None of that stuff bothers me as long as the movie is moving fast enough that I don’t have to think about it.
OTOH, sometimes something happens at just the wrong moment in the story (i.e., when you notice it immediately) to drive me insane.
Near the beginning of the 2009 version of Star Trek, young, hot-headed Jim Kirk is blasting through Iowa in a vintage Corvette when his uncle or someone calls him and yells at him to bring the car back.
I could overlook that someone had managed to preserve a Corvette for 300 years, and it was still capable of being driven at 80+ mph. But, if you have such a car, lovingly preserved and passed down from generation to generation, YOU DON’T RUIN THE INTERIOR BY JAMMING A MODERN INFO SYSTEM INTO THE DASH!
Took me right out of the movie. I still hate it, to the point I never watched it again, on DVD, TV or anywhere else.
I know a bit about Scottish history and culture. More than the producers and director of Braveheart. Enough to know that William Wallace didn’t wear a belted plaid, like a Highlander, or paint his face with woad, like a Pict. I still enjoyed the movie, but that told me that the filmmakers probably think all Scots wear kilts, drink single malt, and say “Och, aye”.
Supers in the Marvel Universe traditionally wear clothes/ costumes made from unstable moleculesthat adapt to their powers. If someone has stretch powers, their costumes stretch too. If someone has shrink/grow powers, their costumes shrink and grow with them. The Human Torch doesn’t burn his unstable molecule clothes, but does destroy his tux. Any clothing related nitpicks, just assume it’s unstable molecules. See also Edna’s creations in The Incredibles.
Superman and Supergirl have an aura of invulnerability that surrounds them and protects them from virtually any damage. If they want to pick up or catch a submarine, ship or aircraft, they extend their aura around it so that it holds together in one piece. Also prevents any passengers from suffering whiplash or other injuries from suddenly stopping.
My suspension of disbelief fails when they contradict themselves.
If they’ve established the rules, and they are consistent across all the scenes and characters, then I’m cool with whatever fantastical magic-science they want to throw at me. Tell me the rules, stick to those rules, no worries.
But when a superstar hero can kill a hundred anonymous henchmen with one single bullet each, but the bad guy can take fifty bullets and survive for another hour, or worse the good guy gets hit by a ton of bullets and lives to fight another day, that just pisses me off. I understand the tropes, but there are better ways to have a final fight play out than to break all established rules.
Another example, when a good guy can tumble from a great height and survive the landing, and in fact can get up, run with a limp for a while, (until they turn the next corner when the limp disappears); while the bad guy (and this is mega-common) falls a similar height but, for them, that’s literally shorthand for definitive perma-death.
And on the rare occasion anyone does attempt CPR, they do a couple of compressions, yell ‘Don’t leave us!’ maybe slap the victim round the face a bit, then someone says ‘It’s no use, he’s gone’ and they all walk away. Even if the character is supposed to be medically trained.
That’s better than someone doing a few compressions and then the victim gets back up fully recovered. CPR doesn’t actually cause recovery. It just delays death, hopefully long enough for someone to get there with the equipment and training that they can actually cause recovery. Fortunately, this is a lot easier now than it used to be, with automatic defibrilators in most public places
Umm, yes? Doing a few compressions then deciding it ‘hasn’t worked’ is exactly the same fundamental misunderstanding of the point.
Having said that, the woman who ran a first aid class I went to said she’d actually had a teenager- who had drowned- spontaneously start breathing and come round when she was doing CPR once. Once. In over 30 years of being one of the main first aiders in the region. She was one of the area coordinators and normally trained first aid trainers (as well as doing a lot of front line stuff), and it hadn’t happened to anyone else she knew. It’s incredibly rare but it can happen, usually in exactly the situation she had- someone young and healthy, whose heart was stopped due to outside factors like drowning, not a heart condition.
Yeah, that started bugging me several years back as well. Now, in any movie or show where they knock a guard unconscious I assume he’s dead or severely brain damaged. Since recovery is often not shown it makes a lot of “heroes” seem rather callous or clueless.
