“You Are Going To Be Dead, My Dude”: 50 Internet Users Ruin Popular Movie Tropes With Their In-Depth Knowledge
We all know that unless we’re watching a particularly well-researched and historically accurate documentary that the things featured in films and TV shows simply aren’t real. The writers and directors have to take certain creative liberties to create drama and tension and move the story along.
However, once you know something to be factually false, it can take you out of the story. Redditor u/Eatar sparked an interesting discussion on r/movies when they asked everyone to use their technical knowledge to ‘ruin’ popular movie tropes for everyone else. Scroll down to see what they shared. But be warned, Pandas, you might not be able to look at fire alarms, chloroform, silencers, and courtroom drama the same ever again!
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“Enhance!”
Anytime they take some grainy footage or picture then the tech specialist taps a few buttons, zooms in, and makes the license place of the car in the parking lot 2km away fully legible. Like pulling the pixels from thin air.
That’s not how that works, that’s not how any of that works.
My sister is an architect and absolutely hates the spy trope of maneuvering through the air vents. air vents are designed to hold air, not people. they’d certainly collapse under the weight of fully grown, muscular man.
Negative_Gravitas:
Plus, even if it didn't collapse, it would be like crawling through a drum kit. The bad guys would hear you two floors away.
The obligatory corset lacing scene in any period piece, particularly if the woman has to hold a bed post while she's being tight laced, PARTICULARLY if she's not wearing anything under the corset. These scenes are media shorthand for 'look how oppressed women were back back then' and perpetuate a lot of myths. For one, very few women tight-laced their corsets, only those who were extremely fashionable (on this note, you also shouldn't believe every antique photo of wasp-waisted women you come across - folks edited their photos back then too). For another, tight-lacing only even became possible part way thru the 1800's when metal grommets started being used for eyelets - in previous decades and centuries, these would be hand-stitched, and would rip if you even tried to tight-lace (here's looking at you, Pirates of the Caribbean). For a third, ALL women wore these garments for back and bust support, stomach support (when you spend a lifetime bearing kids, this comes in clutch), and garment support (wearing layers of petticoats, skirts, etc. would be extremely uncomfortable if hung directly off your waist). And finally, they were NEVER worn directly against your skin! They'd have been worn over a chemise, which would protect your skin from rubbing, and protect the corset from your body oils since it's a difficult item to wash.
If you're looking at Pirates of the Caribbean for historical accuracy you're going to have a hard time.
When we go to the cinema or put on a movie at home, we’re entering into a sort of unspoken agreement with the team behind the entire project. They promise to entertain us somehow. Meanwhile, we subtly promise to go along with the story… so long as most things make sense within the context of the story.
The audience willingly suspends its disbelief, and in return, they get to go on a journey of adventure, intrigue, romance, mystery, horror, or all of the above.
If you put the lights on the inside of your space helmet, you wouldn't be able to see s**t outside of your space helmet.
Of course, if you put the lights on the outside then we wouldn't see your pretty face. 😞
Any server room ever, or whenever they put racks of high power computer equipment in a scene to make it look techy, and then proceed to have a normal conversation at normal volume. Server rooms and server hardware is f*****g loud. The fans are f*****g loud. The ac units are f*****g loud. I generally need hearing protection when I’m in a server room. Literally no movie server rooms are realistic.
Thank You!: This one drives me nuts! If you're talking to someone in a server room, you're shouting. Looking at you "Free Guy".
Against popular opinion, an explosion will not “blow you to safety”. You are going to be dead, my dude. A shockwave can cause rupture of your lungs in an instant as well as where any gas pockets in the body live. Gut, sinus cavities, ears. Thermobaric shockwaves can leave a spider web of fractures in the skull. Long story short, if you’ve been thrown by a blast, you may not be dead now but you will be soon.
"Thermobaric shockwaves" Google that if you never want to sleep well again.
The main issue when it comes to immersion is believability. When building up the world of the film, the director, producers, and writers have to pay attention to how the details work together in unison. Let’s reiterate that everything has to make sense in the context of the story that’s being told.
For example, you can certainly enjoy a story about knights, dragons, and political intrigue even though dragons don’t exist. However, everything would fall apart if you suddenly added poor story development, stiff dialogue, irrational battle tactics, and illogical character motivations that flip-flop from one episode to the next. The events can (and even should!) be dramatic, but they have to be somewhat grounded and believable. You have to build up to the payoff instead of slapping your audience with illogical ‘twists’ that will make them grumble at the water cooler the next day.
A ton of foley effects are basically just things we've been trained to expect earlier use in other movies. Swords don't make *shing* sounds when they're just being waved through the air (or even when pulled out of most types of scabbard), and even when hitting other swords they make more of a clacking sound most of the time. Punches are sometimes more realistic but a lot of movies use foley from smashing watermelons. Real eagles make sounds more like seagulls (the standard foley sound is a hawk). The MGM lion roar is actually a tiger sound. My favorite: a lot of animal sounds in movies are actually just Alan Tudyk.
