I’m aware of the NCIS scenes, what else you guys got?
When someone’s falling hundreds of feet and when they’re inches from the ground a super hero swoops in from the side to grab them.
Sure, they didn’t hit the ground but not only did you catching them slow down their vertical velocity just as fast as the ground would have, now you’ve accelerated them horizontally so fast that they’re now twice as dead as they would’ve been otherwise
My head canon, at least with Superman, is his powers. He doesn’t have multiple unrelated powers, but only 1 main one. Instinctive momentum control.
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Flying - Momentum control
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Bullet proof - Momentum stopped at the point of contact.
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Heat beams - Changing the momentum of particles he’s focused on.
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Holding a plane by a thin aluminium sheet - Adjusting the momentum of the plane directly.
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No sonic booms, or massive wind - momentum nulling on the nearby air.
In this case, catching a falling person safely makes complete sense. He just nullifies their momentum before they hit.
I guess you could explain it like that, but I’d really prefer it if they just started writing Superman stories with a more realistic depiction of the world around Superman in mind. It would add more drama since, while Superman himself is invulnerable, the rest of the world isn’t, so Supes should have to be extremely careful with how he uses his powers if he’s actually going to save anyone.
while Superman himself is invulnerable, the rest of the world isn’t
Larry Niven wrote a great essay many years ago about the physical realities of being Superman. My favorite bit was about how him having sex with Lois Lane would have resulted in her head being blown off.
You lazy b##stard!
[jk, enjoy!]
https://temp.larryniven.net/?q=man-of-steel-woman-of-kleenex-by-larry-niven
this is what I liked about man of steel but last time I said I liked that movie online I got called an inbred lmao
The Superman in Man of Steel didn’t give a crap about the world around him.
yeah but it showed what you’re talking about. he’s a destructive force of nature that can cause great misery even when he’s trying to do the right thing
Superman himself is invulnerable, the rest of the world isn’t
Go watch The Boys!
Actually not a bad rationale, especially given the era when Superman started - it reminds me of E.E. “Doc” Smith’s inertialess drive.
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Similarly- when a person is hanging off a building or cliff by one arm, and holding something heavy or another person with the other. It requires an INSANE amount of strength to hold that position, let alone actually haul them back up.
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Another way that works is just to catch them on a downward tangent to their current fall trajectory, but rapidly slowing down and then turning back up. It means your scenario has to have enough vertical space to perform this maneuver, but not necessarily a lot–even a very small downward deceleration will turn death into bruises, because it’s like falling into padding.
Only the “speed force” or maybe Pym Particles can counteract inertia like that
LOL in The Boys the supe would splatter through the falling character’s body, stop to pick up a dime off the ground and fly away.
And then there is specifically the night Gwen Stacy died.
There’s some kinda odd irony here when complaining about how unrealistic superhero movies/shows are… 🤔
This is how Gwen Stacy died in the comics. I think in the movie they had her head hit the ground instead.
The Dark Knight trilogy really wanted to be a realistic, grounded take on the Batman mythos, so they dropped the more fantastical elements of some characters’ backstories. Ra’s Al Ghul was no longer immortal, Bane didn’t have super steroids, the Joker wasn’t permanently bleached by chemicals…then there’s Two-Face.
I guess they thought acid burns were too unrealistic, so they gave him regular burns…apparently without knowing that burns that severe would be so painful that he wouldn’t even be able to remain conscious, much less run around the city on a killing spree. I mean, you can see exposed muscle in some places. There’s a line where Gordon says he’s rejecting skin grafts, and I remember thinking, “WTF are you talking about? He should be in a medically induced coma, not making healthcare decisions.” Half of his body was an open wound; I’m amazed he didn’t die of infection 15 minutes after he left the hospital.
It always bothered me that two-face has no pronunciation problems with only half a pair of lips
This might be the only time we’ll see somebody complain that somebody is speaking too clearly in a Chris Nolan movie.
