[Discussion] What's your "this has bothered me for way too long" movie moment?
Can be anything, from characters not using objects they have on them, to physics not being realistic, or a very big plot hole.
As an example, one of my friends told me that his pet peeve is that in a lot of sci-fi movies, when spaceships run out of fuel, they stop moving, while inertia and lack of atmosphere should keep them in motion.
In The Dark Knight it’s bothered me that two-face didn’t develop any pronunciation problems after losing a cheak and half a pair of lips. I know, I know, it’s a comic book movie, but seeing him pronounce the ‘b’ sound with his teeth showing takes me out of it every time
These are more common in tv than film but happen in both:
Any time a shot is given with a syringe, especially by an addict, it’s almost always done in a way that would severely damage the person.
And more of a narrative issue that is common, but I hate the trope where a person overhears part of a conversation and jumps to conclusions, but had they listened for a few seconds longer it would have contradicted their conclusions.
Any time the villain has the upper hand and then leaves the room with no reason not to just kill the protagonists.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hoping for the good guys to catch a bullet to the face. It’s just that it’s lazy writing. Give them a reason to be left alive, or create some distraction that requires attention. Not just “I want you to see this” sort of bullshit, but a legitimate reason.
Both, probably. My favorite neutrino fact is that to receive a lethal dose of neutrino rediation from a supernova, you’d have to be standing inside the implosion.
Noises in space. I know Star Wars is the worst offender, and people have tried to make excuses about how ships have speakers that add explosions and laser noises, but that’s crap.
I think shock waves might still make sound. Once they hit you, that is, not when you first see them.
I like it when a movie accounts for the extra time it takes for sound to travel. I’m replaying subnautica and when the ship explodes you hear it right away even though it’s about 1km away and it was disappointing.
Shock waves need a medium to travel. If something explodes in space, it will send debris that might hit you, but if it produces a shock wave in a low-density environment, it would probably miss you due to the lack of matter.
Generally speaking: Things that humans would never survive. Like, if someone is thrown so hard against a wall that they go through it, they’re not going to live (this happens with non-super characters). Or when someone is falling from a great height and they grab hold of something to catch themselves. Yeah… No.
Or in scenes where fire is present… People having a discussion without coughing their brains out, being able to see, and easily keeping their eyes open, just a few feet from raging flames.
After experiencing any and all of these things the characters will just continue in the story and be able to move and breathe like nothing happened. Sometimes they’ll move with a limp or cough occasionally but this is usually right before they make a 100m dash in record time.
My specific example is The Butterfly Effect when he gives himself stigmata in prison; the movie has already established that’s not how it works. Looper made a similar mistake, again not following the rules the movie itself set up.
The more general example: sprinkler systems. Basically every single time a sprinkler system goes off in movies and TV it’s wrong. They get it wrong so consistently that it’s trope at this point and would confuse people if they decided to get it right.
Each sprinkler head is triggered by heat individually, so smoke won’t make the place get flooded out, and holding your lighter up to the head will only make that one head go off. The systems would be so poorly designed to work like in the movies, with false-triggers and flooding areas nowhere near the fire all the time causing more damage than fires.
The water in those sprinklers is disgusting too! It’s been sitting, stagnant in that pipe for years. It won’t be clear water like from the tap and it will stink.
Can we talk about that scene in The Office where Michael proposes to Holly, and sets off the sprinklers and everybody just shrugs it off and it is never spoken about? It’s a paper company. Everything would be ruined.
I don’t know about residential sprinklers, but industrial ones will trigger a cascade of sprinklers to flood. The first one drops the pressure on the line, which activates the high volume pump, which will cause all sprinklers heads to open.
POV when using binoculars has two circles, which isn’t how it looks when you actually use them. It should be one circle.
Camera footage that’s played back in movies as part of the plot always has the recording icon, time code, etc burnt into the footage, which should really only be visible on the camera monitor while recording, not during playback and especially not on another device.
Star Wars Episode 8 is the one that lives in my head ever since it was released.
Play by play of the opening sequence battle:
First Order ambushes the Resistance base as it is evacuating
First Order summons a ship described as a “Fleet Destroyer”.
First Order only has enough time to charge one shot, but has 2 targets: The Resistance base full of intel and equipment that can’t move or the Escape Fleet with all the escape ships and evacuated people.
And 8 was the better movie. 7 was janky but hopeful and 9 was a plot faucet.
They’re all fanfiction. But they’re all distinct kinds of fanfiction.
7 is written like the characters are also fans of the movies: Finn is shocked by hologram technology he’d see every day, people parrot lines that were once clever, the camera lingers on a broken astromech droid, et very cetera. The returning characters are living legends famed for their transformative effect on the whole galaxy but also haven’t changed one iota since we last saw them.