As one redditor once put it: “In Encanto, Alan Tudyk voices a Toucan. He also voices Hei Hei the chicken in Moana. This proves that Alan can handle the birden of voice acting.“
Tying a rope around your waist will not save you from a fall. Climbing harnesses go around yout pelvic bone and hips. They are designed to stretch to cushion your fall and place all your body weight on your a*s, which can take it. Tying a random rope around your waist will crush your internal organs and break your spine.
In apocalypse the leather and natural fiber stuff will rot away first and the polyester and Lycra and spandex will last forever. So road warriors will be in lulu lemon.
"There can be a dragon. The dragon can swear, smoke cigars, and drink whiskey if it wants to. But if it starts talking about cigars and whiskey and gets basic facts (which are easily found) wrong, someone's going to notice, and that will pull them out of the moment. The audience will willingly accept the big stuff, or they wouldn’t watch the movie. It's the small stuff that's distracting, and sometimes you wonder if they could've avoided it,” writer and movie fan Christopher Burke explained to Bored Panda earlier.
Mine is a complete misunderstanding of the weight of money. I think Way of the Gun pretty well nailed it, in that our protagonists wanted a million dollars in unmarked twenties and fifties or something, and I think it was two good-sized heavy-a*s duffel bags. This is accurate, because the weight of an American bill is about a gram, so you can figure the math from there.
Which brings me to that Zack Snyder Netflix Zombie Movie. So, Hiroyuki Sanada wants Dave Bautista to loot $200 million from a casino vault. At this point, I don’t even care about zombies; I start thinking about how to move that kind of cash. Like, physically move it; not like how to launder it or anything like that. Even if every single bill in that casino’s vault was a hundred dollar bill, we are talking about two thousand kilograms, or about 4,400 pounds, and the plan is to fly it out on what appears to be a UH-1H “Huey.” Problem is, they’ve got a big group, but we can sidestep that, because we know people gonna die. So, let’s say they’re planning on half of the people getting out. I think that ends up at seven people (I don’t know, because I haven’t seen this steaming pile of s**t since it was new), and we will just ballpark each person at 70 kilos, or about 154 pounds, which leaves about 2500 pounds for payload and, y’know, fuel. Well, now we’re already down to $100 million and change, which is great for the seven people, but this is still assuming everyone who walked into the casino with cash had $100 bills and nothing else.
At this point, Dave Bautista should have done some basic math on the napkin of the s****y restaurant he was working in and told Hiroyuki Sanada to go f**k himself, and everybody would have been a lot happier, including the audience.
This is one of the best critiques I have ever read, especially that last paragraph.
Electricity has no idea what color wire it is flowing through. While there are standards colors for certain things (Black and red come to mind), trusting the mad bomber to follow any kind of color scheme is never done.
IRL the bomb squad uses what's called a disruption charge. It's a shaped charge with a layer of inert material like water. basically they kill the bomb with another bomb. The idea is to separate every bit of the bomb from every other bit of the bomb before the bomb goes boom.
The fire alarm is a good one. The male lead pulls the alarm, and his lady love kisses him while the water romantically showers them both. As an electrician who has been there while they change the system, that water stinks and is black and disgusting. Chances are, especially in old school buildings, that water has been sitting in those pipes for possibly years. Whole generations of bacteria have lived their lives in those pipes. That s**t is the worst smell, it stinks up whole rooms when they drain it. And it’s nasty brown black. I don’t think I could kiss someone that just took a shower in it.
Also, some places don’t use water. I work in a big, very old library and we have books/documents dating back centuries. In case of a fire, the rooms they’re kept in will fill with argon which will suffocate any people left in there. Only a handful of our employees are authorised to enter these rooms, and they need to undergo a special training. There is some waiting period for them to leave before the gas starts streaming in, but it’s not much. I don’t remember exactly, but I think it was ~ 1 minute.
"Every now and then, I find myself focusing on something that just takes me out of it. Information is readily available. I would rather that the movie makers created a fictitious train, such as the T line, than use a real line and have it go where it doesn't belong (and no one has a problem with this)," the author gave an example of how subway systems should (not) be used in films.
"Using Vancouver or Toronto for Brooklyn is fine. I accept that. Using Hoyt–Schermerhorn as a stand-in for City Hall is fine, too,” he urged the teams creating movies to do some proper fact-checking so that they could maintain the immersion for more people for longer.
Private investigators existing in some legal gray area where they’re willing to risk their lives/do highly illegal s**t for clients. I make good money as a PI, I’m not about to risk my license to do anything illegal for a client, and I’m certainly not going to get in a fist fight on the roof of a high rise building.
The number of programmes where the PI breaks the law, in the name of justice, is legion. My other pet peeve is, Private Detective. Detective is a rank, not a job. It's the same as saying Private Sargent, or Private Colonel.
As someone who competitively rode horses for over a decade, my husband now reflexively looks at me whenever a horse appears on screen because there's always just so many things I have to eye roll at.
The most common offense is the horse neighs that are piped in as the hero rides on/off screen. Amazing that they're vocalizing without moving their mouth/nose.
The "majestic stallion" is almost NEVER a stallion as they're notoriously difficult to work with, and you shouldn't pair with an unexperienced actor. And sometimes you can tell the horse changes gender or markings between scenes due to multiple horses being used.
Some actors and actresses are pretty good riders, but a lot of them are just hanging on for dear life.
