I’ll add A Night At The Museum - I know it’s stupid and expecting far too much to see any consistency in that movie, but…
-Do the dead things come back to life, or don’t they? (T Rex remains a skeleton, but the Egyptian mummy guy is perfectly restored.
-Do the statues and wax model characters know they’re not the real historical person? Some act completely in character, others seem to realise they’re not real.
-Jed’s guns don’t work - presumably because they’re just little models - but they have working dynamite, a working steam train, the Romans have real flaming missiles, etc
-Radio control cars don’t have a fully working set of driver controls inside them.
I personally have no special particular interest in Alan Rickman. Hadn’t noticed him really. He’s an actor, right?..What? That “fanfic” site? (nudge, wink) How did that get in my bookmarks?
I will write an epic historical movie about the Roman sewer system: Cloaca Maxima!
In Jerusalem, there had been some kind of system of cisterns and sewers going back for quite a while, built in response to water management needs, Torahnic purity laws and, of course, the effin’ Romans. I don’t remember the movie scene well enough to know whether it looked plausible, and I’m sure as hell not going to watch that film again to see.
It’s odd how an art director on a historical movie may make a fetish of authentic details (in Prince of Thieves, they got short-legged cows to look just right in the background) only to be undermined by the idiotic script (telescopes and gunpowder in 12th century England).
But could any script have rescued a movie that has Kevin Costner playing Robin Hood? (Though it reminds me that originally Jimmy Cagney was up for the part in the 1938 movie that wound up starring Errol Flynn.)
Well I recently watched Cloverfield, and well,
not too much of a spoiler but just in case…
the people who made the film didn’t seem to be familar with the geography of NYC. I honestly thought there were at least 3 giant monsters due to the fact that it seemed to to be hitting downtown westside, Columbus Circle and the LES at the same time.
Everything in Jurassic Park. Oh, and Jurassic Park: The Lost World. And then there’s Jurassic Park III.
Velociraptor did not stand 6’ tall. T. rex cannot fly, nor was its eyesight based on movement, nor were they likely to be particularly stealthy. Spinosaurus was bigger, in terms of length, than Tyrannosaurus, but was not “badder” in any way. And was more lightly built overall. Pterosaurs very likely could not pick up an adult man who probably weighed 2x - 3x what they did. Dilophosaurus would not fit into a Jeep Wrangler (and you’d damn sure know it was in there if it did somehow get stuffed inside, even if you were blind, since it’d take up pretty much the entire cabin). And much, much more!
Getting back to Robin Hood: PoT, they land at Dover and Costner gives a totally unrealistic timescale for them getting to Nottingham. Yes, today you can drive from Dover to Nottingham in less than a day; back then it would have taken them over two weeks (averaging 10 miles per day).
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. OK, I can suspend disbelief far enough to accept invisible men and vampires, just for the sake of the story. I cannot suspend it far enough to accept a world where Carnival (Mardi Gras) is celebrated in July and the canals of Venice are broad and deep enough for a submarine the size of an aircraft carrier to cruise submerged and invisible.
And Mr. Hyde is a giant?! In Stevenson’s novel Hyde is physically smaller than Dr. Jekyll! (Because he is the manifestation of the hitherto underdeveloped Dark Side of Jekyll’s character.)
This was addressed in the comic book. Hyde states that when he was first created, he was “practically a fucking dwarf”, because Jeckyll’s dark side was so puny to begin with. Apparently it consisted mostly of thinking about men while he masturbated, and being impatient with the servants sometimes.
Of course the original purpose of the experiment was for Jekyll to isolate his dark side so he could purify himself of it and get rid of it.
But by manifesting his dark side, he didn’t isolate the dark side, he gave it free reign. And as the dark side became more powerfull, Hyde also grew physically.
I have to agree. I think I actually jumped out of my chair and shouted “WTF!” when that happened. Totally not expected it. One moment its super hot Salma Hayak in a bikini, and another vampire Salma Hayek in a bikini with fangs.
Lemur has already answered, but I’ll amplify this.
Moore was obviously taken by the idea of Hyde-as-The-Hulk, and used it without explanation in the first “volume” of The League (Hyde’s “explanation” came in the second series) – Jeckyll becomes Hyde when he gets angry (An idea that they used heavily in The Hulk for many years, but which wasn’t true when he started out, and I don’t think is true now).
When they made the movie Van Helsing, they lifted this idea, so you’ve got a ludicrously huge CGI HulkHyde in the opening of that film, too. I suspect we may be seeing the start of a new meme here. Vladmir Nabokov would have a heart attack.
Along a similar line, Pompeii by Robert Harris is about a Roman water engineer. Lots of good details about how the system worked. Ghosts of Vesuvius has a good bit about the Roman sewage system. They had flush toilets.
How do you know about its eyesight? I don’t mean that as a challenge, I’m genuinely curious, since obviously there’s no soft tissue to analyze, and some predators (the cat family, for instance) are very sensitive to motion and not so much to colors and shapes, relative to, for instance, us.
The roads are better, there’s more light these days (no walking after dark), you were likely unburdened, you didn’t stop to find and tell the news at each thorpe, and, most importantly, it was probably a good day. I would have expected them to do more miles on a good day, but not all days were good: if it was pouring with rain then they wouldn’t have ventured out of the inn. And the roads weren’t much cop either: the best were the Roman roads and they hadn’t been maintained in over 600 years; the rest were dirt tracks which easily became quagmires. And I’ll reiterate that there was no travel after dark. Sure you might be able to do another 2-3 miles before dark, but if the next safe hostelry is 4 miles away, you’re staying put.
