How many times do I gotta say this?
So he falls out of his plane to the ground (at least he gets the advantage of trees to break his fall) and say he then goes down that ski slope and over a waterfall.
I’m not saying I don’t believe people could fall out of planes (although it is pushing the envelope), but that they couldn’t go through the whole beginning of IJatToD wringer.
[QUOTE=John DiFool]
The same thing happened to me last season for 24: for some strange reason the
head agent at CTU (Samwise Gamgee) fails to report his security badge as missing
and uncontrolled; even though he mentions it to a colleague, NOBODY bothers to
disable the badge, DESPITE the fact that his sister just got killed and the badge
is apparently missing.
15 minutes later a baddie uses said badge to sneak into CTU and set off a nerve
gas canister, killing about half the staff.
I just refused to believe that an organization supposedly as competent as CTU
is alleged to be could fail to have an automatic procedure to lock down lost badges.
[/QUOTE]
Not even close to the stupidity of “Minority Report”. Tom Cruise goes from respected cop to wanted fugitive? Okay, fine, he’s a man on the run, the hunter has become the hunted, he’s holed up in a safe house, and he eventually tries to get back in to police headquarters with hopes that he’ll pass the retinal scan. Which he does.
And I’ll even suspend disbelief on this point – because, well, maybe it never dawned on anyone at Pre-Crime. That’s stupid and implausible, but it’s real-world stupid and implausible; stuff that should occur to you sometimes doesn’t. It probably should, but it doesn’t ruin the movie.
But after they find out what he’s done, after he’s pulled off his theft and gone back on the road – after he gets tracked down and captured and sentenced and locked up, even – his retinas are still on file as “Open Sesame”.
No. I can’t go along with that. Tell me law enforcement didn’t think of it the first time, I’d say you’re probably wrong; tell me that after they had their noses rubbed in it, and you’re no longer talking about people.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
How about sitcoms where some overweight schlub always has a hot wife.
[/QUOTE]
Hey, leave me some hope, will ya? 
[QUOTE=InvisibleWombat]
I watched an old episode of Walker, Texas Ranger the other day. Walker was in his pickup truck–a Dodge Ram 1500, which was easily pacing the sports car driven by the bad guys–when one of the bad guys smashed out his rear window and unloaded at Walker’s truck with a submachine gun. From a distance of maybe 50 feet, the pickup didn’t get a single scratch, the windshield wasn’t broken, and Walker didn’t even duck…
QUOTE]
i believe you’ll find that the bullets were ducking away from Chuck Norris.
[QUOTE=kawaiitentaclebeast]
…but I have never seen or read any accounts of people using rifles to any great effect from a helicopter.
[/QUOTE]
Never watch too many nature documentaries, did you? Darting all kinds of animals from helicopters is fairly common - and not just big elephants and rhino, but smaller things like antelope and cats, too. And dart guns are all single-shot rifles, even.
For me, I take things in the spirit they were intended. Which means I’ll watch any sort of crap, really.
[QUOTE=kawaiitentaclebeast]
I don’t find the lack of accuracy in movie firearms to be unbelievable, given that movie villans are usually spraying from the hip. It’s rather hard to hit anything that way.
Similarly, firing a rifle, even an automatic one, from a helicopter seems to me a very questionable proposition. To begin with, it isn’t particularly easy to hit a target with single shots that is moving laterally across your frontage, even when the shooter himself is stationary and in a supported position. To do so when the shooter himself is on a rattling, vibrating helicotper moving across 3 dimension at hundreds of miles/hour, well, my suspension of disbelief sort of stops there. Now, I stand ready to be corrected on this if anyone has actually done it in real life, but AFAIK hitting a moving target while moving generally requires either a) Computerized fire control and mechanically stabilized guns, such as on ships and tanks, or b) a weapon that puts a bullet in every square inch of a football field every second, such as the gatling guns that helicopters generall use. Now, I can accept the use of mounted machine guns firing tracers, even slow firing ones like the .50 cal, although I gather that .50s are not really used much in this capacity because of its slow rate of fire, but I have never seen or read any accounts of people using rifles to any great effect from a helicopter. To accurately fire from even a moving car would require a lot of practice and experience.
[/QUOTE]
Back in the Eighties, when the worst of the fighting was going on in Beirut, P.J. O’Rourke says he saw people water skiing on the Mediterranean, while various guerilla groups were firing at them.
O’Rourek was astonished by their courage/stupidity (he wasn’t sure which), and he asked them how they could go water skiing amidst such heavy gunfire. O’Rourke says the skier just shrugged non-chalantly, and said, “They’re automatic weapons. They’re not too accurate.”
So… when I see a movie where the hero escapes machine gun fire without a scratch, it’s not TOTALLY unrealistic, even though it’s not very believable.
[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
Robot Arm, you do realize that within 90 minutes flight time from Dulles (I think the airport in the movie.) there’s Reagan, BWI, Wilmington, Richmond, Norfolk and several smaller commercial airports. I think Newark’s in that range, too. …
[/QUOTE]
More airports than you can shake a stick at.