I'm also remembering at the end of Hidalgo, Viggo's character let's his horse go free and as he's dramatically galloping away you can clearly see he still has horseshoes on. Like congrats he's free, but is gonna be crippled in no time with no one maintaining those shoes.
There are virtually never surprises in court, and 98% of the work is done before you ever get in front of a judge. Most court events other than trials are minutes long. Shout out to my homies who drive an hour or more to attend a five minute status conference.
Real court cases (usually as reenactments) are beyond boring, from a tv point of view.
Gun silencers don't magically make bullets completely quiet.
Fun Fact: Mythbusters NEVER did an episode about silencers/suppressors because they didn't want to show people how to commit a crime.
The scientists who knows everything about everything…That person doesn’t exist. I work as an organic chemist, and I regularly have to consult with biochemists and molecular biologists because it’s not feasible to be an expert in even field that are directly adjacent to my own.
People cutting the palm of their hands when blood is needed. I would prefer to cut a lot of places on my body BEFORE the palm of my hand because YOU NEED THAT. You are going to be moving that hand. It's not a trivial pain either.
Maybe if you've got a love handle, or part of a butt cheek. Maybe someone can help me out with "best place to draw blood." I'm pretty pain resistant, but some of the worst injuries to heal are the palm. Or between the fingers.
There's the movie trope of people cutting their palms to clasp together to become blood brothers. Be a TOTALLY different movie if they are rubbing their butt cheeks together..🤣
Autism isn't a superpower. My extensive knowledge of geeky s**t isn't useful, I hate math, and no movies ever want to talk about the intense fear of death a lot of autistic folks deal with.
Savants can have, for want of a better term, super powers. But that is a very different condition from Autism.
Virologist here. Any movie, be it 28 Days Later zombie movie, or any other movie with a dangerous virus that acts in seconds or minutes is a Hollywood trope. Viruses do not, cannot act that fast. At best you might have something happen after 24 hours but even that is fast.
Why? Because the virus has to do some things in the body that take time. It needs to get in, find a receptor to bind to, go through the process of getting into a cell. Then once in the cell it has to go through the process of reproducing itself, then releasing those viruses which find other cells and do the same process. It does not happen in a blink. Those steps take some time.
Nor are you infectious immediately on exposure. Again the virus has to go through this process above before someone will be infectious.
And if you really want to talk about real life, be it COVID, the flu or common cold, you will get exposed to the virus, it will go through this process over a day or so, then you will be infectious but will not yet have symptoms. You are infecting others before you know you have millions of virus particles inside you. So if you are at work and a coworker has a cold it is good to avoid them, but if you interacted with them the day before when they had no cold, you were potentially exposed and may get the cold yourself. And as I teach students, the symptoms you experience are not due to the virus, but your immune response to the virus. Otherwise you would not be asymptomatic yet have the virus raging inside of you. When your body recognizes the foreign invader you start to get symptoms. One last tid bit, you are sick longer than you are infectious. With a cold you might be infectious till day three or four of symptoms or so, then no longer, but you still have several days of symptoms to go.
Ironically as a scientist, my beef with 28 Days Later was just this. Yet having zombies running around eating people I am able to suspend belief. I am a scientist hypocrite.
Doesn't make you a hypocrite. We buy into certain things when we watch the film or drama, but we need the rest of the world to work correctly otherwise it literally becomes meaningless. There was a scene in an episode of The Walking Dead where a car rolled backwards off a bridge. In one shot it fell off the bridge tail first and in the next shot it landed on all four wheels at the same time. Also, the inhabitants suffered no ill effects whatsoever, not even slight jarring. A lot of people were cross about how unrealistic it was but the response from others was 'but you're watching a film about a zombie apocolypse? And now you're saying **that's** unbelievable?' Yes, yes we are. We bought into zombies. We didn't buy into basic physics not working. If literally anything can happen how can we care?
Chloroform takes ages to have an effect. You wouldn’t just touch a rag doused in it to their face and then they’re out … you’d be there a good 10 minutes.
Duct tape is ridiculously easy to remove from a mouth by pushing it outward with the tongue. Once it is removed, it is very hard to retape. Every hostage movie gets this wrong.
Rifle bullets go through the trunk, the backseat, the drivers seat, the driver/passenger, and out the front of the car(if they don’t hit something particularly chunky in the engine bay, like the engine block).
So when the good guys are in a car chase and their trunk has 700 bullet holes in it, the occupants of the vehicle are dead.
Swords do not cut through armor like butter. There's a reason why people wore armor. Even arrows *designed* to penetrate armor are more likely to bounce off or get stuck in armor. It still hits like a strong punch or fist and can wear you down if a hundred arrows nail your a*s.
But heroes do not carve their way through armored warriors. You basically had to catch them where they had no armor: eye holes, arm pits, groin, that sort of thing.
Armor was also fairly easy to move in and trained knights could run, jump, vault onto horses, and do kip ups from lying flat on their backs. The idea you'd get knocked over and lie there like a turtle sadly awaiting death did not happen unless ten peasants were straddling you and pulling daggers out to cut your throat. Which did happen.
