If you were to take your cues from the movies on how machines and devices work, you’d believe that stealing a car involved little more than yanking some wires from the steering column, that all elevators feature human-sized access panels at the top and that ventilation ducts in all commercial buildings are large and sturdy enough to support multiple adults. Any other examples of man-made things that are consistently misrepresented in the tv and movies? Not talking about suspension-of-disbelief stuff where a car can jump a canyon and continue on with no damage. I’m talking about the basic functionality of everyday devices.
I’m sure we’ve gone over this ground many, many times in the past.
My contribution (which I’ve brought up here before): Cutting an elevator’s cables won’t make the car fall and plunge the occupants to their death.
The reason that “Otis” has his name on all those elevators isn’t because he invented a box that goes up and down – we’ve had those, believe it or not, for a great many hundred – possibly thousands – of years. What he invented and patented was an elevator car with an emergency brake mechanism to prevent such plunges to your death. And he did it well over a hundred years ago.
so, the Matrix and all notwithstanding, your car ain’t gonna fall.
You can’t conveniently knock someone out by bopping 'em on the head. Any blow to the head which causes unconsciousness will typically result in a severe brain injury.
Part of my job responsibilities involve working with digital images of varying quality supplied by customers. Every once in a while, in an attempt to increase the size of the image while simultaneously increasing the DPI resolution of the images, I lean into my monitor and dramatically say, “Enhance.”
It doesn’t work very well.
A blast from a shotgun, even at close range, is surprisingly unlikely to send a 200lb man into backflips.
For that matter, a woman who is skilled in hand-to-hand combat is unlikely to consistently overpower similarly-trained men who are 50-100% heavier than she.
This is the most consistent departure from reality across all entertainment media. People get knocked on the head, keel over, and wake up an hour later with a slight headache. And this is something that pretty much cannot happen. You can hit someone hard enough to knock them unconscious. They’re likely to have a fractured skull, concussion, and possible lifechanging brain damage. Or they lie there unconscious for a while, and then die. Or like what happens in boxing, the guy gets knocked down and can’t get up for a while, but he’s not completely unconscious, just dazed and possibly concussed.
Human beings don’t come with an off switch, and knocking someone unconscious or drugging them into unconsciousness is pretty difficult without risking serious injury or death.
Are we allowed to include misconceptions about how space travel works? Because we could pretty much fill up the whole thread with those.
Let’s not forget real-time satellite tracking that can follow you around town and monitor your every move… especially because the sky is always clear and unobscured by clouds or haze or anything else. Yeah.
Let’s stick with common devices and machines rather than scientific concepts and theories. Otherwise, we’ll devolve pretty quickly into an endless spectrum of things the movies get wrong.
This plus Gordon’s example reminds me of “Enemy of the State”, one of the more egregious offenders in recent memory. Remember the 3D model they made from two security camera angles?
You also can’t hold a chloroform-soaked rag over their face for a few seconds to knock them out, either. In reality, it would take five minutes or more to render someone unconscious that way, and you’d run the risk of things like liver damage, suffocation, and overdose resulting in death.
Much the same goes for “sleeping gas,” as the Moscow theater hostage crisis ought to prove.
There’s a reason that anesthesiology is a medical specialty requiring years of training and knowledge.
The most common set of interlocking misconceptions is that space travel “should work” pretty much the same as travel by ocean in the golden age of sail. It should take about as long to travel to another planet as it does to sail from Bristol to Jamaica, ships should be about the same size and have the same sort of crew, the space navy is just like the wet navy except in space, ships should be out of contact with home base while traveling, there should be space weather and space storms, space pirates, colonies set up the same way countries set up colonies during the Age of Exploration, aliens who are either colorful natives, or spacefaring great power rivals, even forms of government should be the same, so you have space kings and space queens and space princesses and space aristocrats. And planets are exactly like small islands with one and only one city or base and some surrounding countryside.
Of course not. (For that, you need a Vulcan nerve pinch.) When you bop someone on the head, they get amnesia and forget who they are, until you re-bop them so they get their memory back.
Well, I’ll now say something irrelevant that you forbid me to mention to the jury, but I’ll then take two steps back while holding up my palms and saying “withdrawn.”
If you are holding someone at gunpoint, you don’t need to cock the weapon again to demonstrate how serious you are. Presumably you have already cocked it and have a round chambered.
You don’t need to chase an aircraft through a dangerous winding canyon. It is safer and just as easy to follow the aircraft from a slightly higher altitude. (I think this was lampshaded in Firefly)
SAMs and air to air missiles do not pull up behind your aircraft, chase you through every turn, matching your speed and then get distracted by any convenient heat source that crosses it’s pass. They plot an intercept course travelling like Mach 3 and either explode if they get close, peppering your aircraft with shrapnel or miss and most likely lose track of their target and run out of fuel.
AFAIK, night vision goggles don’t glow green or red.
System admins do not get alert messages indicating “someone is hacking the network” and then get into hacker battles where each side is feverishly typing code.
Password cracking software does dramatically find each digit of your password in sequence like a contestant on Wheel of Fortune.
If someone shoots a small hole in the side of an aircraft or space ship, you will not get sucked (blown?) through it.
The generally accepted way to perform CPR is not to take a break for a few minutes before screaming “LIVE DAMN YOU!” and then slapping the shit out of the patient.
Cars generally do not explode. In fact, most things don’t outside of a Michael Bay film.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ER that was a constant madhouse flurry of activity and beeping lights like you see on TV.
When my company’s office was robbed a few years ago, they did not solve the crime in 24 hours. Although, I did get to sit with them and go through security camera footage, saying “enhance…” every time I clicked a button. The cops thought that was pretty funny. In fact, the cops were actually more Brooklyn Nine-Nine than Law & Order. Then again, no one was murdered. But I digress.
You can’t have a gun fired near you at close range and not experience some kind of hearing damage.
(Watching “Magic City” last night and one character shoots a gun across the other character. Second character later rubs his ear - my husband said that was first time he’s ever seen someone on TV acknowledge that a close-range gunshot hurt their ears.)
No, that prostitute does not have a heart of gold.
Movie guns never seem to need reloading. And the ones the bad guys have are terribly inaccurate.
Bad guy’s cars, however, are exceptional! Old Soviet-era Skodas are able to keep pace with Aston Martins on twisty mountain roads. Right up till they explode for no apparent reason.
Security doors can’t be opened by shorting their keypads.
No OS that I know of has** “ACCESS DENIED”** in 96pt type displayed on the screen when you type the wrong password.
Large datacenters are not cooled by submersion in seawater…
If you engage in a sword fight with someone where you keep hitting each other’s swords, what’s actually going to happen is you’re both going to wreck your swords.
I’ve noticed recently in movies that people get thrown right across rooms, often smashing into furniture and such, and they go “oooh” or “ugggh” and slowly get back up. Quite often these people are not, in fact, superheroes. In actual fact, if you were flung twenty feet across a room crashing into furniture and walls, what’s going to happen is you’re going to be really badly injured, with broken bones and stuff.