Drop your most "wtf that's not how the world works" from movies/tv shows.
Drop your most "wtf that's not how the world works" from movies/tv shows.
I'm aware of the NCIS scenes, what else you guys got?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
When something or somebody is injected into space, they always freeze in seconds. The logic is that "space is cold" but space is mostly a vacuum and vacuums don't have temperature. Vacuums insulate against conduction, so you're not going to freeze anytime soon. (You'll lose heat via radiation but that will take a while).
Not to mention the effect that zero pressure has on freezing/boiling points. If anything you'd be steaming as all the water on you evaporates!
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.
L shaped blankets.
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.
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.
So many.
Normal people get slammed into a wall by monster, explosion or whatever, stand up and walk away. Buddy, you don't walk that off. People die or need months of recovery from less.
Don't get me started on the speed force. You do some napkin math and see the Flash is taking on a 1000G running in circles close to mach 2 without blinking and then gets knocked unconscious with a single punch in the next scene. Flash is not the only one of course.
And the lone inventor developing a fully conscious AI in some mountain cabin on an old laptop. It was clear that would never work and reality now shown us AI companies looking into nuclear powered data centers to speed up things.
The first time I remember absolutely losing my suspension of disbelief was at the end of the first Mission Impossible reboot where Tom Cruise puts an explosive on a helicopter he's hanging on the outside of that's flying behind a train through a tunnel, and the explosion completely destroys the helicopter and flings him onto the back of the train. Yeah, that helicopter (which probably couldn't be flying through a train tunnel to begin with) was made of far tougher material than Tom Cruise. Any explosion that destroyed it, would have turned him into a stain on the wall of the tunnel.
Electrical shocks applied to asystolic hearts to restart them is a classic.
The shock serves to stop fibrillation and to induce a rhythmic firing of the neves, that's why it's called defibrillation. Fibrillation is random firing of the nerves, asystole is no firing.
If I recall correctly my father told me you use an injection of adrenaline for asystolic hearts. Kind of like in Pulp Fiction. Though I think injecting directly into the heart isn't the preferred method anymore.
I love scenes where a character hotwires a car by:
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reaching under the steering wheel and pulling a panel off. It isn't held on by fasteners or anything, it's just like wedged in place.
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A bunch of loosely coiled wires tumbles out. In front are two thicker wires that are cut, stripped and tinned.
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The character strikes these two wires against each other like attempting to strike a match, mostly to make sparks.
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The sound of a car engine turning over plays.
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Climb in, shut the door, put it in gear and drive off.
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I always think its funny how bullets never seem to penetrate anything in movies. Like, guy hiding behind a barrel? Nope, cant penetrate, even with a rifle. The newest Batman movie had me shaking my head as he shrugged off multiple rifle rounds to his armor.
Bullets are insanely dangerous and powerful. A .223 round can penetrate a solid brick wall pretty easily, and can destroy a cinderblock wall with some effort. Even if it doesnt penetrate, the amount of force applied is incredible. Plates designed to stop bullets have to be made in specific ways to make sure a bullet doesn't penetrate, but even with that plate, the sheer force of an impact can break bones.
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.
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)
Kingsman
Training scene where they shove a shower hose down a toilet and use it to breathe...
There would be no air (or even sewer gas) to breath in that case. Toilets work by raising the water level in the bowl above the water level in the S-bend/siphon. Since the room was full of water, those toilets would have been flushing constantly, and the whole pipe would be full of water.
Better(ish) solution. Use the body bags that they each had to fill out and place in their trunk/locker to capture an air bubble. That would at least give you some time to attack the door, or figure out how to drain the room.
"We got their hard drive!" *Holds up a power supply.
And even if it was a hard drive, what were you going to do with it? You went in there guns blazing with no warrant after you knocked on the wrong door. The evidentiary chain is well and truly broken at this point. Nothing from that scene would be able to be entered into evidence.
There’s a scene in Spider-Man: No Way Home where Tom Holland is fighting the Green Goblin. Goblin grabs Spidey, jumps with him, and then they both smash through the 23rd or so floor of the apartment building they’re in and they land on the floor below.
Sure, they’re both super strong but neither of them used their strength to push through the floor. They just jumped and reached no more than like a foot off the floor, implying that gravity pulled them both through the floor. Okay, so the floor was built poorly, but then why did falling 10+ feet from the 23rd floor to the 22nd floor not make them smash through the 22nd floor?
That movie’s a lot of a fun but that scene makes me upset lol
Hacker shit. Some lone genius passing through systems intended to be secure for militaries and governments. It's not about details being stupid, that's to be expected. It's about the very fact of power imbalance.
