I thought of this topic after having seen the trailer for The Core for the second consecutive night.
Every movie, to some extent, asks that you suspend disbelief, to accept an unlikely or unfamiliar premise as real or the truth as it leads you along. Some ask you to think in a world where elves, wizards, and magic are natural and commonplace, where forces of good and evil fight epic wars. Some ask you to modify your understanding of natural laws and phenomena or manmade technology. Others hold that outwardly normal people can have superhuman abilities, have telepathy and psychokinesis, see the future, or transform into another being during certain conditions. Though we see little of these things in the real world, we can usually accept the presuppostions these movies put forth.
Some movies, though, ask a little too much. No matter how hard you try, you simply cannot accept what it’s asking you to believe. Others so horribly mangle facts or reality that you lose all desire to continue watching the movie, as it can do nothing to redeem itself.
As soon as I managed to get my disbelief propped up on some flimsy scaffold, supported by a few two-by-fours, judiciously applied duct tape, and a big sloppin’ bucket of good will, another howler would come down the pike, and CRASH, there I’d be, my disbelief in a heap in my lap.
After a while I gave up. Nothing about the characters or the story made me want to believe.
Plus, what was with the soundtrack???
(My absolute favorite was the “point of no return” indicator. I couldn’t stop snickering even though this was a Very Dramatic Point in the movie.)
I felt something akin to awe during Armageddon at several points. The first point was when they nonchalantly decided to start spinning Mir–Mir–to get rid of the hassle of weightlessness. By the time one of the shuttles crash-landed on the Armagederoid, and sent the flight crew smashing through the window just like a non-seatbelted car crash, I was giggling madly and waiting for it to end.
I have high hopes that The Core should be able to top that.
Honorable mentions to **Volcano/b], wherein a volcano suddenly starts spewing lava in downtown Los Angeles, but Tommy Lee Jones saves the city by damming the lava flow (which is thoughtfully confining itself to main roads) by using concrete i-beams.
Yeah, The Core looks pretty bad. I don’t think I could suspend my disbelief enough to accept the premise.
But one film that really insulted my intelligence was Wargames. At the very end the computer says – over, and over, and over, and over – “The only correct move is not to play the game.” Okay, I’m a reasonably intelligent person. I was able to pick up on the message without being hit over the head with it. I hate it when the filmmakers say, “Our audience is stupid. Let’s make The Point so clear that no one will have to do any thinking to figure it out.”
I know I’m going to get slammed for this, but my nomination is The Matrix. Let’s keep all the people on the planet alive and dreaming so we can use their bio-energy to… something, something, something, change reality only when the plot demands it, rebels, drugs, guns, explosions, whoa.
Embarassed the hell out of my friends by howling with laughter from the moment they said “the Earth’s core has stopped spinning” until midway through the next trailer.
My husband has pointed out that it is sci-fi in the 1950s pulp tradition of completely ignoring reality.
Hands down to Double Jeopardy on this score. I’ve seen some pretty fast and loose summaries of the law, but this one takes it. Not only does the movie tell you that Ashley Judd can kill her husband in broad daylight after she’s been sent up for killing him, it also assumes that she has no legal recourse in identifying her very high-profile husband who’s very well known in another town. And it also screws around with her daughter, who should either be a lot more traumatized by all this, or should be her conduit to help by the authorities (what do you mean you lost my daughter?). And the ending is contrived, contrived, contrived.
I’m gonna jump on ** The Matrix ** as well. Utterly irrational.
I’ve always had a problem with a movie I actually like a great deal, except for one aspect of it, and that is ** The Green Mile. ** The supernatural aspects of it don’t bother me at all, that is something set apart. But on the earthly end… it’s the Depression. It’s the South. It’s a mob. It’s a giant black man with two white female children in his arms, dead and covered in blood. * And he goes to jail? * Bwahahahahaha!
*Jurrasic Park.[/] “Oh no, dinosaurs. Oh, no, but it couldn’t be. Not those dinosaurs. No, it can’t be happening. No, it’s unbelievable. What?!–No, it’s not possible! Not those dinosaurs!” The book was bad and the movie was worse.
Good Lord, where to start?? Well, most recently I saw Bless the Child, which was two hours of my life I’ll never get back. The most ridiculous segment was when Nicole Kidman gets knocked out by the bad guys, but they don’t kill her…instead, she wakes up DRIVING THE WRONG WAY down a freeway!! Good job, driving all those miles while unconscious.
24 also lost me with that bomb that went off at CTU, killed 32 people, and yet everyone is still there WORKING IN THE BUILDING, the phones & computers still work, there’s NO NEWS MEDIA swarming around…and don’t even get me started on Jack’s stupid daughter and that battered brat. But by far the worst example was when Jack only took 15 minutes to drive from downtown L.A. to Simi Valley (which is 40 miles away.)
There was a made-for-TV disaster movie about twenty years ago called Starflight: The Plane that Couldn’t Land that was staggeringly bad. It was about a hypersonic airliner that accidentally (it may have been sabotage) goes into orbit. So right there, it’s pretty obvious that Physics wasn’t real high on the screenwriter’s list of priorities. But since everybody was weightless now, the crew strung a rope along the seatbacks so people could move around. When they did, they went hand-over-hand along the rope, while walking on the floor in slow motion! Oh my god! It’s the magical gravity rope!
And there was one I caught a few minutes of once, I later found out it was Turbulence II: Fear of Flying. The passengers on a hijacked airliner fight the hijacker and disarm him, but the guy who winds up with the gun is also on the plane to hijack it. Later, during the tense-negotiations-with-his-arch-nemesis-from-the-FBI-in-the-control-tower scene, the hijacker decides to Show Them He’s Serious[sup]TM[/sup]. He takes one of the passengers to the back door of the plane. The passenger fights back, and they struggle for a minute until he gets pushed out. The hijacker yells “This one’s for you!” or something, and the falling body hits the control tower! Cruise missiles should be so accurate.
Each of the three Jurassic Park movies was pretty insulting. Oddly enough, the second least of all - in terms of the dinosaurs themselves (though still pretty insulting with respect to the plot). The third one had me wailing and gnashing my teeth at what they did to Spinosaurus. And those “raptors”. And the pterosaurs. And the plot. And…and…
Actually, it was Kim Basinger. Other than that I’m totally with you, although I’m surprised you were able to narrow it down to one outstanding instance of shocking implausibility in this movie.
