I’m aware of the NCIS scenes, what else you guys got?
If a girl doesn’t like you, but you just keep pursuing her, everything will eventually work out and you’ll be happy together.
I watched Reality Bites recently and this was prominently displayed
A more mundane one, but people on reasonably normal incomes living in a house that’s at least one order of magnitude more expensive than they could ever afford even if they purchased it twenty or thirty years ago. Its particularly bad in things set in expensive areas like London or New York or Tokyo. Like being able to afford a house in central London rather than renting a flat with three other people takes substantial money, you aren’t going to be afford that if you work in a supermarket.
I’d love if in one of those shows it’s just implied lightly throughout the entire thing that they are squatting in the home of someone who died and the city never noticed or something stupid like that XD
That kinda happens in Friends. Monica is living in her grandmother’s rent controlled apartment in the village. And still had a roommate!
There was an old meme about house-hunting reality shows that was like, “David sharpens colored pencils for a living and Kirstin volunteers 2 days a week at the butterfly museum. Their budget is two million.”
How the fuck does Bundy own a palacial 2 story + basement suburban mansion on the salary of an incompetent shoe salesman in a store that gets almost no customers!
The apartment in Big Daddy was awesome and I was like ain’t no way Adam Sandler’s character can afford that!
Everyone lives in amazing homes in movies and they all have amazing jobs like director of the cia at like 25 years old and they do a lot of work while walking quickly down the hallways barking instructions to their assistants on their sides.
The Dark Knight trilogy really wanted to be a realistic, grounded take on the Batman mythos, so they dropped the more fantastical elements of some characters’ backstories. Ra’s Al Ghul was no longer immortal, Bane didn’t have super steroids, the Joker wasn’t permanently bleached by chemicals…then there’s Two-Face.
I guess they thought acid burns were too unrealistic, so they gave him regular burns…apparently without knowing that burns that severe would be so painful that he wouldn’t even be able to remain conscious, much less run around the city on a killing spree. I mean, you can see exposed muscle in some places. There’s a line where Gordon says he’s rejecting skin grafts, and I remember thinking, “WTF are you talking about? He should be in a medically induced coma, not making healthcare decisions.” Half of his body was an open wound; I’m amazed he didn’t die of infection 15 minutes after he left the hospital.
They also bankrupted Bruce through theft.
That was one of the biggest things that took me out of that movie. They stage this huge operation at the Gotham Stock Exchange or wherever, everybody knows this giant crime is happening there, but woops, looks like Bruce Wayne has been magically bankrupted, there’s nothing we can do about it. It just took me out of it thinking, “I don’t think you can just bankrupt a billionaire like that.”
It’s really crazy, because not only is it obvious, the stock market has several protections for more or less this. Trading is routinely halted when weird things happen like massive plunges in price. Rollbacks are also a thing that happen somewhat regularly for all sorts of reasons.
I totally agree, really took me out of the movie too.
I find it funny in a world with a billionaire dressing up as a bat, the most ridiculous thing is how they commit white collar crime. I think largely it seemed to easy and also soo stupid that batman wouldn’t have a diversified portfolio with things not all tied up in the stock market.
He could also talk normally despite half of his lips being gone.
The Nolan movies always cared more about giving the appearance of realism by making everything dull and monotone than actually being realistic.
There was an analysis of Nolan and post-Nolan Batman that argued that once you strip away all the fantastic parts of Batman, all the Clayfaces and Mr. Freezes and Poison Ivies and the sentient robots and uncanny weirdness, all that is left is a bunch of problems that frankly the cops should be able to handle, and that Batman at that point is just a cop who is willing to violate people’s Constitutional rights.
If Batman can be replaced by a well-outfitted SWAT team, then you’re not writing Batman well enough. Give him some insane nonsense that cops are not equipped to handle.
all that is left is a bunch of problems that frankly the cops should be able to handle
They could but they don’t because corruption.
Fundamentally, Batman isn’t about solving insane problems. He’s driven by his anger to not any other kid be an orphan like him.
