Physics free-for-all? Go ahead, ignore the square/cube law and bring on the giant giant insects. Laser beams are cool, who cares if light doesn’t work that way? And in space, everyone can hear you scream if it’s more dramatic.
History? Don’t know much 'bout it. Go ahead, have your professor of “symbology” chase down Jesus’s descendants. Use “Middle Ages” and “Dark Ages” synonymously. If your Greeks are using Roman technology, I won’t notice or care.
Also, medicine (okay, that’s technically biology, but not the part I’m interested in). You can have your action hero routinely hit on the head and knocked unconscious, because it would derail the plot if he developed serious brain damage.
But anything to do with animals, I can’t get over. If I read a book that has one sentence about tigers in Africa, I will spend the whole book annoyed that the author got things wrong, WRONG.
I got a book called A Rustle In The Grass, billed as “a heroic fantasy-style novel about ants”. Sound interesting, right? I open it up, and within two sentences I’m banging my head.
Can you spot the error there?
I mean, really, how could someone be writing a book from the point of view of an ant colony, and not even know that all worker ants are female?? If you’re going to attempt “the most remarkable novel of its kind since Watership Down”, do the freakin’ research!
Heist movies.
There are people who work well in teams, and people who don’t. Somehow in heist movies the entire crew is supposed to be made up of people who reached the pinnacle of their profession (Navy Seal, safecracker, pickpocket, con man, etc) in a field that requires precise teamwork and the absolute trust of your teammates. And then they supposedly couldn’t stand working for anybody anymore, being lone wolves who couldn’t abide having anybody else as a boss. And then they somehow meet up with a crew of other lone wolves in the same boat, and then they’re all willing to work together as a precise team with absolute trust in one another again, even under a boss with an iron hand. This is all while still deeply distrusting all people and still being lone wolf rogues and the best in the business.
It’s no wonder that the movie always ends with betrayal. It should be obvious.
Angels. Any story, tv show, movie that has an angel or angels as a character, or if belief in angels is mentioned, I just put the book/magazine down or switch channels.
Biopics when the lead actor looks nothing like the real-life person he’s portraying.
Sorry. Maybe it’s just me. Put I couldn’t get past Frank Langella looking nothing at all like Richard Nixon in Frost / Nixon and whose idea of sounding like him was adding a gravelly, gruff tint to his baritone that most third-rate impersonators feel is beneath them.
Will Smith has a distinctive face and so does Muhammad Ali. Will Smith looked nothing like Muhammad Ali in the movie Ali. Did not compute.
John Turturro -an actor who I really enjoy- was comically miscast as Howard Cossell in some forgettable TBS made-for-TV flick. I mean, come on. John Turturro as Howard Cossell? The elasticity of suspension of disbelief stretches only so far.
Military stuff in general. Usually when it’s blatantly obvious that none of the writers have ever been in the military(nothing wrong with that), but apparently didn’t bother to research it either(such as hiring a technical/military adviser who did that job in that branch).
Or maybe something as simple as a quick read through of The Art of War.
Though my personal pet peeve is the fact most movies/shows fail to acknowledge the existance of enlisted people or NCO’s(unless as background extras), focusing only on officers. Which feeds back into my first point of not doing the research.
I can get over it, but in animated cartoons, can we at least get it straight that insects have six legs, spiders have eight, and neither of them have human faces?
I’m about to open my big mouth and piss off a lot of people, but actresses who portray surgeons, lawyers, jet pilots, and nuclear physicists, appear to be in their early 20’s, are stick thin, and look like super models. They just look like they don’t have the stamina. Every time I watch 13 on ‘House’, I want to put a blanket around her thin shivering shoulders and bring her a sandwich.
Along the same lines, I can deal with one ridiculously hot lady in a stereotypically male/nerd-dominated field, but movies where all of the physicists/programmers/etc. are very attractive just make me laugh.
Also, “ugly” characters who would be one of the hottest people in their sphere in real life.
One thing I loved about The Wire was that they let the show be filled with a lot of normal and ugly looking people (a few hotties, to be sure, but it seemed a realistic proportion).
The cop/CSI doing the scene collection, the questioning of suspects, the scientific testing, the research, basically everything. The cops I have known would never be caught dead with a microscope and would have no clue how to run a DNA test. I seriously doubt the CSI guys interrogate suspects.
A horse in a movie or TV show just has to go “neigh!” Horses are actually very quiet animals who rarely vocalize like that unless they are agitated. Cows, on the other hand, are incredibly noisy, but are always portrayed as quiet.
Well it’s a borderline case for me—both in terms of my ability to suspend disbelief (which I can still do, if it’s good enough), and if it even qualifies under the OP’s question, or just counts as noticing a special effects failure.
But for me, it’s…aircraft.
A biggie is when they’re in an animated work, and they just don’t move right. You’d expect this at least a little when dealing with hand-drawn animation, but it gets worse when they go with a cel-rendered CG vehicle, but still have it move like a little kid’s slowly zooming around a toy plane in front of a backdrop.
