This one’s in a lot of movies, but the first big one I can recall is Tim Burton’s Batman – Hero fires his gun/hurls his grappling hook while he’s falling, it snags onto something, the rope goes taut, and our hero comes to a sudden jerking halt with no ill effects. (When the real stuntman pulled a trick like this for the climbing scene in For Your Eyes Only he aparently had all sorts of safeguards built in). I’m sorry – there should be broken bones, broken spines, maybe a few limbs pulld out of sockets, the rope should stretch and rebound… all sorts of gory and uncean stuff. Don’t try this at home, kids.
Rockets in space are always good for a laugh – rocket engines roar in vacuum, and ships bank in vacuum like ships flying in atmosphere, and never turn around their center of mass. There’s no point in listing all the film that got it wrong – almost all of them do. A handful – ** 2001, 2010[/] (although their noisy braking maneuver is borderline inaccurate)Apollo 13 and a few others got it right. If you want to see how real spaceships move, watch some old NASA footage. Everything seems unreal – because it’s an unreal and unfamiliar situation. The bad films play to our expectations, and screw up – like the Superman cartoon The Bulleteers that features a jet plane-type craft – which makes propellor-airplane noises.
Special mention to Starship Troopers for unphysical fying above and beyond the call of logic (swooping turns as mentioned above, the surface of a glass of liquid gets pulled sideways by the gravity of an asteroid – but the glass doesn’t move good non-skid surfaces, etc., etc.).
To me, there’s a certain level of forgiveness I give to a writer. When I see something in a movie that is impossible or “lazy” (as you call it), I simply ask myself, “Can the movie work without that?” If the answer is “Yes,” I simply don’t care.
One example: The laser in Goldfinger… y’know, “Do you expect me to talk?” and all that. Technically, THAT’S an impossibility, as you shouldn’t be able to see the laser. However, it is so insignificant and infinitesimal to the plot - a visible laser - that there’s no point in getting worked up about it.
Other examples would be “sound in space” or other such sci-fi conventions. Only the most anal of people would give a damn.
The scene in X2, where the X-schoolmarm’s are taking the X-students through the exhibit on human evolution…why, there were enough science bloopers in that one scene to make me almost wriggle off my seat with anxiety. My favorite was “recent genetic studies have suggested humans and neanderthal’s may have interbred.” (I’m probably not quoting it exactly, but that’s pretty close). Well, no, actually, the mtDNA work suggested the exact opposite, which was known at least as far back as 1997, well before even pre-production work on the film. Also, a lot of the gobbledegook about “mutation” in the opening or closings of those films…agh! Total cringer. Then there’s Magneto’s magic EM field that, I guess, mutates every cell in a non-mutant’s body, but doesn’t mutate mutants, unless, maybe, they’re unmutated mutants, or perhaps even unmutated mutants are immutable? The leg bone’s connected to the head bone? What?
Trivial? Trivial!?! They’re mutants! This whole mutation madness is the thing that makes them the X-Men! It’s implausible enough; why do they have to rub our poor noses in it?
I understood this to be deliberate - he was judging how much these potential suckers knew about spaceflight, if they swallowed it whole (as they did) he could bamboozle them with bullshit and charge them even more than he usually did.
Well, when you think about it, if you remove the O from H2O, and all the electrons with it, you’re left with only H+ ions. Seeing as how, IIRC, the acidity of a substance is based on the concentration of H+ ions, you’d be left with one helluva a strong acid. Now how you make all those particles just disappear like that is beyond me.
It’s probably unfair to take shots at one of the dopiest movies ever made, but if anyone complains I’ll say this post was meant as a satire.
Anyway, there was a scene at the beginning of the movie where the nefarious plans of the bugs were being explained. With lots of pictures and voiceover narration for the slower members of the audience. It was shown that the bugs lived on the opposite side of the galaxy. And the main part of their military strategy was throwing asteriods from their solar system towards ours. If you’re the intellectual equivalent of a bug (a Hollywood screenwriter for example) this probably seems like a good plan. But the rest of us have to wonder if maybe the bugs were actually at war with the dinosaurs and couldn’t figure out who we were and why we were attacking their planet.
And let’s not go into the whole issue about hearing a spaceship explode.
“Lord of the Flies” carries over an error from the book…lenses for near-sightedness (myopia) are concave and diverge light, so they can’t be used to start fires. I remember getting upset when reading the book in 8th grade, since this was a major plot point, but no one else caught the error, or cared when I mentioned it.
Tom Sizemore, as the biologist in Red Planet, made at least two ridiculous mistakes (three, if you count trying to play a character with a graduate degree):
[ul]
[li]Referring to the Martian creatures as “nematodes” when they were obviously arthropods (i.e., they were like insects–not worms).[/li][li]Stating that the four letters that make up DNA are “C, A, T, and P.”[/li][/ul]
It’s supposed to directly tie in with the whole “evolution” angle they keep bringing up in X-Men films. Hence, I’m not under the impression it’s a completely throwaway scene. It’s, y’know, supposed to make you think about human origins. How we evolved, and what we may be evolving into. Thing is, what they want you to think is total crap.
Are you serious? That’s where you lose your ability to suspend disbelief? Cyclops can shoot rays from his eyeballs, but don’t expect me to believe that homo sapiens and neanderthals interbred? Wow.
I know your complaint is in line with the OP, but the bolded sentence required me to type this response.