That always killed me! Like… bro, a soft breeze should take him out. He’s not ready to be a villain, he’s ready to spend 5+ years in rehab.
The pseudo-realism in those batman movies and comic book movies in general is a huge part of why I detest them. It’s like an uncanny gap or something. Comic book characters are inherently ridiculous and absurd so I can’t take them seriously. They ask me to suspend too much disbelief.
One specific example from the batman movies is at the end of one of them, I forget which, I think a few hundred cops charge a bunch of guys with machine guns or something? And I remember thinking in the theater they are about to get mowed down World War I style. But somehow they win, they all live, and the streets aren’t flowing with a river of blood. You want me to take them seriously, while having absurd characters and situations, and then you put them in situations where they absolutely should be massacred…I just…I’m out…
I feel like the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies did that well. Sure their absurd but it kinda works into the favor of the movie. Also the acting of basically everyone helped, especially Willem Dafoe chewing the scenery.
First time I saw the Jurassic park I thought no way would intelligent people just run around a huge and therefore dangerous Brachiosaurus or jump out of the car and run right to the ill Triceratops. That would be Darwin’s award kind of madness.
Then I studied biology, got to know some zoologists and paleontologists, and yeah, this is exactly what would happen.
See also Yellowstone National Park visitors
GI Joe movie where they blow up a sheet of ice on the ocean to make it sink down and destroy the base below.
I had to read that 2-3 times before I could comprehend that the base was not on top of ice and falling through it.
Yeah…
It was probably ice made from heavy water.
That got me upset enough that when I read “GI Joe movie” in your comment, it was the first thing I thought of, before reading the rest of your comment.
Basically searched through the comments for this one. I knew it would be here. I know there’s a lot of “movie logic” for hacking, space flight, how guns work, etc. but how do you fuck up elementary physics? Even kids know ice floats.
The ice blocks had metal of the underwater villain lair duh
Cartoon GI Joe or live action GI Joe? I’m inclined to cut cartoons in general a lot of slack in terms of physics abuse
This was one of the live action ones
Hacking.
There is no way that you keyboard danced for 12 seconds and completed a nmap scan, identified an unpatched target with a remote code execution bug, delivered the payload, pivoted to an account with the permissions you needed, and found the server running the internal application you are looking for.
telnet 127.0.0.1
I’m in!
Ah legacy systems.
All the young kids use ::1
It’s really simple, you just search the evil corporation’s hard drive for a file named
EVIDENCE.txtOnly Mr Robot
Realistic hacking scenes would be funny.
“Okay I’m in”
“Wait… how?”
“Oh I figured out the default passwords and naming conventions for new employees awhile ago.”
Funnily enough I got my college to change password policies because for a report for one of my classes I wrote about how stupid it was that all new users passwords were First intial + last initial + last four of social security number, with usernames being firstname + lastname + year. Since they had no max number of attempts on logins, and didn’t prompt you to change password on logging in, it took a few minutes to get into anyone’s account once you knew their name. (That school was very incompetent, and they are closed now)
OR
“Give me 20 minutes, I’m on hold with IT. They’ll reset the password and tell me it if I give them an employee ID, dob, and name. Which I see clearly on this guys facebook picture where he has his badge visibile.”
Or a hacking guy trying to brute force for days. Then the “no nonsense” guy goes out for 20 minutes, and comes back with it and refused to answer questions. Oh wait… that’s just XKCD.
That water pollution is neon green goo, air pollution is thick black smoke, or radioactive waste is only in drums.
Most of it is invisible and you don’t know about it until it’s too late.
Well how else are you gonna visualize those things for the audience. Same with green smell clouds coming off of something or someone who smells bad. It’s difficult to make the audience understand and care about something invisible
It’s pretty easy - show the effects and the cause and not a visualization of something that you can’t see. Like in the movie Dark Waters where they showed cows dying and birth defects, then the plant that produced PFAS nearby to tie it together.
