When watching television or movies of any type you have to carry a certain suspension of disbelief. You accept things happening that would be unlikely in real life.

Such as...

You can knock a person unconscious with a single punch.

How often do we see that? The good guy sneaks up on a guard and taps them on the shoulder. Then it's one punch POW! knocked out. Or they will mow through a horde of thugs one punching each and every one into a coma. Sure, you might get lucky once or twice but unless the person has super strength it's highly unlikely.

You can run away from an explosion

Sure, it looks fantastic when the heroes are sprinting away from a humongous explosion and are then thrown through the air before landing in a heap. Then they pick themselves up, dust themselves off and continue on with whatever else was going on. Look, at the very least there is going to be some type of injury - broken bones, internal hemorrhaging, shrapnel wounds, concussion, etc.

You can be thrown through a plate glass window and emerge relatively unscathed.

I know you've seen this. Toss someone through glass and they come out with merely flesh wounds. True story, I was walking home from a bar several years ago with friends and two of my buddies were "play fighting". Well, my boy Adam ended up getting thrown through a plate glass window and I can tell you first hand that it wasn't pretty. First of all, he didn't make it all the way through the window.

You can pick a lock with a paper clip.

Yep, take an ordinary old paper clip or hairpin, stick it in the lock, jiggle it around and viola! Door open!

You can ride on top of a moving car.

OK, how many times has that happened when the hero climbs on top of a moving vehicle and then jumps to another one. Go ahead and try that and let me know how it turns out!

I've got more but I will give you a chance. Anyone have any other things That Hollywood would have you believe?

As long as a bullet is removed quickly, the person who got shot will suffer very little damage and regain full mobility quickly

How often do we see someone get shot in the shoulder and go on acting like they weren't shot at all. Or that someone is on death's door after getting shot in the stomach, only to come back for the final act just hours later like they hadn't been shot at all.

Computers can be hacked by simply guessing a password.


One that I hate is breaking into a computer by simply guessing the password. MAYBE it could be believed during the early days of computers, but NO WAY would that happen today when most passwords are case sensitive and require a combination of letters and numbers.

I still find it shocking that Alan Moore used such a lazy writing convention in Watchmen. I'd expect more out of an acclaimed book.

This is a fun thread.

One of my pet peeves is....

Any scientist is a scientist of everything
In the real world, of course, scientists specialize. A meteorologist knows nothing more about marine biology than anyone else. In movies, though, when you are a scientist you are apparently a repository of all the knowledge in the world....AND out of the world. Remember when Jeff Goldblum was able to decipher the alien technology in Independence Day? No sweat for a scientist.

Cops everywhere have access to a massive database that is instantaneously updated with every traffic accident, ticket, and arrest anywhere in the country as soon as it occurs.

Really, anything about cops or any sort of law enforcement agency in Hollywood is complete BS. The sad thing is, most people don't seem to understand this concept.

Since Virginia borders DC, everything within the state must be within an hour drive.

Bones really irritated me with this one, where they were zipping around Virginia and back to their lab all in the course of an afternoon. Heck, they had one episode where they got all the way to North Carolina, got involved in a tornado or something, and still drove back to DC before it even hinted at being dark. (There are 178 miles of I-95 in Virginia, which means it would take a minimum of three hours driving just to get from the DC/VA border to the VA/NC border. And that's not factoring in any traffic, or figuring out how far into NC they had to go.)

So true. As anyone who has ever been to DC or Northern Virginia well knows, sometimes it can take three hours just to get to Woodbridge (about 30 miles). Maybe they were using the HOV lanes.

That always bothered me with 24 as well. Jack Bauer would zip around LA with impunity and never hit any traffic. It strained credulity.

People always read emails out loud to themselves.

I understand why filmmakers do this, but it still annoys me. In fact, having an extended scene where people are communicating via instant messaging or chat really bugs me. It's so boring for the viewer! At least in the old days when people talked on a phone they were still free to move around and do something interesting the viewer can watch. Having two people sit in front of a computer brings the movie to a screeching halt.

You can jump a car 30+ feet and when it lands you can just speed off with little damage.

Yeah, good luck with that. Something's gonna get broke. Thanks Duke Boys!

Actually what's even sillier is that the hero's vehicle makes the jump and zooms off while the bad guys either come up short or crash and burn upon impact.

You can jump/get thrown over the side of a building or a mountain or a bridge, etc and hold on to a ledge with one hand until someone reaches down to rescue you.

This happens in pretty much every single action movie ever made. Someone is just hanging in there with one fingernail supporting 200+ pounds and whatever gear they happen to be wearing until someone else reaches down and pulls them up. Also hard to believe. If you even tried to catch a hold of something your fingers would probably get ripped off or dislocated at the very least.

