How about the classic “horror movie jump scare false alarm” trope? Protagonist hears a sound or sees a flash of movement in a darkened, empty house and decides to investigate. Suspenseful soundtrack music while the person pokes around. Suddenly “RAWRRRR!” a cat jumps out of its hiding place while giving a loud yowl. I’ve lived with plenty of cats over the years and they generally only make a sound like that when you step on a paw or they are seriously pissed off.
Yeah, that one’s trite and old enough to get AARP junk mail. Many are even lamer than that, and I’ve seen some vapid “thrillers” where the whole false alarm bit was so overused that anybody with an IQ above 75 would become jaded and and just groan. It’s like the movie just bumped from one lame false alarm to the next: all sizzle; no steak.
This trope is parodied by Community here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxauTJpY-hg
They should have the cat turn out to be the monster.
Armageddon? But I don’t remember the guy who sacrificed himself having a fatal illness…
I have one knife that does that just about every time I pull it out of the knife block.
It’s a bread knife. Badass.
In “Space Cowboys” the guy with a fatal disease sacrifices himself.
Parenthood, duh! Specifically, Overbearing Father Syndrome.
Here’s one: Any plot involving time travel always takes the hero to a point in time when something significant happened. Sometimes it’s some major historical event, like WWII. Sometimes it’s just something significant in that person’s life, like Marty arriving in 1955 the exact week his parents met. A time traveler never arrives in the past on some random boring day when nothing much important happened. I recently rewatched the Voyager episode “Shattered”, in which some temporal anomaly causes different parts of the ship to exist in a different period of time. And every one of there time periods was during the events of past episodes where some major disaster befell Voyager (it almost felt like a clip show in a way). None of them were just some random day on Voyager when nothing much happened. If this anomaly split Voyager into random time periods, it seems awfully improbably for all of them to be during major significant events.
I remember some SF story about a immortal neanderthal?- anyway when asked about important historic events and personages, he said he never met any and wasnt around for any of them, except maybe a plague.
Are you sure it was a Neanderthal and not… just some guy? Because then it sounds like it could be The Man From Earth. But then he was at least one notable past individual himself, so… shrug.
No, that’s not the one, but that is interesting.
L. Sprague DeCamps’s The Gnarly Man - Wikipedia
Related to the Time Travel to Significant Dates trope is Your Past Life is a Significant Person.
Luckily, it’s a trope that you see a lot less of these days, but as a kid I remember a lot of “past life regression” (often using hypnotism) on TV. As well as in real life, used by psycho-babble charlatans.
We used to laugh at how many ordinary housewives were Joan of Arc or Cleopatra, or at least in the court of a French king. NO ONE regressed to the 1300s and discovered they were “Mary of the Bog, peat peddler of Lower Nemobbin”.
Outrunning an explosion. Not gonna happen.
That’s it!
I-ah-don’t suppose you could give me the real story of RichardIII and the princes in the Tower?"“Why should I? I was just a poor blacksmith or farmer o rsomething most of the time. I didn’t go around with the big shots. I gave up all my ideas of ambition a long time before that. I had to,being so different from other people. As far as I can remember, the only real king I ever got a good look at was Charlemagne, when he made a speech in Paris one day. He was just a big tall man with SantaClaus whiskers and a squeaky voice.”
Oddly, my parents were friends of a woman who did that. She claimed I was a number of slightly important people, but no one who was in any way famous- A member of the Witan and Harold’s army in 1066, a backbencher senator in late Republican Rome,a London DI during Victorian times, a German Army Doctor in WW2- sent to the Russian front due to a vague connection to the plot vs Hitler, and so forth.
She said that was my destiny, to always be slightly important but never majorly so. Since I am slightly noted now IRL, I guess so.
A corollary to Time Travel to Significant Dates: If the heroes don’t travel to a significant date, they will meet significant people. In the TNG episode “Time’s Arrow” Data travels to San Francisco on August 11, 1893 according to Wikipedia. As far as I know that’s not a particularly important date in San Francisco’s history. But then while there he just coincidentally happens to meet Jack London and Mark Twain.
And every desolate landscape has the scream of a Red-tailed Hawk in the background. It’s the Wilhelm Scream of bird calls.
It used to be that every jungle movie featured an Australian Laughing Kookaburra. But now they’ve branched out and started to use the Amazonian Screaming Piha.
I’ve seen a couple of “mistakes” that I think might have been deliberate. A.I. Artificial Intelligence takes place in a future global-warming world. A forest scene in the central US features a Screaming Piha in the background, appropriate for the new climate.
In Charlie’s Angels, they figure out exactly where a kidnapped Bosley is being held by hearing the call of a Pygmy Nuthatch in the background when they are able to communicate with him. Of course, this wouldn’t work because the species is found all over western North America. But the funny part is, they use a tropical Troupial as a stand-in for the nuthatch.
One thing I find jarring is when people in the distant past talk about things that are modern concerns, but wouldn’t have been then. No, ancient Spartans aren’t going to be concerned with “liberty” or “freedom,” and medieval couples aren’t going to be seeing their relationships in terms or modern advice columns. Most movies don’t make any attempt to convey the different world views of other times or cultures; everyone speaks and reacts like people of the current time. (And that changes with the culture as well: Roman society as depicted in movies in the 1950s is different than that in current movies.)
Of course, this is understandable so that people can relate to the people in the movie. However, I find it much more interesting in those movies that actually try to depict a different worldview than our own.