There’s a trillion ones around unrealism, so I may as well pick something that would be more enjoyable if fixed.
Professional chatter. Let’s say a team of 30 scientists have been trying to communicate with a dimensional portal for 5 years. They wouldn’t be using speech like “Identity verified. Doctor Faris, you are clear to approach the anomaly.” Often, they’d have extremely abbreviated lingo for everything they need to express that happens on a daily basis, and otherwise are chatting about other stuff.
“Ok, approach endorsed. Bob wasn’t so chatty yesterday from what I heard, we’ll just aim for 2 logic points for this cycle.”
“Ryan was suggesting we spread the cycles. Bob has to sleep sometime.”
“Yeah, 90% of us would rather listen to Ryan than Mick, but Mick signs the checks.”So the only actual order comes from some obscure phrase like “Approach endorsed”, which they may only say verbatim for safety reasons. The rest is just workplace banter about how best to accomplish their task, none of it being essential. EDIT: And, to make clear, in the above quote, Bob is the portal/anomaly.
In Robocop when Murphy gets shot to pieces and wheeled into the ER, Verhoeven got real ER doctors to play the scene, so their chatter is very realistic and very nonchalant as they work on a guy that they know full-well is a lost cause.
Ever seen Primer? Equal and opposite to that, easily the most confusing movie I’ve ever seen and they don’t spoon feed you anything, lol
As a counterpoint to the excellent examples posted here, I will cite an example of the opposite that I appreciate: In the Big Lebowski when the Dude goes to retrieve his stolen car and he asks the cop if they have any leads. The cop’s reaction is both realistic and absolutely hilarious.
Gotta be the “high noon duel” in western movies. That didn’t happen much in the real wild west.
Citizens shooting at gangs during bank robberies? Yup.
Shootout at The OK Corral? Yup.
Lynching of accused criminals before a judge could come to town? Oh hell yes.But that trope of lawman/outlaw facing off in the middle of the street for a prearranged gun duel just didn’t really happen.
Makes me wonder where the trope came from…
People definitely used to do pistol duels at prearranged times, but maybe that fell out of favor in the West?
Stepping on a landmine doesn’t make it explode instead it arms the mine with a noticible click sound then lifting up your foot is the thing that makes it explode.
“sir, we’ve invented something that blows up when you step on it”
“That’s great, but where’s your sense of drama?”
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IIRC the whole thing about the land mines exploding when you step off of them is purely down to the Bouncing Betty or the German S-Mine, which saw widespread use and gained its infamy in WW2. They almost worked in the manner described, actually going off with a time delay rather than waiting until the hapless soldier removed his foot from the plunger. But they used a small lift charge to pop the main explosive up into the air a couple of feet and then went off, with the aim of shrapneling in a circle a whole group of soldiers passing by and not just whoever stepped on it. Obviously this wouldn’t work so well if someone were standing on it at the time.
The popular conception formed that they went off “after you stepped off of them,” which was true in most cases (who was going to just stand there like a nincompoop after you’d just triggered it?) and then Hollywood writers of the era just assumed that most or all landmines worked that way and wouldn’t let that misconception go. So now here we are.
Ah, so obviously you gotta just take off your boot, brilliant!
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Space Flight.
I walked in on my roommate watching “Don’t Look Up” right during the space shuttle launch scene. Literally every single thing was wrong. The trajectory the shuttle took off the launch pad. It flying RIGHT SIDE UP as it did the gravity turn like a fucking airplane. The fact 50 other rockets were in formation with it despite that being stupidly dangerous, them all having different TWR ratios, there not being nearly enough launchpads anywhere in the world to do that, etc. Just everything.
We have existing video footage of shuttle launches. It’s not some crazy mystery. This isn’t Gravity where they add a window that doesn’t exist on the ISS for dramatic tension. It’s not Star Wars where the X-Wings behave more like airplanes than spacecraft for visual appeal. This was deliberate negligence.
