It seems like if you’re going to question the physics of superhero movies you’re really going to get into the weeds.
I said in my OP, that when it comes to Marvel movies, I know that Iron Man’s armor could in reality only protect him to a certain extent- if he falls to Earth or gets thrown into a building, no amount of armor is going to protect his brain from sloshing up against the inside of his skull like shaking jello inside tupperware (unless he has some handwaving inertial buffering tech built in there). But I’ll buy it for the sake of enjoying the movie.
Thor, on the other hand, the whole “magic to us is the same as science to you” no, can’t do it.
No, I disagree. Now, to your point, I do not expect general relativity, quantum mechanics, or even biology to work anything similar in superhero movies like they work in the real world. But basic, experiential, newtonian mechanics? Naw. You throw something forward, it continues forward. You hit something, it reacts. Hell, in movie-speak, the very violations of Newton are themselves an indication of powers being used.
… but that’s not what happened here.
Now, all props to the director and editor for doing this with as much sleight of hand the cinematic medium gives them: it truly is a great piece of movie making. However, it still took me out of the movie… for a minute, for S2 is a great film… but it still took me out.
I don’t think I disagree with you really. I find I have to turn off a significant portion of my critical thinking to enjoy any superhero movie at all, because really, what superhero movie does NOT violate basic, experiential, newtonian mechanics? Is there any superhero movie that did not break your WSOD, that you were able to enjoy?
Well, it’s not my favorite genre to begin with, but I’m merely remarking on one moment which caused me to break the suspension of disbelief, even if but for a few moments.
Look at his face: Doc Ock was as surprised as I was! What can I say?
Sometimes I’ll be watching a movie and I’ll think to myself “that’s impossible”, but I can usually shrug that off. It’s when I find myself thinking “that doesn’t make sense” that I have trouble suspending my disbelief.
The Living Daylights is a good example. That’s one of the Bond movies with Timothy Dalton. At the beginning, Bond is assigned to guard an Eastern Bloc defector who wants to come to Britain. As the defector, Koskov, is leaving a concert hall, Bond spots a sniper trying to kill him, but recognizes her as the cellist from the concert. Rather than kill her, he shoots the rifle out of her hands.
Then some plot happens; Koskov leaves Britain and Bond suspects that the whole defection was a ruse. So Bond starts romancing the cellist in the hope that she’ll lead him to Koskov. It turns out that she’s in love with Koskov, and only aimed the rifle out the window because he asked her to. Wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation:
“Honey, could you do me a favor?”
“Do you want me to pick up your tux at the cleaner?”
“No, but during the intermission of your concert, could you go upstairs and point a gun out the window?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Oh, no reason.”
The Bond movies do six impossible things before breakfast, but I can usually overlook that. For some reason, the stuff that doesn’t make sense is what nags at me.
I’ve always wondered if the various web-swinging scenes in the Spider-Man movies follows the actual equations for time related to the length of a pendulum. He seems to swing awfully fast, although he’s usually not starting from a dead stop.
Now THIS bothers me more than the other part that bugs you.
Why is the fact the sniper is a woman justify not killing her? The inherent misogyny of Bond even shows up here, in a scene supposedly undercutting it. “I can’t shoot/hit a woman” is the most annoying on-going trope in all of fiction for me.
Give her her agency - if she chooses to be an assassin, treat her like one, not like some kid play acting. “Isn’t that cute! The little lady thinks she’s a spy! awww”
I don’t think it’s just that. Bond says later that it was obvious from looking at her that she wasn’t a professional sniper. Something in the way she acted, or held the rifle, tipped him off that all was not as it appeared. He spared her so he could figure out what was really going on, not because (or not just because) she was a woman.
In the Ian Fleming short story of the same name this is based on, the cellist really WAS a sniper, and she carried the rifle in her cello case to and from the concert hall (evidently leaving the cello there). She really was trying to shoot the defector crossing the no man’s land between the two Berlins. Bond had spent a couple of days waiting for this, and his job really was to shoot any sniper. He sees it’s the cellist and redirects his aim. It plays out much as in the film, andthey do get points for adhering to the story at least as far as they did.
If they’d left her a sniper, it would’ve worked out. But, despite Bond’s consorting with women who have shown murderous intent in other films, I guess they figured this was going too far. So they changed her, as unbelievable as that makes things.
The story’s worth reading. It’s much more atmospheric and grubbier than the film (Bond kills time reading cheap exploitation pulp while waiting for the kill, and sweats up his ninja-like black hood something fierce).
Reminds me of the episode of Columbo where Dabney Coleman asks his secretary (played by Peter Falk’s real-life wife) to put on a mask with his face, drive his car, and make certain she’s photographed for a traffic violation without explaining why. (Of course, she does it “just because he asked her to.”)
Turned out he was using her to establish an alibi so he could go out to his beach house and murder his faithless lover. IIRC, the secretary starts blackmailing Coleman when she finally figures out what’s going on.
