they're gonna infect the aliens with a disease" and then Jeff goes "computer virus" before tapping away with his laptop.
tbf though I consider that movie the king of blockbusters for the absolute massive list of wacky tacky bs that occurs pretty much the entire runtime of the film lol.
Funny what can pull you back into reality and out of the temporary relief we get to enjoy when watching a movie. Some people are better at ignoring the absurd and out of place.
I love that level of detail in books! Reportedly in the first 6 books of the Wheel of Time every time they mention the moon, it's in the correct phase. Iirc it's never relevant to the plot.
Mission Impossible, the first remake with Tom Cruise. The final scene ruined the whole thing for me. He's hanging on the outside of a helicopter flying through a train tunnel chasing a train - which apparently wasn't improbable enough because he then blows up the helicopter and the explosion sends him flying safely onto the train.
I'm sorry, but that helicopter was made of metal and glass. Anything that blew it up is going to turn him into a fine mist. In another, cheesier action movie, fine! But the movie took itself so seriously otherwise that I just couldn't anymore.
I don't agree movie need to be as realistic as possible or insist on enforcing fact to audience face ,especially when the movie theme based or source is fiction itself , but i do agree realism and fact matter in movies that sell themselves as inspired, based on true event or a documentary and such.
I had this with Interstellar. The story is that most plants died and they can't grow food but corn. So they're at a baseball game and this older character says "Popcorn?! I'm sick of corn, I want a hotdog". He knows there aren't hotdogs anymore, he's just frustrated at the situation. Nobody responds.
That's the moment everyone should have jumped up to shut up grandpa. You can't say that! Billions died, you insensitive asshat. Be glad you have food. Eating meat would be socially unacceptable because you can't feed society that way anymore. It would be on the level of grandpa saying old-timey racist shit out loud in public
No that’s realistic lol. Nobody would have said shit other than to agree, because after all of that everyone would want a hot dog.
Humans in general don’t deal with mass change that well. Look at Covid.
They’d bitch at the government, bitch at their neighbors, and find a nationalized group to blame for why the way of life changed.
It wasn’t that long of a time period in interstellar. The whole collapse happened over about 30 years. So anyone over around 40 would have remembered a normal time and would agree with grandpa. They’d have seen their lives get worse and worse and desperately want to go back to the old life.
I get what you're saying but I think society would change much more in 30 years with billions of deaths compared to covid which effectively lasted for like 2-3 years. A generation would grow up that doesn't know any better. Society would change. Covid was peanuts compared to the crisis in the movie. There is no going back in the movie.
All of humanity is doomed but the movie doesn't really show what that would do to society generally. A movie like Children of Men does show that. They also still have blaming immigrants and shit, but at least that movie doesn't pretend life would carry on as normal when faced with "no more food, we're all going to die"
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Normalise removing your interest and presence from bullshit situations 👏🏻
What about a free and available parking spot in front of every location they're driving to?
Or how there is always a path to drive through. Even in War of the Worlds (2005) when a jet liner crashes in the street, they can still drive away.
I personally think this is due to the writers all living in LA and not being able to conceive of getting anywhere without driving.
I work in IT, don't get me started on things that don't make sense. I was genuinely shocked when I watched Mr. Robot and thought omg they actually tried!
I count bullets. If someone with a revolver fires off 20 rounds in a row without a pause, the show/movie lost credibility and I'm taken out of it. Extra bad if they later try to use ammo as a plot device to raise drama, ugh.
The most egregious example of this that I can think of is in the final shootout of Commando, where Schwarzenegger's character fires hundreds of rounds without ever reloading once
It's just bad prop decisions. There are guns that better fit. In a cheap movie, I can forgive it. A budget over 200k? I'm upset
I don't know enough about the division of duties to know whose fault it is, but I blame the director. It's just lazy, and easy.
Do any modern movies use revolvers? The only reason i can see for using a revolver is if the movie is set in the past or if there's a plot reason to be using an old gun like e.g. it was his grandfather's
They still make revolvers today. They’re supposedly more reliable and easier to maintain.
That was true until about the late 90's. There are quite a few modern pistols that are equally reliable, and require little maintenance. I've fired thousands of rounds through my Glock 21 and although I clean it after every time, I certainly don't have to. And I've never had a malfunction of any kind. Not one. Some guys I know clean theirs two or three times a year.
Now there are some rather unreliable brands out there still, so I imagine that's why the cliche still exists.
What? Revolvers are really common. They're incredibly reliable, in a way that a semi auto mag fed pistol isn't.
A revolver rotates the cylinder and the hammer falls on each individual round. If the ammo is bad (incredibly rare but it happens) then nothing happens, but just pull the trigger again and you're not jammed or anything.
A mag-fed semi auto, while higher capacity, has WAY more complicated moving parts. There's tons of ways it can jam up or malfunction, and since all the ammo is stacked in the same spring-tensioned magazine, if there's a problem you have to clear the jam in order to fire anything else.
If you're in a position where you are actually pulling the trigger your fine motor skills are gone because of adrenaline. Clearing a jam like that isn't something you'll be able to do effectively without a ton of training, and most people don't have that kind of training.
So a lot of people prefer a revolver. It's only 6 shots instead of 11, 17, whatever, but you KNOW you'll get six shots, and the thinking is if that's not enough then 17 probably isn't either. It's personal preference.
But yeah, they're not just "grandfather" guns.
And if you don’t get 6 shots you advance the chamber and get the others.
With a mag you gotta swap mags and unjam and ya dead.
While I disagree with guns for self defense if you were gonna get a pistol: get a shotgun.
You're buying the wrong pistols then. You can throw a Glock in mid then run 800 rounds through it without cleaning, without jamming. And reloading a pistol is much easier than reloading a revolver. They also don't kick nearly as much as a revolver, making them far more accurate.
I shoot an average of 4000 rounds a month. I would bet a whole lot of money that I'm far more familiar with "pistols" in all types than you are.
Revolvers are pistols.
Their recoil is often less than a semi auto. It depends on so many factors that saying they have more or less recoil is a nonsense claim; it depends on your ammo and the mass of the gun, primarily.
Accuracy is the same. Sights matter. Build quality matters. Length of your barrel matters. It all matters.
You can throw a Ruger GP100 in the mud and I'd trust it any day over a Glock covered in mud. It's foolish to claim otherwise.
Glocks are great handguns. But they have malfunctions just the same, especially when you have mags with worn out springs like a lot of daily carry guns do because people pack the mags full and then leave them that way for years on end.
I'm not saying revolvers are better, I'm saying they have pros and cons and it's personal preference. Many people who obviously know more than you do think they're the best guns to carry when you need them most. I won't say I agree or disagree, just that I acknowledge the points, and I'm sharing them here because firearm knowledge is generally abysmal, even in countries where they're readily available.
I hate when an actor clearly doesn't even understand how to hold and aim a gun and their character is supposed to be competent at it.
