Hmmm… I’ll admit that my memory is a bit fuzzy, but it seems to me that if my call to my friend the admiral got cut off, my first reaction wouldn’t be to go into hiding. And it’s definitely the case that unaddressed unreality is worse than tersely-addressed. If they want to explain that she can’t get a line to anyone, and freaks out, okay, but as is it just rubbed me the wrong way.
Plus, and this is important, a really good movie with one moment of bullshit can get a pass. A movie where they MISPLACE A PLANET, not so much.
Well, explicit on Carol’s reaction, not Uhura’s. My point is we go from a scrambled, “you’re breaking up!” conversation to the scientists going into hiding. And for the purposes of this thread, the important thing is not whether or not the reaction is legitimate, or well-explained, or what-have-you. It’s that, for me, it’s far more distracting to see what I think of as unrealistic actions by the characters than it is to see retarded physics. Not that I won’t make fun of the retarded physics later (wait, you made a planet out of a nebula? What?), but they don’t take me out of a movie the same way.
I haven’t read all of the replies, but I’ll pipe in with my 2.5 cents anyway…
MISTAKES bother me. Alternate worlds or realities don’t, as long as they don’t seem like mistakes. Your “Penguins at the North Pole” seems like a mistake to me, since they only live in “my” world in Antarctica. If you explain it away as previously suggested, then I can go with it. If you don’t explain it, I’ll just think you’re stupid and it could ruin the story for me.
A great example of what I’m talking about was in the movie Deja Vu with Denzel Washington. The plot device in question was time travel. In the movie, they actually discussed the implications of time travel, saying either the “single thread of time” (If you go into the past, you can’t change anything because it has already happened) or the “multiple universes” theory (the future is an infinitely branching tree of possible futures) were true.
The problem: one major plot point required the “single thread of time” theory to be true, and another required the “multiple universes” theory to be true! It completely ruined the movie for me.
Okay, I’ll grant that a throwaway line of dialog from one of the scientists (“I don’t get it, I can’t get a signal through at all. What are we gonna do?”) could’ve been worked in somewhere, but I’m unconvinced it was necessary.
For a weak moment in an otherwise excellent film, I nominate the “figure out what we’re dealing with” discussion from Aliens. It always struck me as being far too obviously and clumsily expositional and a more likely use of the marines’ time would be to catch some sleep. Had that scene been just Ripley and Bishop, it would have worked better:
Bishop: [continuing to dissect facehugger] Magnificent.
Ripley: [walks up, shudders at Bishop’s work] These things come from eggs, right?
Bishop: Yes.
Ripley: Well, what’s laying these eggs?
Bishop: I’m not sure. A queen? It must be something we haven’t seen yet.
Ripley: When you’re done with these, I want them all destroyed, got it?
Bishop: Burke said they were to kept alive in stasis. He was very specific about it.
(segue to Ripley/Burke “You didn’t even warn them!” conversation)