There’s a difference between characters being clueless and writers being clueless. A lot of people in the real world are clueless, so an actor depicting a character as clueless is realistic. If someone does a few compressions and then gives up, well, that’s something that really can happen. But someone doing a few compressions and the victim suddenly gasping, getting up, and continuing running from velociraptors is not something that really can happen.
I am, and bad geology isn’t the problem I have with The Core (I can watch any number of movies where people *don’t *spontaneously combust when they are right next to pools of molten lava and not scream at the screen, for one thing. Never mind pointing out how they would not sink in…). It was just not a good movie besides that. But I realised that when they landed the Shuttle on the LA River…
I’m going to put forth one that isn’t based on violating the laws of nature. It’s just too stupid to believe.
I was in the library a few days ago and I saw they had a copy of the Batman series The Long Halloween. I had heard that this is one of the classic Batman stories so I decided to check it out.
My God, it’s bad. On so many levels; bad story, bad art, bad characterizations, bad dialogue, bad continuity, stolen ideas, and a lot of stupid little details.
Here’s one of those stupid little details. There was a bomb that killed some people and Batman is interrogating a suspect. The suspect is a professional bomb-maker. Batman reveals that he can prove the suspect made the bomb because he always uses nails in his bomb. Batman found one of these nails at the crime scene. And Batman tracked down the serial number on the nail.
Wait…he what?
Yes, in this story, all nails have a serial number on them. And the serial numbers are tracked and recorded so Batman was able to look up the files and find out where the nail had been purchased. And it was a store two blocks away from the suspect lived.
Let’s count some of the ways this idea is stupid:
Why would anyone put serial numbers on nails? Who thought of this dumb idea and enacted it into law?
Imagine buying a sack of nails at a hardware store and having to sit there while the clerk recorded the individual serial number of every one of the hundreds of nails in the bag.
Imagine filing all those serial numbers into the central nail database.
Despite maintaining this elaborate system of tracking each individual nail, there’s apparently no requirement to show an ID when you buy nails.
What happens when the suspect doesn’t immediately break down and confess? What if he just says “So what? They were bought at a store two blocks from where I live. This is Gotham. There are hundreds of people who live within a two block radius of that store. There’s nothing connecting me with those nails.”
This guy is supposed to be a professional bomb maker. How did he not know before now that nails, something which he supposedly uses in all his bombs, have serial numbers?
How did the police never know this and use it to convict him for one of his previous bombings?
How did Jeph Loeb expect that people reading this comic book would accept something this stupid?
I swear, every episode had some equivalent of “Chin, get me the name of everyone that bought a number 2 pencil on the islands within the last month. Danno, check every gas station and see if someone bought gas in a blue chevy. Kono, get me the blueprints for the warehouse.”
Even in this day of computer record keeping you can’t get this kind of data. Poor Danno would have to personally talk to every gas station attendant, including the ones not working every day. Well, there’s a week. I’ll get back to you, Steve. Chin probably thought, “I should have been a doctor, like my mom wanted.” Kono would have to personally dig though file cabinets to find decades old plans, if they even exist. And that assumes it isn’t a weekend.
But even now, magikal “hackers” and FBI databases still are used to find this unfindable data on every procedural I watch.
Dude, you complain about IRON MAN’s physics?
Remember that he is in the same universe that hosts Thor, the Hulk, Fantastic Four, and various other aberrations of physical law.
I’ll make you a deal. I will explain the intimate details of the laws of physics that enable the abilities given by the Extremis treatment,
if YOU first explain to me how Reed Richards can stretch like that, and how Johnny Storm manages to fly by setting himself on fire.
Explain just those two, and I will make everything in IronMan3 make sense to you.
Please do not judge their world by your world’s Laws of Nature, they are quite clearly NOT the same place!
I fully acknowledge in my OP that my nitpick is NOT consistent; that I handwave and overlook other equally egregious violation of basic physics in the spirit of enjoying a pop-corn flick.
I’m not attacking anyone’s “break point,” nor asking anyone to defend theirs, though an explanation, in the spirit of a genial conversation (which is what I intended; indeed, it’s what the forum is for), is always welcome.
I too have read other people’s posts and thought to myself, “Really?” Then I remember my own, shrug, and say to myself, “Well, yeah, sure, okay; they are them and I am me and we are not the same.”