Cate Blanchet's character in Borderlands is a recent and particularly obvious example. In the movie's trailer she is shown holding and aiming a rifle like someone who clearly never held a gun before and my understanding is that her character was supposed to be a highly competent gunslinger.
Someone coach those actors for crying out loud.
Or when people in a gunfight clearly aren't hearing the apocalyptically loud sound gunshots would make in their situation - like in a small room or in a car.
I love the scene in (a movie, just realized I can talk about it without spoiling if I don't say what movie, those who have seen it will know), where there's an attempt to do a romance scam where they rob you when you get naked to have sex with the bait woman. He takes the other guy's gun, at which point the guy laughs and says it's only loaded with blanks. MC pauses for a second then shoots him in the face point blank anyways because blanks still release a ton of energy, they just don't put half of it in to a small projectile, and the guy ends up rolling on the floor in agony, blinded.
Though that shot is fired inside and I don't recall if they even acknowledge that aspect of it.
Archer definitely does, though!
I find it kind of cool that they portrayed blanks correctly, or at least more accurately than usual. The public has a misconception that shooting blanks is like shooting a cap gun.
Yeah, with bad luck blanks may kill even from distance, so it's really better not to push your luck pointing a loaded gun
I think the problem is that Cate Blanchett has too big an ego to be taught/learn anything, including how to act. But that's just my humble opinion.
I don't know enough to notice bad gunplay but anachronistic makeup/hair styling can bother me. Costumes I give some slack because it could be a budget issue.
When it's supposed to be a post-apocalyptic/survival genre but everyone looks clean-cut, shaven, and recently showered with a day-old haircut 🙄
Oh God yes and women with no body hair in times when only sex workers would shave pits&crotch
Yeah I saw a still frame from what appeared to be some sort of post-apocalyptic movie with a grungy super-spy/bounty-hunter type woman as the protagonist. Dirty torn clothes, nappy dreadlocks, the whole works. Clearly hadn't showered in months. And her pits were clean-shaven. I was like "wat."
To be fair, armpits are pretty quick to shave and I could see some people sticking with some personal hygiene habits in times like that just to feel a bit more normal. Also, if they don't have time for showering, shaving armpits might be one of the most effective ways to keep the smells lower, like the difference between needing to scrub a lot with a sponge or just give it a wipe.
Personally, I shave my face because once it gets to a certain length, it annoys me. Same with my head. Now I do use an electric razor for both of those and don't go down to the skin for either, so whether I kept up with that or went all mountain man would depend on access to electricity, but if I had that access, I would absolutely spend a bit of time managing that because it starts to be a distraction if I don't.
Sure, if you can find enough razor cartridges. Armpits are too concave to use a straight razor on I would think.
Granted it is possible she did IPL or electrolysis before the downfall of society, so that is a potentially reasonable explanation
Where do you base this on? Have you got any experience shooting with her?
You learn a great deal about certain people by working high-end retail.....
I don't know if this is exactly "anachronistic" since the movie is set 20,000 years in the future and who knows, but there's a scene in the second installment of the new Dune where the emperor is surrounded by his Sardaukar soldiers and they all have LA hipster haircuts.
Yes I think anything that is specifically recognizable like that counts. 80s permed hair is especially noticeable.
I also sometimes notice "old lady hairstyles" in the old movies that those old ladies watched in their teens, copied their style, and kept doing it for several decades, but that's different.
Take your finger off the trigger!
The butt of the stock goes against your shoulder, not in your armpit!
That's a subtle one. If a revolver fires 7 or 9, unforgivable. If it fires 20, they knew damn well what they were doing and it's a Machete Kills style comedy, we're back to acceptable.
Honestly it depends on the revolver. Different revolvers do hold different amounts of ammo. I have seen heavier revolvers like .357 or .44 that hold anywhere from 5 to 6 shots. I have also seen light caliber revolvers like a .38 or .32 that holds 8 to even 12 shots. Of course, a 12 shot revolver is typically only a very light weight like the .32, and they tend to be very small guns. Thay being said, most movies don't show that. They show a guy with a huge ass gun that probably only hold 5 to 6 shots at best. Then again, very few shows or movies ever show guns accurately. The sound from shooting even a light caliber gun can deafening in an open space. The sound of a .357 is so loud its unbelievable.
This makes me want to see a fully automatic revolver. If you're going to be absurd, lean into it.
Mini guns?
Guns are absurd in almost all movies anyway. Zero reaction to firing in enclosed spaces, powering through a gunshot wound by using muscles that basically no longer exist because a bullet ripped through them, etc. And it's not even just action movies, it happens all the time.
My pet peeve is the reactionless guns with unlimited kinetic energy bullets. The shooter's hand barely twitches but the target flies as if they were hit by a cannonball. Newton would be spinning in his grave.
I think Newton would be the first to say that being appalled by things doesn't cause a torque force on corpses. Well, he would be if he wasn't dead. I guess it's really just me saying that but trying to add Newton's weight to it.
What if there's a cut where they could have conceivably reloaded?
I'm OK with it, if you show me at least one reload before you run out of bullets at the most dramatic opportunity.
Underworld was always the one that annoyed me with their guns. Main character fires this automatic handgun for minutes and doesn't reload.
This unironically looks pretty cool. It looks like an ESP8266 dev board at the top with a few DIP ICs below that
Looks like an Adafruit Feather nRF52
You guys are just making up words atp.
That's a bad script supervisor. A script supervisor is responsible for scene continuity between takes. Guaranteed the shooting schedule had a dozen days of frequent high intensity filming and the script supervisor was tired from making sure really busy scenes lined up within the time allowed.
Whats up tiger lily
Don't you believe in fairies?
Was watching the latest season of slow horses. Great show, I fully recommend. However... a couple of assassins that kept firing their pistols while chasing someone annoyed me. Sure, there was time to reload and it's plausible that they simply didn't show that. But what are the odds that they were carrying 3-4 spare clips with them? Especially since they weren't wearing tactical gear anything of the sort.
I'll accept whatever the premise of the thing asks of me to enjoy the story; that dragons exist, the main character finds a real spellbook, there's a secret community of shapeshifters, or that there's a long-lost secret artifact with magical properties. It's not a documentary.
But breaking internal logic is different. Unless someone's mentioned time travel, it's still a huge issue that it was Sunday in one scene and Friday in another on the same day.
Some people hate 'The Hulk' because they can buy genetic mutation that turns him giant and green, sure... But where the fuck is the extra body mass coming from? You can't just gain weight from nothing. Yes, magic does exist in the MCU, but he didn't get his powers from magic, did he?!
I mean... Marvel has clearly shown that in their world mutations just unlock some sort of magic. None of the X-Men powers make any sense in a world where conservation of mass / energy is a thing, the only possible explanation is that those genes unlock magic potential, so it's not breaking internal logic, that a specific mutation unlocked some kind of anger-magic in Dr. Banner.
