Dumb things in movies

Even better would be an ear-shattering screech like a seagull. That would be scary as hell! :eek:

I once found my cat after he’d been lost in the wilderness for three weeks by following his screeches (birdlike, not catlike; more like loud croaks, actually!) when I called his name. I felt like I was hunting a giant roc!

Doesn’t the first Jurassic Park movie give you that? In the scene where the velociraptor s are hunting the kids in the resort kitchen, the first 'raptor enters the room and emits a high-pitched screech, calling to the other.

Yep, that’s what my cat sounded like! :smiley:

(Damned if he didn’t just jump up on the arm of my couch as I was typing that! :eek: )

I think Caveman did that.

Space guns that:

a)mildly injure victims (good guy gets shot and immediately grunts ‘Aaargh! My arm!’ through gritted teeth. Of course, they are instantly fatal to bad guys, so I guess that’s good).
b) fire coloured beams so slowly they can be seen and avoided in real time.

Seriously, they are lesss effective than a mid 1800s pistol. Twice the size, twice as shiny - less than half as potent.

Leo has some experience in defying hypothermia :slight_smile:

I think I’d last about 15 seconds in the Atlantic or a river up to my waist.

That reminds me…“That’s treason!!” I even tried to create its own trope page. Treason is incredibly difficult to prosecute. And yet TV shows…and real people on FB…cannot stop saying it.

Maybe that’s the point? You really don’t want to be shooting high powered artillery inside a sealed spaceship in the hard vacuum of deep space. Something that will bounce off walls harmlessly, supposing you can still wound people or hurt them enough to make them stop, would be a decent defense weapon in that kind of environment.

Why would being hit in the furniture hurt?

Exactly. I’m no cop, but even I know that you can’t tell it’s cocaine just by tasting. You have to smell it, too.

Deeply! You gotta snort it way down.

I have no idea, but I assure you that it does.

When you’ve got your gun pointed at Bruce Lee and you stand their just looking at him to give him time to disarm you and kick you in the face.

I’ll never understand giving androids free will.

Marlowe got him.

I’m not sure which movie you’re discussing here, but I’d like to bring up a distinction I have mentioned many times on this Board – from the 1930s until about the 1970s “android” was widely used in science fiction to mean artificial biological constructs, not living, but using non-metal parts (as opposed to Robots, which were basically mechanical people, largely built out of metal). Edmond Hamilton seems to be the writer who made the distinction, and propagated it through both his science fiction writing (such as the Captain Future series) and comic books (he write for Superman and other DC titles). The authoritative Encyclopedia of Science Fiction followed his lead, and the online version still supports this definition. *

Therefore you’d expect to have an android having arteries and veins filled with, if not blood, then some other fluid serving the same purpose. It’s the Robots that you wouldn’t expect to have fluid-filled conduits.

But in the late seventies things changed. I suspect it was due to two factors in 1977 – the death of Hamilton and the release of Star Wars, in which R2D2 and C3P0 are called “Droids”, which I suspect is a shortened form of “Androids”, influenced by the term “Drones” used for short robots in the film Silent Running (R2D2 and CeP0 actually ARE called Robots in one scene of the original Star Wars, and then never again in any of the Star Wars films, books, etc. , as far as I know). Ever since, “Android” has been creeping back to meaning "Man-Shaped automata, whatever it’s made of.

In the film Alien, which you might be referencing, (Spoilers!) Ash is ultimately revealed to be a “Robot”, but it’s a Robot with lots of non-metallic parts and filled with white fluid, so it’s not clear if he’s a classic Robot or a classic Android or some mix of the two. In the sequel Aliens (which you might also be referring to), Bishop is also revealed to be an android, also with gooshy parts and filled with white fluid.

So it’s not unreasonable to have an android/robot/whatever to be filled with fluid, although not human blood (although even that, I think, has been done).

  • The term “Android” for human-shaped automata actually predates “Robot”. It was used in the 19th century, whereas “Robot” dates from Kael Capek’s play R.U.R. (1920), and is a shortened version of the Czeck word for “worker”. To make things more confusing, Capek’s “robots” are what Hamilton would have called “androids”, since they’re made of organic matter, and were portrayed onstage by human actors that weren’t trying to look like metal.

Dinosaurs are reptiles.

There are two living groups representing the Archosaur clade - birds and crocodilians.

Saying that dinosaurs (including birds) aren’t reptiles, but crocs and the more distantly related snakes and lizards and turtles are, is rather silly.

They were, however, terrible lizards.

I know, right…it’s like they weren’t even trying to be Squamates.

About every 10 years or so, I get an opportunity to make that joke.