A common trope in movies and TV is the scene where the hero arrives (or something good happens) just at the very last possible moment before all hope is lost. Frequently, the nick-of-time-ness of it is played up to such a degree that it becomes ridiculous. For instance, I was just rewatching The Matrix for the first time in a while (an interesting topic in its own right… some parts of it hold up really well, and some parts don’t), and the timing of the end of the movie is just off. So Morpheus’s boat is sitting in a sewer while Neo is in The Matrix confronting Agent Smith. And there are these hunter killer squid robots coming at the boat. The guys in the boat have an EMP that they can detonate. But if they detonate it before Neo escapes from The Matrix, Neo will be killed. So, their only hope is for Neo to hurry up and get out of the matrix before the squids get there, right?
Well, funny story. Turns out the squid robots are approximately the least effectual things ever. They get to the ship, start shooting it at super close range with their big red lasers, get inside the hull, swim around and blow stuff up, for like FIVE MINUTES without actually doing any relevant harm. (Bear in mind that this is a dystopian ruined future where spare parts are presumably hard to come by.) Oh, and when one of them gets right up to Neo and Trinity it takes the time to rear up threatenly rather than shooting them with its laser, so it can be EMP’d at the last last last possible moment.
I think that whole scene would have been a lot more effective if the squids had gotten close to the boat, almost to the boat, things look threatening… and then EMP. As it is, they just end up seeming like silly non-threats.
In 2012, not once but twice (maybe more, I forget), as a plane is taking off the landing strip collapses into an abyss immediately behind it. There’s a bunch more nick of time scenes as well. In fact, nearly the whole movie is a nick of time scene.
There was a scene in Scarecrow and Mrs. King that was a brilliant parody of the classic bomb-diffusing nick-of-time scene. Scarecrow opens the bomb, and has to decide whether to cut the red wire or the blue wire. “The blue wire”, Mrs. King tells him. He cuts the blue wire and the bomb is deactivated. How did you know, he asks. “Well, at home, whenever something goes wrong with the dishwasher, I just jiggle the blue wire.”
And no matter how much of a final crisis moment - the hero fighting against 187 bad guys - the minute the last one is killed and all is right with the world - suddenly you hear the police sirens getting closer in the background - coming too late to join in the fun, but finally arriving as the hero walks away and hundreds of police now show up to clean up the mess.
And of course we all know that if you run real fast, you too can escape the fireball blast of 394 pounds of plastic explosives.
In the 1930s, movie theatres showed serials on Saturday afternoons. Those were episodes that ran for a half an hour or so, ended in a cliffhanger and continued next week. The cliffhangers were often ludicrous to the point of showing the burning building collapse on the hero, his girlfriend and his funny sidekick.
Next week you’d see the burning building and see the hero, his girlfriend and the funny sidekick run out the side door just before it collapsed.
That reminds me of a bomb defusing scene from the CGI Starship Troopers; from memory it went something like this:
Character 1: “What do we do?! I don’t know anything about bombs!”
Character 2: <fiddles with bomb> “Should we cut the red or the blue wire?”
Character 1: “What?! How would I know? Uh, blue!”
Character 2: <snips red wire>
Character 1: “What? Why’d you snip the red wire?”
Character 2: “You said you didn’t know anything about bombs!”
In the movie *Juggernaut * several bombs are placed aboard a cruise ship with a ransom demanded for their safe disposal . The bomb expert (Richard Harris) who is
Parachuted aboard, receives instructions from his mentor. It’s a red/blue wire situation . He chooses correctly .
I don’t think they’re necessarily “silly.” First of all, in a lot of these movies, we are watching the story of the survivors. It’s like watching a special on the Super Bowl winner. They have to win the wildcard/divisional/conference championship/Super Bowl, but if they lost in any of the rounds, we’d be watching the story of another team.
So, when the plane takes off in “2012” we are not watching the story of the millions of people who fell into the chasm. That would be a short movie.
And we’re not watching a movie about someone who successfully disarmed a bomb 9 hours before it was supposed to go off. You think disarming a bomb at the last second is silly? How silly would it be to watch a movie where the action hero disarms it the day before? Or watching “2012” and they have years to take off from the runway before the quake hits? Heck, you could go out to the airport today and watch tons of planes taking off right now in areas where a quake may hit eventually. But would you watch it if it were a movie?
It would be like watching a movie where the action hero is always safe and never in any peril, like a normal everyday person. Or watching a movie about the guy who dies 5 minutes in. Imagine watching “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” but the story is about Satipo.
The story is about those who make it to the end because of something interesting and compelling, even as unlikely as it may seem, not the ones who die along the way.
Here’s a cracked article about quantum immortality that discusses how an infinite possibility of universes, there is bound to be the one where everything goes the way it needs to for the hero and that’s the story we are watching:
In the British TV series Primeval there is a scene where someone is under a car trying to defuse a bomb. Their boss yells for them to cut the red wire to which they respond with an “Uhh…”
The boss looks under the car and all of the wires are red.
Later than that, when I was really, really small, I was sometimes taken to an American Base ( in Yorkshire ); and small Americans were shown b/w projected films in a mini-cinema which were serials of some sort produced I guess by Army Child Entertainment divisions, prolly to keep them occupied. I only saw a few, unlike those blasé Army brats who had got used to them, and I would say the production values were low. If OK for 5-yr-olds. Which a lot of people are still, no matter chronology.
Anyway, all I can remember was that they ended on a cliffhanger; and this was resolved in a few seconds at the start of the next. The only definite memory is one of the Flash Gordon-type hero standing with two others in a tunnel facing the audience as tons of molten lava/mud filled up behind, with no escape possible.
Even at that age I lost no sleep wondering if they would be all right.
You miss the point. It’s not that they survive, it’s that they survive in such a ludicrous fashion. Every time a plane takes off the airstrip collapses into a vast pit immediately behind the wheels. John Cusack’s party survives not just a few close calls, but dozens. (Actually, they probably survive a dozen near misses in each disaster scene.) It’s like a parody.