True, though I didn’t mean I had a problem with it.
Just that a supposed scientist finding there’s a gene that just lets you break physics and nobody of authority in-universe really commenting on entire branches of modern science being scrapped is too much of a stretch in logic for some.
This never gets mentioned, but I wonder what responsibility Marvel bears for the generally low level of comprehension in our society of how evolution by natural selection actually works.
Miniscule compared to the work of the Christians
My understanding is that hulk gets his strength (and size/mass) from his anger. So in the universe, anger must have energy that hulk converts to mass
Right… but then anger itself would require huge amounts of calories. You can’t just create energy.
Perhaps its pulled from another dimension, like Cyclop's laser from the DCU, or maybe it's another force of the universe, like the speed force also from the DCU. There's endless ways to explain it.
You mean the Cyclops on xmen (marvel) or does DC also have a cyclops character that shoots a powerful laser?
My mistake yes cyclops from the MCU
The gamma does turn him green. Maybe that's not just stylistic, maybe he's photosynthesizing.
Sunlight only contains so much energy. Even if he's managing to metabolise every bit with no loss, there's not nearly enough light hitting him at any one moment for that to really make sense. If he's always photosynthesising and his body storing it for later somehow... he'd put on a huge amount of weight in his non-Hulk form.
Well, I mean, he is wearing those purple shorts. Maybe they're... battery shorts.
Someone explained to me that apparently in later comics it has been revealed that the gamma radiation that his anger resonates with is drawn from something called the green door which is created by a character known as the one below it all who is more or less Satan (gods nasty alter ego).
And apparently this is limitless so if he gets pissed enough he could destroy the universe as we know it.
I don't care about the extra mass, but how do his boxers work?
I think this is covered by the Pym particles explained in Ant-Man.
Ant-Man makes lots of things, and himself, turn giant, so by Occam's razor, why not say Hulk's mutations allow his cells to access the same mechanism.
If you think the Hulk is bad, don't even try to work out Ant-Man. Even if you use the "it's magic" argument (which IIRC Ant-Man's powers are not described that way), it still contradicts its own logic constantly.
I don't know the official MCU explanation for the Hulk, but in the comics the lore goes to absolutely insane places and him gaining mass is incredibly tame in the grand scheme of things.
This is called verisimilitude. Self consistency. If you present the setting as Our World + Premise, then we are forgiving of the premise part but not so much of the unrelated things that don't match what we were told to expect.
Was gonna say this, fucking, yep.
Its this apparently baffling concept that even a fictional world has to be coherent and consistent within or as itself, otherwise, it seems cheesy or schlocky, obviously fake and contrived.
There's suspending disbelief, and then there's suspending disbelief.
The one that gets me. In all the crazy wild stuff in The Fast and the Furious franchise.
I can't handle the safe drag scene in the 5th movie. There is no way those Chargers could drag a safe full of money with any sort of speed, if at all. I don't care how reinforced the frame is, or how much NOS they throw at it. Even if the thing happened to have wheels on it.
I can accept shit like, cars parachuting from a plane, and cars on ice battling a giant submarine, but not that stupid safe drag chase.
Yeah, that scene soured me on the franchise too. The first few were kinda stupid, but you could make an argument that the things they were doing was just regular car shit, albeit pushed the very, very extreme.
Then they yoinked a safe out a reinforced concrete wall with a car, and didn't just tear the fucking towing hitch off? Nah mate.
The cars fine even weigh enough to do that. They’d just break traction and spin the wheels lol.
What gets me, is they had The Rock with his little tank truck that would ALMOST believable be able to drag it around maybe, but still probably not very fast. Hell at one point they || Swap the real safe to a garbage truck || and I would find it more plausible that they put some huge engine in the back of that and sped it around more easily.
had to look it up, this is indeed ridiculous 😅 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vCvnOv3-Og
I’m like this if a movie’s plot can only happen because of bad communication.
I was able to tolerate more of this in movies than I used to after acknowledging that tons of people in real life suck at communication.
Like its honestly one of more believable situations. Look at Home Alone, those parents saw Kevin not once yet decided to leave the driveway. They got on a bloody plane without him
I think a lot of sitcoms rely on it because it's a way to create conflict without needing to create a bad guy.
Malcolm in the Middle is an example of a show that didn't rely on miscommunication for every plot and I realized during my first streaming watch through that there isn't a single recurring character on the show that I'd consider a decent person.
Yeah, I'm watching the show Below right now, and they're faking into the "we can't advance the plot without a failure to properly communicate" rhythm, as expected with Netflix, and so much modern TV in general.
I just want a movie where somebody "says turn on the TV", and the main character does, and it's just halfway through an episode of The Big Bang Theory or something because who's tuned to the news channel.
There's a scene in Community about this, where Abed is narrating a story, and when a story character turns on the radio, and its just playing conventional chill music instead of anything notable. Abed then points out that it's unlikely the radio would have anything notable right as they turned it on.
I agree this is rare, but my TV happened to be tuned to CNN on 9/11 when I turned it on around 10:30. I was playing hooky from work and getting high while playing bridge on my computer and nobody had called me. The screen showed a pillar of smoke and the caption said "second World Trade Center tower collapses" and I was like "what fucking movie is this?" Took a while for me to process what was happening.
They are not only on the news channel, but they always switch on the TV just in time to get the exact information they needed to hear at that specific moment. All while not tuning in in the middle of a sentence, just perfect timing from start to finish.
I mean, it's a movie. They have license to cut out the boring parts seamlessly.
To be fair, if it was a zombie apocalypse scenario in the states, the national network news would have cut in on the local broadcast and the talking heads would be yapping 24/7 for the ratings. Every channel. There's be a good chance that you'd turn on your TV right to a newscast about the zombies.
Now something like an insane killer escaped from a mental institution would be at most a ticker across the bottom of the local broadcast after a brief local cut in when the story broke.
Not just that, but always the anchor says "For those of you just joining us..." Then does a exposition dump
Who uses a TV anymore?
If they want to make it realistic, they're texting a link.
This is hilarious because it would also resolve that part where the person saying to turn on the TV basically needs to be psychic because they almost always tune in at the start of the presentation where it isn't even clear yet what the presentation is about.
If you click a link, then the video starts from the beginning but it also makes sense that the person that sent the link already knows what it's talking about.
Though this wouldn't really help when that same "needs to see the future to be able to point something interesting out because it hasn't started happening yet and thus wouldn't yet be worth pointing out" gets applied to events about to happen nearby.
I wish shows would have some people just confused and not really understanding what's happening, and not just for "the helpless civilians that need to be saved" but incorporating the whole "it can take time for individuals involved in something unexpected to even understand what is going on or what they are responding to". It's kinda funny how much some fiction ignores things like the fog of war, especially ones where they have a sniper that can somehow just see everything and always has a shot (often also sitting way out in the open where they'd get counter sniped pretty quickly, like hanging from a crane, which also begs some more questions).