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
How many times do I gotta say this?
So he falls out of his plane to the ground (at least he gets the advantage of trees to break his fall) and say he then goes down that ski slope and over a waterfall.
I’m not saying I don’t believe people could fall out of planes (although it is pushing the envelope), but that they couldn’t go through the whole beginning of IJatToD wringer.
[/QUOTE]
No, your exact quote was "I’ve heard of people surviving falls out of planes, but not of their walking away from it."
I provided an example of someone who did fall out of a plane and walk (admittedly, hobble) away from it.
Your point about the rest of the events in Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom are perfectly valid, though- but then, is it really more “unbelieveable” than Blofeld having a hollowed-out Volcano for a lair, or people always being able to get carparks right outside the front of major buildings, no matter the time of day?
I said that “I’d heard about people falling from planes and not walking away from it”, but what I found stretched my suspension of willing disbelief was the entire sequence, as I said in my first post.
The esteemed Mr. Smith deserves his own thread on suspension of disbelief:
The Aforementioned ID4 (coldcocking an alien with a single punch THROUGH the chitinous exo-armor)
MIB II
Wild Wild West: a BLACK James West? A walking hydro/steam/mechanical spider? Selma Hayek married to a 70 year old scientist?
What’s most interesting is: he still gets the gigs!
[QUOTE=Yookeroo]
How am I supposed to know it’s movies that are being discussed? And do you know how many movies there are? A lot. So if I can magically figure out that it is movies that are being discussed, if there’s any movie that I don’t want spoiled, then I better not read the thread. OK, not 100% useless, more like 99%. :rolleyes:
[/QUOTE]
Don’t you roll your eyes at me. Most undeserved. Feel free to exit the thread if you are so petrified of being spoiled. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
[QUOTE=jayjay]
I know you’ve already corrected yourself, but I have to note that I would so totally worship a puppy god…
[/QUOTE]
My puppy always thought I was god.
[QUOTE=ululate]
Not even close to the stupidity of “Minority Report”. Tom Cruise goes from respected cop to wanted fugitive? Okay, fine, he’s a man on the run, the hunter has become the hunted, he’s holed up in a safe house, and he eventually tries to get back in to police headquarters with hopes that he’ll pass the retinal scan. Which he does.
And I’ll even suspend disbelief on this point – because, well, maybe it never dawned on anyone at Pre-Crime. That’s stupid and implausible, but it’s real-world stupid and implausible; stuff that should occur to you sometimes doesn’t. It probably should, but it doesn’t ruin the movie.
But after they find out what he’s done, after he’s pulled off his theft and gone back on the road – after he gets tracked down and captured and sentenced and locked up, even – his retinas are still on file as “Open Sesame”.
No. I can’t go along with that. Tell me law enforcement didn’t think of it the first time, I’d say you’re probably wrong; tell me that after they had their noses rubbed in it, and you’re no longer talking about people.
[/QUOTE]
I hated this movie. But the part that most annoyed me was the part he is dragging one of the Clones (the female one) along the street. It really irked me that after all those years in a puddle of water she could
a) walk, even if it was a limping sort of walk, and her muscles had atrophied, and
b) She had time to put on some fucking makeup. GAH!
Actually, add that to my list. Every movie where the actress has just been through some harrowing ordeal and then has time to put on makeup and look all pretty before they’re done. Enemy at the Gates really annoyed me about this. Every other solider is filthy dirty, and yet the one female character almost always has a fresh, clean face, with no filth, even though she’s doing the same thing. i wanted to bitch-slap her.
II Gyan II, I’ll address your points one at a time.
All-humanoid aliens: Lately they’ve been doing a lot more non-humanoid stuff as the CGI gets better.
All aliens speak English: Starfleet officers have a device called a Universal Translator embedded in their communicators, and for ship-to-ship. The aliens are speaking their own language, but we get a free translation. See the TNG episode “Darmok” for more on this point.
Circadian days: You do need to have some standard time system, so that everyone knows when to show up for work. They use it because it works. Also, I recall a brief mention early in Deep Space 9 that they’re on a 36 hour day.
4)The supernatural: I’ll grant you this one, the writers are a product of their time. The only thing I could say is that when they characters disavow the supernatural, it may be just another way of insisting that whatever weird phenomenon does in fact have a natural explanation, even if it is a fantastic one.
5)Universal morality: Don’t forget that we only see a small and non-representative portion of the Federation population, namely those who fit into the Starfleet subculture. The rest may be radically different.
6)Lack of new music: I’ll grant you the absence (or at least severe lack of) 21st to 24th century music. However, the holodecks are used for just about anything you can think of. Many episodes in TNG feature Picard going for a horseback ride or participating in a Dixon Hill holonovel. DS9 had Quark’s Bar with his holosuites, and that show made it clear that outside of Starfleet there was quite a market for high quality holosuite programs. Voyager even got into the act when the Doc wrote his own holonovel.
Warp travel: Yeah, they ad hoc this thing called the navigational deflector that brushes away the minor stuff, and to avoid things like planets and stars they chart their course carefully.
