Friends who knock movies for not being realistic

I'm happy enough to suspend disbelief for a clear-cut fantasy movie. Any of the superhero films, for example. Or things like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc.

I tend to be a little more critical of Sci-Fi. It's fine if they take the liberty to imagine, of course, but if what they imagine is utter rubbish I get annoyed. I'm happy to accept, for example, that there's an engine that can make things go faster than the speed of light, but I get annoyed if people walk around empty space with just a surgical mask in front of their faces.

A film that is trying to portray reality, though, or history, had better actually do that!

Even with Sci-Fi, there'll be aspects to a story line that just don't make sense, but you'll be happy to let it go, if it doesn't impact the film too much.
However, watched Passengers recently( look away now....Spoilers) and there is only one android\robot on board this massive space craft. And he's a waiter in a bar, on a craft full of sleeping people. And he cant leave the bar apparently. In the cargo hold, there is a spare part of everything on board....except the one thing they need... the pods that keep them alive( all 5000 sleeping people and no spares)
Its just lazy writing.
Also, this had great scope to be a good film, but its crap.

I have a particular bugbear with scenes involving computers and people trying to break into systems* but I generally don't make a big deal of it.

*Hackers & Jurassic Park being the obvious exceptions

Wibbs wrote: »

I just switch off TBH. Historical stuff can be just as fantastical and wrong on the details as science fiction. Flaming torches in castles and town streets? G'way outa that.

So would I, but sometimes the husband likes the look of the main actress spilling out of her bodice...

But yes, the last scene in The Name of the Rose with the upset townspeople saving the witch and killing the bishop had me roaring at the telly.

I always knew they weren't using real dinosaurs in those movies, they thought they could fool people, but not me my friend. No way Jose.

Crazy scenarios being played out in a movie are perfectly acceptable as long as they have their own internal logic. If you set up in a galaxy far far away and have loads of aliens, and robots, and intergalactic travel it's obvious things are not going to keep to the same rules you'd experience in real life (here on Earth anyway!). However, if you set a movie on Planet Earth in the present day and have it full of scientists and engineers you immediately reset your bar for the level of realism you expect.

The prime example of a 'sci-fi possibility' type story descending into utter utter nonsense is "The Core". This movie set the high bar for the amount of guff that you could fit into a single movie and dress it up like it's supposed to be science fact.

It's about the core of the Earth slowing down and a mission being launched for a team of scientists to drill through the planet in a train shaped vehicle thing to set off some nukes to get it going again. Okay, so the premise is a little bonkers to start off with, but it attempts to take it's pseudo-science seriously, and then changes the rules at every twist in the plot. Internal consistency goes out the window and it's just an avalanche of stupid building momentum throughout. Even the most open of minds would be thrown by some of the daftness that occurs.

Sample of action 1: They have to drill maybe 1500-2000 kilometres through the crust and magma, etc. to get to where they want to go. They decide the best place to start drilling is at the bottom of the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean. Why? Because they are at the closest point to the core of the earth if they start there. Closer by about 10 kilometres that is, never mind the several days trip to the middle of the ocean.

Sample of action 2: Everything has gone wrong and something needs to be fixed on the outside of the drilling machine.

"You can't go out there, it's 10,000 degrees. You won't last more than 60 seconds!" (...in your flimsy tinfoil environment suit).

Cut to heroic sacrifice guy toughing it out and lasting maybe 90 seconds before melting, and saving the day, etc.

There is such a current of nonsense built up in this movie that it is impossible to ignore. It some respects the entertainment value of this film is more for calling it on it's inconsistencies than the actual drama itself. That's a kind of victory I suppose!

Riddle101 wrote: »

I'm willing to suspend my disbelief in regards to some things, but I have my limit. I remember in the last season of Game of Thrones, in one episode, Arya Stark get fatally stabbed and falls into a river. Somehow she manages survive, and gets help from a friend who heals her wounds. Yet in the next episode, while Arya is still recovering from her injuries, the person who stabbed her comes back to finish the job. A big chase scene occurs and Arya is sprinting for miles, jumping over things like a long jumper, and doing all these crazy stunts. Remember Arya just got seriously hurt in the last episode and was not completely healed. Yet she was able to do all that despite it. Plus the other assassin who was better trained and had more experience, and was perfectly healthy, was unable to catch her.

The whole Arya sequence really annoyed me at the time, because while it's just a tv show, and a fantasy show at that. The whole thing was silly to me. It's one of the reasons why I hated Arya's story arc in Season 6. It's like the film producers just decided to say "F*ck it, we'll just ignore all logic, and make a cool action movie scene instead".

Yep I agree with this, it's the inconsistencies that annoy me more. Also I really dislike last minute saves, I think it was The Following with Kevin Bacon that started promisingly but then soon every episode had a scene where one of the "good guys" was cornered only for a colleague to appear out of nowhere and save them.

Walking Dead is going down this route, their constantly surrounded by walkers but end up pushing them away without a scrape and getting into a car, it's just lazy, don't put them in the situation in the first place.

The whole basis of 'The Martian' was a fallacy.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/06/how-scientifically-accurate-is-the-martian

The storm
This is the only thing I noticed that was completely impossible, as opposed to improbable or sub-optimal. The Martian atmosphere is only 1% as thick as Earth’s, so a Mars wind of 100mph, which is possible although quite rare on the surface, would only have the same dynamic force as a 10mph wind on Earth. You could fly a kite in it, but it wouldn’t knock you down.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/the-fact-and-fiction-of-martian-dust-storms

I mean, come on.

Irish Guitarist wrote: »

What bugs me is watching people eat or drink in a film.

There is a good practical reason for this. There may be multiple takes of a particular scene and if the actors have to keep eating burger after burger you can run into problems pretty soon. The continuity with the condition of the food props can be a headache to keep track of too.

Once had a friend who gave up on the LOTR films.
He said it got stupid for him once the talking trees arrived.

Yeah cos everything else up to that point was totally believable?

fergiesfolly wrote: »

Even with Sci-Fi, there'll be aspects to a story line that just don't make sense, but you'll be happy to let it go, if it doesn't impact the film too much.
However, watched Passengers recently( look away now....Spoilers) and there is only one android\robot on board this massive space craft. And he's a waiter in a bar, on a craft full of sleeping people. And he cant leave the bar apparently. In the cargo hold, there is a spare part of everything on board....except the one thing they need... the pods that keep them alive( all 5000 sleeping people and no spares)
Its just lazy writing.
Also, this had great scope to be a good film, but its crap.

I can barely watch films anymore, especially sci-fi because I can't help doing stuff like this. My main gripe is that it's just laziness, it's giving the customer what they expect rather than developing out and idea and speculating on what the future might be.

My childhood love of star trek is one of the worst. It's stuck in a 1960s outlook, the only modern twist there is to it was doubling down on the militaristic side of the crew make up. I think it's basically dying a flash gorden death where it just become irrelevant.

Star trek has no AI bar the one mainframe computer, it has no robots or automation bar one data, star trek communications are already out of date. There's basically no background culture to star trek, it's a bunch of scientists on a ship that for some reason have military ranks, lieutenant science officer. And over the course of hundreds of years nothing new happened. Replicators where just about the only new thing invented between dozens of species.


Sci-fi has become extremely lazy, even something like the expanse is today with see through phones. But again, no AI, no robots, no automation (because automation would basically eradicate the worker issues of the show).

humanity is heading towards a very weird and different reality, The world I'll live in by the time I'm an OAP will probably make most sci-fi around today look like it was written in the 1960s. It's like the writers are sticking their head in the sand when it comes to current technology because they just can't imagine what the future will be like. They'd rather stay in that fantastical flash gorden age.