Anybody who reads comic books, science fiction, and fantasy–hell, even people who like soap operas and mystery novels–is familiar with the necessity of suspension of disbelief (if not the term). You have to accept certain impossible or improbable conventions to let yourself into the story.
But there’s always a limit.
For me, it’s the powers of theFlash. I love comic books, as anyone who reads my posts may have guessed, and I even like the character as written by Mark Waid. But Wally, Barry, and Jay’s powers bug me in a way that Superman’s do not. In the case of the Big Red S, his flight, super-strength, heat vision, and so forth are so unlike anything in the real world that I can just say, “It’s merely some invisible force that we haven’t discovered, or that doesn’t exist in our world but does exist in his, that makes these things possible.” That works because I’ve never tried to heft a tractor-trailer, or burned through a metal object by staring at it, or soared through the air under my own power.
But I’ve run from place to place, and that makes the Flash more overtly self-contradictory than Supes or Captain Marvel. I mean, *Why aren’t all Wallys strides a quarter-mile in length? Why were Barry’s arms powerful enough to move a thousand miles a second without making him strong enough to bench-press a thousand pounds? Why doesn’t the impact of Jay’s feet hitting the ground at thousands of miles an hour crack the asphalt? *
I just can’t buy it.
What about the rest of you? Where do you drop off the suspension of disbelief bridge?
as I’ve said several times, my suspensio of disbelief snapped at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom when Indy, Short Round, and Willi jump out of the falling airplane using only an inflatable raft (I’ll grant that they used one successfully on Mythbusters, but not the way Indy and gang did). Not content to merely fall a few hundred feet onto a relatively thin coating of snow, they then barrel down the snow and go off the edge of a cliff into a shallow river. And suffer no ill effects.
I’m sorry – those folks snapped multiple bones on the first drop. On the second drop they struck bottom in that rock-filled fast-moving stream. Even if they hadn’t, they would’ve broken a lot of other bones, including, I suspect several vertebrae.
I know the Indiana Jones movies are supposed to be outrageous, but that’s abusing literary license. Once you throw the audience something that unbelievable, it’s hard to come back from it. And the rest of IJatToD didn’t really work for me.
I heard Lucas wanted to use that stunt at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I’m glad he didn’t.
I have a hard time with themes featuring ghosts, psychics or similar supernatural themes. I can go along with magic and the supernatural in a fantasy context like LOTR or Harry Potter but when it’s supposed to be a realistic setting and I’m expected to take it seriously (say in something like the movie White Noise or that stupid show, Medium), my eyes start to roll uncontrollably.
Well considering that in real life people’s bodies do do miraculous things and survive, not as a matter of course of course (not a Mr. Ed reference) but strange things happen. People falling thousands of feet out of planes-bouncing- and waking away, for example, has happened a handful of times. People going over Niagara with relatively few injuries has also happened from time to time. There’s enough variables to allow leeway with the Indiana Jones situation.
With the Flash… I thought the “speed force” was supposed to be the catch-all explanation for things. His feet don’t break the the asphalt becuse his feet never actually touch the ground. A thinlayer of the speedforce surrounds him and absorbs the shock.
For me, it’s all those scenes where the good guy is being chased by several dozen bad guys, all with high-power machine guns spewing out a zillion bullets a second, and he escapes harm just by running fast, maybe ducking and diving a little - not a single bullet finding its mark. This kind of scene was kinda believable in the old days, when the pursuers just had simple rifles or revolvers, but in more modern movies (I’d say from the Arnie / Willis era onwards) these scenes are just stupid and kill the ‘suspension of disbelief’ stone dead.
Worst example I can remember offhand was the original ‘Die Hard’. Great movie and all, but too many scenes where Willis is being chased from every direction (the bad guys even had a helicopter to shoot from), yet despite the hail of bullets flying every which way from some serious hi-power weaponry, he doesn’t get even a flesh wound. And how does he achieve this? By running quite quickly and ducking and wincing a little. Some of the more recent Bond movies have copied the same type of scene. Look, it’s one thing if you’re writing a story about a special character who is invulnerable. Quite another to just say ‘Yeah, all the evil henchmen have super-duper billion-bullet machine guns… but none of them could hit a hippo with a banjo’. It’s lazy.
Oh, and another ‘sus of dis’ killer… all those scenes where Mr Hero effects his escape via a ventilator shaft. Moreover, one big and clean enough to host a small party.
I saw that flick with relatives. Later on the bad guys are chasing the good guys on mining cars. There’s a gap in the track. The good guys’ car jumps the gap, lands neatly on the other side, and rolls along. (The bad guys’ car jumps the gap and crashes.)
My cousin: “I don’t believe it!”
My aunt: “That’s the first thing you don’t believe?!”
(By this time, of course, we already have seen the Evil High Priest pluck a man’s living heart out of his chest without breaking the skin.)
No, the worst example of this is from the second Toimb Raider movie (don’t look at me like that: I was on a plane, and had already seen everything else they were showing). Lara and random hunky love intertest avoid a hail of machinegun bullets by ducking behind the railing of a fire escape. The railing of a fire escape. It blocks, IIRC, the better part of a full clip from a Kalashnikov.
I can buy just about anything in a sci fi or fantasy setting, unless it’s some real-life, non-movie-science/magic thing that seems too ridiculous. I’m not explaining it too well, but I’ll give a couple of examples:
Independence Day - Outrunning fireballs, accessing an alien computer system and giving it a virus? No problem for me! Driving from downtown New York to Washington DC in about 5 1/2 hours in Armageddon traffic? I’ve found my limit in what I’ll believe.
After we first saw the Kenneth Branaugh version of Frankenstein, I was telling a friend about the part of the novel they always leave out of the films: the monster learns to speak by eavesdropping on an Eastern princess who happened to be living in a woodsman cottage, and who was also learning the local language. And a good thing they always cut it; it’s so bizarrely implausible. Then we agreed that someone putting together a body from the parts of dead people and reanimating it was probably not all that likely anyway, but that part of the story had never troubled us.
I’ve heard of people surviving falls out of planes, but not of their walking away from it. Having them then go over a waterfall unprotected is pushin’ it well into the territory of the ludicrous.
The one that just killed me was in the Village - where they send a blind girl out in the woods, all by herself, for an overnight trip. A blind girl! All because they didn’t want their stupid secret exposed. The night she was sitting underneath the tarp all alone was terrifying and totally, totally ruined the flick for me… I couldn’t enjoy any other part of it because of that.
I have a hard time swallowing this one scene from West Side Story. I’m talking about the segment where the male lead is running down the streets of east New York, yelling “Maria! Maria!”…
… and only one woman pokes her head out of her window.
I have problems with a movie like Dreamer where the central plotline depends on a sequence of incredibly bad luck followed by a sequence of incredibly good luck. I mostly liked the movie, with my limited knowledge of the Kentucky Horse Racing Scene, the background of the movie and the details were delightfully accurate. (OK, there may have been a few details that were fudged deliberately for the sake of the plot, but on the whole the background was accurate enough to be delightful to me). But the central plotline had too many things going conveniently wrong or right for my total happiness.
The recent movie starring Charlize Theron (I think) about a woman miner in Northern Minnesota whose lawsuit on sexual harrassment changed the world (only slightly melodramatic) was much the same way–although far less pleasant.
The article says he’s the only one but NPR just ran a story a few days ago about the guy whose job it was to rescue/recover people who went over and he seemed to imply that there were many more non-safety device using survivors.
(Possibly suicide attempts meaning the people are loathe to publicize it)
I couldn’t find any information on the famous Bounced and Walked Away skydiver from the 70s but I had a whole TimeLife book about miraculous survivals and he was featured. So here’s a humorous article on the idea.