So I was bored one afternoon and flipping channels and ran across a movie on HBO called “Panic”. I only watched a few minutes of it becase I saw this brilliant scene and my brain hurt so much I had to turn the channel:
A father and his son are in the woods where the father is teaching the son to use a gun. They spot a squirrel sitting on a log a few yards away and the father orders the son to aim and fire. The camera then cuts away to show a cute and lively little squirrel sitting on a log.
The boy fires the gun and of course, misses. That’d be fine except for the fact that two seconds later the father tells the son to try again. To aim and fire at the same squirrel on the log! The boy fires again and this time hits the poor squirrel.
Umm…unless that was an incredibly stupid squirrel I seriously doubt that it was still sitting there calmly waiting to be shot at again.
Sheesh!
I’m sure I can think of many more examples of movie scenes that defy logic but right now that’s the only one that’s stuck in my head. Scenes like that completely distract me and then I can think of nothing else for the rest of the movie. It drives me nuts!
(It’s almost as bad as “dead characters breathing” in movies. But that’s another thread unto itself. I have a bad habit of looking for that sort of thing.)
What’s the worst example of bad movie logic you’ve seen?
If I recall correctly, it was Lost in Space. I think the planet they were on, after getting destroyed or something, was turning into a black hole. This was a planet with Earth-like gravity, mind you. Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong here, because I just can’t understand the logic to it.
Well, there’s the above quote for starters. You mean that movies have to actually kill their actors or else you start nitpicking about it? :rolleyes:
But the champ in this category is Battlefield Earth. Everything in the film defied logic, but the most egregious examples are:
[ul]
[li]Primitive people can learn to fly complex airplanes in one week.[/li][li]After a thousand years of neglect and and caveman technology, buildings still had electrical power.[/li][li]An alien race whose biggest goal is the quest for gold doesn’t find Ft. Knox in a thousand years.[/li][li]A superior alien race lives for a thousand years in buildings wrecked in their invasion and never make a single repair.[/li][li]Radiation – any at all, even presuming cosmic and background radiation – causes the aliens’ atmosphere to explode.[/li][/ul]
Well, no…it’s actually the only thing I’m really nitpicky about while watching movies. Okay, so it sounds a little obsessive but it’s just distracting to me. Maybe I’m the only one who notices it?
The climatic scene in “Resevoir Dogs” left me quite confused as to who shot whom. It seemed impossible for everyone to shoot everyone and one guy didn’t even have a gun pointed at him. Hmmm… I think Q.T. did it on purpose.
I occasionally notice it, but really, unless you use a real corpse (something I don’t think the health department would allow), the actor has to breathe. I’m gonna cut him a little slack for that if it shows up (but if he’s taking huge breaths that can easily be seen, then you have a point).
I tend to get more upset at things like:
Guns that fire far too many times or for far too long.
People who continually rack/pump the slides on said guns to be menacing, but actually reveal to some of us that said guns aren’t actually loaded because nothing is ejecting when they should. (instead of racking/pumping, just hit him with it if you’re not being taken seriously).
Set design that makes no sense or doesn’t look right. For me, the big thing is sewers and air vents. The air vents(except maybe in die hard) are usally far too big, and the sewage systems/sewers are usally far too clean (Damnit! It looks like I could eat out of this damn thing and not get sick! IT’S A F***ING SEWER! MAKE IT LOOK LIKE ONE!)
You know, things that you can help with the proper research, not stupid bloopers like the length of a cigerette, the amount of water in a glass, or the reflection of a building that isn’t supposed to exist in a car windshield that you can barely see even if you are looking for it.
In Fearless, Jeff Bridges wants to prove a point to Rosie Perez, so he drives his car at over 60mph into a freakin’ brick wall with her in the back seat. Now in real life, this is an excellent way to get yourself killed. In the movie, though, not only do Jeff and Rosie survive, but Jeff proves his point and Rosie’s life is changed for the better. Not only that, but it’s a helluva scene!
Also, a bus jumping a 50 foot gap on a freeway defies logic–but that too is a great scene.
The amount of punishment that Edward Norton goes through in Fight Club, yet seems to fully recover from, defies logic–but still a great film!
Every other scene in a typical James Bond movie defies logic…
Good entertainment can built on the defiance of logic.
Having said all that…
…what really gets me is when people either jump or are thrown through plate glass windows with nary a scratch.
What was that movie with Sylvester Stallone and the mountain climbing? It had a terrific opening scene where they were inching along a rope between two mountains that makes my hands sweat just thinking about it. That’s not the scene. Later in the movie, Stallone is chasing the bad guys and ends up beneath the ice of a frozen river. For an incredible length of time. In only a t-shirt.
(Some of the details above may be slightly incorrect. It was mostly a dumb movie but many of the rock-climbing scenes were so terrifying I can recall them clearly!)
OK, while in preview I had to look it up at imdb. It’s Cliffhanger.
Isn’t headbutting all about transfer of energy? I’m sure if it’s done wrong it hurts both people. But, I mean, people can break boards or even bricks with their bare hands if they do it right.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, that is way below the belt. 2001 was an absolutely brilliant movies and one of the most scientifically accurate (especially when compared to movies of today: Star Wars, Armageddon, etc).
If you’re talking about the concept of the movie; it was on a very deep level. If the scenes “defy logic”, you probably didn’t understand it.
That’s one of the biggest brainbugs of the movie industry… quiet guns. Even a pathetically weak piece of crap gun firing near-zero-powder bullets will make a bang loud enough to hurt your ears. There’d be scenes where a gun goes off right next to someone’s head and they just flinch a little. Hell-O! You’re gonna be hearing a ringing in your ears for hours! Hell, if it was a rifle or a shotgun, you’re probably gonna be deaf in that ear!
At least Blackhawk Down got this right…
I disagree. I understood the movie just fine. I just thought it was boring. Why? They made it very realistic. But reality’s boring.
Actually, as a hunter I can say that something similar has happened to me on more than one occasion. I shot at and missed a deer once and the durn thing just stood there and then actually took a few steps toward me! (allowing me another shot that removed that dumb buck’s genes from the pool) Animals can become confused sometimes when there is gunfire. Not knowing which way to run, they may stay right where they are.
Of course, it is more common to see an animal run away when shot at. But it’s not all that unbelievable that sometimes they don’t run.
Why, just the other day I discovered the concept of “killing,” took a trip to the Moon, touched a four million-year-old monolith, flew to Jupiter, went through an airlock without a space helmet, lobotimized my HAL 9000 computer and aged 60 years in three minutes…
Even worse, I’m almost positive they were using Macs, as everyone in movies does. They look better, and creative types tend to be Mac-ophiles, so they put them in their movies.
About “Cliffhanger”: Did you notice that aluminum buckle twisting way out of shape under the weight of little Janine Turner? NO WAY. Those things are rated wayyyy over that kind of stress, precisely because people’s lives are literally hanging on them.
Right after we saw that movie in the theater, my roommate had me try on his Black Diamond climbing harness, and not only couldn’t you imagine the straps whizzing through the buckles, or the aluminum twisting, IIRC, you’d also fall over backwards as you hung by the only the leg straps and not the waist one too. This didn’t happen in the movie.
As a very minor point, the same roommate commented, “Stallone’s using way too much upper body strength to climb here. He should push instead of pull.”