If I remember The Living Daylights correctly, Koskov’s defection was just the beginning of a much larger plot. He needed it to look realistic, so he tricked his girlfriend into pretending to be the sniper. If you make her a real sniper, I’m not sure if that still fits in with Koskov’s plan.
My willing suspension of disbelief spontaneously combusted when I made the mistake of reading Clive Cussler’s book Valhalla Rising. At one point, the totally over-the-top larger-than-life hero Dirk Pitt gets in a bad situation and Clive Cussler himself shows up as a character in his own story to rescue the hero.
Didn’t he tell Kara that the reason he wanted her to fire blanks in his direction when he made a break for it was so the Brits would believe his defection was real?
That is the real reason for the ruse, but it doesn’t seem possible that that’s the reason he gave Kara. When we see more of Kara later in the film, she talks about Koskov as if he’s gone to the beach for the weekend. If she knew that he had staged a defection, she’d probably know that half the agents in Europe were looking for him and he’d have to lay low for a while. Plus, her participation in his charade damn near got her killed. If I were in her place, I’d be a bit miffed.
I have a basic get-out-of-jail card for the weirdness in science fiction and fantasy settings where real world physics are defied. The fantastic science allows me to just posit that physics works differently in their universe.
Star Trek has a variation: evolution apparently works differently than it does in our universe. Once I realized that, I was more able to enjoy episodes that involve evolution again. Just as long as it remains internally consistent, I’m okay with it.
It’s the stuff that’s internally inconsistent that I find to be the parts that are more likely to break my suspension of disbelief. (Though, as I said upthread, it’s less likely to bother me if I’m enjoying myself and am actually invested in the movie. It won’t take me out until afterwards, and, even then, I’ll usually come up with a fanwank within a minute or two.)
I had been thinking about this topic recently because of a couple of podcasts I listen to. One I have not been able to suspend my disbelief, and the other I was able to.
Both are produced and I’m guessing written by the same people. Both are vaguely similar plots. And mostly realistic. In Tanis, the plot centers around this “mystery”/“legend” of Tanis. (A fictional one) while the other- Rabbits- is the story of the narrator looking for her lost friend and a mysterious game.
Both are told kind of similarly, but diverge as they go about telling their story. I keep coming back to how they are told more than how believe-able they are. Magical hackers and a seemly infinite supply of BitCoin are easier for me to believe than the main character’s skepticism or naivety.
How do you figure? She seems pretty guarded until Bond shows her the blanks that were in her rifle and says, “That was clever of Georgi, using blanks. Made the British believe his defection was real.” Kara’s reply: “How do you know that?” Bond, pretending to be a friend of Georgi’s: “He told me.”
Bond then goes on to assure her that Georgi is safe and sound, at which point Kara drops her guard entirely and says “He kept his promise to send for me! Where are we going? To London?”
In later scenes, she explains to Bond that Georgi believes she can someday play at Carnegie Hall, and that Brad Whitaker is a patron of the arts whom Georgi said would help her — and you could argue that Kara ain’t too bright, but AFAICT the scene where she first meets Bond covers what she already knew: that she’d been told the plan was for shots to ring out when Brits see Georgi showily acting like a VIP defector; and that, after those now-impressed Brits have smuggled him to the other side of the Iron Curtain, he promises he’ll send someone who’ll get her across the border likewise.
I remember that episode! Didn’t the ending go something like this----
Columbo: Ahhhhhh, one more thing…I’ve been staring at that traffic photo, and something about it was bothering me, but for the life of me I couldn’t put my finger on it for the longest time. Was driving me crazy, couldn’t get any sleep…
Dabney Coleman: Please get to the point Lieutenant! I’m a very busy, very important man!!
Columbo: Sorry sir, sorry. My wife, she tells me all the time that I ramble on…
Dabney: Please for God’s sake, spit it out, man! And, if you are by any chance about to accuse me of murder, you cannot have any evidence that will hold up in court because if I had done the murder (not that I did), I’m much too smart to get caught.
Columbo: Well, see sir, it’s the shadow on your face in the photo. It’s in the wrong direction for the time of day.
(Dabney immediately confesses, a couple uniforms walk him out. Scene.)
Something that nags me while watching Law & Order…
In every single scene where the detectives are interviewing people, those people are all furiously doing something.
Housewives are ironing; janitors are running their floor buffers; waitresses are serving; bricklayers are laying bricks; nurses are caring for people; salespeople are tending to customers; bakers are kneading; secretaries are busy filing. And when the detectives are interviewing someone who is in their home, they are often sitting at the table shoveling food in their mouth.
Finally, every single one of them speaks with a note of arrogance in their tone.
Maybe I’m different, but a visit from detectives would be an unusual event in my life and would merit my undivided attention. And I would be polite with them.
