It shouldn’t be. There are few things more boring than a world where anything can happen. Would it have bothered you if the bus in Speed missed that jump, smashed into the pylons on the other side, and then Q showed up, laughed at the silliness of the human bus driver, and rewound time to before the jump? Heck, why not? After all, it’s a movie, anything can happen, right?
In order to be interesting, a fantasy world needs limits, and it needs to follow those limits consistently. Those limits need not be anything resembling the limits of our own world, of course. If part of your story is that people can levitate FTL spaceships while shooting lightning out of their fingertips, that’s fine. In such a world, it’s OK if the hero uses similar powers in a climactic scene. But if you’re in a world that purports to follow our laws of physics, then there’s no tension if the protagonists can just spontaneously break them when it happens to be convenient.
See, this is the heart of the argument here. For whatever reason they use the 555 number, it’s become a standard and something one should expect in a movie. So, why is it if a movie has good writting, good characterization, and a good plot, something so small and insignificant as this can “completely ruin a movie” for someone? If you’re the kind of person that this happens to, I don’t understand how you can find any movie enjoyable with the exception of documentaries, because there isn’t a single film out there that adheres to reality 100%.
To an extent, I agree with you…in an action film like Speed it would be absolutely ridiculous for an unworldly omnipotent being to suddenly show up and change the direction of the film, because you’re not there to watch a movie about intergallactic beings, you’re there to watch a movie about a hunky police officer fighting a mad bomber. Despite that fact, you’re still watching a movie where Keanu Reeves is supposed to outsmart a genius, so you should know to expect a lot of little laws in reality to be stetched. Let me ask you this: if they had dropped the other end of the road so the jump was more realistic, would you have had an issue with the fact the bus kept driving? Because to my knowledge, any bus that would jump 50 feet at, what, 75+mph would blow out its tires and quite possibly destroy it axles as well, making it completely useless. But then everyone would blow up, your movie would end prematurely, and the audience would be very unhappy. Moreso than if the bus just made the friggin jump and kept the plot rolling.
My problem with the bus jump in Speed was that it didn’t look right. It was a poorly done special effect. Much the way that, say, the Rancor in Return of the Jedi had really obvious matte-lines all around it. It certainly didn’t “ruin” the movie for me, but there was a definite sense of “Oh, they could’ve done that better.” It was slightly more annoying in that, unlike RotJ, it was a poor special effect because they set the stunt up wrong, not because of the limitations of technology of the time.
However, I can see how it could ruin a movie for someone else, because the movie itself is pretty marginal to begin with. A lot of little stuff like that can add up, until the whole movie experience is ruined. If the movie had been absolutely fantastic in every other regard, I doubt anyone would be seriously complaining about that one stunt, or claiming that it ruined the movie. But if the only thing the movie has going for it is the stuntwor, and they can’t even get that right, then I’d say complaining about that jump is a legitimate complaint.
And I suspect who ever was in charge of that scene was disappointed in how it came out, too. I think that, when they were setting it up, they thought it would look more plausible once they’d filmed and edited the scene. When it turned out it didn’t, well… too late.
I will probably never have perfect pitch, even if I try really hard. I do believe everyone is capable of understanding at least some of the logical problems mentioned in this thread. Also, you don’t need perfect pitch, only relative pitch, to tell if something is in tune, but I think I understand your analogy anyway.
In The Matrix Revolutions (the third one) there is a scene where we see Smith’s fist moving through the rain to punch Neo in the face, in (surprise…) slow motion. We can see the individual CG raindrops falling in front of his fist, and they are shaped like lines, which is how they appear when they’re blurred by real-time falling. But we’re watching it at a much, much slower speed, and there is no blurring. I do believe they’re supposed to be spherical, or at least very nearly so. It didn’t really ruin it for me, because that whole fight (not to mention that whole trilogy) seemed a bit pointless, because neither character seemed to be getting any weaker or “winning” the battle. Plus, you know Neo’s going to win eventually.
And yes, this did take place inside the matrix, but I’d rather not allow that to be used as a cop-out, at least not for something like this, when it could have been changed easily without screwing up the plot.
Lead core rifle ammunition will NOT penetrate steel. Unless it’s like 1/16th of an inch thick or something ridiculous. So I’ll have to grant the movie that one.
But that’s about the only thing I’ll give them. Holy crap, that movie sucked! Ok, so I will accept that the guy is immortal, but does that mean he can jump out of a car moving at 60mph and then just land on his two feet with no forward inertia?? The movie was just one piece of crap scene after another. And yes, the giant sub navigating the tiny, but apparantly VERY DEEP, canals throughout the city of Venice was just about the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen!!!
Well, they use it because there is always some dork out there who will call numbers they hear in movies, or songs.
My original point was that, like Giant Insects, the International Criminal Mastermind Bomb Wiring Code and lovers who can kiss passionately in the morning without brushing their teeth, it has become a standard, and we do have to accept it.
But it still gets to me, as do peasants with excellent dental plans.
Because it is so damned easy to avoid.
‘May I have your phone number?’
‘Here’s my card.’ or ‘Do you have a pen?’ or ‘E-mail me; j66@sdmb.com’.
In fact, that bothered me so much, it drove the fact that the bus could not have made the jump right out of my head.
I am watching a film where Keanu outmarts a genius, so I expect him to be extra smart and be able to make fantastical unbelievable deductions. Fantastical brains do not make busses fly.