Chest Compressions on an Unconscious Person: In reality, CPR is not a light pressing of the chest. It’s the physical equivalent of a car crash. Some 200 lb EMT *attempting to push to a point about two inches behind your body at *100-120 beats per minute. Even highly athletic caregivers have to swap out every *2-10 minutes or so to make sure you’re being sufficiently pulverized. Ribs often fracture. When it’s really bad, the whole chest feels like a sponge. TLDR: you do NOT want your 90 year old grandmother receiving CPR.
Typically, a cigarette thrown into a puddle of gasoline will simply go out rather than igniting the gasoline.
Babies are born with an umbilical cord attached. And healthy babies look purple for a few seconds.
The majestic shriek associated with movie eagles is most likely that of a red-tailed hawk. eagles have a high squeaky call and chirp like little b**ches.
And the bird call "oo-oo-oo-ah-ah-ah" we often hear in movies placed in the jungle is the kookaburra, native to Australia and New Guinea, not Africa or South America. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc_-icFHwQo
The reactor is going critical.
A reactor loves being critical. It's running perfectly fine when it is critical and is probably the safest state it can be. Most of it's safety features are designed around it being critical.
"Meltdown" is a far better term for what happens when a reactor fails. At Chernobyl, the reactor heated to around 5000% of design specs in a few hours. The fuel and control rods melted and pooled into the bottom of the reactor. It takes a lot of heat to melt carbon BTW.
A bullet wound to the shoulder isn’t just a flesh wound. Taking a bullet to the shoulder isn’t something you can “work through”. Something like that will have you rolling around in agony unable to focus, or you go into shock. Also bullets don’t always pass through, they can ricochet off bone and travel around the body. A bullet can enter your leg, run up the inside of the body and shread every organ it comes into contact with. They have previously found bullets in the brain that entered via the foot too.
Not sure about the foot to brain, but OP is talking about tumbler rounds. They came up with them during the Vietnam War. The bullet impacts, strikes the bone and then travels along the bone doing more damage. Nasty stuff. Last checked, using that type of ammunition was a war crime.
I work for the airline industry.
Because of that I *cannot* watch Die Hard 2, anymore.
In the movie, terrorists shut down a Washington DC airport.
Literally all the plane had to do was divert to another airport.
There’s like a dozen all within thirty minutes: DC Reagan, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Annapolis, Richmond, even LaGuardia or JFK.
Also they wouldn’t fly a military prisoner such as General Esperanza into a civilian airport.
They’d fly him to an Air Force/military base.
Dart guns do not instantly incapacitate anyone. The chemicals used for immobilization take anywhere from 3 to 20 minutes to work.
As proved in nature docos. Want to pat the big kitty cat thirty-seconds are the dart's gone in. Be my guest!
It's not 'over and out.'
It's 'over' [I'm done transmitting, waiting for a response], or 'out' [I'm done transmitting and signing off]. Saying both is like saying 'No no keep talking, I can't wait' then hanging up.
Giving a diabetic insulin is the last thing you want to do when they are displaying signs of hypoglycemia, which is usually what you see happen in movies and TV shows. In this case, you'd be advised to give them something with sugar in it, like a soda.
Yes - smell their breath to know if it's hypo or hyper, if in doubt give sugar in liquid or dissolve in the mouth form and get to medical help
I just want to see people charge their cellphones at night on a movie. Just once.
And have it fully charged for the next day's emergency. Where's the story in that?
Numerous medieval/fantasy movies that show iron/steel weapon making like swords via pouring molten metal into a mold: Conan the Barbarian, Lord of the Rings, the Game of Thrones show etc.
You can’t really cast proper weapons out steel that way. Firstly that high of a heat to make the metal molten will cause a serious loss in the carbon that gives the steel its hardness. Second, the steel solidifies too irregularly and likely won’t be homogeneous throughout. Forging is really the best and only way to make steel anything discounting magic.
Computer geek breaks into super protected mainframe trope. Hacking is social/psychological skill these days. Nerdy guy from mums basement can't “hack” into NASA mainframe. I would say that 95% of “hacking” is ordinary phishing.
Lifelong mental patient here. It's only the rich people -- like Hollywood screenwriters -- who go to see a therapist and that therapist writes them a prescription. That's because they're seeing a psychiatrist who does hour-long talk sessions. Keep in mind, it's expensive enough to see a therapist with a PhD, but to see one with a PhD *and* an MD, you need to spend a lot of money. Us plebes over here are seeing a therapist for talk, and seeing a psychiatrist for meds. You don't make some big breakthrough in your session and then your therapist writes you a scrip. It just doesn't happen that way.
This true. My daughter saw a therapist then had to go to a different doctor to be evaluated to maybe get a scrip.
Red laser dot on someone from a sniper
Snipers would not ever project a laser pointer over at someone they're trying to shoot, firstly it would not be accurate at all because bullets drop while the laser light stays straight.
it would also alert the enemy and give away their exact position.
and lastly, why would they need a dot on their target? They're already looking through a scope with crosshairs showing where the bullet will hit
Laser Pointers on guns is an actual thing but it's only really used for close range work where you may not be able to aim quickly or easily, such as chasing feral pigs with a shotgun from a vehicle
They have these new laser scopes that don't do the dot... you see the dot in the scope, but not on the target. They are way cool.