A very common one is spacecraft seem to always launch in a direct line away from the planet. They just go straight up. That’s the least efficient way to get into space. But I usually let it slide because explaining orbital mechanics and Hoffman transfers isn’t necessary for good story telling.
Anyone who hasn’t done a Mun landing shouldn’t get to direct space scenes.
For real. Omg you just reminded me of another absolutely stupid scene from the Netflix series, Another Life. That series’ writing is so bad some people think it’s on purpose.
So the ship needs to perform a gravity assist to avoid a cloud of dark matter or something. During the slingshot maneuver, they get so close to the star that they should’ve been absolutely vaporized. But you know what, fine. Flying unnaturally close to the star looks cool and the rule of cool applies. But their first attempt at the gravity assist FAILS and now they have to try again.
That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
Star Wars where the X-Wings behave more like airplanes than spacecraft
My favorite part of Empire Strikes Back was when Luke takes his (presumably) short-range interceptor X-Wing and flies it to another star system to hang with Yoda. I dunno, maybe canon explained this one somewhere (was Yoda’s planet in the same star system as Hoth or something? are X-Wings capable of FTL travel for no reason?).
are X-Wings capable of FTL travel for no reason?
Heh, that’s actually the canon reason. Whereas TIE Fighters would launch from star destroyers like aircraft from a carrier, X-Wings would jump into hyperspace along with the frigates they were escorting.
Star Wars had basically no concept of fuel until like, one of the recent movies I didn’t watch. Obi-Wan calls a TIE fighter “a short range fighter” in A New Hope. Luke flies an X-Wing all over creation; several are shown jumping to hyperdrive alongside other larger ships in Jedi, it’s established that X-Wings are FTL capable.
The X-Wing is explicitly hyperdrive equipped. That’s also part of why it has an astromech droid seat in it (R2), apparently so the droid can handle the jump calculations. A lot of later technobabble in the expanded universe expounded on this after the fact, but I presume this decision was made on a snap basis specifically so Luke could go to Dagobah in his cool
planespaceship.You get to make hyperspace jumps yourself in your X-Wing a few times, fittingly, in the X-Wing games.
You typing “TWR ratio”.
Go KYS yourself!!
/s 😂
L shaped blankets.
Hah, that’s great. I’m going to be on the lookout now.
How night and day work above the Arctic Circle.
Movies and TV and stories talk about how there’s 6 months of daylight and 6 months of darkness. That does not fucking happen. This is still part of storytelling to this day (I’m looking at you, Sweet Tooth season 3).
Days get stupidly long in the summer, and there’s a while where the sun really doesn’t go down. in the Winter days get stupidly short, and there’s a while where it doesn’t really come up all that much. But it’s not 6 months of one and 6 months of the other.
(edited for clarity)
(I’m looking at you, Sweet Tooth season 3).
Tell me about it. And sunsets aren’t from a bright day to a dark night. During winter “days” are permanent twilight, the sun being very very low all the time it’s above the horizon, and during the summer, “nights” are dim because the sun is never that far below the horizon.
Sweet Tooth had pretty much a countdown iirc. And then it went from 100% daylight to complete darkness in seconds.
edit also i’m annoyed when people don’t wear hats in the cold but iirc in Sweet Tooth they had pretty good winterclothing most of the time idk.
Half year day, half year night only really holds on the poles I guess. And it goes paired with a long twilight in between.
The ones that really get me are the way they show execs at companies. The “look, this character is so bad ass at being an exec!”. They always come off as so unrealistic and cringy.
I’ve swam in that ocean, and that’s not how that shit works. Engineering too. In reality, it’s always a team of engineers that get something done… It is NEVER some rich smart guy inventing stuff on his or her own in their super fancy workshop.
yeah but a script that sucks the balls of an executive is far more likely to be greenlit.
And subordinates rarely balk at obeying illegal orders - and if they do they fold when there’s a threat of firing or a vague offer of compensation, as if either would instantly persuade a person to risk prison.