A lot of the rest of it is just a lot of little things…like radar displays making a 360° “sweep” in a plane that only has forward-looking radar (or none at all); “stealth” aircraft broadcasting huge amounts of electronic noise (like active radar…or full motion video, in one movie; wrong weapons being used or identified fights (IIRC, the 1998 “Godzilla” movie—yeah, a nitpick here is like criticising the Titanic’s paint job—during an aerial attack, a fighter pilot announces he’s launching one type of missile, his cockpit display identifies it as another model weapon, and the outside footage showed it as a third kind of missile); the wrong kinds of aircraft being used or identified, even simply in the wrong branches of the same country’s military (like Air Force F/A-18s, or something), etc.
I know, I’m a stickler. Probably 70% of the audience wouldn’t know or care. But it still bugs me.
I had the same complaint about Brian Dennehey’s portrayal of Coach Bobby Knight in Season On The Brink. He looked and sounded nothing whatsoever like Knight and he also didn’t even come close to matching the real man’s intensity in his performance.
For me the thing that really gets me is how in movies, all computers must constantly be bleeping, blooping, beeping, clicking, whirring and making all kinds of ridiculous noises all the time, whenever the (often fictional) GUI is being operated, menus are brought up, etc. Constant R2-D2-type noises from computers might have been OK several decades ago when PCs were unfamiliar to most people but now that EVERYONE knows how a computer works, portraying them as science-fiction devices with magical interfaces and robot noises is just inexcusable.
Also any gun immediately going “CHHH-CHHH” as soon as it is drawn, even if the action is not being operated. That annoys the fuck out of me.
Similarly, it drives me batty when there’s a naval show (including a navy-in-space show) and either the Marines don’t exist or you never see them, leaving everything the Marines do on a ship to be done by hotshot pilots, the people who drive the boat, or the chief medical officer.
What you said. Likewise, a dog that is always whimpeing and barking. If my dogs made that much noise they’d be GONE.
Also… switching horses and pretending like it’s the same animal. There is a scene in Troy where a chariot is being driven; the team of horses is black. Change of camera angle, they suddenly become a team of bays. Another change of camera angle, they are back to black again. :rolleyes:
You just made me flash on a scene from Bender’s Big Score:
Fry: Can you help him Doctor Goodensexy?
Dr. Cahill: I told you my name is Doctor Cahill.
Hermes: It figures I had to get my body crushed when the bimbo is on duty.
Dr. Cahill: Sir, the fact that I have a breathy voice, blonde hair, full, sensual lips, and a hot body does not make me a bimbo.
Dr. Zoidberg: Tell me about it.
Hermes: I think we've all learned something about sexual stereotypes while *my head's slowly dying because I'm not in a jar yet, you bimbo!*
Dr. Cahill: Oh. Right. Ditzy Witzy!
I totally agree on the computers constantly beeping. Nevermind that everyone knows they don’t do that - I always think how intolerably annoying it would be to work on such a machine, and therefore why it wouldn’t (and doesn’t) exist.
Come to think of it, everything in movies having to make noise irritates me. Noise in space. Space itself is noisy (“There’s a deep humming in space, no doubt about it”). Noisy computers. Noisy horses. Noisy ferrets (*and *they always make a generic squeaking sound that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the sounds ferrets actually make - double grrr!). Noisy guns. Noisy blades (ALL blades constantly go “Schiiing!” whenever they are moved even a nanometer, yes, even through thin air. By this rule, slicing a tomato would sound like a fencing competition.)
I also find myself going with the flow with whatever craziness, as long as it’s built into the world they’ve created, but then balking at something simple. I.e., Lost: smoke monster, time travel, magic numbers, living dead (or something), etc. - no problem. But in the latest season finalewhen Juliet is standing near the hole with the supermagnet, and a big chain just happens to get pulled against her in the perfect way to pull her into the hole, and miraculously gets wrapped around her so inextricably that she and two other people can’t get her disentangled, so that she falls to her (eventual) death. THAT struck me as stupid and unbelievable.
It irritates me no end when movies get firearm-related stuff wrong; guns from the wrong time period being used, characters with shotgun shells on bandoliers across their chests when they’re carrying a rifle, and- this is a big one- soldiers carrying the wrong country’s weapons.
It’s very specific, but when I’m watching Supernatural, I’m happy to suspend my disbelief in ghosts, vampires, demons, whatever. No problem. But that the Winchesters can somehow evade the FBI and their very own Inspector Javert, Agent Henrickson, for two years? That I have trouble believing. Sure, they get caught occasionally, and always get away, but it’s never due to good policework (except once by the Baltimore PD). I don’t have a lot of faith in the FBI’s competence, but I think they’re probably good enough to catch a couple of guys as weird and conspicuous as Sam and Dean.
To go with another specific example:
I like The Giver a lot and I’m willing to suspend quite a bit to enjoy the story. I’ll buy the fact that their weather is controlled, that they’re drugged to keep from feeling sexual desire, that they don’t know what animals are because they’re never exposed to them in their compound, but I can’t accept that they don’t see color. There’s never any explanation to account for them not being able to see color as there is about the “stirrings” being drugged away, so it makes no sense to me that Jonas and The Giver (and maybe baby Gabriel) are the only ones who can see red and other colors - and with the example of the apple appearing red to Jonas, it’s clear that things do not in fact lack color so it’s not a drab environment being portrayed. No matter how strict as society is, society can’t change optical perception through force!