Shaun of the Dead does a nice bit using this classic trope of turning the TV on exactly at the right moment.
And Community, as mentioned in another comment.
Big Bang Theory is witty and funny. It’s my favorite show now. Am I old now?
TBBT is bottom of the barrel humour. It's meh at best. IMHO.
I disagree. But that’s OK. I like simple, family friendly (for the most part) jokes. If I want raunchy, doubled over laughing, I watch Dave Chappell. The difference is I can watch one with my kids present. Different strokes, bro, and that’s A OK.
Not exactly the same, but the only time I've seen Cloverfield, my dad was watching it. He fast-forwarded through everything that wasn't giant monsters. The movie was about 40 minutes long, and I think it's my preferred cut.
How good was the battery in that camcorder as well?
I absolutely love the Sherlock & Co. podcast, the conceit of which is that Watson is a podcaster who records the adventures of Sherlock and releases them as a podcast. He's apparently always recording everything, at every moment, on a little portable recorder that's small enough to pass essentially unnoticed in almost any situation--and yet there's been only one time that I can remember in which this recorder has failed, and it has never run out of battery power, including when the investigation unexpectedly took them to rural southeast India for several days in The Sign of Four.
There can always be a south east to any place, especially if the person is not from there.
I just looked. There is an Andhra Pradesh and a Tamil Nadu that very squarely fall in the south-east category. Just like the Philippines is the South East of South East asia.
I know what you mean, but the Wikipedia article even says it's "on the southeast coast of India."
The spinoff with John Goodman was good though.
I'd be down to try this, but I'm not skipping any scenes with my beloved Lizzy Caplan either. Been had a crush since Mean Girls came out.
Off with Snyder's Cut, in with Dad's Cut.
I'mma about to ruin medical shows/scenes for y'all. And once you see this, you cannot unsee it. the source for all this is the 15 years I spent riding in the back of the bus as a medic.
When you see a scene in the ER and a critical patient arrives, all the doctors go rushing into the exam room and start doing things and arguing about what to do. If we put this stupidity aside for a moment and roll back the scene to the beginning we will see the mistakes the show makes every time.
First, doctors don't rush into the exam room the moment the patient arrives. The doctor, just one and not a whole squad of them, will wait for a moment or two to let the medics and nurses get the patient on to a bed and the triage nurse gets the medic's report.
When the Medics and the cot leaves the room, the doctor will walk to the doorway and stop. Most of them will actually lean against the door jam and just look for a minute or so. They are making their first assessment of the patient from that distance and begin to formulate a treatment plan. Doctors are ACTUALLY TAUGHT to do this medical school. And they practice it because it's hard to remember in an oh shit moment and hard to do. Even us medics are taught the same thing. If the TV doctor does NOT do this, this is your first warning that this a bullshit medical show no matter what the producers and actors claim about realism. This is basic and fundamental to ER medicine and would be soooo easy to do. This is the point where I'm out and ne'er to be seen again.
The second mistake that gets made is that the doctors themselves do very little of the actual treatment of the patient. They stand off to the side and tell the nurses what they want them to do. The nurses do most of the work. The doctor observes and directs. Only if a procedure that requires a doctors skill and knowledge to do, do they get hands on. So that's the second bullshit thing in these shows.
And finally, doctors do not consult in the patient's room unless it absolutely can't be avoided. Which is very rare. They have a room, generally behind the nurses station where they go for that. I have been in there with doctors on occasions when I asked for a teaching moment to further my skills as a medic from one of them. And no matter what hospital, that's where we would go.
But they will share all the details with any random supporter waiting for the procedure to be finished in the otherwise empty waiting room, right?
Is he going to make it, doc?
cries
I don't know. Damn it Jim! I'm a piano player, not a Doctor!
Oh yeah, that is so totally true. HIPPA doesn't apply to strangers in the hallway.
Speaking of medical dramas:
I was amazed how Stargate Atlantis got one medical procedure right over so many medical dramas I've seen.
Patient is in defib, so they get the defibrillator. Doesn't work, patient's heart stops. They take away the defibrillator and start doing chest compressions.
I was just... Woaw. This series plays so fast and loose with science. Didn't expect that.
That's pretty close, but no cigar. You never remove the defib. Then you do 2 minutes more of compressions and then you re-analyze again. Wash rinse and repeat until you are relieved or someone with the authority to decide tells you to stop.
Now, if one of the characters is a medical doctor or the idiot script writer in this case, they were quasi military right, then those people can make a decision to stop CPR. But it would have been a more accurate scene if they just shown them starting CPR, doing a cut scene to everyone being exhausted and done. Or checking the body and seeing an obvious sign of death like lividity and not even starting. So still pretty poor writing.
The worst part is that it's so easy to get this stuff right. It's just simple things. not rocket surgery.
And isn't CPR deliberately depicted wrongly in movies and shows because the proper IRL CPR procedure risks breaking a person's ribs?
Oh, you break ribs when done right.
My wife loves hocus pocus.
Every year I'm like... That zippo wouldn't light. The fluid would have evaporated ages ago. Look at the cobwebs, it's obviously been there for years.
She just reaches over, softly touches my and says 7u5k3n, it's a movie.
Lol
So yeah there's nothing wrong here.
Edit: softly touches my arm. Haha apparently I I accidentally'd a word
Softly touches your what? Please elaborate
His 'broomstick', and after she does that touching it begins to rise up... like magic!!!
Hahahaha whoops
They could have just used a normal lighter (with butane)....
Yep. Could have But the virgin makes a show of lighting it.
It's just one of those things in movies where it's product placement and it needs to light. But it just bothers me. Lol
Inconsistencies in movies or shows do that to me. Happens.
Hocus Pocus is kinda wild. 90's Disney laughing at a kid being a virgin at 15.
I stopped watching Stranger Things because in a show about demons from a parallel universe invading a small town, I couldn't get over a soccer mom breaking her friend out of a Russian prison camp.
That broke the realism for me.
I stopped before that, I think around the time the guy in the cool car banged some soccer mom. It was just a sign that we weren't exploring the human condition wither otherworldly tropes, but just throwing shit at the plot wall.
I mean, he doesn't actually bang her. But those scenes always grossed me out. I don't want to see adults even almost fucking high school kids in my kids-on-bikes sci-fi show. Maybe the Duffer brothers would say they were lampshading an older sexist trope by gender-flipping it, but that doesn't make it less repulsive.
Season 1 is goat level of good. Goes off the rails from there. The whole 11 going wild thing and then the Russian thing were just not needed.
Not to mention the 76 years or whatever it took them to film it all. Those kids in the last season all looked like mid 20 year olds with a shit corpo job. Not high school age kids.
I'm like this when something gets very basic technology wrong.
“I’ll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic. See if I can track down the IP Address”
I'd like to see a cop show that applies that level of writing to guns.
A: What can you tell me about the bullet you recovered from the victim?
