This is probably more of a criticism of the book, and I may be wrong in my presumption, but wouldn’t cadaveric spasm make whatever position he chose before dying meaningless? It’s not as though dying from an abdominal GSW is painless!
The explanation given in the book was that because frog DNA was used to fill in the gaps in dino DNA, T. rex must have inherited the frog’s movement-attunded vision. It was ridiculous in the book with explanation, and even moreso in the movie sans any explanation at all (of course, it was also ridiciulous to have used frog DNA at all, when bird or croc DNA would have been the obvious choices). Being reptiles, there is no reason at all to believe that T. rex’s vision was any different from a modern reptile’s - which is not solely movement based.
And never mind the fact that even if its vision were so based, he still would have been able to detect Grant and Kid Whatshername because tyrannosaurs are thought to have had exceptional smelling (which was also touted in both the movie and book). Especially given they were mere inches from the beast’s nose!
ETA: after reading through the thread some more, i see these issues have already been brought up…
Good point. Perhaps he’d intended to pass into the great beyond while lying in the same position as the Heisman Trophy, but a post-mortem twitch ruined his carefully laid plan.
Wouldn’t he more likely have tried to Butkis his ass goodbye?
Edit: Butkus. Wouldn’t want to make the man angry.
Really applicable to the original play as well, but since it’s a movie:
Sweeney Todd is the pseudonym of Benjamin Barker, a barber framed for a crime and exiled to Australia by an evil judge and his evil lackey beadle. Fifteen years later another man opens a barber shop in the same location and looks just like Benjamin Barker, only older, and neither the evil judge nor the evil lackey beadle recognize him. In the same play/movie, Mrs. Lovett claims not to have had a customer in weeks and to bake the worst meat pies in London, but somehow and for some reason remains in the meat pie business- it would seem it would cost her more to keep the shop open than to just close it.
Not only movie WTF moments, not only WTF moments with Kevin Costner, but also one of the funniest clips on all the YouTube: The Wicker Man.
(Actually, the one called “The Best Scenes from the Wicker Man” is the best video, but it won’t load)
Katie Beuller: “I just picked up Jeannie at the police station! She got a speeding ticket, another speeding ticket, and I lost the Vermont deal because of her!”
Tom Beuller: “I think we should shoot her.”
Sampiro - I could pretend that 15 years of labor in Australia followed by an arduous journey back to London could have changed him beyond recognition – if he looked like Len Cariou instead of Johnny Depp.
My dog has a keen sense of smell and knows when I’m holding one of his favorite treats, but if I toss it on the ground in front of him, it can take him a while to zero in on it. But if I give it a nudge with my toe, he’ll gobble up the treat in nothing flat. So while freezing might not foil a T-Rex, it might buy you some time and give you a chance the T-Rex could be distracted by something else.
Yes, sometimes I go to extraordinary lengths to make sense out of a movie, even one I haven’t seen.
I love the movie Excalibur, but when
Modred impales Arthur with a lance that abruptly disappears a shot or two lateralways takes me out of the moment. I can rationalize it by imagining that it was a magical Arthur-killing weapon and magically ceased to exist once it had accomplished it’s purpose, but it would have been nice if John Boorman could have rationalized it for me.
In the movie, Grant and Lex are inches from the tyrannosaur. The beast’s breath blows off Grant’s hat, he’s so close!
Here is a 9-minute Youtube video of the T. rex attack sequence. Fast forward to around 6:30. There is no way in heck (or hell, for that matter) for the T. rex to a) possess a superb sense of smell (which is supported by fossil evidence), and b) not be able to smell either Grant or Lex. This falls under the category of “holding one of his favorite treats”, not “toss[ing] it on the ground in front of him”.
I’ll be damned if I can remember the film, but it was set at least partially in Chicago, and during a chase scene, someone opened a door and ran through it, magically transporting themselves from the Art Institute to the Field Museum (if I remember the two museums correctly). The buildings are miles apart.
Even now that, and especially because my ignorance has been fought, this thread is great! I’m diggin’ on this.
Oh, and as for telescopes, it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder about it. Guess now I ought to go looking for telescope history as well.
OK, I literally laughed out loud watching that. If I were a defense attorney I would apologize to the jury for wasting its time and advise Jurassic Park to throw itself on the mercy of the court.
The big WTF? moment in Jurassic Park for me is in that same T Rex scene. The cars are level with the ground in the T Rex area. It remains level for half the scene. The T Rex walks away to eat the lawyer in the bathroom, walks back to the car, and knocks it off a cliff (a cliff that was level ground just moments before). I can suspend my disbelief for everything else in the movie and just enjoy it for what it is, but that just annoys the crap out of me.
Cliffs magically appear when needed in Spielberg movies. How else can you explain that Nazi chase car going off a cliff during the “The Ark’s being Driven by the Nazis out of the desert I gotta hijack their truck” sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark? Indy and the Nazis are driving along in an apparently flat and dusty desert without even an appreciable dune, until Indy needs to get rid of an inconvenient vehicle, so he bashes it sideways, and suddenly they’re riving along a cliffside road, just in time for the Nazis to go plunging over the edge.
The Europeans invented telescopes. Not the Arabs. The arabs did indeed have advanced glassmaking skills. But then the mongols savaged them so badly that it wrecked their centers of glassmaking and they lost the advanced knowledge. After that, the baton was passed to the Europeans who came up with telescopes and microscopes during the rennaisance.
“Chain Reaction” with Keanu Reeves and Rachel Weisz. And they were transported from the Field Museum to the Museum of Science and Industry, which is even farther than from the Art Institute to the Field. I think that in the film, both museums were used as stand-ins for a single fictional museum in the DC area, but it’s still pretty funny when you know what’s “really” happening.
Friggin’ hilarious. 
Every Bridget Fonda movie, at the end, when I realize that she didn’t take off all her clothes and wave at me, I say, "WTF!"
You do realize that Nick Cage and Kevin Costner aren’t the same person, right?
I’ve covered forty miles in a twelve-hour march through good terrain, thirty-four through “bad” terrain. (Forests and the general outdoors) Just a note. The average sustainable walking pace for a man is 3,5 mph. If there’s 140 miles to a place, I’d say four to six days, depending on urgency and the weather.