He should have also lost the one eye, like if your eye lids were burnt off there is going to be definite damage to the eye itself. Looked fuckin’ rad though so he’s got that going for him.
Thoo Faith
He could also talk normally despite half of his lips being gone.
The Nolan movies always cared more about giving the appearance of realism by making everything dull and monotone than actually being realistic.
There was an analysis of Nolan and post-Nolan Batman that argued that once you strip away all the fantastic parts of Batman, all the Clayfaces and Mr. Freezes and Poison Ivies and the sentient robots and uncanny weirdness, all that is left is a bunch of problems that frankly the cops should be able to handle, and that Batman at that point is just a cop who is willing to violate people’s Constitutional rights.
If Batman can be replaced by a well-outfitted SWAT team, then you’re not writing Batman well enough. Give him some insane nonsense that cops are not equipped to handle.
all that is left is a bunch of problems that frankly the cops should be able to handle
They could but they don’t because corruption.
Fundamentally, Batman isn’t about solving insane problems. He’s driven by his anger to not any other kid be an orphan like him.
The pseudo-realism in those batman movies and comic book movies in general is a huge part of why I detest them. It’s like an uncanny gap or something. Comic book characters are inherently ridiculous and absurd so I can’t take them seriously. They ask me to suspend too much disbelief.
One specific example from the batman movies is at the end of one of them, I forget which, I think a few hundred cops charge a bunch of guys with machine guns or something? And I remember thinking in the theater they are about to get mowed down World War I style. But somehow they win, they all live, and the streets aren’t flowing with a river of blood. You want me to take them seriously, while having absurd characters and situations, and then you put them in situations where they absolutely should be massacred…I just…I’m out…
That always killed me! Like… bro, a soft breeze should take him out. He’s not ready to be a villain, he’s ready to spend 5+ years in rehab.
If a girl doesn’t like you, but you just keep pursuing her, everything will eventually work out and you’ll be happy together.
Uhm, it kinda happened for me, I felt that this girl liked me but she said no the first time. I stuck around, as we were in the same group of friends, and after a while she changed her mind. We’ve been together for over a decade.
Ya know, it kinda makes sense that Hollywood is full of sex criminals when you look at romantic comedies and are always left wondering “And he’s not in jail why?”
There’s a Christmas movie called Holiday in Handcuffs where a woman abducts a dude to play her boyfriend so her family gets off of her back, and naturally they actually fall in love by the end but also HOLY SHIT HOW IS THAT A THING
Unfortunately, this one goes both ways. Some women feel like they need to play hard to get, because otherwise they’re sluts, and also they want to know that a guy really likes her. It’s self defeating of course, on both sides.
I watched Reality Bites recently and this was prominently displayed
I watched Reality Bites as a teenager, and I’m convinced it had a negative influence on my life.
The character Ethan Hawke played became my role model, and he’s just not a very good one, at all.Lmao damn rip
In episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy’s skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes that same rib twice in succession yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we, to believe that this is some sort of a, a magic xylophone or something? Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
I’ll field this one.
Why would a man whose shirt says “Genius at Work” spend all of his time watching a children’s cartoon show?
…I withdraw my question.
First time I saw the Jurassic park I thought no way would intelligent people just run around a huge and therefore dangerous Brachiosaurus or jump out of the car and run right to the ill Triceratops. That would be Darwin’s award kind of madness.
Then I studied biology, got to know some zoologists and paleontologists, and yeah, this is exactly what would happen.
See also Yellowstone National Park visitors
So what you’re saying is, Prometheus was realistic?
I haven’t seen Prometheus - the reviews talking about stupid characters were too much for me. Are you saying the characters are not really stupid, just have way too much enthusiasm for their scientific field to care for their safety?
In that case I may give it a try.
It starts going downhill when a xeno-biologist takes off the helmet and gets touchy with an alien lifeform out of curiosity.
