[QUOTE=Marley23]
Excellent post, Terrifel. I wish I’d thought of most of what you say. That said, does The Matrix really violate all three laws of thermodynamics? It’s not the stupidest movie ever, but that does deserve some kind of prize.
[/QUOTE]
Well, I ought to clarify my earlier remarks with the observation that movies, especially of the fantasy/SF genre, can exhibit different distinct categories of dumbness (often simultaneously). The Matrix’s apparent ability to extract more energy from humans than it takes to maintain and feed them, or Waterworld’s suggestion that melting the polar icecaps could somehow magically produce enough water to put Denver below sea level, are examples of “technical dumbness,” or stuff that’s just flat out impossible to begin with. While these examples are fairly egregious, I think it’s arguable that they’re not qualitatively different from other movie premises-- FTL travel, time travel, magic powers, ghosts, etc.-- that are not generally regarded as “stupid,” even though they’re widely considered just as impossible. Presentation counts for a lot.
Jaws: The Revenge, on the other hand, doesn’t actually contain any events that totally defy physics (except perhaps for the great white’s ability to teleport from Long Island to the Caribbean). It’s not impossible that a shark or sharks might attack several people from the same family under widely varying circumstances. It is, however, very, very unlikely, and that sort of thing sets off my BS-Meter much more frequently than genuinely impossible stuff.
Another example that comes to mind: Blade 2. Vampires exist; moreover, they can’t be killed by guns, but *can * be killed by UV flashlights. Impossible, silly even, but not a deal-breaker. However, in the course of the movie, after killing several vampires with the flashlights, the heroes just decide to stop using them and attack using totally ineffective guns instead. Unlikely, massively stupid, totally unacceptable.
I can’t remember who said it (and Lord, do I hate repeating unattributed quotes, because they usually turn out to have been coined by Hitler, or Orson Scott Card, or both), but I believe it was an SF author* who observed (paraphrase) “You can ask your audience to accept an impossible thing, but not an improbable one.” The illustration of the principle was a robber trying to crack a safe: it’s acceptable to establish that the safe is guarded by an antimatter bomb that will detonate if the correct code isn’t entered. It isn’t acceptable to have the robber choose the correct combination totally at random. The merely unlikely scenario is the stupider one.
*–although for all I know it could have been another poster on this very forum; I’m just too stinkin’ lazy to search.