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.
Ya know, it kinda makes sense that Hollywood is full of sex criminals when you look at romantic comedies and are always left wondering “And he’s not in jail why?”
Unfortunately, this one goes both ways. Some women feel like they need to play hard to get, because otherwise they’re sluts, and also they want to know that a guy really likes her. It’s self defeating of course, on both sides.
I watched Reality Bites recently and this was prominently displayed
When someone’s falling hundreds of feet and when they’re inches from the ground a super hero swoops in from the side to grab them.
Sure, they didn’t hit the ground but not only did you catching them slow down their vertical velocity just as fast as the ground would have, now you’ve accelerated them horizontally so fast that they’re now twice as dead as they would’ve been otherwise
My head canon, at least with Superman, is his powers. He doesn’t have multiple unrelated powers, but only 1 main one. Instinctive momentum control.
-
Flying - Momentum control
-
Bullet proof - Momentum stopped at the point of contact.
-
Heat beams - Changing the momentum of particles he’s focused on.
-
Holding a plane by a thin aluminium sheet - Adjusting the momentum of the plane directly.
-
No sonic booms, or massive wind - momentum nulling on the nearby air.
In this case, catching a falling person safely makes complete sense. He just nullifies their momentum before they hit.
I guess you could explain it like that, but I’d really prefer it if they just started writing Superman stories with a more realistic depiction of the world around Superman in mind. It would add more drama since, while Superman himself is invulnerable, the rest of the world isn’t, so Supes should have to be extremely careful with how he uses his powers if he’s actually going to save anyone.
“I live in a world made of cardboard, except for Lois’ bones and ligaments.”
while Superman himself is invulnerable, the rest of the world isn’t
Larry Niven wrote a great essay many years ago about the physical realities of being Superman. My favorite bit was about how him having sex with Lois Lane would have resulted in her head being blown off.
You lazy b##stard!
[jk, enjoy!]
https://temp.larryniven.net/?q=man-of-steel-woman-of-kleenex-by-larry-niven
Superman himself is invulnerable, the rest of the world isn’t
Go watch The Boys!
this is what I liked about man of steel but last time I said I liked that movie online I got called an inbred lmao
The Superman in Man of Steel didn’t give a crap about the world around him.
yeah but it showed what you’re talking about. he’s a destructive force of nature that can cause great misery even when he’s trying to do the right thing
Actually not a bad rationale, especially given the era when Superman started - it reminds me of E.E. “Doc” Smith’s inertialess drive.
-
Similarly- when a person is hanging off a building or cliff by one arm, and holding something heavy or another person with the other. It requires an INSANE amount of strength to hold that position, let alone actually haul them back up.
deleted by creator
Another way that works is just to catch them on a downward tangent to their current fall trajectory, but rapidly slowing down and then turning back up. It means your scenario has to have enough vertical space to perform this maneuver, but not necessarily a lot–even a very small downward deceleration will turn death into bruises, because it’s like falling into padding.
Wait how exactly does rolling help? I can understand catching the victim sooner to accelerate upwards over a longer time period.
Catching and rolling is physically similar to landing on a curved vertical ramp and sliding down it. The motion is not altogether stopped but instead redirected. Rolling is like hitting a tiny tiny ramp so your velocity is redirected at a very high rate, but it’s still better than just instantaneously stopping
No offense but why do you think it works that way at all?
deleted by creator
Only the “speed force” or maybe Pym Particles can counteract inertia like that
LOL in The Boys the supe would splatter through the falling character’s body, stop to pick up a dime off the ground and fly away.
And then there is specifically the night Gwen Stacy died.
This happens with fire sprinklers a lot, one sprinkler goes off, and triggers the rest of the floor, or sometimes even building.
That’s not how it works. Each sprinkler has it’s own trigger mechanism, the glass bulb, and cannot trigger another sprinkler.
There are systems where this happens, but the sprinkler heads look very different, and you won’t find them in an office building.
There are sprinklers where this happens and the sprinklers look exactly the same. There’s a pressure switch on the sprinkler line that activates a deluge pump. This pump has enough pressure and flow capacity to break open the glass ampules of the remaining sprinklers in the circuit.
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.
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.”
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!
You’re telling me a waitress in New York City can’t afford a penthouse apartment and have a comedically unlimited food budget?
The apartment in Big Daddy was awesome and I was like ain’t no way Adam Sandler’s character can afford that!
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!
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.
It always bothered me that two-face has no pronunciation problems with only half a pair of lips
He should have also lost the one eye, like if your eye lids were burnt off there is going to be definite damage to the eye itself. Looked fuckin’ rad though so he’s got that going for him.
Thoo Faith
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.
In episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy’s skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes that same rib twice in succession yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we, to believe that this is some sort of a, a magic xylophone or something? Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
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
Hack the planet!
Only Mr Robot
It’s really simple, you just search the evil corporation’s hard drive for a file named
EVIDENCE.txtThere’s a scene in NCIS where somebody is losing a “hacker fight” so to turn it around a second person joins in and starts typing on the same keyboard.
Like there’s suspension of disbelief, and then there’s whatever psychological issue watchers of NCIS suffer from.
Hehe that scene was the one that made me think of this post.
NCIS should just dive into self parody at this point.
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.
In movies when there’s a huge explosion in space, there’s always this ring that comes out from the explosion. No!
In space the blast wave would be spherical: it only looks like a 2d ring when observed from a telescope many many light years away, since the telescope can only pick up the outside edge of the blast.
Edit: fixed auto-incorrect
I remember very vividly when they redid the special effects in the original Star Wars trilogy and added this dumbass ring coming out of the Death Star explosion. It completely broke immersion for me because I was like “wtf is that supposed to be?”
You could make an argument that there was some kind of huge spinning gyroscope reaction wheel system on that axis which projected the explosion that way.
But we all know there wasn’t.
My thought is that it’s revealing the construction and weak points of the death star. It may have been constructed in two hemispheres that were joined together, and that seam might have been the failure point where gassed were released when the internal pressure got too high.
Except then we should see the two hemispheres blow out from each other a bit, which they don’t.
All in all, the film makers had many things they could choose to make the effect look plausible, but they didn’t.
That makes it look all Loony Toons :S
I mean, it might have made sense if it lined up with the equatorial channel that the death star has. If the inside was exploding and that was the weakest area, material would be ejected out the ring first before the rest of the structure exploded. That might, indeed cause a ring effect. But in this scene the ring is going vertically, not horizontally. So yea, doesn’t make much sense.
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…
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.
It was probably ice made from heavy water.
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
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
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?”
deleted by creator
God landmines are disgusting
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!
Apparently this actually happens, with a very specific type of mine meant for tank infantry. Stupid people just think “some mines work this way, therefore all do.”
Kinda like how a decade ago we had the Gluten-Free craze because somehow enough people heard “Some people can’t have gluten” and interpreted that as “No one should have gluten”
deleted by creator
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
what the heck is a dimensional portal in your real world example
We’re talking about TV shows and movies.
There’s normally one unrealistic conceit, eg aliens existing, that the audience believes. But then, the regular conceits like “The scientists studying the aliens speak like a bunch of robots and act like total idiots” become harder to believe.
This is what makes Arrival so good. They don’t want the best person for the job because she insists on being involved, they give the aliens nicknames immediately and everything goes to shit at the first excuse to start a war.
Oh okay! And I see your edit that Bob is the portal, yeah I did not pick up on that one from the script alone. Great dialog on second pass though! Very believable, Tarantino levels of mundane.
Your company doesn’t have a portal to hell in the basement?
L shaped blankets.
Hah, that’s great. I’m going to be on the lookout now.
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.
