Skyfall was also guilty of monologuing. During Silva’s escape, Bond had chased him enough to have his gun drawn and pointed right at Silva. And then they started chatting, until Silva sprung the next step in his intricate scheme and a subway train crashed through the wall. While they were talking, I said “just shoot him, already.”
Well, there have been a few, “I’ve perfected Time Travel!” >Character dies in the vacuum of space< type stories, where the person failed to consider this issue.
The TV show “Travellers” at least alludes to this issue. Their version of time travel involves sending a person’s consciousness back in time to overwrite another person. They try to only do this with people who are about to die anyways, so it’s almost not murder, but they make the point that they need the “T.E.L.L.” of a person’s death to target them. That’s the time, elevation, latitude, and longitude of their exact time and place of death. One supposes they can just assume that the movement of the Earth was a given, albeit a complicated one.
If the original owner had already cut a hole in the dashboard for a radio, or an 8-track player (or, in a really old model, and air conditioner), the 23rd Century owner might be able to justify it.
Hell, 2000 A.D.'s Strontium Dog weaponized it.
Doctor Who also occasionally alludes to this - the TARDIS travels in space as well as time (although the time shifters used by the Time Agency occasionally seen in the series don’t seem to account for this).
But I think I’ve brought this up on the board before - the Earth has moved relative to what? There is no absolute positioning is spacetime. If you travel back in time, I don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t remain stationary in space relative to the dominant gravitational attractor in your frame of reference. If you don’t, then relative to what are you moving (or remaining stationary)?
Well, you might want to shift over a few feet to avoid the Morlocks.
New example:
I am slow - just got around to watching the final episode of Sherlock. Spoilers!
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ok so the Holmes sister is so fucking brilliant and adept at near-mystical mind control that she literally runs the asylum, has teams of henchmen that can go anywhere and do anything: bug Molly’s house, kidnap and hang three brothers, kidnap the warden’s wife and (more on this later) hijack an airplane in flight and incapacitate all but one person? And have the freedom to move people around like pawns on a chessboard? And she’s so brilliant that she’s three steps ahead of the Holmes boys.
And on top of that, neither of the Homes boys ever figures out that there is no hijacked plane? It was obvious to me about halfway, and I don’t think as fast at Sherlock let alone Mycroft.
I can’t believe that the Holmes boys are so stupid to let themselves get led around by the nose, and that neither of them even came up with a germ of an idea to beat their sister. Sure they were busy, solving problems, shooting people - but they are geniuses. They should be able to multitask.
What a letdown to an otherwise great series. Even Elementary had a less stupid finale (and it was pretty stupid).
It depends on the skill of the author.
In Mad Men, for instance, it was in the first episode when they pulled an anachronistic resolution out of thin air. That was the bad part – it’s one thing to do something anachronistically (Inglourious Basterds), but another to resolve the story by doing something like that.
But there are many times when the story is good enough that I’m willing to accept things like that.
I’m used to it by now, but the unreality of movie and TV characters sustaining what should be disabling or fatal trauma and just walking away (maybe with a slight, temporary limp) represents a strong element of Unreal.
If you jump from a third or fourth floor landing, the impact is going to put a substantial dent in your future plans, whether or not you land on a human body.
I thought for a moment that she was about to pick her nose. That kind of thing really takes me out of an art classic.
Unrealistic physics and magic don’t bother me, as long as they are depicted consistently. Establish some rules early on and stick to them - I’m good. Pulling new abilities out of thin air at the critical time they’re needed, however, is a big nope.
I also need characters to behave like real people would, no matter how bonkers or unrealistic the situation is.
Recently I watched the “cult classic” Near Dark on TCM. Vampires…sure. Can drive around in the daytime as long as not directly touched by sunbeams. Ok…those are your rules, I’ll roll with it. Lone victims picked off individually after being led into traps. No problem. But then came the roadhouse scene. The clan of 6 vampires (actually the word “vampire” is never used in the film) goes into a bar and sit in a booth. The leader asks for just an empty beer mug, grabs the waitress and slashes her throat to fill the mug. What is the reaction from the other patrons? Run out the door in a panic? Screaming? Calling the cops from the pay phone? Attacking the vampires to fight them off? Nope, nope, nope and nope. Just stand still and eye the vamps nervously and get picked off one-by-one while nobody else does shit to try to help. Sure, the bartender attempts to surreptitiously load a shotgun, which of course has no effect. Finally the last man standing jumps through the window and runs away to start a foot chase scene.
At that point, I checked out. I can accept vampires in a vampire movie. I can’t accept victims just standing silently to make the vampire’s job easier.
On vampires, I saw only the first 4 seasons of True Blood in the original run. I recently binged all seven seasons. Talk about inconsistency? Sometimes drinking a single drop of vampire blood is a powerful aphrodisiac and hallucigen and drinking a whole vial (maybe half an ounce) led to extreme priapism requiring a painful emergency room visit. Sometimes sucking it up from a vampire like they are a drinking fountain does nothing but heal wounds. And when you drink blood directly from a vampire you begin having intense sex dreams about them and they can feel your emotions and location. But apparently if you drink it bottled as a drug it doesn’t have either of those effects?
