# Movies with incorrect basic premises? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [December 18, 2015, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778 "2015-12-18T16:12:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![j666](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/9de0a6/32.png) [@j666](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/j666)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2015, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/61 "2015-12-19T15:06:17Z")
> [@Superdude](#): > > Which brings to mind _Liar, Liar_. In which a woman lies about her age to appear older than she really is. This reveal at the end of the movie cancels out that she signed a prenup that would leave her with nothing in her divorce proceeding, since she entered into the contract as a minor. However, wouldn’t that also invalidate her marriage, since she cannot enter into a contract as a minor? There was no mention of emancipation. I believe it would depend on the state, but a marriage is not like other contracts. I seem to recall that in some states a minor can legally marry at the age of consent, and that legal guardian would have to sue to have a minor’s marriage legally annulled (which is different from a religious annulment.) Not that I have made a positive legal claim, I am sure one of the lawyers will jump all over it. Thank you. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2015, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/62 "2015-12-19T15:12:23Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > I disagree completely. I still feel there’s a valid difference between arguing _“that movie was silly because real policemen wouldn’t act that way”_ and _“that movie was silly because real Martians wouldn’t act that way”_. ---
**Author:** ![Eyebrows\_0f\_Doom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eyebrows_0f_doom/32/3119_2.png) [@Eyebrows\_0f\_Doom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eyebrows_0f_Doom)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2015, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/63 "2015-12-19T16:07:12Z")
> [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](#): > > “West of Memphis” and “Devil’s Knot” both take the premise that the West Memphis 3 were innocent. Weren’t they?😕 ---
**Author:** ![Suburban\_Plankton](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/suburban_plankton/32/219_2.png) [@Suburban\_Plankton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Suburban_Plankton)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2015, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/64 "2015-12-19T17:00:25Z")
> [@Sefton](#): > > As much as I love _Casablanca_, I always found it hard to believe that the Nazis would give a damn about Charles de Gaulle’s signature on letters of transit. They wouldn’t. But they might care about [General Weygand’s](http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2008/04/weygand-or-de-g.html) signature… ---
**Author:** ![Morbo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/morbo/32/389_2.png) [@Morbo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Morbo)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2015, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/65 "2015-12-19T17:08:09Z")
**Passenger 57**. Ads: “They finally captured the World’s most dangerous hijacker. Now they’re bringing him back for trial…on a **plane**!” Dun dun dunnnn! Me: “On…a…commercial airliner? Where’s Con-Air when you need it?” 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2015, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/66 "2015-12-19T18:06:12Z")
> [@campp](#): > > The Civil War depicted in _The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly_ was, um, a bit different than the real Civil War. There actually were several engagements between Union and Confederate forces in the southwest, most notably the [Battle of Glorieta Pass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Glorieta_Pass) in New Mexico in 1862. The main difference is that this battle occurred earlier in the war than the one in the movie appears to. ---
**Author:** ![That\_Don\_Guy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/that_don_guy/32/538_2.png) [@That\_Don\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/That_Don_Guy)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2015, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/67 "2015-12-19T18:48:45Z")
_Man of the Year_ - Robin Williams is a late-night talk show host that manages to get elected President…or did he? The problem isn’t that he could get elected president (in fact, I think it was Roger Ebert who said - and I agree - that the movie would have been better had he been elected and showed what his term would be like), but that: (a) every state would be required to use the same company’s electronic software to count votes, and (b) while each state’s main vote-counting computer would display the (wrong, thanks to a software glitch) winner’s name, it would also display the correct vote counts, and nobody would notice that the numbers listed a different winner. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2015, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/68 "2015-12-19T21:30:12Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I still feel there’s a valid difference between arguing _“that movie was silly because real policemen wouldn’t act that way”_ and _“that movie was silly because real Martians wouldn’t act that way”_. Everybody in this thread is only arguing the former: How do real taxmen act, how does the real core of the Earth act, how do the real laws of thermodynamics act, what is the real composition of the Earth’s atmosphere etc. When the movie tells us that martians are deathly afraid of hot weather, it is \*more \*valid to point out that a real Martian wouldn’t be lying on Bondi beach in January than to point out that a real policeman wouldn’t throw down his gun. Once again: movie premises have to make sense within their own universes. If the movie tells us, even implicitly, that the universe is identical to ours except that there are Martians and they are afraid of hot weather, the movie can’t then have a Martian sunbathing on Bondi Beach at the height of summer without it being a faulty premise. That is a silly thing for a Martian to do when Martians are deathly afraid of hot weather. It isn’t a question of what a real Martian would do. It’s a question of what the weather is like in Australia in January and how that gels with what were are told about Martians in the movie universe. If someone were arguing that Star Trek is incorrect because “real” robots don’t act like that, then I could see your point. Star Trek takes place in a universe where robots are like that. It’s an implied plot point that we have to accept on its own merits. But if someone were arguing that Star Trek is incorrect because Kirk travels back to WWI and saves the day by commandeering a Sherman tank, that is a valid criticism of a faulty premise. They didn’t have Sherman tanks in the real WWI. See the difference? ---
**Author:** ![Arcite](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/67e7ee/32.png) [@Arcite](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arcite)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2015, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/69 "2015-12-19T21:57:59Z")
I recently watched _The Avengers: Age of Ultron_, and was bemused to see that a basic plot point revolves around the notion that the internet has one central “hub” through which all traffic passes. Not only is that not true, but the internet was specifically designed to avoid being like that. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2015, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/70 "2015-12-19T22:26:47Z")
> [@Arcite](#): > > I recently watched _The Avengers: Age of Ultron_, and was bemused to see that a basic plot point revolves around the notion that the internet has one central “hub” through which all traffic passes. Not only is that not true, but the internet was specifically designed to avoid being like that. This sort of objection \*is \*what Little Nemo is complaining about. The Avengers Universe is implicitly stated as having diverged from our universe in ~1940. And it diverged in all sorts of ways. One of those ways was computer tech. Howard Stark and Nazi scientists developed machine AI and a form of the internet by 1960 at the very latest. Computer network technology by the time of the first Iron Man movie already consists of high speed, global wireless coverage capable of instantly extracting and consolidating any information from anywhere, including every smartphone and modem on the planet. Once again, that is explicitly stated and nobody is at all surprised to see such things. IOW the Avenegers universe internet is explicitly stated to not be like ours. The Starks have had a program running for 70 years to make it not like ours. It’s not really valid to say that an internet that is explicitly stated as being nothing like ours is nothing like ours. That’s just the way that the internet behaves in this divergent universe. Maybe it’s silly. Maybe, with the sort of AI that already existed in 1960 in this universe, it makes perfect sense to run it through a central AI controlled hub. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2015, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/71 "2015-12-19T23:05:19Z")
> [@digs](#): > > But they do have to follow their own rules. > > If Samwise Gamgee suddenly pulled a blaster pistol out and zapped a big smokin’ hole in the middle of a ring-wraith, it might just pull you out of the movie… Or make it watchable. Personal taste. ---
**Author:** ![TheBoltEater](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/779978/32.png) [@TheBoltEater](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TheBoltEater)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2015, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/72 "2015-12-20T00:05:37Z")
Oh, definitely the J Lo film _Enough_. J Lo must escape her abusive husband - ok, he’s a jerk, she should leave him. But when she is specifically asked in the movie why she doesn’t just divorce him, she explains that she’s so purely Catholic that she doesn’t believe in divorce. THEN SHE LURES HIM INTO A TRAP AND MURDERS HIM IN COLD BLOOD. Did he deserve it? Sure! But it’s surprising that such a good Catholic girl missed that day in Sunday School where they explained that one should not avoid the sin of divorce by committing the sin of premeditated murder instead. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Librarian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_librarian/32/402_2.png) [@The\_Librarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Librarian)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2015, 9:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/73 "2015-12-20T09:42:35Z")
> [@Richard\_John\_Marcej](#): > > **“Signs”** > > The premise about an alien race, who obviously have the intellect and ability to seek out other planets in the solar system that support terrain life (life that can breath oxygen) and to build crafts that can travel the vast distance from their world to other worlds, and they don’t notice that the planet they finally come upon and land on is 2/3 covered with a liquid that can dissolve and kill them. > > It would be like NASA sending off a space craft full of astronauts to land on Neptune, without wearing helmets or having tanks of oxygen to breathe cause, gosh, Neptune is made from hydrogen and helium with no oxygen. Oops. Not to mention the opening scene were they run around in a cornfield at night. ---