B: It's a handgun round, caliber 9x19 inch, solid steel frangible hollow-point. Fired with a muzzle velocity of 100 joules, one of these can punch through an inch of hardened RHA like wet toilet paper.
A: 100 joules?! Jesus Christ, that's enough to kill someone!
B: Exactly. This is the kind of bullet only a professional would use. Thankfully the firing pin left an imprint on the bullet; if we can find the shop that sold the gun they can tell us who fired it.
A: Only one shop in LA carries weapons that powerful. Let's go.
...velocity in joules?
Yes, that is certainly the only inaccurate part in that dialogue. ;)
that's the one that stood out in my sleep deprived state :P
With scenes like that and the 'two characters typing on the same keyboard to hack faster' one, I'm 90% sure it's just the writers having fun and seeing what they can get away with. Long-running formulaic shows must be boring as hell to write for, so I can understand the impulse.
Funny enough, writing a GUI using VB.NET isn't even a bad idea, it just didn't have anything to do with the task
It's just about the easiest language to create a GUI in, too. It's like saying "I'll write a quick Hello World in Python, and then we've got this case in the bag!"
Or use "complicated technology" to prove some utter bs.
Dude I'm all for suspending disbelief but I feel this so hard. Like, sure, there's werewolves and you have silver bullets which in this universe don't melt and tumble, but that's a Beretta 92FS, you have 15+1 silver shots before a reload, not infinite, and you can't use your infinite Berettas to cut a hole in the floor.
They bought their guns from the same dealer who sold Lara Croft her handguns in the original games.
Yeah give me his number lol
It didn't stop me from finishing Prometheus, but what grinds my gears is when the supposedly biologist was trying to pet the alien and it attacked him. Any trained biologist would know not to try to pet animals which you don't know if it's timid or not.
Ah, but you're forgetting - that only happened because the trained cartographer with the 3D mapping drones... got them lost.
I find it unrealistic for any movie involving contact with aliens to not even consider how our and their microbial life would interact with each other. There should be a default rule of "oh you touched the alien? Ok, you will be the quarantine subject that we will monitor to make sure you haven't caught some slow developing disease that will inevitably kill any earth life in your vicinity because we haven't developed any kind of resistance to it".
Except instead of "touched the alien" it would really have to be "entered their atmosphere with your ship" because the ship itself could bring back contaminants that would eventually destroy all life on our planet. And maybe even entering the atmosphere isn't needed if microbial life occasionally gets swept into space by extreme weather, meteor interactions with the atmosphere, maybe solar ones also. Including this because it's plausible that earth life originated elsewhere and was just seeded here by some event that allowed life to escape some other location and survive to come here. We've also had ships return to earth with life detectable on their outside--because someone on earth sneezed on it before it was launched and the microbial life wasn't destroyed by being in space.
Similar line of thought when they go on the alien planet and just breathe the atmosphere because they detect oxygen.
Ironically it's canon in even Alien (1979) and even a truck driver / pilot knows it. "Oh you got in contact with an alien organism? Sorry can't let you on the ship."
For some reason the cowboy style of the Prometheus. The sad thing is they could have written around these bad tropes but chose not to.
The original script (ironically written by the screenwriter who did the Catwoman script) was a much better movie. You can blame this on Executive Fuckery.
I don't know why people forget even the first moon missions had a quarentine trailer/chamber used by the astronauts for this exact reason.
They were pretty sure they weren't gonna find microbial life on the moon but they sure as hell weren't gonna take the risk in case there actually was.
I walked out of Total Recall(the original) in the final minutes when people got thrown out into the Martian landscape unprotected and their faces blew up like those little stress heads that you squeeze and the eyeballs pop out.
Once you kill my suspension of disbelief, that's it, I'm done.
This is also why I never liked Blade Runner. There were too many violations of known science for me to enjoy the movie.
I will say that scene in Blade Runner where Tyrell is trying to explain why they can’t extend a lifespan and basically just says “all these things create deadly viruses” instead of literally anything more accurate like disrupting the immune system or causing cancer etc. that scene really does piss me off.
Why the hell would repressing a human gene create a virus in the first place?
Also checking “pupillary dilation” and “blush response” but no “it won’t affect the test” if you’re smoking despite the fact nicotine would probably mess with those metrics as well as basically any other biometric like heart-rate or blood pressure.
That being said, I do actually kinda like watching it (or just having it play in the background while I’m doing something else) just for the vibe of the environment. Cyberpunk megastructures? Cassette futurism? Dense but partly abandoned urban infrastructure? Synth jazz playing over shots of a rainy city night? Hell yeah.
(Tbf I’ve only watched the director’s cut so I dont know if the version with Harrison Ford’s voice over makes any glaring mistakes; it definitely ruins the vibe of the movie imo)
I can accept three tiddies, but bad atmospheric pressure is where I draw the line!
Well yeah, three tiddies are 50% more likely to keep me around than two.
I won’t stop watching, but it drives me nuts when lawyers in a show misuse “begs the question”
It drives me nuts when anyone gets that wrong.
"But language evolves!!"
Oh yeah? Evolve yourself back into the fucking sea!
Whales and dolphins: hold my legs
I think there are probably about three people who use the expression "begs the question" as it's defined in books. Through misuse it has evolved to mean, "brings up the question," just as "based off" has come to mean the same as "based on".
lawyers would know the difference
We got three of those people right here in this thread baby.
Aristotle in the house
How do you feel about other words or phrases with multiple definitions, like "theory"?
If a scientist character uses the word in a scientific settings with the colloquial meaning, it would annoy me.
I rarely do that, but i did once with 28 Weeks Later where the army when they found out someone is infected inside the colony, just made everyone come out of their own room that is safe and isolated, and wait inside a huge room, which inevitably caused everyone to just get nibbled and infected. They also ordered personel to station at the place where they're unprotected from sprinter, and inevitably got nibbled and turned. I just give up. The series never recovered after that from what i've heard.
28 Days Later was fantastic. 28 Weeks Later was shit sandwich. I've not yet seen 28 Years Later.
28 Years Later isn’t nearly as good as 28 Days Later, but it’s way better than 28 Weeks Later. IMO
Honestly 28 Years a very different movie than the others, but it’s good.
28 Years Later felt like it was mostly a setup for The Bone Temple, which was a trip.
So I still need to watch bone temple if I watched 28 years later?
The ending broke me with how ridiculous it was. I should see bone Temple i suppose
Glad to hear it was better than 28 Weeks Later, but honestly it wouldn't take that much.
I saw 28 Years Later on a plane. I could have just slept instead. It wasn't terrible, but it was certainly more artistic than I expected. Soooooo close to morbidly charming, but ended up just short of the line.
That's a better review than I would have given 28 weeks later.
I still haven't watch 28 days later, currently not in the mood for horror. But definitely in my watchlist.
