Oh, you guys haven’t even begun to scratch the surface excrescence of ‘Die Hard 2’. Oh, where to begin…
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[li]The phones all said “Pacific Bell”, even though the story was set in Washington D.C.[/li][li]The whole terrorist plot, which was hatched MONTHS before the actual events unfolded, hinged around there being a terrible snowstorm in Washington on that very day.[/li][li]One of the plot points was that the terrorists controlled the tower, and therefore no one could communicate with the jets (until McCain’s wife figured out the airphone, I guess). Hello? How about area control centers? Other airport towers? Handheld radios? The radios in about 100 aircraft sitting on the ground? At the screening I attended, the audience actually started murmuring when this plot point was introduced.[/li][li]Another plot point was that the jets didn’t have enough fuel to divert. Uh, a commercial jet carries enough in reserve to divert to freakin’ FLORIDA from Washington. There are at least 20 large airports within diversion range of Dulles.[/li][li]The first aiplane to land is crashed when the terrorists ‘lower’ the ILS by turning a big dial. Uh huh.[/li][li]The snowstorm as depicted in the movie was mild enough that the jets could have made a GPS or Inertial Nav or ADF non-precision approach and landed that way.[/li][li]At one point, a reporter is standing outside and says, “I can see the aircraft circling overhead.” Hello? If she can see them, they can see the ground and don’t need the ILS.[/li][li]A Hercules transport does not have ejection seats.[/li][li]Bruce Willis dives off the wing of a 747 at near takeoff speed, and gets up without a scratch. That’s like jumping off of a 2 story building going 150 miles per hour.[/li][li]Speaking of the takeoff roll… That took about 3 minutes. I didn’t realize Dulles had a 10 mile long runway.[/li][li]Throughout the movie people go through secure areas in the airport at will, without gathering any notice.[/li]
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Man, I could go on all day about that piece of crap. I’ve seen better film in soap dishes.
They could have gotten the permits if they paid off the right people. Based on the slimy-ness of Craig T. Nelson’s boss, and the fact that they did indeed build over the cemetary, I would venture to say that some money did change hands in this case.
OK, the movie has it’s flaws but come on! She was a freaking alien! We don’t even know how she got them in there in the first place. If she hadn’t been shot and killed she probably would have pulled them out the same way she got them in there.
The behavior of the people on deck didn’t make me scratch my head nearly as much as the scene where Rose goes below decks as the ship begins to sink.
The icy subarctic water inside the ship can’t be much warmer than the icy subarctic water out on the open sea. So why doesn’t Rose react to the temperature as she wades and swims through it for the five minutes it takes to rescue Whatsisname? She doesn’t even shiver.
Um, if you’ve ever studied the Titanic, it WASN’T a bleak scene the night she sank. Most of the people WERE out, just wandering around the deck, the band was playing ragtime, people were joking, dancing, and complaining about how stupid it was that they had to wait out there to get into a stupid little lifeboat-most of them believed they would be back on the ship for breakfast.
Um, yes she does! As she lowers herself in, she starts going “OH! Eeek!” or something like that! She starts yelping. Sheesh!
What bothered me about the movie was the part when Lovett is talking about the Heart of the Ocean, and mentions the famous blue diamond worn by Louis XIV, and saying, “If it were around today, it would be worth more than the Hope diamond.” Um, hello? The diamond worn by Louis XIV IS the Hope Diamond, at least, that’s what most historians and jewelry experts and such have concluded. ARGH!!!
It was indeed the icebergs. It’s somewhat funny, I think, but the reason there were so many icebergs in that area, was because the weather had been unusually WARM that winter, and thus, in the north, the ice was melting, allowing more bergs to break off, and float in a southern direction. Icebergs in that area were very rare.
And yeah, the water was freezing, and people WERE cold, but most of them were bundled up. But people were very casual and skeptical about the whole thing-one reason the boats had so few people in them.
So see, we’re BOTH right. I guess they just didn’t do the breath thing-because most certainly you WOULD have been able to see your breath-was it was just too much with all they had to do.
Plus, it might have looked, too, I don’t know, much? Like, with all the visuals going on, to go in and add that…
Actually, my big problem with “The Relic” was the protagonist’s rant about how no reputable anthropologist would ever dream of making the superstitions of different cultures into a subject of serious academic study.
The funny thing about this whole thread is that I, as a scientist, stick to the “measure ten times, cut once” rule. Because if you screw up, you can lose at least the week’s worth of work it took to get you to that point, plus another week finding out what went wrong, plus whatever money you sunk into the experiment.
But Hollywood? An eight-digit budget, more than a year of work, and yet they never seem to invest the ten seconds of thought needed to realize hey, silly rabbit, double jeopardy doesn’t really work that way.