Yes actually, not sure why people had an issue with that film
A more mundane one, but people on reasonably normal incomes living in a house that’s at least one order of magnitude more expensive than they could ever afford even if they purchased it twenty or thirty years ago. Its particularly bad in things set in expensive areas like London or New York or Tokyo. Like being able to afford a house in central London rather than renting a flat with three other people takes substantial money, you aren’t going to be afford that if you work in a supermarket.
I’d love if in one of those shows it’s just implied lightly throughout the entire thing that they are squatting in the home of someone who died and the city never noticed or something stupid like that XD
There was an old meme about house-hunting reality shows that was like, “David sharpens colored pencils for a living and Kirstin volunteers 2 days a week at the butterfly museum. Their budget is two million.”
You’re telling me a waitress in New York City can’t afford a penthouse apartment and have a comedically unlimited food budget?
How the fuck does Bundy own a palacial 2 story + basement suburban mansion on the salary of an incompetent shoe salesman in a store that gets almost no customers!
He probably bought it in the 70s when he had no kids and his salary was higher, compared to the 80s and 90s with inflation, but the same salary.
The apartment in Big Daddy was awesome and I was like ain’t no way Adam Sandler’s character can afford that!
Everyone lives in amazing homes in movies and they all have amazing jobs like director of the cia at like 25 years old and they do a lot of work while walking quickly down the hallways barking instructions to their assistants on their sides.
That water pollution is neon green goo, air pollution is thick black smoke, or radioactive waste is only in drums.
Most of it is invisible and you don’t know about it until it’s too late.
Well how else are you gonna visualize those things for the audience. Same with green smell clouds coming off of something or someone who smells bad. It’s difficult to make the audience understand and care about something invisible
It’s pretty easy - show the effects and the cause and not a visualization of something that you can’t see. Like in the movie Dark Waters where they showed cows dying and birth defects, then the plant that produced PFAS nearby to tie it together.
When something or somebody is injected into space, they always freeze in seconds. The logic is that “space is cold” but space is mostly a vacuum and vacuums don’t have temperature. Vacuums insulate against conduction, so you’re not going to freeze anytime soon. (You’ll lose heat via radiation but that will take a while).
Not to mention the effect that zero pressure has on freezing/boiling points. If anything you’d be steaming as all the water on you evaporates!
Space Flight.
I walked in on my roommate watching “Don’t Look Up” right during the space shuttle launch scene. Literally every single thing was wrong. The trajectory the shuttle took off the launch pad. It flying RIGHT SIDE UP as it did the gravity turn like a fucking airplane. The fact 50 other rockets were in formation with it despite that being stupidly dangerous, them all having different TWR ratios, there not being nearly enough launchpads anywhere in the world to do that, etc. Just everything.
We have existing video footage of shuttle launches. It’s not some crazy mystery. This isn’t Gravity where they add a window that doesn’t exist on the ISS for dramatic tension. It’s not Star Wars where the X-Wings behave more like airplanes than spacecraft for visual appeal. This was deliberate negligence.
A very common one is spacecraft seem to always launch in a direct line away from the planet. They just go straight up. That’s the least efficient way to get into space. But I usually let it slide because explaining orbital mechanics and Hoffman transfers isn’t necessary for good story telling.
Anyone who hasn’t done a Mun landing shouldn’t get to direct space scenes.
For real. Omg you just reminded me of another absolutely stupid scene from the Netflix series, Another Life. That series’ writing is so bad some people think it’s on purpose.
So the ship needs to perform a gravity assist to avoid a cloud of dark matter or something. During the slingshot maneuver, they get so close to the star that they should’ve been absolutely vaporized. But you know what, fine. Flying unnaturally close to the star looks cool and the rule of cool applies. But their first attempt at the gravity assist FAILS and now they have to try again.