Keep in mind that I saw it when it came out and it was my introduction to fast zombies. They were not popular before that movie, although DDG says a movie in 1980 had fast undead. Also it was artistic in a time when all movies were leaning toward "independent film" asthetics, despite being big budget films. And the opening with the Godspeed You Black Emperor song playing was freaking great.
I don't know how the movie will come across having decades of films in between. Will it still seem fantastic to an early 20s kid? No clue. But I thought it was fantastic back then.
It's honestly still pretty good, they were the first fast zombies I remember as well. Good tone throughout, good pacing, good sound I don't know much more you could ask for in a zombie movie.
It was shot on an old Motorola phone, but there are some shots that are really awesome and it works well. It's been pretty emulated, so it may not have that novelty anymore. It's still one of my favorites.
For sure. A great film.
I can't find anything about the Motorola Phone stuff. Do you have a source?
Here's what Wikipedia says, "The majority of the film (except for the final sequence when the military plane finds Jim, Selena, and Hannah, which was shot on 35mm film) was shot on Canon XL1 digital video (DV) cameras,[24][9] which were smaller and more manoeuvrable than traditional film cameras, which would have been impractical on such brief shoots. Boyle said the early London sequences avoided "litter[ing] the world with corpses", instead emphasising a more symbolic emptiness and atmosphere.[25] The scenes of the empty M1 motorway were also filmed within limited periods; Boyle said police created a "rolling block" in both directions to produce a temporary corridor of empty road, giving the crew seven or eight minutes to shoot using multiple cameras.[26]"
Those opening scenes in an empty London were amazing. It's a zombie movie, and if I try I can remember scenes with zombies. But, I mostly remember the opening, the buckets on the roof, travelling in the cab, etc.
Like all good zombie movies, it's really about how people cope with the changes to the world.
28 Weeks Later is such an incredibly stupid, and also unnecessary, sequel.
The sequel turned the infected into regular zombies. The 28 Days Later, nobody was a zombie. They could actually die from getting shot, needed to eat to survive, and by the end they all starved to death.
None of the characters were monumentally stupid either. So many incredibly fucking stupid characters in 28 Weeks Later. I watched it once when I was a teenager and I remember essentially asking "Why would he do that!?" every 5 or 10 minutes.
I have not seen that one, but people taking a bad situation an making it much worse for the dumbest reasons possible actually sounds painfully realistic.
That's not "stupidly unrealistic though". Because the unrealistic part (everybody waiting together in the waiting room) actually plays a huge part in the plot moving forward. That's just bad writing.
Going the the post office on a sunday is something that can be easily tweaked without changing the rest of the plot.
A shit plot is not better....?
I'm saying that OP's post is about unrealistic movie details that don't really affect the plot. Whereas root comment's example does significantly affect the plot.
But it's still stupidly unbelievable though, whether or not the plot hinge on this shouldn't matter imo. But i guess it's not minute enough in this case.
Exactly right. If the plot depends on people making bad decisions that no one would ever make, its bad plot!
There is nothing wrong with this.
I know. It's unlikely, but possible that a professor of archaeology gets up to all sorts of adventures, but non native snakes in a pit is impossible.
Nazis dragging looted treasures all over the world but nobody could import a bunch of snakes for their snake pit?
It's more that if the story is about human drama and adventure, and then suddenly you go from desert to tropical island, or if everyone changes clothes to Victorian era, not all people will pick up on it. But some will, and it's enough to go from an adventure story where the actions are the fiction, to "woah.... Hey, now it looks like you just don't care to tell the story right."
It's that. Attention to detail.
Rather, the care imparted into a work of art.
If they don't care, neither do I.
Whenever evil antagonist broadcasts his evil message on every major advertisement screen and TV in the world (and PC/mobile device), with full audio.
::: spoiler stupid rant
Ad screens don't have speakers you dolt
No one in times square looks at the ad acreens except the tourists when taking a picture
Not all ad screens can handle a live stream connection and you'd need to hack into each one to play your message.
It is literally impossible for everyone to be conveniently watching the TV at the same time as everyone else across the globe
Overriding every TV broadcast channel with your message requires an RF array an order of magnitude more powerful than Russia's massive Murmansk-BN electronic warfare system.
No one watches broadcast TV anymore in most developed countries
The internet cannot handle a simultaneous stream of video to every digital device in the world without the use of multicast or broadcast, which means evil antangonist is either rolling in with hacking the entire internet backbone to enable multicast traffic or magically broadcasting a signal to devices that don't support receiving a broadcast signal.
Evil antagonist has to use multiple zero day CVEs just to force stream his evil message on PC/mobile devices for a whopping 30 seconds.
:::
My personal favorite was in Batman and Robin where they cut open the city's water main and the water just keeps flowing along in a cylindrical shape... Come ON
That's Batman Begins
The snakes were not even dangerous in any way, they were mostly ball pythons if I remember correctly, those are neither venomous, nor eager to bite, their usual reaction is to curl into a ball. Oooh so dangerous! The common theme is to use non-venomous species (for obvious reasons) and people do not notice, since they usually know jackshit about reptiles, and ooh aaah snakes! Scary!
I also laugh, when there is some "super dangerous spider" or something, and then it is always of one of the slowest moving, least venomous, most docile tarantula species. The worst thing with those species is, they might kick itchy hairs on you, and the fangs make a small wound, if you manage to somehow make them bite. But aaah! Spiders! Scary!
Also hilarious when they use goddamn show bred huskies for wolves. Oh come on.
In every scene in The North in Game of Thrones I was yelling at the characters to PUT ON A HAT! Also bacteria don't seem to exist in that universe. No wound ever gets infected despite medieval levels of health care.
The books are quite keen on people getting infections iirc, but those characters probably didn't make it
I guess you could say
they didn't make the cut.
YEEEEEAAAAH
Quite right too. In this life, a man must have standards.
I'm very forgiving in this regard, as long as the movie is entertaining, I'll go along for the ride.
I did have a related weird thing happen once, though. I don't remember what movie I was watching, but about halfway through I suddenly realized everyone in the movie was acting and I couldn't watch anymore. It was a weird feeling, like they were all just lying to me, which of course they always are, but I was suddenly offended--"WTF? This is all bullshit!"
Maybe it was terrible chemistry. Maybe I subconsciously noticed all the subtle clues that the actors hated each other, but were pretending to be friends.
I suppose the one thing I can't forgive is a complete lack of chemistry between the actors, and that killing their performances.
What I enjoy is watching poorly directed/acted shows or movies and stopping right after a cut. Pay attention, if they’re not the best actors, you can see them starting their lines or getting the gears going. This is especially apparent when there’s no sound. It’s ruined syndicated shows for me.
I stop watching when characters do something stupid. I'm like, "if I wanted to watch stupid people I would have gone outside".
However, that's what made the new Resident Evil such a fun movie.
I demand films that show a realistic amount of traffic, even when traffic is completely unrelated to the story.
