I mostly believe this way, as long as the movie doesn’t overtly break the rules it sets up. That said, sometimes something just seems ‘wrong’. It a subconscious decision that follows no rhyme or reason, but it can take me out of a film. For example, in The Two Towers, I was going along fine, not minding the Elves showing up to save the Rohirrim, but then there was Haldir’s nose. We had seen that big old schnoz in The Fellowship of the Ring, but for some reason, in The Two Towers, it pulled me out of the scene and had me wondering why PJ didn’t photoshop that damn thing. I would have not thought twice on a human, but Elves do not have noses like that. It took awhile (and a bad joke or two about targeting the nose) to get me back into the movie.
I have found that enough boobies will bolster my suspension of disbelief WRT to things like the structure of the Statue of Liberty, laws of physics, and so on. Thus, boobie-free movies like the Star Trek franchise are watched with a very fragile suspension of disbelief. Boobie-rich movies like the typical 80’s action movies engender a much more robust suspension of disbelief. Thus, the question is whether or not Cloverfield has boobies.
Because it’s pretty ridiculous, physically. And it will LOOK ridiculous, if you try to put that on the screen. It will tear through that suspension of disbelief and create, instead, a comic effect, and one that I’ll wager is outside the director’s intent, unless he’s making a comedy.
One of the greatest moments in science fiction cinema, to me, is where Doc Ostrow is reasoning about the attack of the Krel Monster in Forbidden Planet
J.J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen): Doc, a creature that cannot be destroyed by atomic fission
Doc(Warren Steves): No… Captain. That is a physical impossibility. It’s have to be made of solid nuclear material. It’sd sink to the center of the planet from its own weight.
Adams: But you saw it there, standing in those neutron beams
Doc: There;s your answer. It must’ve been renewing its structure from microsecond to microsecond.
That crystallizes the best abot science fiction – being able to apply knowledge to the unknown and reason about it, even when little is known. Possibly this scene means nothing to you, in which case, we are cultures apart, and there is no middle ground. But the film didn’t just say “wekll, the monster has to be indestructible” and leave it at that. The point is that this cain of reasoning leads to revelations farther down the line, and to the dramatic and emotional payoff of the film.
Heh. This is one of the few places, maybe even the only place, where my disbelief suspension is always tested, based on physics. Superstrength just brings out the geek in me. No, you cannot just toss a car by the bumper. No, you cannot lift an island from pushing on one spot. Same with a naval warship, airplane, etc. Even as a child, the bullets ricocheting off of George Reeve’s Superman had me wondering whether he cared about innocent bystanders.
I enjoy many SF, fantasy, and action films, but admittedly am not a connoissuer. My kid OTOH is a big fan. Moreover, since he was a kid he has been very hip to what was and was not conceivably believable. (Excuse me if I use imprecise terms for what I believe is a longstanding debate.) He’s going to study aeronautical engineering in college, and has long said one of his goals is to write “realistic” SF.
I believe Heinlein is one of his fave authors. And he’ll always favorably point out things movies get correct like (IIRC) in Serenity the explosions don’t make sound in space. Of course, accuracy alone doesn’t cut it with me, as I think 2001 one of the most boring films I ever saw. Kid didn’t like it either.
Another one that we always comment on is the inability of action figures to carry all of the ammo they fire off. But to heck with it, we love when Arnold and his boys blast the jungle for a minute or so.
Well, I guess each individual viewer has to make that decision for himself. And I wager that for every SF fan who objects to the structural integrity of the SoL’s head, there’s 10 or 100 who will just say, “Whoa, neat!” Who should the studio make movies for, the few SF purists, or the hundredfold more potential ticket buyers.
I see this from countless angles. Several of my family members are historical re-enactors. They will consider a movie like Keira Knightley’s Pride and Prejudice unwatchable because the characters are dressed and acted entirely inappropriately for the period, whereas the vast majority of people watching that movie will simply say, "Whoa, neat!"
Me, I don’t know what my individual sticking point is. Maybe golf movies where the actor has a horrible swing. Or in Tin Cup, there’s NO WAY Costner would have kept trying that shot. Heck, I recently watched Pat and Mike. Didn’t really care for it, but Kate sure had a nice swing.
For me it really depends on how seriously the movie is taking itself.
I can watch a ConAir/Diehard4/TheRock/Armageddon/Charlie’sAngels and enjoy the hell out if because I know it it doesn’t take itself very seriously and isn’t attempting to be something it’s not.