Gasoline has a shelf life. If the apocalypse was a few years ago, the gas that is left isn't going to work so great anymore.
Gasoline in cars or small tanks can be fine for about 3 months, but still usable for about one year with minimal loss of performance and some risk of potential engine issues. It would still be kind of usable for two to three years, but muck deposits would be a real issue then. Older engines and 2-strokes were far more tolerant to bad fuel. Gasoline can be stored by manufacturers in controlled conditions for much longer though, since most of the issues come from the degradation of additives and ethyl compounds: in case storage is needed, the gasoline is stored before additives are put in. This can extend storage life up to five years.
Car airbags never deploy.. the car chases are so extreme with multiple collisions, and not one airbag (that has been a required standard safety feature since 1998) ever goes off.
The air bags never deploy, but the entire car explodes at the slightest touch.
A university professor says all their life’s research is in that one little thing that they must retrieve- um…try several drives, ethics committee paper trails, file cabinets, notebooks, grant applications, employee review paper trials, open science depositories, archives, and a bunch of publications perfectly available to the public.
Not to mention all the notes, etc of all the subordinate researchers and assistants. Plus all the previous drafts and proof copies.
Microphones feeding back every time a speaker begins to talk on stage, in order to convey awkwardness. What it really conveys is someone at the mixer who doesn’t understand how to ring out a room.
Space movies always have a scene flying around an asteroid field, like dodging thousands of giant rocks tumbling all over the place. In reality you'd need a telescope to even detect another asteroid. Space is so big that dodging stuff is the least of your worries, it's not missing stuff that's hard.
I always loved the scenes in Star Trek (the original series, yes I'm that old) where they had to go through an asteroid field, and the cameras got all shaken about. I was a little disappointed when I found out that asteroid fields are extremely spaced out and it would be very poor steering to continually hit them.
Gun fights indoors without ear protection, everyone’s ears would be bleeding. I love how the cartoon show Archer actually makes fun of this consistently. Actually just bullet physics in general in movies.
The Sopranos did this (I presume accurately) when a hit was carried out in a car with the assassin yelling in pain from the noise when he fired his gun.
Not a mechanic, but those scenes/schemes where the villains cut the break lines and the hero only discovers this while driving down the highway at full speed or down a hill towards a crowded area?
Unless you're driving a manual, good luck trying to get out of your garage and getting into reverse or drive without your foot on the brake. Cutting the break line would pretty much brick your car these days and inconvenience you.
Cars are really hard to make explode. You can burn them, they burn really big. But that don’t blow up often. The tires could explode because of the heat, that’s make loud bang. But movie level explosions don’t happen often. And shooting the fuel tank, or worse fuel door, isn’t going to cause a massive fireball. It’ll cause a fuel leak.
And speaking bullets then don’t spark when hitting pavement. Or really anything. And don’t shoot a lock. Chances are you either break the lock and make it even more of lock, or the bullet/fragments will splash back at your soft not made of steal body.
I grew up believing that US cars always blew up, through watching TV. So I was grateful that we had non-incendary English, European, and Japanese cars on our roads.
You’ll regularly see someone who needs to hide push aside a ceiling panel and climb up, then have a well framed shot of their face up above while they slide the panel back over covering their escape.
You can’t do that. Those panels are fragile enough you can break them with one hand. The cheap ones are literally fiberglass insulation with a sheet of paper glued to the face. The scene from The Office with Angela’s cat is what would actually happen.
Yeah, I’m not going to trust the weight-bearing integrity of something so easily damaged by a school pencil! kauGU.jpg 
Train brakes apply when there is an air hose separation. So if our hero cuts a train car full of bad guys from the train as soon as the air hose separates the train will have air brake trouble and brakes will apply or the train will have issues at the very least. Locomotives also have a dead man switch so if there’s no one behind the controls the train will apply brakes once it’s tripped.
Not all trains have Westinghouse Brakes (especially freight trains), but the dead-man switch is definitely a thing.
When people just casually walk into a restaurant kitchen and everyone just keeps cutting celery or whatever, you're getting stopped and asked what the hell you are doing.
There is no waiting period for reporting a person missing. You don’t have to wait 24 to tell the cops your loved one has been missing all day long. It’s a weird, potentially dangerous, trope to have been started.
Also, in the UK at least, you don't have 'one phone call', absolutely nonsense. If you've been arrested and you need to arrange for someone to pick your kids up from school, someone else to take over your dog, and to let work know, then you need to make three phone calls. And then call your solicitor, if you have one.
I’ve worked for an enormous biotech company, and never once did I see their massive elite army of security guards with machine guns. Very disappointing.
Typing really fast is not hacking. Real hacking is tedious and time consuming and quite often involves exceptional interpersonal and bluffing skills to convince someone to give you access you shouldn't have.
People have to actually pay when they get on a bus. Technical knowledge: Used to work on transit. People actually say 'goodbye' before hanging up on phone calls. Technical knowledge: work on phones all day.
Firefighting in movies is completely wrong. When inside of a well involved structure fire, firefighters almost cannot see their hands in front of their faces. We crawl on our hands and knees through the black smoke, navigating the building using thermal imaging cameras, and basically the feel through our gloves, dragging our hose behind us.
It’s a rush but it’s much dirtier and disorienting than any movie or TV show.