That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
Star Wars where the X-Wings behave more like airplanes than spacecraft
My favorite part of Empire Strikes Back was when Luke takes his (presumably) short-range interceptor X-Wing and flies it to another star system to hang with Yoda. I dunno, maybe canon explained this one somewhere (was Yoda’s planet in the same star system as Hoth or something? are X-Wings capable of FTL travel for no reason?).
are X-Wings capable of FTL travel for no reason?
Heh, that’s actually the canon reason. Whereas TIE Fighters would launch from star destroyers like aircraft from a carrier, X-Wings would jump into hyperspace along with the frigates they were escorting.
The X-Wing is explicitly hyperdrive equipped. That’s also part of why it has an astromech droid seat in it (R2), apparently so the droid can handle the jump calculations. A lot of later technobabble in the expanded universe expounded on this after the fact, but I presume this decision was made on a snap basis specifically so Luke could go to Dagobah in his cool
planespaceship.You get to make hyperspace jumps yourself in your X-Wing a few times, fittingly, in the X-Wing games.
Back when they made the first movie they literally used WW2 fighter footage to design the final battle with the Death Star.
Worst was some show my MIL was watching. A team of super savants is trying to stop an ICBM from nuking Los Angelas, and not only was it completely not understanding orbital dynamics but they didn’t even seem to follow any kind of rudimentary in-universe laws of physics (usually shows and movies just treat spaceships like submarines which at least if it’s consistent it can still make a decent story) as the ICBM was 30 seconds from impact 3 times over a 20 minute period somehow
There’s a trillion ones around unrealism, so I may as well pick something that would be more enjoyable if fixed.
Professional chatter. Let’s say a team of 30 scientists have been trying to communicate with a dimensional portal for 5 years. They wouldn’t be using speech like “Identity verified. Doctor Faris, you are clear to approach the anomaly.” Often, they’d have extremely abbreviated lingo for everything they need to express that happens on a daily basis, and otherwise are chatting about other stuff.
“Ok, approach endorsed. Bob wasn’t so chatty yesterday from what I heard, we’ll just aim for 2 logic points for this cycle.”
“Ryan was suggesting we spread the cycles. Bob has to sleep sometime.”
“Yeah, 90% of us would rather listen to Ryan than Mick, but Mick signs the checks.”So the only actual order comes from some obscure phrase like “Approach endorsed”, which they may only say verbatim for safety reasons. The rest is just workplace banter about how best to accomplish their task, none of it being essential. EDIT: And, to make clear, in the above quote, Bob is the portal/anomaly.
In Robocop when Murphy gets shot to pieces and wheeled into the ER, Verhoeven got real ER doctors to play the scene, so their chatter is very realistic and very nonchalant as they work on a guy that they know full-well is a lost cause.
“You’re about two kilometers outside the anomaly.”
“Chuck.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“The anomaly. I named the anomaly ‘Chuck’.”
“NEVER name the anomalies. That’s how you get hurt.”
Ever seen Primer? Equal and opposite to that, easily the most confusing movie I’ve ever seen and they don’t spoon feed you anything, lol
what the heck is a dimensional portal in your real world example
We’re talking about TV shows and movies.
There’s normally one unrealistic conceit, eg aliens existing, that the audience believes. But then, the regular conceits like “The scientists studying the aliens speak like a bunch of robots and act like total idiots” become harder to believe.
This is what makes Arrival so good. They don’t want the best person for the job because she insists on being involved, they give the aliens nicknames immediately and everything goes to shit at the first excuse to start a war.
Oh okay! And I see your edit that Bob is the portal, yeah I did not pick up on that one from the script alone. Great dialog on second pass though! Very believable, Tarantino levels of mundane.
Your company doesn’t have a portal to hell in the basement?
Sprinklers react to heat, not smoke and they don’t all go off at once. Also the water that comes out is brown from rust, not clear.
War bows are so heavy that you can barely hold it for the moment it takes to aim. There’s no way you’re holding it for minutes before told to release.