Random characters challenging militaries and governments and just "quickly finding" some qualified assistance in doing that. And winning. You don't. You are an amateur and they are professionals. And if you want to do that, you are likely already under personalized surveillance.
That last thing is a trope from a free society where some people on the top are bad. And fighting them you can find help and learn, because in some sense you are protected, and guaranteed privacy and safety. There are no such free societies on our planet right now. The closest you can get is probably to join Hezbollah or some mafia, that is, well-established powerful organizations.
On the contrary, Luke Skywalker taking a lucky shot at a vulnerability that a team of engineers and military men, all of which were high-level Imperial defectors, with support from many planets of what is the Star Wars alternative of Western Europe and North America, had found by analyzing space station's stolen blueprints, using computers and what not, is realistic. Similarly to the Empire (at that moment with kinda democratic Senate and all) being fine with anyone on the way being murdered trying to contain such high-value corpus of information.
Again, I love Star Wars so much. A lot of the materials written in AotC and RotS time describe very well, in my modest opinion, how the real world oppression really works and how you can't really escape evil or defeat it. The best you can do is survive till that evil dies on its own, but the realistic best is planting the seeds for that time.
In general everything showing fighting your enemy as something easy, impressing upon audience that if it didn't work out in a month, then you just give up and do something more pleasant, deceiving yourself.
At the same time the sheer extent to which personal brilliance and hard work and persistence can change the world is often downplayed in movies. Drastic changes made by characters are attributed to magic or being in some unlikely situation. But the whole reason for previously described power imbalance is that professionals perpetuate their knowledge and understanding every day, and if one's persistent, one can beat them.
Yes, I like fiction about justice and fighting evil.
Recently, I've been mindful of how long fights are in movies.
Sword fight? Fanning at each other, crossing and smacking swords. Maybe even walking around each other. I don't think that's how a real sword fight would look.
Fights where it's mostly talking. Talking and talking. Nobody would fight like that.
Fist fights without a smack and dead. It's fancy movement - only because of the shaky camera and cuts of course. Give me back Jackie Chan or smack them once and they fall over.
I also dislike noticing the wire-guided movements. Fast acceleration and you can see them balancing in the air lifted by wires. Wires removed after-the-fact, but it's such unnatural movement.
And of course, the classic gunfight where nobody hits anything.
Or any monster chase or fight. If a giant monster chases you it's faster and instant-kills you. But not in movies.
It's certainly prevalent.
I don't have a particular scene, but a here's a funny conversation I had with an acquaintance:
Huh, this thing takes just 12 volts. Could run it in a car.
Wait, a car's electricals are just 12 volts?
Yeah. The battery and most wiring around a car is 12 volts.
Wait.. then what about those scenes in movies where they torture people with car batteries?
Yeah, those are fake.
looking into the distance as the realization dawns on him Those movie directors deserve jail time.
We just watched "The Trap" last night. There was a major pop concert that ended in time for family dinner time during daylight. In the concert, they were depicted having time to make multiple trips to the merch tables and concessions, and in one of those trips, they talked like it was an intermission to change the stage set between songs.
I hate to say it because so much of this show was actually really excellent and accurate but in the Chernobyl miniseries they totally did the "radiation is contagious" thing and it is just not true.
Things and people that are irradiated/hit by radiation in a situation like a reactor failure or contact with radioactive waste do not become radioactive. They can have radioactive particles on their clothing/skin or inside their body if they have ingested/inhaled radioactive material, but they are not emitting radiation themselves. Furthermore, a thin sheet of paper or cloth will stop the kind of radioactivity that would be emitted by such material, if it is on the outside of a person's body.
Anyways the point is that the woman whose husband was dying of radiation poisoning and then she went in and spent time with him did not lose her baby because she spent time with him. That's just not how it works.
Lots of environmental contamination-related stuff in movies is inaccurate but that one is the most recent I can think of.
There's this scene at the start of War of the Worlds where the hero races his classic muscle car up this tiny neighborhood street at full tilt, exhaust notes at full blast, and I think he even screeches the tires by slamming the brakes pulling into the driveway. Then he walks up to his neighbor and they're all chill with him. In any other world, the neighbors would have him in handcuffs.
CPR. Doing 2-3 chest compressions, seconds apart, and then some mouth to mouth, followed by 2-3 more chest compressions. Or the needle into the heart thing. Or the shock a flatline thing. All of it. It's just all wrong.
On Andromeda? I believe it was, a villain used the stereotypical twist the head to break the neck and they fall over dead bit. The character proceeded to be not dead and did the stereotypical express their love while dying in the protagonist's arms bit, talking and moving their neck as if it wasn't broken. And then died.