I heard about a tragedy when several firefighters died in a basement fire. When their oxygen tanks were getting low they tried to get out following their hoses. But there were multiple lines in the room and they ended up going around and around before they suffocated. They simply couldn't sense when they switched from going toward the exit along a line to going back following another.
In space, people don't float away when they let go of whatever they're holding onto.
Remember that scene in Gravity, where George Clooney was holding a strap and he let go so Sandra Bullock could save herself? He just floated off into space. No way. Once that strap tugged him, he would've matched the speed of the space station and just kinda floated along with them.
But, he needed to die for plot reasons, so fake physics happened.
also its space there is no gravity so all she had to do was pull him in
Head trauma. All these do-gooder heroes being high on their own nonsense by “not killing.” Okay Batman, but how many of these shoplifters are spending the rest of their lives s******g into a bag and using a ventilator to breathe?
Also, even in those instances where it doesn’t leave any lasting damage, getting hit over the head is extremely disorientating. It’s difficult to explain if you’ve never experienced it before, but I’d describe it as: all of a sudden, out of nowhere you fall to the ground like a sack of potatoes and you don’t understand why. Your body and limbs are heavy and cumbersome to move, nothing makes sense, you can’t hear or see clearly. Your thoughts don’t make sense. It’s totally surreal and it takes a good while for you to even understand what just happened.
I'm super late but it's really hard to fake a prescription for a controlled medication, even if you have a prescription pad.
I forget what movie it was but some guy had a one night stand with a doctor who happened to keep prescription pads in her night stand (lol what)
Anyways he takes one and the next scene is him at a pharmacy and he looks down at the prescription and it literally says "Percocet 100"
No name, no date of birth, no address, no written date, no strength, no form, no sig, no diagnosis code, nothing, literally just the drug name, the amount, and a perfectly legible prescriber signature at the bottom
It should have been something like "Percocet 5/325 tab #28 1q4-6hprnpa" with today's date and "g89.4" or something written *somewhere*
Some states require the patient's address to be on the prescription for a controlled medication, some require the diagnosis code, a date or birth is always required, as is the written date
I actually rewound the movie and paused it to go on a mini rant to my bf because of how ridiculous it was
Thanks! Now I know how to write a good fake Percocet prescription. I'll let you know if it works.
Military historian and WW1 specialist here...
1. Straight front-line trenches that you can stare down and see to the horizon. Seriously, these weren't used past the initial digging in at the end of the Race to the Sea in 1914. And do you know why? Because if an artillery shell scores a direct hit on the trench, it sends a shock wave down taking out everything in line of sight. Once the trench systems were established, front line trenches used what was called a "traverse" system - they were short segments with sharp corners.
2. Human wave attacks into enemy artillery. Everybody had moved past the human wave tactics by the end of 1916, and silencing enemy artillery was a key part of preparation for an attack. Now, soldiers did walk into artillery fire, but it was from their own side and was called a creeping barrage - a screen of shellfire just in front of the advance protecting them from enemy fire and hidden positions.
So, basically, just about everything you see about trench warfare in most WW1 movies is probably, well, wrong.
Also, soldiers did not spend years living in a trench. They were rotated to the rear areas every few days. One source claims that the longest anyone stayed in the frontline was eleven days. Three to five days was more likely.
The cop/main character gets in 15 shootouts, killing 15 bad guys each time. Hate to argue with John Mcclane or Martin Riggs, but in the real world if you discharged your gun ONCE on duty you get all the report writing you can stand. Along with administrative leave. Somebody else will be jumping out of windows saving America.
Any courtroom scene where the attorney roams about in the well and/or stands directly in front of the jury (you need to ask the court's permission and it's only to speak privately to the judge).
Also, the attorney inevitably starts arguing the case while examining the witness.
And finally, a gotcha question during cross rarely happens as opposing counsel already knows the evidence and line of questioning from discovery.
LegalEagle regularly talks about tv/movie attorneys being in the well
There is no drug that you can inject intramuscularly that renders someone immediately unconscious for a convenient period of time. They are either going to slow down and pass out over 15-20 minutes, or just stop breathing and die.
Another one that I wish I'd known earlier.
I've seen so many movies where an important scene at a church -- usually during a sermon or a funeral in a Catholic or an Episcopal church -- has a choir singing in the background.
Like, yes, churches have choirs, BUT THEY DON'T SING WHILE SOMEONE IS TALKING.
The fact that they don't sing over the minister, is one the reasons I stopped going to church! (Anglican FYI)
Military members don’t mindlessly follow crazy orders. If I told my Marines, “OK, gents, listen up. We’re going to storm a school and kidnap children, including using lethal force, to put them in pit prison,“ they would’ve been like “OK, yeah, sir, that’s not f*****g happening.“
Repairing dislocated joints. They take months to heal and aren’t usable for days not minutes.
Not entirely true. My joints are damaged and pop in and out at on a regular basis.
I see it a lot with the Hallmark movies. There are zero writers that make a living working on ONE story for months, weeks or even days at a time. Writers of today have to be a conveyor belt of stories. There were days I was pumping out a dozen stories a day. It's a quantity over quality world. Shouldn't be, but it is. Gotta get them clicks.