This happens with fire sprinklers a lot, one sprinkler goes off, and triggers the rest of the floor, or sometimes even building.
That’s not how it works. Each sprinkler has it’s own trigger mechanism, the glass bulb, and cannot trigger another sprinkler.
There are systems where this happens, but the sprinkler heads look very different, and you won’t find them in an office building.
Isn’t the water in sprinkler systems a stagnant mess too?
Yes. A combination of rust, thread cutting oil, and water that has been in the pipes often since the system was filled. It smells, it will stain anything it touches, and it’s a smell that’s difficult to remove.
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That’s to test the incoming main, the actual grid on the floor doesn’t get flushed. There’s a lot of dead end pipes that can’t be flushed.
Dry pipe systems are a thing. But not very common from my limited understanding.
Dry pipe systems are a thing. But not very common from my limited understanding.
Once I turned a suspicious faucet I shouldn’t have and got a blast of this in the face.
Also I’ve heard that the water that first comes out of those sprinklers is RANK from having sat in the pipes for years
It definitely is.
It has a particular smell that doesn’t come out of fabric easily, either.
Hacking.
There is no way that you keyboard danced for 12 seconds and completed a nmap scan, identified an unpatched target with a remote code execution bug, delivered the payload, pivoted to an account with the permissions you needed, and found the server running the internal application you are looking for.
telnet 127.0.0.1
I’m in!
Ah legacy systems.
All the young kids use ::1
There’s a scene in NCIS where somebody is losing a “hacker fight” so to turn it around a second person joins in and starts typing on the same keyboard.
Like there’s suspension of disbelief, and then there’s whatever psychological issue watchers of NCIS suffer from.
Hehe that scene was the one that made me think of this post.
NCIS should just dive into self parody at this point.
It’s really simple, you just search the evil corporation’s hard drive for a file named
EVIDENCE.txtRealistic hacking scenes would be funny.
“Okay I’m in”
“Wait… how?”
“Oh I figured out the default passwords and naming conventions for new employees awhile ago.”
Funnily enough I got my college to change password policies because for a report for one of my classes I wrote about how stupid it was that all new users passwords were First intial + last initial + last four of social security number, with usernames being firstname + lastname + year. Since they had no max number of attempts on logins, and didn’t prompt you to change password on logging in, it took a few minutes to get into anyone’s account once you knew their name. (That school was very incompetent, and they are closed now)
OR
“Give me 20 minutes, I’m on hold with IT. They’ll reset the password and tell me it if I give them an employee ID, dob, and name. Which I see clearly on this guys facebook picture where he has his badge visibile.”
Or a hacking guy trying to brute force for days. Then the “no nonsense” guy goes out for 20 minutes, and comes back with it and refused to answer questions. Oh wait… that’s just XKCD.
Only Mr Robot
Hey now, War Games had pretty dang realistic hacking!
As a counterpoint to the excellent examples posted here, I will cite an example of the opposite that I appreciate: In the Big Lebowski when the Dude goes to retrieve his stolen car and he asks the cop if they have any leads. The cop’s reaction is both realistic and absolutely hilarious.
I’ll ask the boys down at the crime lab. They got us working in shifts.
When the computer hacker character clicks 8 keystrokes and says, “I’m in!”
The password was “password”.
Or if it’s Chip from marketing, it’s the letter A.
That’s 8 keystrokes, nice!
Or the reverse
Two people typing on the same keyboard - that’s above l33t level. The moment she said they were hacking her computer my first thought was unplug it lol.
JFC. I knew that show was bad, but I honestly feel like I’m thicker from having watched that. You can’t just post shit like that without warning.
Don’t forget looking around the office to find a clue as to what the password is. It’s either the dog’s name or the owner’s favourite baseball player.
Op team sees a family photo on the desk, hacker back at HQ googles the birthday - Bingpot!