I can relate to this. A movie asks for suspension of disbelief, and I am happy to grant that. But then it has to present a coherent world for which I suspended my disbelief. If it doesn't then I wasted my suspended disbelief and that's annoying.
Noah put them in the Ark just before the Flood, duh.
My wife can't help pointing out when travel isn't realistic enough, like when a series of city landmarks show up in the wrong order.
The one that gets me is people flying backwards when hit by a bullet / shotgun blast.
I can accept it in movies that aren't going for realism, even though it annoys me. But, I've seen it in movies that are trying for a gritty realism aesthetic, and after that I just can't enjoy the movie. Add to that movies where silencers go "pfft", or someone uses a pillow as a silencer, or people shoot guns without ear protection or hearing damage.
Physics wasn't my best science, but wouldn't the recoil have to be equivalent? So if the bad guy gets thrown back 3 feet, the protagonist would also get thrown back about that amount?
Yeah, exactly. Newton's third law. If the person who was hit goes flying, an equivalent force had to be acting on the shooter. If that shooter is shooting a handgun, imagine just how much force is acting on their wrist.
If you're wearing plate armor, you sure do. Especially if it's got cheaper plates.
You sure do what?
What kills me. The smart person, call them a leader in molecular biology. That can suddenly fly a space ship. Operate everything in said space ship. Write a computer program, in excel, to translate an alien species. Like come on dawg. I get it. You’re smart and make a fun movie. But the whole 1 person that is a fucking the expert in literally everything that happens is just getting old.
I feel like your calling out Project Hail Mary. Is this what you are referring to?
Yeah. That was the last movie I saw like this. Keep in mind, I love the book and movie. But watching the movie, I keep going “oh come on” how does he know how to program a translator in excel. Still a great movie.
Rocky, the alien, was doing the vast majority of the work in their communication - being careful to only use words already in the list recognised by the laptop, except when absolutely necessary to introduce a new word, and also saying the words in an order suitable for English grammar. The laptop was only doing single-word speech synthesis from Rocky's sounds, a fairly simple task.
In Excel? In space? How did his M365 account not expire? Or connect back to MS to validate when he opened it up next time?
I only saw the movie, but I thought the same stuff for the most part. It would have helped if they were training him, but from what I remember he was only teaching his specific area and then thrown into having to do it with like almost no time for training. Yeah definitely not going to happen lol.
I don't nitpick over really minor things, like the wrong snakes and such. I can understand unrealistic silly if it makes sense for the movie.
What I can't stand are plots or situations that can only exist because the writers don't know what the fuck they're writing about, or lack any imagination in making plot reasons happen.
Battlefield Los Angeles is one of those movies I just can't fucking stand because of this.
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler
Excuse me, but are you telling me an interstellar capable alien civilisation cannot melt ice? Do you have any idea how much water there is in the Kuiper Belt!? There are chunks of ice floating over there the size of countries.
Any alien could be mining the Kuiper Belt for a thousand years and we'd never notice. Nobody would have to commit so many resources to cunduct such a wasteful invasion of an inhabited planet with an amount of water that is a knee high puddle compared to everything that's available in space!
So... The alien species can cross the stars. The alien species apparently has the technology to analyse Earth from light years away. They can not only detect liquid water on Earth from that distance, but also that there is a civilisation living there.
They have some pretty fucking granular information about Earth for observations made several light years away, and... that is the best they could do!? A two day failed invasion with a pitiful amount of troops and no orbital support?
They have the technology to fly through the depths of space and get mind bogglingly detailed information from so far away, and they invade land tiny force equipped with crap that functions almost worse than what we currently have!?
This species is written too stupid to have even made it to an interstellar level.
:::
I lost it during Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy stowed away on the outside of a U-boat and then rode it like a thousand miles across the Mediterranean or wherever they were. I guess they thought submarines just buttoned up when they left port and nobody ever went outside on the conning tower. And they never dove or anything.
It's been way too long since I watched Raiders, but I remember it being great so I'll have to watch it again.
That definitely sounds stupid. The only saving grace might be that U-boats, unlike modern submarines, very rarely went underwater. They had diesel engines that ran the engines on the surface and also charged batteries. They could use the batteries underwater, but they didn't last long. When they attacked they'd go underwater so they could ambush the ships they were attacking. But, to set up for that attack they'd race ahead of the ship while staying above the water, then go under for the ambush. Even a lot of the attacking happened above the water. Yes, they had torpedoes, but they also had deck guns. Since their targets were mostly commercial ships, they didn't have to worry about the ships shooting back.
On the other hand, the fact they were used on the surface meant that there was almost always a crew on the conning tower. Technically you could do everything without using the conning tower bridge. But, they almost never did. Even during storms they were up on the conning tower, not sheltering inside. It was awful being exposed to the elements like that, but the visibility through a periscope was awful compared to standing outside.
It is a fun pulp adventure action movie, but if you expect realism you gotta stop there. As far as I know it was all inspired by old serial shows and pulp stories from magazines. Ya gotta just let certain stories be fun. Though as a geek it is fun to rag on their issues I know, have done that lots.
But yes seemed silly he hung on the uboat that long, I wondered about it growing up since was a regular watched movie, that was a long freaking trip to be hanging regardless of food service and comfort.
I've read a lot of memoirs from WWII submariners (German, American and British - not sure if there are any Japanese memoirs in existence) and they always made test dives at the start of a trip, just to make sure everything was shipshape. Even if they somehow hadn't noticed Indy clinging desperately to the conning tower, he would have been left behind pretty early on. Unless he had gills like Kevin Costner in Waterworld.
Fun fact: the British experimented with subs that mounted a (fixed) 12" gun taken from a decommissioned battleship. The idea was that they would surface just enough to expose the gun and then blast enemy merchant ships. This actually sort of worked, except that the remote-firing mechanism tended to get water in it and the gun would shoot its own barrel off. And since the barrel was wire-wrapped (a technique the Brits loved) the blown-off part would stay attached and act as an anchor.
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to do a test dive right at the start.
A 12 inch gun on a sub is crazy. That's not just a gun from a battleship, that's one of the main guns from the battleship. That's a ridiculous amount of overkill for a merchant ship. If you wanted to ambush armoured enemy ships that's another matter. If you could successfully do that, it might not even matter if the gun only lasted a few shots. A sub is cheap compared to anything requiring a 12 inch gun. I'm surprised they got far enough with the program to actually test fire them.
Since the gun could only be loaded while the sub was surfaced, it had to sink its target in one shot, which was unlikely to be the case against warships, even something small and unarmored like a destroyer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_M1_(1917)
Good luck managing to hit a destroyer with a fixed gun.
I would imagine that if you did manage a hit though, it would be devastating. I don't think there were many ships that could shrug off hits from a 12 inch gun. Even if it didn't sink, it would probably be badly damaged, which might give the sub the opportunity to surface somewhere safe, reload, and shoot again.