**Author:** ![Gretchion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/8edcca/32.png) [@Gretchion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gretchion)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2015, 1:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/74 "2015-12-20T13:59:24Z")
The Phantom Menace. That is _not_ how the force works. ---
**Author:** ![astorian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ad7895/32.png) [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2015, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/75 "2015-12-20T14:34:22Z")
“The Quick and the Dead” comes to mind. Look, MOST Western movies take it for granted that gunfights were common and winked at in the Old West. It’s not true, but one on one gun duels in the town square are such a staple of Westerns that I generally overlook the fact that you simply COULDN’T gun a man down in the streets of a western town and walk away scot-free on the grounds that it was a fair fight. But “The Quick and the Dead” asks us to believe not only that gunfights were common in the Old West but that people from all over the world came to an annual gunfight tournament in an Arizona town. And that everyone in the town was okay with this. ---
**Author:** ![DrForrester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/8edcca/32.png) [@DrForrester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrForrester)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2015, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/76 "2015-12-20T15:02:17Z")
There are many movies, James Bond movies come immediately to mind, that depend on the existence of large, well funded, well organized criminal empires that are completely secret - entirely unknown to law enforcement. So, you’ve built a secret base, to the tune of tens of thousands of square feet of sophisticated equipment, over the course of years, inside a volcano, employed many dozens or possibly hundreds of people, paid for it all, and it’s entirely unknown to anyone outside your group? Real-life examples of this sort of thing might be… oh, let’s say Area 51. But, we know that it exists. We know how it is funded. We know how many buildings are there and roughly the purpose of each building. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2015, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/77 "2015-12-20T15:07:01Z")
> [@astorian](#): > > “The Quick and the Dead” comes to mind. > > Look, MOST Western movies take it for granted that gunfights were common and winked at in the Old West. It’s not true, but one on one gun duels in the town square are such a staple of Westerns that I generally overlook the fact that you simply COULDN’T gun a man down in the streets of a western town and walk away scot-free on the grounds that it was a fair fight. > > But “The Quick and the Dead” asks us to believe not only that gunfights were common in the Old West but that people from all over the world came to an annual gunfight tournament in an Arizona town. And that everyone in the town was okay with this. Well, actually, _not_ everyone in the town was okay with it, but they were under the thumb of Herod, who supported (and participated in, and set the rules of) the tournament. Some of the townspeople even hired a ringer in the hopes of killing Herod during the course of the tournament. I remember expressing a similar objection about the unlikeliness of he tournament. My girlfriend suggested viewing it as something the authorities tolerated as a means of culling the more violent members of the population in a controlled manner. Or we could just accept a lethal tournament as acceptable in that fictional world. It’s not really any different from the martial-arts tournaments in _Enter the Dragon_ and its endless ripoffs. ---
**Author:** ![billfish678](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7bcc69/32.png) [@billfish678](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/billfish678)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2015, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/78 "2015-12-20T15:50:36Z")
> [@Richard\_John\_Marcej](#): > > So what are they then, cosplayers with an aversion to water??? Cosplayers don’t bathe. Now you know why. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2015, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/79 "2015-12-20T16:17:00Z")
> [@xizor](#): > > [The Core](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/) > > You can’t even get past the first sentence in the synopsis: > “The Earth’s core has stopped spinning.” How about [Sunshine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_%282007_film%29)? The premise is that the Sun is dying, so a ship is sent to kick-start it using a bomb consisting of all the fissionable material on earth (a bomb the “size of Manhattan”) that’s designed to explode once it gets to the core of the sun somehow. The first ship is lost so a second ship is sent with another bomb (consisting, perhaps, of the fissionable materials found in the sofa cushions). The movie follows the voyage of the second crew. I kind of like the movie for the insane idea that the people are supposed to get right up against the surface of the sun, drop the bomb in and get away somehow. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2015, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778/80 "2015-12-20T16:21:47Z")
I dunno, I haven’t seen _The Hunger Games_, and I’m assuming everybody must have been hungry. Sounds unlikely to me. 😛 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-with-incorrect-basic-premises/740778.md?page=5)