If you get hit in head and dont wake in few sec but wake several hours later in plane/house/mexico you have severe brain injury. And you are probably f****d up.
I think the point here is that any head injury that results in unconsciousness is not something you just get up and walk away from. You can't just shake your head to clear the cobwebs and jump back into the fight. You'll be lucky if you remember your name or how you got wherever you are.
Jumping over a car going a decent speed is technically possible. The timing is essentially superhuman, but it is possible with a high vertical and insane body control.
But when you see people tap the front of the car with one foot and kick up? In reality, the vector of that car's momentum would pull the part of the foot that made contact 40ft straight behind the person. They'd be painfully horizontal incredibly fast.
Terry Pratchett pointed out that while 7 League Boots sound like a great idea, it tears right up the middle when you realize you just put one foot 7 leagues away from your other foot.
Trope: "He's going into shock!"
My god, that's now how "shock" works in a medical sense. There's a little bit more to it, it isn't a surprise, and fixing it isn't easy either.
Trope: People wake up from CPR
Nope. The heart/breathing doesn't just magically recover. CPR is pretty much just keeping the person marginally alive until you can shock the heart to reset it. Also if the heart is completely stopped, that s**t isn't happening.
Trope: You can make a nuclear reactor explode like an atom bomb.
First the fuel is the wrong enrichment level to achieve the criticality necessary for a big badda boom. Second it's not concentrated enough. Third, any reactor built since the 50s has an insane amount of safeguards built into it to keep even a small event like Three Mile Island from happening. (TMI wasn't that bad). You can't just go to a control board and make it melt down either. Chernobyl the HBO series is almost accurate about the sequence of events, and that was a badly built, badly manned, 1940/50s design.
The Soviets would build containment structures for their export reactors, but not for their own.
Every race car movie: goes faster by pressing down on the throttle *further*. Every race driver even slightly competitive will have the sucker on the floor every chance they get. Passing on a race track is more about better lines, momentum and head games.
Ford vs Ferrari did a good job showing technique better than just raw speed.
Punching or kicking through a windshield. Windshields have a layer of plastic or vinyl between the layers of glass that is extremely hard to puncture. You cannot punch or kick a hole through a windshield.
In horror movies when the lights shut off one by one in a hallway making a loud "kachunk" each time one goes out, that noise is typically the lighting contactor for an entire lighting panel, and each individual light isn't going to have it's own.
Also, defibrillators do not restart a stopped heart. The automated ones (AEDs) won't even allow a charge to pass through the paddles as they are designed to automatically discharge only when an improperly beating heartbeat is detected (fibrillation). Every scene where someone is flatlined and a doctor yells "clear!" and zaps the patient is a lie.
Diplomatic immunity doesn't work like you see in Hollywood. Officers directly witnessing a felony will certainly take the felon into custody, until the diplomatic process starts. Even then, a country could absolutely hold an ambassador, but would face serious diplomatic consequences
In the US, in areas with a high level of diplomatic officials, police receive training on how to handle these incidents.
Like a lot of movies, like Mission Impossible, Bourne and such, where the US hero apparently can do anything in another country...
Q should never have plugged in Silva's laptop in Skyfall. "He hacked us." No Q, you hacked yourself.
This drives me crazy and I don't even work in tech. (But my husband does). Never NEVER connect a suspicious device to your network. There are ways to get around this
I love the John Wick movies for its “gun-fu” and other details to firearms handling. However, for all the bullets that are fired there are no brass bullet casings on the floor. I think this would add more to the emphasis on how much is being fired. That along with the sound of casings hitting the floor would be extra badass. This is why I always loved the small detail in Inception where DiCaprio holds his hand over the chamber to catch the discharged casings to keep them from hitting the floor, alerting anyone nearby.
I go to the range, shoot 50 from the 9mm, then have to clear a space to do 50 from the .22. And there are brass on the shelf which I have to clear
Activating a fire alarm pull station does not, in real life, set off sprinkler heads. Apologies to all the fictional characters who have relied on this sudden downpour of water from the ceiling to throw the scene into chaos and cleverly escape or interfere with some ongoing situation. Sorry, Mean Girls and Lethal Weapon 4, among many others. It didn't work. You'll have to find another way. Neither does setting off a smoke detector. And when one sprinkle head does activate, it does not start all of them flowing.
Sewers, storm drains, manholes etc are not enormous, cavernous, labyrinthine tunnel systems that you can drive a small car through. Most manholes go down into a vault, which is a concrete room the size of your average storage closet that has about a dozen pipes and conduit wires coming together and going back out through holes in the walls. Each pipe is about the diameter of a pool ball. You are not traveling from one manhole to another through those. Notable exceptions are Manhattan, Las Vegas, and any of the old European cities with Roman catacombs. Those all have tunnels like you see in the movies. Your average midwestern suburb doesn’t.
Land Surveyor here, we have to open manholes for utility locations. While the post is absolutely correct about the size of the pipes, most sewage pipes are 6 inch diameter pvc, there are not usually dozens of them, nor any conduit wires. Most manholes you open will have two, an in and an out pipe. The most I have ever seen in twenty years was five. Most sewer lines from houses don't run directly to the manhole, they join the pipe run in between the manholes. And having electrical wires in a chamber meant for flowing water is just never a good idea. If there are electrical wires in the manhole it is not a sewer or drainage manhole, its a manhole for utilities, which don't have water flowing through them.
