There’s a bit like that in Blade Runner, where Deckard is manipulating a photograph and manages to ‘look around’ an obstacle that is obscuring some detail in the picture.
Before the, say, 90s, it used to take about thirty or sixty seconds for the technology available to police departments to track a call through the old electromechanical switches.
In the digital era, this is… less of a concern. Old meme.
Sure, but you’re being too forgiving.
What if, in Fried Green Tomatoes you have dumbass on the traintracks with his foot wedged so he can’t move. The train is coming…it’s about to hit him…and then he uses his super strength to lift up the rails so that the train runs OVER him? Stupid, huh?
In Jurassic Park the whole concept of the Park, the amber, and the DNA were the central backstory of the film. What if they’d all just flown, Superman-style, off the island once things started to go wrong? Stupid, right? Your logic seems to be that if you’re going to forgive one thing (Dinosaurs) you should be willing to forgive the other (Everyone is Superman’s cousin). But if they’d done something that idiotic you’d have used that as a stike against the film, right?
-Joe
Well, if we are knocking Mission: Impossible techonology. lets go all the way to the MI face mask, which can make Martin Landau look like anybody, so good your closest friends will not know you are an imposter.
Jim Phelps: “Ok, now, Rollin, for this next mission, you’re going to have to look like Bela Lugosi…”
…
Don’t forget the voice changer strip thingy, which will make him SOUND like anybody too. Man, they really overused that stuff in MI:2… that’s why I hate that movie. Lazy writers kept reusing it as “the twist”.
And this drives me crazy every time I see it, and I love that movie.
Well, no, not being in the NSA; but I think that’s what I’ve heard. (And the font size on a license plate is larger than the font used in a newspaper, of course.)
This sounds like something you got in a circulating email, especially since it’s in the passive tense.
It’s from the book ‘Patriot Games’
Isn’t that a Tom Clancy novel? :dubious:
I hated the MI 1 movie the moment they used thin wire-framed glasses that had built-in video cameras with transmitters.
Agreed. Password systems that work like a game of MasterMind are generally not worth the money they save. First rule of user authentication: Don’t give out hints.
But there’s an interesting question here. Which impossibilities and improbabilities do we (some of us) object to, and why? And no, it’s not just because nitpicking is a lot of fun.
Just because some impossibilities are made possible in the movies, doesn’t mean that any impossibility should be made possible. The interesting question is where we draw the line. As Merijeek says, if the main characters in Jurassic Park just flew away like Superman to escape — or if they shot lightning bolts from their eyes, or revealed themselves to be titanium robots that can’t be chewed on and therefore have nothing to fear — we would hurl our half-gallon cups of Pepsi at the screen. (Unless we’re at home of course.) So yes, give us the resurrected dinosaurs, and plenty of them please. That’s wonderful. But don’t get all magical on us now.
It all going to come down to personal taste I’m sure, but sometimes a blatant impossibility, especially one that isn’t necessary to the plot, diminishes one’s enjoyment of a movie. The gaffe reminds you that you’re just watching a bunch of fiction, a cast of actors giving a performance with props, sets, costumes, and special effects. The movie frames are all up there in the projection booth, on film reel or an optical disk, waiting in line for their turn to be flashed onto the screen. There are no real decisions the characters will be making, no real consequences, no lives to be lived happily or nightmarishly ever after. No reason to actually care about what you’re seeing and hearing, even for just the two hours. No reason except maybe that you paid $9 to be there, and that usually doesn’t do it. For me.
Of the movies described so far in this thread that I’ve also seen, I wouldn’t say my enjoyment of them was ruined by any of the technical errors. But I’ve often said to myself, while watching such a movie, “Why didn’t they just do such-and-such instead?” — where “they” now refers to the writers, not the characters. At this point, I’m thinking for a while about the making of the movie, and not the movie’s content. This is a distraction. Possibly a funny distraction, or possibly annoying, but still a distraction from whatever immersion I might have had in the movie’s story.
That’s a little different, though, since the picture isn’t a 2D photograph – it’s a mundane-looking sort of holograph. Before Deckard does all the shifting around looking for tiny details with the viewer, there’s a conspicuous shot that shows (without comment beyond a glance from Harrison Ford) the shadows moving quite dramatically in the picture as he handles it.
It may have the superficial form of a Polaroid, but it’s supposed to be some vaguely super-advanced technology. We’re talking about a society that has genetic engineering down to the point where they can put serial numbers on repetitive features like snake scales and it’s taken for granted; it’s no biggie that their “photos” have surprising optical properties.
I’m not seeing the issue, here… Are you suggesting that it’s in some way difficult to eavesdrop on an Internet chat?
Bytegeist, I think the issue is what the movie’s premise is. One could, for instance, make a movie where one of the major plot points is a new, super-high-tech system of spy satellites that could do real-time millimeter-resolution images of an entire city. If that was the premise of the movie, then sure, go ahead and zoom in on the crossword puzzle the villain is doing in the newspaper to see what clues he solves first. But in an action spy thriller, that’s not the premise, so it’s jarring. Likewise, a movie about titanium people who can fly and shoot lightning could do very well, as long as it was about flying titanium lightning-people. But depending on how that premise was presented, a T. rex might be incongruous in that movie.
Well, if they put a fiber optic camera mounted inside the wire-frame and ran that back down to a bigass transmitter strapped to the back of their head it might work.
Or a fanny pack. Was Tom Cruise wearing a fanny pack in that one?
-Joe
Let me ask you a question, Wesley Clark. Why would a man wearing a t-shirt reading “Genius at Work” spend all his time studying a children’s cartoon show? (Itchy and Scratchy, that is.)
Thanks. For some reason I wanted the word “premise” and “backstory” was what came out of the ol’ fingers.
Duuuuuuh. :rolleyes:
-Joe
Speaking of techy stuff, and speaking of Law and Order (which I generally like): Man, NSA has nothing on the NYPD’s super-duper database. With a dozen key clicks, you can not only find out who bought a green 1997 Buick in Manhattan in August, but pull of a picture of the guy and what high school he went to.
Granted, I have to give them some artistic license here. No one wants to see some nerd spend 2 weeks trying to compile data from multiple databases to generate some lame Access report.
In Miss Congeniality, the FBI had a database of photographs of their agents in their underwear which you could then manipulate to see how they’d look in different outfits. I’m willing to bet that the FBI doesn’t really do that.