I don’t have super sensitive hearing but my dog certainly did. A few years ago I was walking with her in an isolated rural area when a British army helicopter shot up out of a nearby valley and overhead at treetop height. I didn’t hear it until it was literally on top of us and by the reaction of my dog she didn’t hear it coming either, it scared the life out of both of us.
It made me realise how utterly screwed I would have been if it had hostile intent!
Many years ago I saw a film about a boy who survives a plane crash and spends the next several weeks surviving alone in the wilderness. During all that time, his clothes never get dirty, his hair’s perfectly groomed and never grows longer, etc. Unfortunately it was so long ago, I can’t recall the movie’s title or who was in it.
Ever so many decades ago, in the daily “Modesty Blaise” comic strip, Modesty and Willie get marooned in an African veldt for some time. They have to do everything from scratch: kill animals for food and hides, make tents out of fronds, and so on.
The newspaper got several letters asking why Willie’s beard didn’t grow.
“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” is one of my favorites, but the last shoot-out (before the Venezuelan army shows up), where Sundance scrags the entire police force of the town is done with TWO GUNSHOT SOUNDS! Excellently edited together, but if you’re listening, there’s no missing it! A lot of films of that time used the same “sound library,” it seems.
Today? Can’t tell you; superheroes don’t use guns.
Any character that’s immortal but looks to be about late 30s, early 40s.
I’m okay if there’s a specific reason why their aging STOPPED at that point, or even if they’re just really really slowly aging (a la Wolverine)… but there’s countless cannot-dies who inexplicably age… up to a certain point.
Nobody ever needs to go to the toilet. I’m happy to buy all sorts of ridiculous plotlines if they’re internally consistent, but unless they’re set in an alien world where excretion is done differently to on Earth, everyone needs to piss sometime.
Eagle Eye, for example, tries to be fairly realistic and often succeeds (like one cop can tell that the main characters aren’t used to guns because they hold them like people in video games do rather than like someone who’s used to guns) but said characters also spend at least 12 hours in a cargo container only just big enough to hold them (but with some ventilation). They should emerge stinking of piss if not shit.
A novel-specific one: in The Road the outcomes of a nuclearish war seem fairly realistic (it’s never stated that it’s a nuclear war but the repercussions are similar). There’s very little food around, most cars don’t have fuel, etc etc. But they also have to scavenge for clothes. Huh? Why? Everyone in America, where it’s set, has far, far more clothes than they need for purely practical purposes. And clothes can’t be eaten (you can sort of try with leather but not wool, cotton etc) and are terrible as replacements for firewood. The characters check out enough houses that they should be able to easily find even shoes to replace their worn-out ones or to fit the growing child.
I find that believable - adrenaline in a fight can make you not notice the pain from the blows, or at least not as much. Later, when being cleaned up, the adrenalin levels have plummeted and Our Hero is in a safe enough place to wince if he needs to.
In Anne McCaffrey & Jody Lynn Nye’s* The Death of Sleep* there’s a scene where the main character is looking for a restroom and notices all the other species’ restrooms on her way down the hall to the humans’ version. I always liked that little detail.
Some people just don’t need to go that often - I’ve never been to the loo on a plane, but I’ve flown from Cape Town to Europe many times. That’s a 12-hour flight at least. And I don’t skimp on the free drinks while I’m up there, either. haven’t needed a midair piss yet.
True that some people don’t. But this was two people, one male one female, and I can’t remember exactly how long the flight was but it was over 12 hours. They also didn’t piss for at least a couple of hours before or after that.
Yeah, that giant wall was actually more useless than a medieval castle wall would have been.
A better plot-point would have been some sort of automatic sentry weapons/detectors sabotaged or malfunctioning at some obscure point along the wall, allowing the zombies entry before the human guards could plug the breach … only, a real wall would not have been a single “wall” (breach it and you are through), but a set of defences.