But when you up the ante to a movie that want’s to be taken more seriously and nothing is done tongue-in-cheek like a BourneIdentity/Bladerunner/Ronin then it’s level of belivability has to be upped too.
When Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock play their roles so seriously then jump a bus 50 yards you call B.S.
When Bruce Willis yells “Yahoo mutha-fer!” with a wink and a smile at the camera and falls 40 feet without a scratch you give it a pass.
Oh - I know one that I often notice, but it doesn’t interfere with my enjoyment of a film. I’ve done quite a bit of boxing and martial arts. Love it when guys will be in a bare knuckle free for all, and the next thing you know no one’s hands hurt, their faces are unmarked, no one’s pissing blood.
Or other physical stuff, like when Daniel Craig’s James Bond drops 50 feet landing with his midsection on an I-beam, and just springs up and starts running again. I can believe a secret weapon beam that will destroy the world better than such apparent abs of steel.
Good point about how seriously a film takes itself. But I thought my kid said he saw a Mythbusters where they proved the bus jump could be done?
Understandable all, and I think we can all agree that the movies seriously screw with reality in the name of getting something dramatic on screen – you can find complaints from science types, lawyers, military, doctors, historical buffs, firemen, gun buffs, martial arts buffs, and anyone else. NONE of these are presented entirely believably on film. But my objection isn’t that things aren’t presented with 100% accuracy. It’s that it wasn’t with a consistent level of believability. At some level, everyone is a science buff, and if you don’t depict it right, it sits wrong with a lot of people – not just the specialists.
Of course, what raised this whole issue was Dinsdale’s question of why the SoL’s head not being damaged bothered me. I’ve answered that, and it doesn’t, in ths case, matter if you agree or not. That’s why it bothered me
The example I always use to illustrate this very thing to my wife, who often complains about me nit-picking a movie, is The Ice Storm.
This is a period movie about a very specific time and place, anchored completely in reality. One of the kids is dancing about in an ice storm, and sits on a metal guard rail watching all the freaky-deeky ice, when suddenly a power line snaps and falls to the ground. As he watches, the power line whips around and finally attaches to the metal rail he’s sitting on, electrocuting him. Seeing as how downed power lines do not flail about like unmanned fire hoses, you better believe I had a problem with that.
Had the same thing happened in Fantastic Four or something, meh. But to use it as a major plot device in a movie shooting for utter realism? No.
It depends on the audience, and what you are trying to make your audience feel. If you have certain goals in making your movie it’s not good if your movie has elements that conflict with your goals.
Suppose you’re making a monster movie. What do you want to accomplish? Do you want to make the audience feel like they’re vulnerable and threatened by the monster? Do you want to make them laugh and boggle at things they haven’t seen before? Do you want to make them identify with the omnicompetant hero who’s going to vanquish the monster?
In a movie like “The Mummy Returns”, it doesn’t matter much that you can’t outrun daylight, and that daylight doesn’t creep along the ground as the sun rises. Anyone who’s ever been outside as the sun rises knows this. But the movie is an action comedy, it’s played for laughs, it’s cartoonish. A similar scene in a serious movie would be ruinous.
So if you’ve got a giant monster that rips the head off the Statue of Liberty and throws the head down the street, you’ve got to ask yourself what you think you’re accomplishing when you show that. It establishes the tone of the movie. If the head bounces along, that establishes a certain cartoonish quality to the movie. And this tone will establish certain expectations in the minds of the audience, even ones that don’t follow logically. Like, if the head bounces along, you know that the wisecracking protagonist is probably going to live on edge and make his own rules, no matter what those pencil-pushers back at headquarters think. And secondary characters might die, but they’ll die in service of the plot. Faceless extras might get killed meaninglessly, but characters with dialogue will only die heroic deaths, either to save the hero or to give the hero the motivation he needs to fight the monster. There will be a wrongheaded authority figure who gets his comeuppance when the hero wins by breaking the rules. And so on.
If you’re trying to make a serious movie about what it might feel like to be an insignificant human being faced with a gigantic monstrosity, that scene would be out of place. If the characters in the movie face a cartoon disaster you can’t expect the audience to take the disaster seriously, and the movie will fail if you do.
I wanted to like Independance Day.
but…
The Aliens have this mind power - unless the lead walks up to their space ship and knocks an alien out with one punch.
Fireballs destroy things like cars - unless the lead’s girlfriend needs a ride. The engine will turn over after 2 tries.
Fireballs burn things - unless the lead’s girlfriend is wearing a hairweave - her hairweave isn’t singed at all.
There are more - I just don’t want to think about them.