If they had dropped the other end of the bridge and the bus kept driving, I would have been just fine. The bus continuing on is merely improbable, not impossible.
Odd; when I saw Matrix Revolutions, I noticed the raindrop scene, too, and the raindrops were (roughly) spherical. Were there perhaps two different versions of the movie, one with the special effects a little more cleaned up?
[QUOTE=j66]
Because it is so damned easy to avoid.
‘May I have your phone number?’
‘Here’s my card.’ or ‘Do you have a pen?’ or ‘E-mail me; j66@sdmb.com’.
QUOTE]
And sometimes it’s not that easy to avoid. The majority of the times I see phone numbers given out in movies it’s when one character is on the phone with another and information is being relayed (for example, you’re watching a happy little romantic comedy about a couple planning their wedding. “Have you called the chair guy?” “Shoot, I forgot.” “Well, here’s the number, are you writting this down? It’s 555-____.”). If movies are supposed to be a reflexion on real life, then they shouldn’t have to avoid everyday activities.
But, a bus being able to drive on no tires and with broken axles continuing to drive is impossible. If one small stretch of reality is enough to destroy your suspension of disbelief, why would you be so willing to accept another?
Because you can’t see the stresses that are beng applied to the bus that should cause the axels to snap and the tire to pop. It’s too abstract; not enough people see objects the size of a city bus fly through the air and crash to Earth often enough for them to have an instinctive feeling of how they should react structurally. They might know intellectually what’s supposed to happen, but what they see on the screen doesn’t look wrong, and so it’s easier to overlook this sort of impossibility. On the other hand, most people do have an instinctive understanding of arcs and trajectories. It’s what makes baseball possible to play, among many other activitities. They can understand on a gut level what an object that size travelling that speed will do when it drives off a cliff, and what they see on screen clearly violates that. And that’s annoying, because it looks wrong. A bus with adamantine axels and neutronium tires is impossible, but it doesn’t look impossible, and so is easier to accept.
In the movie The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, there’s a scene where Andrew Dice Clay goes to give a girl his phone number. He spouts “5-5-5,” then four more numbers.
She stops him, and says, “wait a minute! 555’s not a real number. They only use that in the movies!”
He replies, “No shit, honey. What do you think this is? Real life?”
I think you’re mixing your audience members here. Any audience member who’s thinking enough to notice that (despite the brilliant editing) there’s no way the bus could make that jump is the same kind of person that would think “There’s no way that bus could run even if it did.” The kind of audience member who over looks the latter is also going to overlook the improbability of the former. Both actions are impossible, yet thrown together in the movie situation, noone’s going to accept one without the other. Either you’re a stickler for reality and the whole sequence is blown to shit, or you’re able to enjoy it for the fictisous fun romp that it is and accept it.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen Speed, but don’t they edit it so you see the bus jump off one, travel through the air at a high enough level to make the jump, then land? Or at least use some level of flashy camera technique to make it somewhat believable? If you’re able to look beyond that to the reality that “They’d be pancakes”, how can the fact that a bus couldn’t sustain the jump be “abstract”?
I do seem to remember that it kind of looked like the bus had actually ramped off the bridge or something, cause it looked like it was higher than the road.
Actually, I’m describing my own reaction to the movie. The jump looked really fake to me, enough to temporarily snap me out of the movie. Didn’t occur to me that the axels would snap 'til I read this thread, although it’s obvious once I think about it. Because the movie didn’t make me think of the axels, but it did make me think about the jump, and it was obvious that the bus couldn’t have made that jump. Again, I’m not saying it “ruined” the movie for me, but it did look really fake. The bus landing and driving off obviously was fake, but it didn’t look fake, so I was willing to buy it.
No, that is not true; some people here are bothered by the jump, some by the tires, and some by both. And some by neither. But only the bad jump was unnecessary; they could have staged, filmed, and cut it better.
These movies are intended to be block-busters; the producers could make the extra effort.
Most of the time it is; I know this because everytime I hear ‘555’, I automatically re-write the scene without it.
The scene you gave could have gone:
Have you called the chair guy?"
“Shoot, I forgot.”
“Do you have the number?”
[fishes through wallet, finds card] “Yeah, it’s right here.”
But not every little last detail; that would be boring, now. You use details only for characterization or to advance the plot. I hold that only phone numbers like 545-543-7669 should be should be said aloud.
And I can not remember the last time I said a phone number; I always write them down.
I just thought of another ‘555’; that fluorescent yellowish green that is used when good science goes bad. It’s the color of the solution in the test-tubes and retorts that will turn the Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde; or that is emitted from the computer in a dark room just before it starts WWIII because it has decided all humans are its enemies. When you see it you know things are going to go horribly wrong.
Evil-science green.
I can tell you that in about twenty years I have seen that color in a lab exactly once.
For example, any society that can develop interstellar travel doesn’t NEED to trade with other planets! Plus the idea that organisms that developed independently could ever have any sexualinterest in eachother. SciFi HAS to have these contradictions-becuase there is no other way to vuisualize what the future might be like. If we achieve all of this new, great technology, we would have:
-unlimited energy supplies
-the means to synthesize most of the subsances we want
-the ability to cure all disease and extens lifespans
So its hard toimagine why you would want to send a starship to a distant planet, to import some kind of weird spice.