The Prime Directive: Really, I think it’s not so much about presumptuously preserving an alien culture as it is not being responsible for any changes. They figure, whatever happens to them is their problem, unless it was caused by us.
[QUOTE=KJ]
Now that somebody mentioned Star Trek…
I can believe in a giant starship with dozens of decks full of people zipping through space at the speed of light. I can believe in aliens that all happen to look like people wearing lots of makeup. But one thing I can never suspend my disbelief enough to accept is the idea that there’s no money in the future. Humankind has evolved past the point where we need material possessions? Uh huh. Right. No, I guarantee you that even if money were completely phased out officially, something else that serves the exact same purpose would be created, replicators or not. And there’s no television in the future? Give me a break.
[/QUOTE]
I’ve spoken with my father, a CPA, about this issue. He tells me that a moneyless economy based on a general reciprocity principle would be quite stable. Only thing is, it’s a bitch to get there from here.
[QUOTE=Spatial Rift 47]
II Gyan II, I’ll address your points one at a time.
3) Circadian days: You do need to have some standard time system, so that everyone knows when to show up for work. They use it because it works. Also, I recall a brief mention early in Deep Space 9 that they’re on a 36 hour day.
[/QUOTE]
Nitpick–it was a 26-hour day, because that was what Bajor had, and they were on a Bajoran schedule.
Perhaps, but I imagine you can get a lot closer to an antelope on the Serengeti than you can a human opponent. Antelopes don’t try to find cover and shoot back.
[QUOTE=rjung]
(Though actually, I hear that one of the deleted scenes from the movie has Jeff Goldblum’s geek character recording alien transmissions with his Mac early in the movie, and subsequently decoding their protocol or somesuch.)
[/QUOTE]
Protocols, shmotocols. Recall that, when Our Heroes arrive at Area 51, the head scientist says that they haven’t been able to get the spacecraft working, because they couldn’t replicate the power it uses. So: how do you interface with a computer that not only speaks an alien language, but doesn’t use electricity?
And the dog in the tunnel ticked me off too. I mean, there are people running by, about to die, but does she tell any of them that she found a safe hiding place? Nope, she calls her rackin’-frackin’ dog. Way to prioritize. I mean, following a huge city-destroying disaster, I’d rather have companions who can reason and use tools, not one I’d have to scrounge food for every day, but I guess that’s just me. Let the people die, they’re not “cute”.
[QUOTE=ianzin]
Now there you go. See? People often ask me why the SDMB is the bestest, hottest Board in the known universe by a country mile, and there’s your answer. This is where you can get sound advice about how to use a clarinet to hit a hippo. In a thread that isn’t even about clarinets. Or hippos. Truly, the hive mind here has awesome power and knows no limits. Major respect to InvisibleWombat for (a) having such information to offer and (b) thinking to offer it.
[/QUOTE]
It comes from my extensive experience battling a bloat of psychotic hippos in the Ngoro-Ngoro crater in Tanzania, using only a collection of musical instruments and my mad improvisational weapon-making skills. Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you about how to fight off a 7,000-pound bull hippo using only a $19.95 Shure microphone, four triangular guitar picks, the sustain pedal from a grand piano, and a set of used ukulele strings.
[QUOTE=BMalion]
I believe you’ll find that the bullets were ducking away from Chuck Norris.
[/QUOTE]
:smack: I should have thought of that. The bullets knew they’d get the snot kicked out of them (did you know bullets have snot?) if they had the temerity to scratch Chuck’s car.
[QUOTE=MrDibble]
Never watch too many nature documentaries, did you? Darting all kinds of animals from helicopters is fairly common - and not just big elephants and rhino, but smaller things like antelope and cats, too.
[/QUOTE]
In the Yellowstone area, they even dart animals from small airplanes.
[QUOTE=Anaamika]
b) She had time to put on some fucking makeup. GAH!
[/QUOTE]
That applies to a lot of movies. Okay, she’s been trekking through the jungle for a week without a shower. Her clothes are torn in strategic places. There’s a tidy little smudge of mud on her cheek. But her hair billows beautifully in the wind. Not a tangle, not a leaf or stick. Not a matted, oily mess. And she has lipstick on. After a week in the jungle? For that matter, women in movies always seem to be able to sleep (and have sex) without tangling their long hair. What’s with that?
[QUOTE=MrDibble]
Never watch too many nature documentaries, did you? Darting all kinds of animals from helicopters is fairly common - and not just big elephants and rhino, but smaller things like antelope and cats, too. And dart guns are all single-shot rifles, even.
For me, I take things in the spirit they were intended. Which means I’ll watch any sort of crap, really.
[/QUOTE]
Hell, I used to bullseye womp-rats from my T-65 back home and they’re not much bigger than 2 meters.
[QUOTE=Skald the Rhymer]
Nitpick–it was a 26-hour day, because that was what Bajor had, and they were on a Bajoran schedule.
[/QUOTE]
:smack: I need to go rewatch some episodes, apparently.