It's not a profession, but I thru hiked the Appalachian Trail and I cannot handle movies about backpacking. Everything is wrong. All of the hikers are wearing clean North Face quarter zips and their packs are huge and they are never eating enough Ramen.
Tony Stark should have died multiple times from internal organ damage.
I've seen too many military/action movies where they show the outside of a C-17 Globemaster, but when the ramp is open before a HALO jump or something, they show the inside of a C-130 Hercules. Always wondered if it's because they use stock B-roll footage of C-17's from the outside and then rent a commercial C-130 for interior shots.
Source: am a C-130 and C-17 mechanic.
Professors don't usually have big, nice offices.
Most offices are just big enough to fit the professor, 2 students, a desk, and a bookshelf. Furniture is likely mismatched and old.
Also, if you're the sort of prof who has fancy artifacts of historical import, you probably don't keep them in your office. And they probably wouldn't belong to you personally anyway.
I'm a test prep tutor. SAT scores are *always* a multiple of 10. Occasionally, you'll see a movie where someone says they got something like 1327 on the test. That's not possible.
Also, in *Legally Blonde*, she scored 179 on her law school admissions exam. That's possible, but it puts her in like the top 0.1 percentile (the top score is 180). I just thought it would have sounded slightly more realistic if it were a couple points lower.
SATs used to be discrete values. Rounding to the nearest 10 happened later.
You can't open the door in a pressurized aircraft while at cruising altitude.
There are 1,000s lbs of pressure keeping the door shut.
I don't know how much of a troop it is but building anything in less than a week, specially anything that requires very specialized equipment or parts that need to be brought and mailed from China, Germany, Japan, Korea, etc... The last example I saw was in Megan where they designed the whole robot exterior and changes plus reprogramming and a new wardrobe in a couple of days. Of it can't be 3d printed (and even if it can) it will take at minimum a couple of weeks if not more (and forget getting anything near Chinese New Year).
While there are certainly fast carriers out there, in the movies, things get delivered at the speed of plot.
There's no substantial evidence for the "rain of arrows" move on the battlefield.
Arrows were precious ammunition like bullets today. And needed to be skillfully manufactured at scale, transported to the battle (which may mean weeks of transport), and then distributed across your forces. Every shot mattered. It would be absolutely crazy to crack off a few hundred to thousands of pot shots in the air hoping you might *randomly* injure an armored target.
If I'm not mistaken I think the whole trope was invented by Laurence Olivier for one of his films. Once you notice it, you start to see it *everywhere* lol.
I take issue with this. Herodotus wrote about the ancient Greeks and Persians at the battle of Thermopylae. Xerxes said they would darken the sky with arrows, then Leonidas replied they would fight in the shade. This seriously predates Laurence Olivier. Also, archers stood behind infantry for protection, otherwise what were the infantry there for? If the archers were behind, they would have to fire over the heads of the infantry to get at the enemy.
Political staffer: obviously House of Cards and West Wing are rubbish because things never work out how you hope they will, Veep on the other hand is triggering with how much it reminds me of real things.
Never having to constantly feed a campfire. Fake campfires drive me CRAZY!
Backblast from a rocket launcher can kill you. Whenever you see a character fire a rocket launcher from inside a car, or against a building they should be severely burned and concussed.
Also, Sherman tanks were the most survivable armored vehicle of WWII. They were well armored, had a fantastic 75mm gun, had hatches overhead every one of the five crew members, and was pretty mobile.
A lot of movies, like Fury, play up Sherman tanks being knocked out for drama and say they cannot take out tanks. They absolutely fought tanks well.
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TV Tropes said, "No Bicycles In The Apocalypse". Bikes move THREE times as fast and far as walking while using the same amount of food and water. What peabrain would worry about "cool" if society broke down? Gas goes bad within months, while bicycles can be used for decades. .......... The vietcong used bicycles (NOT trucks) to beat both the yanks and the French. The Japanese used bikes to outflank the English in Malaysia during WWII. Even the yanks used mountain bikes during their occupation of Afghanistan because it was quiet and be rappelled up and down cliffs. .......... Bikes are relevant immediately, not years later. "The Walking Dead" and "28 Days Later" blathered about stealth, yet neither movie used fast and quiet bike transport.
One word..... FICTION! If you want a documentary, go and watch a documentary.
TV Tropes said, "No Bicycles In The Apocalypse". Bikes move THREE times as fast and far as walking while using the same amount of food and water. What peabrain would worry about "cool" if society broke down? Gas goes bad within months, while bicycles can be used for decades. .......... The vietcong used bicycles (NOT trucks) to beat both the yanks and the French. The Japanese used bikes to outflank the English in Malaysia during WWII. Even the yanks used mountain bikes during their occupation of Afghanistan because it was quiet and be rappelled up and down cliffs. .......... Bikes are relevant immediately, not years later. "The Walking Dead" and "28 Days Later" blathered about stealth, yet neither movie used fast and quiet bike transport.
One word..... FICTION! If you want a documentary, go and watch a documentary.