I’m reminded of an article by (IIRC) Gregory Benford in which he talked about his trials and tribulations getting a movie and TV show made of some of his books. He said that one of the young-turk Hollywood execs said hey Greg, great script, and not to change everything around or anything, but what if halfway through the movie it turns out that the main character is really an android? Another exec suggested that in a scene where one of the characters dies out in the Martian wilderness, maybe he could take off his helmet and realize, to his amazement, that the cave he’s in is full of oxygen. Why would it be full of oxygen? “Greg, man, we’ve got to have a Spielberg moment.”
-Ben
How cold the water is has very little to do with how cold the air is. In that part of the world (off of the Newfoundland Coast), the water never gets much above freezing, even in the middle of winter. Even inland lakes in Canada often don’t get much above 50-60 degrees in the summer if they are deep.
However, Titanic went down on April 15, and at that time of year it’s mighty cold at night. That particular night, the air temperature was about 30 degrees F. when the ship went down. And the water was 29F.
The Relic was also brilliant in that the perky scientist gal managed to save herself from the fire by lowering herself in the tubs of acid that were used by the museum to strip flesh off of animal bones. Makes me wonder what kind of moisturizer she uses.
Maybe I’m being a bit too picky, but I cannot stand any movie where a plot device involves being accepted into a college. If you are accepted into a college, they send you a fricking huge envelope filled with all sorts of materials. If you are rejected or waitlisted, you get a standard size envelope that is quite thin. Whenever someone is agonizing over a thin envelope and then gets into said dream school, I get irrationally angry.
Good, Christ, where to begin? How about in Planet of the Apes ala Tim Burton, where Marky Mark can’t land his ship (despite being a “great pilot”) and the monkey’s able to do a perfect landing? (Not that the whole movie wasn’t a crock, but that part just really ticked me off.)
The Cell, where the clue to the hiding place comes only after the guy sees the symbol on the giant block and realizes that its a clue? (Uh, hello? Don’t you think that you’d want to know where that big, honking hoist in the guy’s basement came from? Don’t you think that they’d run a complete check on the guy’s entire life?)
Joy Ride, haven’t seen the movie, but I used to own the car the characters are driving in the trailer. Uh, folks, despite how it looks, that car was one fast mo-fo and as close to indestructable as they come. Surely, they’d be able to get away from something as slow and ponderous as a semi.
Traffic, uh, yeah, they let the daughter of the drug czar nominee walk away from a rehab center, riiight. They also don’t bother to monitor Catherine Zeta Jones’s cell phone calls. :rolleyes:
Armageddon, okay, so you guys are flying into a debris field behind an asteroid and you’re not going to wear the helmets for your spacesuit? Uh, yeah, that makes good sense!
Not only that, with all the time it took for Bruce Willis to round up the bad guys (several hours at least), the planes could have flown on to Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, or any one of a hundred different major airports in the Eastern U.S. That plot hole was so awful, all the rest seem minor in comparison.
A person who’s immersed in frigid water doesn’t let out an initial squeal and proceed to function normally for some five minutes. I speak from experience.
Many years ago I fell through thin ice on a pond in upstate New York. At first I tried to climb back to the surface. Soon I was shivering uncontrollably. It got hard to move my hands. They turned numb and unresponsive. The shivers subsided. Then I was in real danger. I have a vague recollection of people shouting and of somebody hoisting me by the shoulders. I had to be carried to shelter. That was a quick rescue: there were a dozen people nearby.
People lose consciousness and die under those conditions in a matter of minutes. The film plot might have needed suspense, but in real life Rose would have had about thirty seconds to play hero. Much more than that and she wouldn’t have been able to save anyone, least of all herself.
Do you understand how a toilet works? Try an experiment for me. Run your garden hose into your bathroom, and turn it on full blast. As soon as the water level reaches the toilet seat, start flushing. Let me know how long it takes the water to drop below the level of the seat.
Yes but something I think many people are forgetting is that the ship itself was heated. Remember those big coal furnaces for the boilers? They didn’t just drive the propellers but they heated the ship as well. It would hardly be a luxury cruise without heat. Even after striking the iceberg they keep the boilers going for quite some time. So while running around on deck the metal is not going to be so cold as to make skin freeze to it. Young Frankenstein the blind man has a candle to light his cigars.
BabaBooey, I’ll give you a headstart, in case the garden hose experiment isn’t physically feasible for you.
By my recollection, the room in which the girl was being held was about 8 ft. x 8 ft. x 10 ft. That’s 640 cu. ft. There are about 7.5 gallons in a cubic foot, so we’re looking at about 4,800 gallons to fill the room. The cops have 40 hours to find the girl before she’s dead. Even though the water didn’t start as soon as she was put in, we’ll act as if it did to be generous. To fill a 4,800 gallon room in 40 hours would require a flow rate of 120 gph.
A toilet these days gets rid of 1.6 gallons per flush. It takes about 2 seconds to flush, and about 30 seconds to – and this is important – refill from the tank.
Also, a toilet is not a vacuum. It works on the principle of gravity. Holding the lever down isn’t going to cause water to rush out of the room. So, you do the math.