I knew the Statue of Liberty was copper, but I - like most people, I think! - don’t know anything about its internal structure, so it never occurred to me that that part of the trailer was unrealistic. It would not have affected my enjoyment of the movie and it still probably won’t, if I do get around to seeing it.
I don’t worry about technical stuff very much in movies. I wouldn’t have bought the premise of The Core, that was a little too much. I knew the streets of NYC should have collapsed under Godzilla’s weight, but that was hardly the biggest problem, logically or otherwise, with that movie. People behaving unrealistically bothers me much more than, say, knowing that objects as massive as the Independence Day spaceships would have crushed Earth’s cities beneath them, meaning they didn’t need weapons. In a world where giant monsters are attacking, unless signalled otherwise, I still expect people to act like people.
I’m going to agree with Cal and nearly everybody else: the biggest issue is how seriously you are supposed to take the movie.
And at the risk of offending anybody and everybody, sometimes it’s just impossible to satisfy people. I’m tempted to say “it’s not always the movie’s fault;” sometimes people refuse to suspend their disbelief. It’s not like they’re required to do so upon buying a movie ticket, but I think refusing to go along for the ride is different from when the movie has you and loses you. (The latter is more annoying, but more amusing to talk about or make fun of.) I love MST3K and I have tried to live my life according to its teachings, but it has become very fashionable to nitpick movies to death that way.
I tend to agree that as long as the movie adheres to its own rules, I am okay with it. I also think a lot of what we don’t want to allow in a movie is based on a feeling of dramatic tension.
For example: I always hated Plastic Man cartoons and Inspector Gadget.
Why? If the bad guy was getting away in a helicopter, bam, they’d turn into a helicopter. A boat? Bam, they’d turn into a boat. Etc.
There was little dramatic tension for me because the rules seemed to be able to be stretched to infinity.
However, one thing I never understood the complaints about (and I really hope this doesn’t turn into a free-for-all about this because emotions run high regarding this) The Matrix and the human batteries.
First of all, the premise for The Matrix is that what we see isn’t really reality in the first place, it’s programmed version of reality that we perceive so the machines can get whatever they need from us. So, as far as I am concerned, in the “real” Matrix reality maybe the laws of physics DO allow for human-powered fusion and the physics we are fed don’t allow it because they don’t want us to tumble to it. But the fact remains, as long as it remains consistent in the movie, I can buy it.
Well, I did have my Comic Book Guy suit on. 
But still, it seemed like a mischaracterization of Worf. Gilbert and Sullivan are hardly obscure. Even though I’m not a fan of opera or musical theater, I have heard of them. I think 300 years from now, they’ll be remembered, just as Beethoven and Mozart are still remembered today. They are considered classic. And if Picard’s affection for Victorian-era culture is weird, it’s also well-known he is a Shakespeare aficianado, as well. Shakespeare is also popular among the Klingons. Hamlet has been translated into tlhIngan Hol. And Worf was raised on Earth for a time, by a human family. He would be more likely to have heard of G&S than a Klingon who has spent his entire life on Qo’noS.
But still, you might have a point. Worf never tried prune juice before Guinan introduced him to it.
I think it was Isaac Asimov that said there are two different types of Sci Fi stories:
-Ones that have predictable/standard social roles faced with a new situation/setting (i.e. Lost)
-Ones that have a standard setting with very different social conventions (i.e. Brave New World, The Island)
I believe his point was that every good story must be believable, so on at least some level the reader must be able to identify with the characters.
AFAIK, the idea of having Libby’s head get knocked into the streets came from this.
I have no trouble suspending belief, but I get a little annoyed when the directors don’t resolve issues easily noticed by even the casual viewer. Spiderman can stop a runaway train in Spiderman 2? No problem. Then why the hell can’t he knock out Doc Oc with a single blow to his face, goddamit!
Exactly. That’s what drives us crazy about Buffy and Angel - okay, there are vampires. Fine. But don’t establish them and then have them walking around practically in the sun all the time unless it suits you! And if your schtick is “normal life plus supernatural”, your normal has be thought out. Like you can’t live in a town with nothing to do and then suddenly, did we mention, there’s a huge university in it? Yeah. Drives me nuts. You have to keep consistency.
ETA - what also disturbs me is the “oh yeah I forgot to mention” syndrome. If you put a gun on the mantle in act 1, it has to go off in act 3. Just as true, if you want the gun to go off in act 3 you damned well better put it there in act 1. You can’t just have it show up.
You nailed it for me. The opening chase scene in Casino Royale had me going :rolleyes: