So I’ve been having some pretty gnarly insomnia and find myself watching tv at all hours of the early morning. I wanted a movie last night, and the only one that was handy on HBO or something was, “Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.” Now lots of people hated that movie, and for good reason. It’s silly, Costner is silly, it’s just one of those movies that you have to ignore lots of stuff in in order to enjoy it. Now I don’t hate the movie. Staring at Mary E. Mastrantonio’s hair is enough for me, so I was content to watch it.
The WTF moment came for me when Robin and Azim are escaping the dungeon in…Turkey was it? Yes, Turkey. It’s before 1200AD, somewhere around 1180. We’re talking the third crusade, Richard the Lionhearted and all that. They emerge onto a Turkish street from a manhole. An honest to god modern MANHOLE. No really, with the cast rim and modern lid.
Now, am I missing something about the technology of the day and Turkey was far ahead of what I thought medieval society was capable of? Could it be that our underground sewer systems were built on a model that came from Turkey oh so long ago? I will concede that there’s something I might have missed about the great Turkish underground, but a modern manhole just seems like some silly shit SOMEONE on that movie might have noticed and changed.
Heh. I’m in construction. Manhole adjustment. Of course I’m going to notice that! Got any specific expertise that makes you notice things in movies that just…aren’t…right? Tell it!
OMG, yes. I watched that particular Pirates the night before. Hamster wheel, indeed.
But Alan Rickman, oh my. I lurrrve him.
“Because it’s DULL, you idiot! It’ll hurt more!”
I don’t have any expertise, but I just finished watching Diabolique and it doesn’t make sense to me that the detective (cop?) allowed Michel and his mistress to scare Michel’s wife to death.
Unless he thought she deserved to die for attempting to kill her husband, but still . . .
Movie WTF? moment, you say? I give you the entire second half of From Dusk Til Dawn. You can time it to the second, the moment that Quentin Tarantino takes his badass prison escapee story story and hands it over to Robert Rodriguez, who promptly goes apeshit with vampires.
I cannot WAIT for the movie version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The rest of the movie can suck (it probably won’t) but I’ll pay double the price of admission to see Rickman during Snape’s death scene
ANY movie where the fiendish plot requires literally scaring someone to death or driving them insane taxes my willing suspension of disbelief.
Maybe it has something to do with my slight expertise in that area, having studied psychology and worked in mental institutions. People don’t just “go crazy” that easily, they can survive some pretty scary shit more or less in tact, and they have a powerful tendency to come up with explanations that fit what they already know about the way the world operates. (Like, maybe the ghost that looks like a guy in a sheet is really a guy in a sheet, or maybe the dead body moved because somebody moved it!)
Concerning the OP: I’ve never seen that blasted movie, but I’d imagine the WTF moment would have to do with how the heck someone would manage to be in Turkey in the year 1180.
I can’t believe I’m defending this movie in any way – but if I recall, Robin and Azim meet in a lockup in Jerusalem, in what would have to be 1192.
Well, it would be called Anatolia, but there’d be plenty of Turks there. Richard I didn’t go through there, though; he took the Mediterranean route, stopping on the way to occupy Sicily and conquer Cyprus.
I’m going to pretend this was posted in General Questions and give a straight answer to this bit.
Constantinople did have a pretty good sewer system. It was built by the Romans, after all. You can read a little bit about it here.
Did Roman sewers have manhole covers? Yes they did, although made of stone, not cast iron.
As for the rest of the question, I work on a oil rig. Any film set there is always silly.
Armageddon: Bruce Willis is chasing Ben Affleck. On an oil rig. In the middle of the ocean. In the very next shot, they’re skipping along happily through an oil refinery. On dry land. That’s some fancy footwork!
The Abyss: underwater oil rig. It’s just so WTF I can’t go into detail. Basically, the question is why would you do that? What are you thinking? Plus, the whole operation is manned by 5 or 6 people.
I’ll be damned. I had no idea that civilization had put any effort into such a thing back then. I plead ignorance on account of I’ve never been anywhere.
