Whether intentionally or not, what do movies depict or present wrong a lot of the time?
Distances in space.
Everything is further away that you can possibly imagine.
Warp 9 to the nearest wormhole.
Loudness of gunshots. Every action hero would be deaf.
Archers being told to “hold”. Nobody’s holding a +100lbs warbow.
Sprinklers. In the vast majority of cases they react to heat - not smoke. They only go off individually rather than all at once and the water inside the pipes is black ink-like rust water sludge, not clear tap water.
Also another plumbing related: you don’t need a huge wrench under the sink and drains are not pressurized so there’s no water spraying anywhere when you mess with the p-trap.
Also archers being told to “fire”
as firing didn’t exist until gunpowder, the instruction wouldn’t make sense. Like telling a soldier now to “activate the positronic tacyons!” instead of “fire”
Loose!
Also they didn’t really do massive coordinated volleys
The relaxed position of mammalian eyelids leaves them open. Muscles must contract for the eyes to be shut. Dead creatures cannot contract their muscles so their eyes remain open after they die.
You cannot shut their eyes for them by closing their eyes with your hand. Morticians place contacts in cadaver’s eyes while preparing the body for a wake. Those contacts grip the inside of the eyelids so that they remain closed.
This is why some cultures have funerary traditions in which objects are placed over the eyes.
TL;DR: you and your loved ones won’t close their eyes when they die.
This is a really big one. I have to revise all of my heroic self insert fantasies where i cover up a dead person’s eyes
Like when you’re at the bank and a bank robber shoots a bunch of people and then you jump out from cover and start covering all the corpses eyes super fast.
I don’t remember well if it was NakedGun, Loaded Weapon or Hot Shots where the eyes of a body stayed open until it was hit in the face.
How big a house an average person can afford.
Explosion and gun sounds in spaaaaceeee!
Gun sounds in general. All those action heroes are deaf after that indoors shootout
Running over a cliff and only start to fall once realizing that you just ran over a cliff.
That’s not real, you fall immediately.
*points a finger at Loony Tunes for starting it*
Have you ever tried?? I think it could be real
Sex and relationships in action movies.
The whole “hot chick gets horny for the hero after a traumatizing couple of hours” thing gives a pretty messed up view of relationship building.
I remember Speed made a joke about this at the end. A crack about “Relationships built on life threatening traumas don’t last” or something lol
And it was proven by Speed 2 I guess.
Or as comedian Kyle Kincaid said, the idea that the action hero could still get it up.
This one definitely turned me off the first Terminator movie. I mean I know it’s critical to the plot but it still makes me roll my eyes.
The 80s and 90s were rife with that trope. I don’t know if modern action flicks are as bad.
Romantic relationships. Way too much stalking and abuse of power. Far too many very large age gaps. All that stuff.
Getting knocked out for a length of time after being hit on the head is likely going to cause pretty significant brain injury or death.
CPR is so hilariously bad and completely against what is taught in even first aid classes. This includes hospital based medical dramas. CPR is also always successful in movies, but relatively rarely in real life.
If a man and woman consume alcohol, there’s an 80% chance that it’s about to transition into a sex scene.
Explosions release a crazy amount of fire. In reality explosions are violently expanding gases with almost no flame seen.
Poverty is rarely ever shown accurately. Malcolm in the MIddle was a good example though.
Forensics and science concepts in general are usually fabricated or badly screwed up for the convenience of the plot. “Zoom and enhance!!”
I unironically like Madame Web, but I admit the CPR was laughable
“I unironically like Madame Web” - @FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca
Some quotes are so unique, you’ll never come across again and they deserve to be immortalised.
If a man and woman consume alcohol, there’s an 80% chance that it’s about to transition into a sex scene.
Also, if a woman vomits without first consuming alcohol, that means she’s pregnant. Bonus points if it’s in the morning.
Cops being the good guys.
Imagine an evil terrorist organization coming into the picture, and it’s up to REAL COPS to stop them.
And like real cops, they end up taking a detour to Walmart, where a woman was accused of stealing so they pull out their guns and kill a baby.
Oh is this too real? My bad.
Getting hit on the head and staying unconscious for an extended period of time.
No… No that’s not how that shit works. If you’re hit on the head so hard that you are lying on the ground limp, you’re either dead, dying, or have received sever brain damage.
No that’s not how that shit works
sh.itjust.works
Telephone etiquette. They just start yapping and then hang up without saying goodbye.
