Odo on DS9.
In one scene, a rock falls on his head in a mine. He then get’s knocked unconscious, even though he doesn’t have a brain!
Also, when he shrinks down to something the size of a rat. Where did the rest of his mass go? (Much like The Hulk gripe.)
I bet you really enjoyed the 2nd Hobbit movie…
This is similar to my threshold: the scientist or techie who is a world class expert in EVERY SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINE. Popular in both super hero and police procedural genres.
“Yeah, the lab technician just wrote an app for your phone that ties into 17 satellite transmitters, but she had to rewire the GPS circuits of all the city’s traffic signals to make you this laser weapon based on some carbon filament she found in the wreckage of an alien submarine. And for good measure she whipped up an antidote to scurvy while analyzing the DNA of the Megalodon based on the seismic activity of the volcano. And she plays the cello and speaks 14 languages.”
The thing I just can’t suspend my disbelief for anymore is the good old “bonk em on the head and they’re instantly unconscious and wake up fine an hour later”.
I know that this is such an ingrained convention that nobody really thinks about it, but it’s so wrong on so many levels.
Just once I’d like to see a movie where the superhero infiltrating the secret base bonks a mook on the head and knocks him unconscious. And then we see EMTs arrive, and find the unconscious mook, and take him to the hospital and prep him for emergency surgery. After 3 days in a coma the mook finally regains consciousness. He goes to trial handcuffed to a wheelchair, and after sentencing undergoes months of physical therapy at the prison hospital. Five years later we see the same mook released to a halfway house where he gets a job compatible with his severe Parkinson’s disease, which is partially controlled by medication, but whenever he sees the superhero on TV his symptoms get worse.
The live-action G.I. Joe movie was bad on many, many levels and in many, many ways, but I gamely hung on through the whole thing, until the end. The bad guys have a secret undersea base on the sea floor under the Arctic ice cap. For some reason, there are pillars of ice reaching down from the ice cap to the sea floor around the base. During the final battle, explosions destroy the ice pillars, and the ice cap sinks and comes crashing down on the base.
The best subversion of this trope occurs in Morons From Outer Space. The aliens are escaping from an army base. One of them sneaks up behind a sentry and conks him on the head. The sentry falls . . .
. . . to his knees, and screams, “Ow! What did you do that for?”
I can accept supernatural and aliens ignoring the laws of physics. Like I told a buddy of mine with Pacific Rim: You can complain about the realism and practicality of mechas and monsters all you want, but then you wouldn’t have a movie featuring mechas fighting monsters. Godzilla doesn’t care about no cube-square law!
But I can get turned off by rather mundane things in sci-fi/fantasy movies:
Battleship: criminal screw-up suddenly becomes a Naval Officer
Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter: They melt all the silver in Washington DC and walk it to Gettysburg both overnight.
Independence Day (discussed recently here): They roll their eyes at an alien abductee after it’s proven aliens exist.
Godzilla vs Destoroyah (1995): Giant destructive monsters battle in Tokyo over a freeway, yet the FX matte they used shows traffic rolling along normally.
Friday Night Lights: They barely lose to an opponent almost supernaturally powerful enough to decapitate the players. Yet, the ending card shows Permian won next year replacing all the star players who graduated. That’s the REAL underdog story the movie should’ve focused on!
[quote=“HubZilla, post:47, topic:825689”]
Well…see…every good guy* who fights for a living (i.e. superhero) lives by the mantra of minimizing both effort and damage. It’s like the old Samurai ideal of doing everything as efficiently-as-possible, from drawing-and-cutting with the sword (Iaido) to preparing and serving tea (chado). The principle stems from the idea that the samurai expects to go out on a battlefield and might have dozens of opponents, so keeping one’s strength and secret techniques in reserve is prudent; when the opponents get tougher the effort can be increased accordingly but, if you blow all your energy and attention too early you’ll be exhausted by the time you reach the Big Boss.
–G!
I put the knee-high boots on when I started this response.
Looks like I should have donned the hip-waders!
*The bad guys don’t care about being wasteful. Wastefulness is another reason they’re the bad guys.
My husband watches many, many, (manymanyMANY) movies that involve war and fighting. Now, I love a good action movie but, as I often complain to hubby, those movies don’t even make stupid sense.
Good guys duck bullets.
Good guys jump out of the way of explosions, sometimes tossing the bad guy into the way of the explosion.
Good guy is having sex with a woman. He apparently has the longest penis on record because she is on top sitting on his chest. This one was very recent. I think it may have been a cable TV show about British wet ops (the name escapes me).
One from a show that I watch and disappointed me with the unbelievably. In Game of Thrones, Jaime falls into The Trench of Regret in the river Mander while wearing armor. There is a dramatic shot of him falling, falling, falling alone into the dark abyss. The next episode’s opening scene is Bronn pulling Jaime up to the surface, armor, golden hand, sword and all. Bronn does this almost one-handed and then swims him to the shore. Nope, nope and nope.
That one actually didn’t bother me that much. Jaime was only wearing a breastplate, really. It is within the realm of “action guy” strength for Bronn to be able to do that. I’m more taken out of the story by the frakking wyverns, who are just too damn big.
I can’t tell how many times I’ve watched action and war movies where the main characters should be wearing helmets(or at least some sort of head protection.) I know it’s an artistic choice so the viewing audience can identify the actors but it’s really annoying watching a SWAT raid where all the minor characters are wearing headgear but the main characters aren’t when in real life everyone would be.
Didn’t bother me. Or at least, not as much. Dwarves, magic, etc. 
Now LotR, I think it was III, when Gollum frikkin’ lands in lava, and sinks into it like he’s sinking in quicksand? Nope. He should’ve burst into flames dozens of feet over the lava, and practically flash exploded/evaporated before he hit.
Is she single? :eek:
Of course. And completely hawt, except she wears glasses so nobody has ever noticed the beauty within… and without.
Noticed this over the decades, on movies and TV: Passing southern California off as other areas of the country.
^ NCIS (in ersatz DC/Virginia [see above]) takes only 10 minutes to make the 3-1/2 hour drive to Norfolk. Plus they’ll do it three times in one day. Before lunch!
The two worst examples are when the locusts marched past the mountains of Illinois in “The Beginning of the End” as they moved from Champaign to Chicago (alluded to in the TV Tropes link) and how Archie always found a parking space and went to a sunny marina in the network version of Nero Wolfe. (As opposed to the good A&E version.)
No no no, they’re only fine after they wince and rub the back of their neck. Then they are better. Otherwise, it would be too unrealistic.
TV Tropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TapOnTheHead
