I was watching Pirates of the Caribbean (Curse of the Black Pearl) again the other day and yes, the whole movie requires suspension of disbelief over many, many things, but despite that, there’s just one innocent little bit that I can’t watch without saying “That’s just stupid and impossible”.
It’s the bit where Jack and Will are trying to sneak out and steal a ship. They walk along the sea floor with an upturned boat over their heads to allow them to breathe.
And it almost ruins what is otherwise a highly entertaining (and yes, highly unbelievable generally) movie.
Is there some reason why a boat full of air, upside down on the sea floor, would be less buoyant than a boat full of air floating on the surface?
I had no problem whatsoever with the ridiculousness in Constantine. But when Rachel Weisz was watching her sister’s suicide in QuickTime Player and rewound it frame-by-frame but clicked on the “restart from beginning” button rather than the rewind button, I threw my hands up.
In a similar vein, the funniest (for me) scene in Jurrasic Park was when the girl said “This is a Unix system! I know this!” It was in fact an unreleased Unix GUI at the time, and was an SGI interface that I actually helped work on. Nobody laughed as hard as I did in the theater at that point, lemme tell you. (“You know this? I don’t remember you…” :))
OK, not the best examples in the spirit of the OP. How about…any movie where the hero can hold his breath for several minutes underwater? For some reason that always just burns my toast.
Mission Impossible, and the absurdly complicated plan to sneak into CIA headquarters hinges on one of the characters, dressed as a fireman, slipping unnoticed into a conveniently unlocked office… I actually blurted out “yeah, right!” in the theatre.
Let me play Devil’s Advocate. (And note that they stole this bit directly from The Crimson Pirate, with Burt Lancaster.) The water pressure would compress the air in the upturned boat to a smaller volume, reducing buoyancy; their clothes would be waterlogged; that’s all I got.
I saw a movie with Pierce Brosnan – I think it was called After the Sunset. There’s a scene where he uses a remote control device to take control of a vehicle after getting its VIN. That’s all. He hasn’t installed radio-controlled servomotors on the steering column, transmission, brakes and accelerator; all he has is the VIN, and can magically use that to make the car do what he wants while its driver is helpless.
I was watching one of those disaster movies on the Science Chanel. Super Comet: After the Collision I think it was. Everything was going fine until our astronomers from Mauna Kea were fleeing the Big Island for Maui in a yacht. So they set sail with about 10 other people and are very low on supplies. Now somehow they miss Maui which you can see from the Big Island. Miss Kahoolawe. Miss Lanai and Molokai and Oahu and Kauai and Niihau. Somewhere along the way their boat capsizes along they way and they wash up nearly dead on the coast of China, thousands of miles away. That’s like some Cuban boat people accidentally making it all the way to England. Ruined everything as all I could think about afterwards was how stupid that one little bit was.
I think they did it for the actress. She looked Chinese and probably really, really wanted to end up in China. That made it more annoying.
It still wouldn’t work. Even a much smaller container of air (an inflated balloon, even) would cause them to pop to the surface like corks. Maybe it was one of those popular lead boats, or an iridium one. Yes, except then… how did they move it off the beach and into the water?
oooh there’s LOADS more in Mission Implausible. I’m sure I’ve shared some of my favourites before, such as…
[ul]
[li]The stakeout at the start, where they are attempting to lure some Bad Guys[TM] into stealing the Incredibly Important List 'O Names [TM] … and it all goes wrong and the Bad Guys actually do make off with the list. But not to worry! Because (…drumroll…) the list used as bait was actually a fake one! Well DUH! Of course it’s fake if they set the whole thing up in the first place. But apparently the fakeitude is supposed to come as some great revelation to a bunch of trained professional intelligence operatives (rather than … oooh…the first thing you’d think of maybe?)[/li][li]The Magic Computer Data which, though residing on a computer disk untouched by government hands, and being read by a computer ALSO untouched by government hands and apparently unconnected to any sort of network,nonetheless is guaranteed to send out an alert to the government on being read.[/li][li]Searching the whole internet for the word “job” and finding … nothing![/li][li]The whizzbang computer guy who, when asked what he wants as a reward specifies “one of those new 686’s with the AI motherboard”[/li][li]The helicopter flying through the tunnel (that’s actually my husband’s favourite)[/li][/ul]
I’m sure there was much MUCH more which I’ve mercifully blocked from my memory.
(and, no, as it happens I didn’t go see MI:II - why do you ask?)
Got another. Die Hard 2. Even with the bar set so high I accepted the fact that there was no other airport at which they could have landed in the greater DC area, I simply could not swallow the ol’ “Zippo ignites the dripping airplane fuel stream” trick. So many laws of physics / logic were being broken at that point that my head kept rebooting like I was caught in an infinite loop or something. IIRC I reacted like Rainman realizing he was boarding a flight.
Pretty much anytime they magically come up with someone’s password, but the worst being the Morgan Freeman/Monica Potter one “Along Came a Spider” where he feeds in the phrase her father used. KingofHearts or something, and it works on the first try of syntax. :rolleyes:
I HATE the opening of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where they jump out of their plane with an inflatable life raft and they don’t break their necks* when they hit the snow, then don’t break them again when they fall into the river. Ruined my Suspension of Disbelief (which was set to a pretty high level already, it being an Indiana Jones movie and all), and it’s hard to get back after that.
*Yeah, I know they did a Mythbusters showing that you could conceivably use a raft to help break your fall. But they clearly weren’t using it the right way. they shoulda been dead and mangled.
I adore the Pirates movies, but it does always bother me whenever someone seems to be able to sail across the open ocean in a teensy longboat with no provisions whatsoever and arrive at their destination none the worse for wear. This happens often in the three films. The worst was in Dead Man’s Chest with Pintell and Ragetti, and the dog with the keys. What did the dog eat???
Well, that must have at least lessened the shock, 30 minutes of screen time later, when Mola Ram starting pulling people’s still-beating hearts out of their chests. See? Suspension of disbelief can be a dangerous thing, and breaking it can be a good thing.
Yeah, but that was supposed to be “magic”. Indy isn’t supposed to be helped by magic when he’s jumping out of planes. or there wouldn’t be any need to feel apprehension. The movie can be over in 5 minutes if that were the case.
In my mind, I’ve added a bit of dialog to that movie in which some scientist tells Jeff Goldblum something like “We’ve been studying the computers in this crashed spaceship for 30 years. The aliens may be smart, but their security is laughable. I guess they don’t have hackers in space.”