My mother’s husband does that shit though. Never says goodbye, just hangs up the phone and I’m left annoyed again.
There’s a common theme in movies — since you can only hear one side of a phone conversation — of a character repeating a lot of what the other person said for the audience’s benefit. I’ve seen some example conversations written out showing both sides that show how ludicrous such a conversation would have to be.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RepeatingSoTheAudienceCanHear
Yeah, Ice Cream.
phone rings, main character picks it up
“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.” - MC
“Uhh, I’m just calling about your extended car warranty…” - poor bastard
Pulling people out of a burning building. In reality the smoke and fire is so bad, you ain’t seeing shit, not like the clear visibility like they show in the movies. And I spoke to a firefighter who’d been doing it for 35 years. The guy was teaching fire safety at my workplace. He said he responded to thousands of burning buildings and the number of times anyone’s been saved out of a burning building? Exactly zero. That always stuck with me.
Though I fully agree with you i do recall this youtube video from a few years ago of a guy running back into his burning home to save his dog and he got him out alive.
If you know exactly where you’re going, and the path is not itself in flame, and the residual heat+smoke have not yet rendered both your path and your patient’s current location unsurvivable, then it is possible.
The movie trope of covering your mouth with a rag and walking through rooms which are actively on fire, trying to find someone who has been inside that same room getting asphyxiated and/or cooked for several minutes is most definitely not real.
The heat alone is off the fucking charts, too. These are 1,100-1,500F. Like trying to walk through an oven only 3 or 4x hotter.
Hacking.
That’s probably just a fancy gui skin over a boring port scanner and a bash script testing some 0 days.
I want a realistic hacking movie, and I know how it should be done:
In plot, it needs to be an ensemble cast heist movie a la Ocean’s Eleven. But it should have a “this isn’t serious” tone similar to Down Periscope. Because it’s about a penetration testing company. They’re hired to do a full physical and digital security audit on some large company, so then we follow the crew of law abiding computer nerds and burglars as they plan and perpetrate a series of hacks and attacks on this company.
The stakes if they get caught are they hand a letter of authorization to the security team, say “good job” and report to the company that hired them that their security in that department is good, so even though they’re taking their job seriously there isn’t really any tension and they maintain a goofy sense of humor.
And you’re in luck, Jayson Street and Deviant Ollam have already pretty much entirely written this, just watch their defcon talks. Get those two guys on either side of a coffee table with a bottle of fine whiskey and you’ll have your screenplay before the bottle’s empty.
It’ll never get made though because Master Lock would sue you for even trying. You couldn’t make it without completely obliterating Master Lock.
Most dishonest about? Hard to say, since movies are dishonest about virtually everything. (As escapism, that’s what we want.) But a big one that comes to mind is proceedings in courts of law.
In real life, a court case is excruciatingly procedural, spread out over months of correspondence and brief hearings, and the vast majority of them never go to trial. And for the few that do go to trial, there are never any intense, witness-stand confrontations, or inspiring speechifying by the plaintiff or defendant. No attorneys shouting, “OBJECTION!”, across the room.
I know of two friends of a friend, one of whom signed a reverse mortgage on his house with some scammers who promised that he could live the rest of his life there, but then who turned around and filed to evict him. Clearly influenced by dramatic courtroom scenes in TV and movies, he seemed to think that “court” meant that he would be able to show up and give the judge a moving soliloquy about being a righteous, disabled veteran, and prevail. The judge did his level best to help the guy out by almost insisting on appointing a guardian ad litem (free attorney!), but he refused. (Sadly, he died before it went to trial, and the scammers kept the house.)
The other one got sued by a credit card company over a charge that was obviously bogus (i.e. from a swimming pool contractor in eastern Europe, which is just who you’d call in the midwestern U.S.), but they had the same mental script: Show up in the courtroom and speechify to the judge. They didn’t even respond to the summons and complaint, and the company won by default judgement.
It’s maddening.
I sat on the jury for a murder trial last year (maybe 2). It was impressive how inept both the defence and prosecution seemed and how flat out sloppy it all felt.
I had the same observation on an assault case.
The story Foxfire, Esq on Royal Road is written by a lawyer, and goes into all kinds of detail about the processes they go through, and just how long things take.
Also goes into a little detail about what kind of legal adjustments the system makes for superheroes, because it’s a superhero legal drama :p
Never heard of it, but it sounds interesting. Thanks!