The destroyers at the Battle off Samar took multiple hits from Yamato's 18.1" guns. The initial hits were armor-piercing rounds that passed right through without doing much of anything, but they took multiple hits before sinking even after the Japanese switched to high-explosive shells. I think a single hit on a destroyer from a 12" shell would certainly not sink it, and depending on where it hit it would probably not even be seriously disabled. Given the close range (less than 1000 yards), the destroyer's deck guns would still knock out the sub pretty quickly.
I think Parks and Recreation had the absolute most unrealistic time-scales. The things they could get done in an afternoon or evening was absurd.
Things are different for Ron fucking Swanson.
Also Pawnee is supposed to be a kinda folksy midwest town with like 30,000 population but the city hall is seemingly a modern $15mil building with floors and departments.
The actual Parks and Rec "department" of a town like that would be one haggard "Selma from the Simpsons" type character chainsmoking and sitting at a folding card table in some shitty repurposed storefront in a building from the 1950s across the square from the old courthouse.
We still laugh at the scale of their city council election. Our town is larger than Pawnee, and you're lucky if the people running spend money to make lawn signs.
Let alone run commercials and have a huge debate 😆
The TV show 24 killed me with how he was able to do much in an hour when it could easily have taken 30-1.5 hr just in travel time around cities like LA.
For anyone who doesn't know the show premise was each episode was 1 hr in a 24hr period where the main guy has to stop some kind of terrorist or otherwise crazy attack with dozens of sub plots and things he has to do per hour too. But somehow he travels across major cities in minutes.
Yeah, but you still remember what it sounds like when the phones ring and the sound the clock makes.
It irks me when an actor who plays a character so is supposed to be a highly competent gunman doesn't even know the basics of how to hold a gun properly.
Or when they have ten-minute discussions while holding guns at one another's face. It's not a talking stick. It's not for intimidation. A basic rule of gun defense is that if you draw, you fire.
Bet he loved how Dexter had 40 hours in a day
Or how Doakes stalked Dexter through a shipping yard completely unseen, no footsteps no arrousing suspicion from employees, nuthin just "Surprise Muthafucka!"
The moment anyone creates a Gui using Visual Basic, we're done.
Isn't that the same steps as making a GUI using C#.NET?
It's a quiote from a crimgy tv show.
Ironically, that is exactly what Visual Basic was good at.
My favorite feat of IT wizardry in a movie is in Independence Day where Jeff Goldblum's character hacks into the onboard computer of an alien spaceship using nothing but his MacBook. Of course, entire generations of scientists have failed to get into that computer but the wizz just does it overnight. Does it even use a binary system? Does it use quantum computing? What security features do alien computers have? No matter.
Better yet, he manages to coax the computer on the alien space station (which he has never had physical access to!) into letting them dock without raising the alarm.
But the icing on the cake is the virus he manages to inject into this previously unknown IT system which not only grants him full access but also plays back a laughing skull animation on an operator console he has never seen, not even while developing his virus.
Ludicrous.
Isn't that because human computer technology was based on reverse-engineering a downed alien scout ship?
If that is a plot point in the movie then I completely missed it. I guess if the aliens were running Bonjour and their displays were VESA compatible it would make Jeff Goldblum's job a lot easier...
Haha I remember watching independence day for the first time and thinking "oh damn they're gonna infect the aliens with a disease" and then Jeff goes "computer virus" before tapping away with his laptop.
tbf though I consider that movie the king of blockbusters for the absolute massive list of wacky tacky bs that occurs pretty much the entire runtime of the film lol.
It's wacky tacky alright. 😅
I dont understand, makes sense, what's the problem?
Funny what can pull you back into reality and out of the temporary relief we get to enjoy when watching a movie. Some people are better at ignoring the absurd and out of place.
But then there's the films that nail even the most pointless things
I love that level of detail in books! Reportedly in the first 6 books of the Wheel of Time every time they mention the moon, it's in the correct phase. Iirc it's never relevant to the plot.
Perhaps they had better things to do than watch paint dry.
Taking a perfectly good true story or novel and ruining it and/or changing it in unnecessary ways
This is sadly why I couldn’t get into andor :(
Please expand on "this"
They went to the space post office on a space Sunday.
What were they thinking.
The thing about Andor is they always try and walk it in
Like people would actually rise up and fight against a totalitarian government run by the biggest assholes.
Totally unbelievable.
Not like the Prequels before it where everyone eagerly clapped along to installing said Assholes as leaders. That is way more realistic.
Exactly! And then before I could start watching the people that won’t rise up came online bragging about how brave and great Andor is.
Mission Impossible, the first remake with Tom Cruise. The final scene ruined the whole thing for me. He's hanging on the outside of a helicopter flying through a train tunnel chasing a train - which apparently wasn't improbable enough because he then blows up the helicopter and the explosion sends him flying safely onto the train.
I'm sorry, but that helicopter was made of metal and glass. Anything that blew it up is going to turn him into a fine mist. In another, cheesier action movie, fine! But the movie took itself so seriously otherwise that I just couldn't anymore.
Am I their dad? Do I have kids now?
That's how you lucid dream. You realize the absurd, then wake up in the dream. Then, it goes where you want it.
Not always for me. If it's too ridiculous, I may wake up. Like "alright, I'm out"
Am I...
Am I a dad...?
I don't agree movie need to be as realistic as possible or insist on enforcing fact to audience face ,especially when the movie theme based or source is fiction itself , but i do agree realism and fact matter in movies that sell themselves as inspired, based on true event or a documentary and such.
I had this with Interstellar. The story is that most plants died and they can't grow food but corn. So they're at a baseball game and this older character says "Popcorn?! I'm sick of corn, I want a hotdog". He knows there aren't hotdogs anymore, he's just frustrated at the situation. Nobody responds.
That's the moment everyone should have jumped up to shut up grandpa. You can't say that! Billions died, you insensitive asshat. Be glad you have food. Eating meat would be socially unacceptable because you can't feed society that way anymore. It would be on the level of grandpa saying old-timey racist shit out loud in public
No that’s realistic lol. Nobody would have said shit other than to agree, because after all of that everyone would want a hot dog.
Humans in general don’t deal with mass change that well. Look at Covid.
They’d bitch at the government, bitch at their neighbors, and find a nationalized group to blame for why the way of life changed.
It wasn’t that long of a time period in interstellar. The whole collapse happened over about 30 years. So anyone over around 40 would have remembered a normal time and would agree with grandpa. They’d have seen their lives get worse and worse and desperately want to go back to the old life.
I get what you're saying but I think society would change much more in 30 years with billions of deaths compared to covid which effectively lasted for like 2-3 years. A generation would grow up that doesn't know any better. Society would change. Covid was peanuts compared to the crisis in the movie. There is no going back in the movie.
All of humanity is doomed but the movie doesn't really show what that would do to society generally. A movie like Children of Men does show that. They also still have blaming immigrants and shit, but at least that movie doesn't pretend life would carry on as normal when faced with "no more food, we're all going to die"