8 is an anarchist deconstruction of Star Wars that somehow got turned into an actual Star Wars movie: a rebel soldier becomes disillusioned after her sister died for nothing, the good guy and bad guy agree the current conflict is a pointless sham, and details throughout scream that no mere organization could ever own the magic that belongs to all living beings. And then a surprise fourth act goes “whoops nevermind.”
9 is a toddler telling a story: “and then… and then… but no he didn’t?.. and then…” It’s like a child learned about fakeout deaths yesterday and expects it to be equally shocking every single time. Then the big battle needed to involve every toy in the toybox, especially the horses, because spaceships can’t look up. At least in the end we got the Rey x Kylo connection it all built toward, and their kids are gonna be the most powerful nevermind.
Nah, 8 is by far the worst of the bunch. 9 is a response to the problems created by 8 and 7 is a relatively good movie outside of reverting the setting.
8 is bad plot mixed with character assassination and intentionally fucks up the flow of a trilogy because Johnson has an ego problem.
Dude literally had them change aspects of 7 so he could make Luke suck in 8, then refused to leave storylines open for J.J to finish the trilogy, even when requested.
Oh nooo he crushed one of seven thousand mystery boxes, all of which had disappointing contents anyway.
JJ’s not even smart enough know Palpatine would be scarier staying dead. An immortal Force ghost whispering to people anywhere in the galaxy is a proper villain. A zombie who did all the bad stuff by himself is a cartoon. Especially if all the bad stuff unhappens if you poke him with a laser-sword. And people have the nerve to wish that was two movies! The silliest defense of 9 is that it would’ve been better if it was longer.
If 8 had been “Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off,” like Rebel Moon, it would have fucking incredible. A royal-led uprising that beat space fascists and then utterly failed to stop them forming again is now on its last legs, and even the decisive battle is a low-speed chase toward inevitable failure. The protagonist, an idealistic young soldier, loses someone close and stops a deserter “or they died for nothing.” Those two risk some hail-Mary espionage that shows war profiteers win either way. Disillusioned in the cause, she gets an unsubtle scene freeing their animals. That plot ends with her ditching precious materiel to stop him from repeating her sister’s sacrifice, and should end with both of them deserting together. But “whoops nevermind.”
Meanwhile: the assumed hero finds an old space-wizard veteran for training, and he bluntly tells her to quit. Wars (do) not make one great. So she goes straight to the dysfunctional bad guys, whose hate-based leadership structure turns out to have issues, and the suddenly-in-charge guy tells her that her mysterious ancestry doesn’t fucking matter. Nobody hands you a destiny. You make your own choices. As illustration of this, he offers to make her empress of the galaxy, and also as illustration of this, she tells him to go fuck himself.
Meanwhile: the good guys’ hope-based leadership system also has issues, and ‘just trust me bro’ nearly gets them killed faster than how they’re obviously about to get killed anyway. They find a corner to back themselves into by deleting the bad guys’ flagship with the coolest moment in all of Star Wars that completely does not work within the logic of Star Wars.
And what should have happened is, the hero arrives to find the battle over. The bad guys have been through and there is no sign of survivors. But what happened is, some nameless rando saw the crystal foxes casually weave through boulders, and learned to use the Force in a fucking hurry. Because again: it is is in all living things. That’s the message the wizened veteran literally smacked into the hero, passed onto him by a sassy frog on planet ketamine.
What happens instead is that of course the hero shows up and does it for them. Fuck themes, right? Not like the movie opens and closes with untrained Force use. Including that shot of a slave child looking to the stars. Subtle as a brick through a window, but god damn, does it work. Shame it’s in the movie we got.
Oh man, the Disney Star Wars Trilogy is full of these.
I get that Star Wars movies are effectively a fantasy adventure series in Sci-Fi clothing, I’m not expecting perfect logical sense out of everything, but internal consistency has absolutely not been Disney Wars’s strong suit.
It always bugs me when someone stands up, unfolds a few bills and drops them on the table. Then they just walk out. How do you know that’s enough? Maybe someone ordered some 32 oz margarita with top shelf tequila. Are they just leaving a massive tip? Or are they leaving a shitty tip and don’t want to look their server in the eyes?
This one is a bit more specific, but in the new dune movie, literally everyone just starts panting and heavily breathing through their mouth after any exhertion.
The fremen absolutely know better, and I’m almost positive there was a line in the first movie when they were explaining desert survival to Paul where they say you must preserve as much moisture as you possibly can so always breathe through the still suit
To generalise it a bit, this could be applied to helmets/masks required but not worn in films, war films and tv for example. In dune the main actors barely had their masks on, but the extras could be bundled up cause we don’t need to see their faces
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