(On a similar topic, if vampires wanted to “come out of the coffin” and get public acceptance, shouldn’t they be providing drops of their blood to hospitals, clinics, and even first aid kits as miracle cures for pretty much all injuries?)
Also a dumb idea. If they got overrun (which clearly almost happened), they would have lost the green goo, and would have unleashed the aliens in 2020, dooming all of humanity. Even If they just got caught in a winter storm and froze to death prior to reaching the spaceship, the green goo would have been lost and no one would have known what happened
They discover the alien spaceship, and instead of calling in the authorities right away, they decide to blaze on ahead because “the UN is just going to talk about it for a few years and not do anything.” Even taking this at face value, who cares? They have 20 years to act.
They did exactly the absolute worst thing they could have done at that point -open up the spaceship, while carrying the only copy of the weapon that can defeat the aliens, with no backup, or even telling anyone what they found.
That was his daughter’s original plan, send the goop back, make an assload of it, sling it forward and use it. When he found the device had been destroyed in the future [what the hell tense does one use, I bet French has one … the bane of my language classes - who uses future pluperfect in conversation anyways =) ] the world was all “oh shit, we can’t go kill the monst4ers, might as well riot and give up”, the head of the DOD pretty much refused to even consider sending people to Russia because the borders were closed so effectively, the political weasel just gave up on the future as well. It was basically rogue lab techs that made the goop and delivered it to the plane in time for them to make the illegal insertion into Russia. I love the interaction in the classroom when the kid had all the answers that pointed them to where they could probably find the aliens.
See, Pratt was trying to figure out how the alien claw had the ash embedded in it, so the kid told them about the millennial big kaboom that deposited ash in Russia, and somehow they figured out it had to be that specific glacier because I guess that is where the Russians first noticed the aliens [perhaps they ate a Russian scientific expedition to that glacier? They never really explained how the Russians found the aliens] It really does make a ton of sense to go kill them now before they get so widespread at the point they showed up. Since they dug up through the deposits, that is why they went for the expedition now instead of trying to figure out some place that would be safe for the goop and military to use it in 30 years.
I don’t have much difficulty accepting pretty much anything in sci-fi/action/fantasy. We often get a kick out of it when we’re watching a show and one of us says, “I don’t believe THAT!” The other will generally say, “Oh but you buy all that other crap!” 
I have more difficulty with things that supposedly happen to real people. Like the guy who falls 50 feet, and just gets up. Or the one arm grab of another person. But in an action movie. I accept it.
What I dislike is developments that are out of character, or inadequately developed. but occur just to move the plot along. Sloppy writing.
Sounds like two implausible things cancelling each other out. I mean, I would think that a group of vampires, who are being chased, led into traps, and such, would want to keep a low profile. When you’re thirsty, lure someone to an out-of-the-way place, bite them, and try not to spill any. Sounds like this group went out of their way to draw as much attention to themselves as possible. That’s a pretty bad survival strategy.
Except, apparently in this roadhouse nobody thinks it’s out of the ordinary. If slashing your waitress’s throat isn’t going to raise any eyebrows, then go right ahead.
I feel like maybe I should explain what I mean better.
It seems to me that, for most people, there is no bright line where the suspension of disbelief stops. It’s more like a rubber band that varies in how brittle it is. If they like a particular work, the suspension will hold for a long time, and, if they don’t, it will break much sooner.
For me, specifically, it seems I have a very wide range in that area. If I’m willing to put up with so much if I’m engrossed in the work, but equally find it easy to criticize if I dislike the work.
I find myself wondering how stretchy that border is for others.
I had thought the original plan was always to send the goop back, make an assload of it, and wait to fight until the critters first show up in the 2040s, since things had already gone so bad in the future by the time his daughter came up with the green goop.
But maybe you’re right, and the movie was even stupider than I thought it was, which is saying something.
I experienced that problem in a Batman comic of all things during the “Hush” story line back in 2002. The story kicks off with someone severing Batman’s grapple line as he’s swinging through the city and he plummets to the ground fracturing his skull. A few days after surgery to remove bone fragments from his brain, Batman is back in business. They pay lip service to the severity of his injuries with some allies saying it’s too soon to go out there. But come on. I’ve got no trouble suspending my disbelief that an orphaned billionaire in a rubber bat suit can effectively fight crime as a vigilant, but that was just too much for me.
Mine stops PDQ. I don’t care for fantasy, sci-fi, and similar genres at all that require a serious suspension of disbelief. My brother takes this further: he refuses to read fiction at all, labelling it “made-up shit” and prefers to read non-fiction exclusively, though for some reason he’s fine with movies that are fictional.
I always suspect (and am sometimes right) that the “rules” authors invent for their imaginary societies, futures, alternate universes are inconsistent internally, and that at some point I will catch them in some contradiction (or massive change in human nature) that will invalidate the entire process, so I don’t even get started. That said, I’ve enjoyed some sci-fi (Asimov and Vonnegut, a few others) that was skillfully written, and was a fan of Marvel comics as a boy, including Thor and the Silver Surfer, until I realized that I was being asked to grant them a cosmological premise that I otherwise rejected IRL.
I draw the line at new movies using thoroughly debunked “facts” as the basis of the freaking plot. For glaring example, any movie made this century where the premise is the main character is special because s/he uses more than 10% of their brain.