The horror movie character who searches a scary room by walking in and immediately looking intently up at the ceiling, while slowly turning around until he ends up backing into the dangerous thing he somehow didn't notice.
The part in Drop Dead Fred where Elizabeth's best friend's house boat sinks and she gets rich off the insurance payout. That's not how that works unfortunately.
All of this stuff makes me wonder how hard it would be to make a fully pedantic story.
I've seen books where the hero was on the verge of winning but gets randomly concussed by a piece of shrapnel. Disoriented, hospital.
Another where the hero had hearing loss issues from solo pistol badassing too much, sans ear protection. (Forgot the titles of these stories).
But what would it take to meet everything? Imagine Superman. Now he has to mind his acceleration to save people. He also has to mind distribution of force, since he can't lift a plane without puncturing it. (Maybe he can make a little energy net under the plane somehow to distribute pressure?) And then he has to mind the Law of Conservation of Energy unless he splits apart matter somehow. And then this and that...
Will adherently realistic changes downrank most stories? I for one laugh my ass off when The Rock flexes his broken arm cast off in F&F.
I didn't watch it, but I saw the trailer for Moonfall and I had a lot of WTF moments just watching that. A lot of 'there's no way that's how it would actually work.'
One that annoys me is "Oh, you can't pay for your food, you work for the restaurant now till you're paid off!"
Getting past the absurd number of Labor Laws and Sanitation Regulations we're violating with that set-up, in addition to how badly this is pissing off of the union if the restaurant happens to be unionized...
Most modern restaurants have dish washing machines minimizing the need for bus boys.
Additionally, there's a little thing called job training that typically has to be done. You don't just throw a mop at a guy and tell them to get to work, even if they're experienced each place has their own way of doing things. It's why it's actually really hard to get fired in real life, laid off sure, but actually fired? Unless you're just THAT incompetent... Cause these things take time and money.
And because you didn't do any training, all your deadbeat patron has to do is cut his hand trying to dry off a knife and he's not only paid off, but he's gonna own the fucking joint when his lawyer hears about this shit.
So what DOES the establishment do? Well it depends, but the most common scenario I've heard is that they take some form of collateral until you come back another day to pay them, and that's usually for a fancy restaurant. For most places though you'd pay before you even got your food making this a non-issue.
That's the most common one, there are some that are less common but still get on my nerves.
It could make sense if it's a long time ago when the population is much lower, there aren't as many labor laws, but I think even by the 60's this scenario would be bizarre if it actually happened. I could see it happening in modern day, but it'd have to be a very specific set of circumstances
- Easy Sex Change - Now the name for this might be somewhat dated because no one refers to it as a "Sex Change Operation" anymore, but I can't think of a better name for it. Basically there's this idea in fiction that you can just go into any hospital looking like Fred Flintstone, and come out the same day looking like Pamela Anderson in her prime.
Medical Science does not work that way
The Transgender Healthcare standards wouldn't let it happen that quickly as you need doctor's notes (Hell I'm Post-Op for the better half of a decade and I'm still trying to get a note for a purely cosmetic boob job)
Doctors actually trained to do Genital Reconstruction Surgery are extremely rare, nearest one to me is three states away, and I'm not even sure he's still alive because that was 8 years ago and he was older than dirt.
Genital Reconstruction only changes what you've got going on down there, and until very recently wasn't covered by most insurance. All the other changes? You have to do estrogen for years and hope for the best.
The body can't recover that quickly (I literally had to spend the better part of a morning learning how to walk again after being bedridden for two to three after that... till then my body was still healing and I was basically immobilized.. also having to learn to pee was weird. Trust me you don't wanna be in a situation where you really have to pee but literally don't know how because the functionality of your genitals has been reversed.)
Admittedly I'm seeing it less and less as the idea of transpeople existing is mainstream now, but from the perspective of a transwoman like myself it's the trans equivalent of someone asking a homosexual male how they know which man's penis will open up to accept the other's.
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Ordering food at a doctor's office - I've not seen this too often, but I have seen it more than once, which is enough to baffle me.
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The Death Card - I just want a script writer to do a scene where someone draws Death, gets super scared, has it explained to them that the card isn't that bad. As it refers to death in a spiritual sense, meaning not the cessation of existence, but rather the continuous cycle of rebirth.... So it's actually referring to change.... And then immediately they draw the Inverted Tower (Which actually does mean that you're in for a bad time). I'm just surprised I haven't seen this joke done before...
Wait a second...
Simpsons did it - https://youtu.be/M-dButYcv14
Though to be fair, I think this is one everyone who isn't in Hollywood knows at this point. But as someone who actually practices Tarot it is annoyed.