There's no way you will be able to grab on and hold on to a tiny handhold with both of your hands much less one. Try this at home: hold onto a door jamb or stair riser with one hand and then lift your feet off the floor. How long can you hang there? Not too long I would wager.

Shooting a vehicle in/near the fuel tank will cause massive explosion immediately.

Despite the fact that the bullet is made of lead or copper-jacketed lead and neither of those metals generally create sparks when contacting steel or the myriad types of plastic that they would have to go through to penetrate a gas tank. Not to mention the fact that modern vehicles have fuel tanks designed to survive things like great big car crashes without exploding.

Also, stuffing a rag in the tank fill and setting it alight will ultimately result in a burnt out rag hanging off the side of the car...

Everyone can be a ninja

So you have to sneak past the security guard in a cavernous chamber, or maybe sidle around a sentry in a dry leaf laden forest, possibly you need to tiptoe through the Pentagon/Kremlin/Death Star unnoticed and suddenly you can tread light as a feather. You could be wearing high heels, tap shoes, combat boots or whatever but you can seemingly glide on air and sneak by the unwitting buffoon who is supposed to prevent your entry.

Space is Filled With Objects

In reality, Space is a vast and empty place. Distance is measured in the trillions of miles with nothing but flotsam and jetsam floating in the universal void. Even with the primitive technology available today we can track most extraterrestrial objects larger than a wrench.

So why is it that in pretty much EVERY single sci-fi movie the astronauts encounter unexpected meteor showers, asteroid belts, cosmic storms, solar flares and more? Don't you think that scientific advancements that have produced spacecraft capable of interstellar flight would also have some kind of detection and/or protection against these kinds of things?

BTW, you don't have to go through an asteroid belt as you can just go around, over, above, below it. Not to mention that an asteroid belt as depicted in space movies does not exist. There's not a bunch of rocks zooming and crashing around in a tight grouping. It's more like a handful here and there spread out over several light years. Not hard to navigate at all, in fact it's super easy, barely an inconvenience.

Along those same lines...

THAT SPACE IS FILLED WITH AIR

Namely that sound can travel through space (it can't). So when you're trying to hide from another ship in aforementioned asteroid fields (which don't exist) then everyone has to be super quiet like you're on a submarine so the other ship can't hear you. Or when something blows up, there's a massive BOOM that you can hear for light years out. Thank you, George Lucas.



Someone has been watching movie pitches! And rightfully so, those things are amazing.

THAT STAN LEE WAS THE ONLY PERSON RESPONSIBLE FOR SUPER HEROES

Don't mind me...just venting.....the more I learn about all the other folks who had far greater impact on the acutal characters rather than just brand promotion and hype I get a little irritated.....

Would love to see many, many more nods in the movies to the writers and artists who truly made the characters awesome.

I always got a kick out of how artists would put other artists and writers name hidden throughout the comics...

Rant over....I don't hate Stan by the way...I recognize his importance, just don't like the way he overshadows so many.....

Yeah, yeah, Yeah! Pitch Meetings by Ryan George are Tight!

You can shoot a chandelier out of the ceiling.

Yes, with a well placed shot you too can shoot a chandelier out of the ceiling and cause it to crash down upon the bad guys!

Except for the fact that those things are screwed, bolted, fastened and fixated to it's moorings that it it is difficult to take them down on purpose much less with a single bullet. Now maybe if you had a machine gun or a grenade but that still might not make it fall, just destroy the glass.

Along the same lines it is ridiculous to see people swinging from one side of the room to another on a chandelier. Yeah, good luck with that!

Dinosaurs are Ninjas.

The Jurassic Park movies especially establish up front that big dinos shake the ground when they walk but damned if they can sneak up on people. In broad daylight even. What are they, teleporting there? I can see how a raptor could probably saunter up without someone noticing but a T-Rex? And not just dinosaurs but pretty much any large creature. Don't get me started on the Meg.

They're on their tippy toes. It's just out of frame.

Starving characters must gorge themselves with food.

This usually happens when we have a character that has been in a situation where they have been without food for a long period of time. When the person is rescued/finds shelter/gets help, there has to be a moment where the camera lingers on the character while they shovel food into their face. This is always followed by a reaction shot of the person they are with looking shocked/disgusted/surprised. We get it, movie writers and directors--the character is hungry. We don't need to see the actor cramming food down their gullet to an unsettling degree, which ultimately has nothing to do with the rest of the plot anyway.

Good one!

Not to mention the fact that binge eating after a person has been starving is very dangerous to your health. It's called Refeeding Syndrome. You have to carefully control intake until your body can readjust. The best show to accurately portray it was Band of Brothers. In the episode where they liberate the concentration camp (hate that ep, makes me cry every time) and the soldiers are giving food to the poor survivors when a medic comes up and tells them they have to stop. Heartbreaking but correct.

But yeah, every other show has the character cramming food down their piehole and then being 100% fine a scene later. When they should be .