- The movie Clerks 2 - Look I love Kevin Smith, I think he does great work, I'm even one of the only people who love Clerks 3.... but... I can't just point to one thing in this film. Pretty much everything about Clerks 2 requires a lot of suspension of disbelief as it's obvious that Kevin Smith is too rich in 2006 to know how fast food joints work at the time.
The part where they close up to a Donkey Show definitely stands out, as chain franchised Fast Food restaurants are not only too busy for that to be plausible unlike a random gas station in the boonies (like in the first movie), but it's 2006, while it's not as common of a practice now, most McDonald's/Taco Bells/Wendy's of this era would have been 24 hours.
- Video Games in general - If movies are to be believed, video games now are basically the same as they were in the 70's. Atari sound effects, high scores, limited lives, games having "levels".... When in reality games have moved on, most games don't really test the player's skill so much as tell you a story through in an interactive medium. So your progress isn't really based in how many points you're getting, but rather how far in the story you've gotten. Lives aren't really a thing anymore for the simple fact that if your streaming platform gave you an overly tough quiz half-way through the movie about things you saw in previous scenes, and punished you by making you re-watch the whole thing up until you got to the quiz again. No one would watch movies ever again.
Actually it's become a bit of a problem for the market as too many gamers are becoming annoyed that games are too much like movies funnily enough...
Now Mobile games play more like classic arcade games, sure.. but in movies they're clearly playing consoles. Heck even re-releases of games that did have limited lives and a scoring system (Sonic Origins for example) took them out to modernize the experience. Which is kind of a good thing because older games were artificially difficult to prevent you from beating the game over the weekend as a method to discourage rental services.
In the early 2000's, sure I guess I can buy that. Gaming was a niche hobby, good to dumb it down I guess. But nowdays it's considered weirder to not play games than to play them, so I don't know how this mistake keeps getting made.
I wouldn't be surprised if my grandmother had a fucking Steam account to play TF2 Themed Solitaire on. Because the oldest guy in my writing group has one to play Civilization and he's fucking 80.
- Ditching a cop - In movies if you get in trouble and police are after you, just run away! You'll ditch them and whatever you did will be forgotten about. In reality: Warrants for arrest exist, the charge for resisting arrest exists, and so do body cams... So, no, not really.
My final one is
The Monitor is the computer! The tower is just decoration! - But, this cliche has vanished thanks to computer use becoming more common.
People driving straight on the highway need to move the wheel around at all times to stay straight. Also, the drivers can look away from the road for like 10 seconds without it being a huge issue that would otherwise be scary and dangerous.
Naval drama in space with magical faster than causality travel.
AGI is the machine god mythos, or the insanity that sentient superiority results in an inevitable existential threat to humanity... because we are a monoculture on this planet after defeating all lesser contenders.
Going to space for stupid reasons like flag planting, or the failure to communicate how much resource wealth is really in space, even close by Earth with M-type asteroids.
Almost any depiction of how consent works.
In the dark knight the police convoy encounters a roadblock (burning fire truck) and goes onto the lower road into an obvious ambush, rather than just... Go onto the incoming lane and around the truck
Basically every moment of this unintentionally hilarious show.
I laughed constantly.
It helps to know archaeology, but it's so bad it's good even if you don't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonekickers
In the first episode they find that the True Cross that crucified Jesus is in Britain and at the end they just kind of let it get burned up in a fire when they could have easily removed it from the fire.
They say to write what you know. I know how to imagine unrealistic things. So that's what I write about.
In Iron Claw there is a scene where Kevin was training Mike how to do a head lock and kept yelling at him about his footing and telling him how he needed to switch his feet so that his left leg was forward and not his right. But your right is supposed to be in front Mke was doing it correctly.
Plus all the other historic inaccuracies and whitewashing hat no normal person cares about.
Weirdly fragile characters, im a durable guy and frankly speaking I am not gonna break my leg by kicking a piece of metal on accident, so why do characters who say get thrown around like rag dolls have weirdly low durability towards what should be painful but not serious injuries based off of previous instances. I will accept weird falls without too much questioning though
Guns that never need to be reloaded, even after hundreds of shots
I think about this way too much https://chunkmcbeefchest.com/Podcast/index.php?name=2024-10-25_cmcb108.mp3
Most recent example: I was watching the remake of Salem's Lot, and protagonist Ben Mears has been on maybe one date with a woman named Susan. Fast forward, Susan is a full-on vampire and is ruthlesssly attacking Ben, trying to bite him. His response: "SUSAN!! IT'S ME!!"
Using an AED on someone who is flat lined to bring them back to life.