Vista level Bonehead mistakes in movies.

[Metryq]

Eh? how do you spray blood behind you if no bullet came through?

It's possible. Hydrostatic shock typically applies to remote internal injuries, but even a bullet that does not exit the body can be messy. (WARNING: Graphic detail ahead.)

My sister is a "surgical technologist" (hands the surgeon the tools) and has seen many bullet wounds, as well as heard additional stories from the neurosurgeons she works with. She told me of two failed suicide attempts. One patient placed the gun under his chin pointing upward. It looks pretty threatening in the movies, right? I don't know the caliber used, but the bullet stopped in the patient's sinuses and pretty much ruined his entire face. (The scene must have been gory because the bridge of the nose was gone, even though the bullet was still inside.) He's still alive, but much worse off.

The second case would be comical, if it were not so sad. Patient number 2 tried to suicide by putting the muzzle in the center of his forehead. Again, I do not know the caliber. The bullet stopped somewhere in the back of the skull, but did not touch the corpus callosum. In fact, the surgeon said the bullet did no damage worth mentioning at all. That's humiliating. If you think these cases are impossible, read about the famous case of Phineas Gage.

As the space ships banking i alsways thought it was nertia on the pilot that was the reasonong for banking.

It's as good a rationale as any other. However, "dogfighting" is unlikely to be a practical tactic in space. Take Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica as examples; the ships are capable of interplanetary speeds within a matter of hours (or about as long as one might expect a pilot even with an iron butt to remain seated). The G-forces at those speeds would be impossible to tolerate. The counter argument might be that the turn radii are simply that much greater, which would also make the distances between craft much greater, and the targeting thus that much more critical. At such speeds and distances, it is unlikely that pilots would ever score a shot.

Star Trek's "photon torpedoes" (which are actually tiny ships with an anti-matter bomb) or the super-weapons described in Murray Leinster's The Wailing Asteroid are more credible.

 

[Snowdog]

That's my gripe with life in general at the moment. Everything has to be sexualised.
Heck, I saw a toothpaste ad that was sexualised, more accurately it implied sexual activity once you had fresh breath. (Being in Australia I imagine you would have seen it).

We seem to live in a society today where, as you say, everything is sexualised, and yet the authorities have a prudish attitude towards sex itself that has taken us back past the 70s into the era where they criminalised saucy seaside postcards. It's positively schizophrenic.

One thing I hate about about many modern action films is the way scenes are cut to emphasize the action, but do so to the extent you can't actually make out what's going on. One director did it and a load of others went 'that's cool, I'm going to do that, but do it more'. It's style over substance and when it's done to the degree that you can't follow the story it becomes non-sensical. Another style-over-substance thing is the over-use of slo-mo. 300 had so much that it got ridiculous, if you ran it at normal speed you'd only have half a movie.

Another thing in action films I hate is impossible/stupid stunts that would get the hero killed double-quick if he really tried them. Such films use these stunts to replace good storytelling, which has largely disappeared from modern cinema (at least in the action genre).

 

[JunkMonkey]

As the space ships banking i alsways thought it was nertia on the pilot that was the reasonong for banking. YOu turn the spaceship to alter direction. Your body is still going sideways. So you bank and let inertia push you down into the seat. Same as a jet really in that sense. ( iknow the diff of a jet vs space craft for flying purpose, just clearing that here) The banking is not to make the craft turn, but to make the pilot not fall off to the side.

Often the ships that are shown banking like this are also shown to have 'Inertial dampers', 'artificial gravity' and other not fall over / float about gizmology. With all that stuff on board why bank?

 

[bedlamite]

Oh, remakes;

-ive Example 1: Who exactly were the people clamouring for a remake of Fright Night? If you had sufficient funds kicking around to get a film made, this is the one you want to do? It's just the laziness of it that makes me sick to the stomach. You just know that the decision to greenlight this was a collision of statistics - kids can't get enough vampires, and this here film on our back catalogue is just old enough to be the perfect nostalgia fest for those kid's parents....

-ive Example 2: Like many other people, I think this remaking of foreign language films has got to stop. Let the right one in was the final straw for me. Again, it's laziness, but this time it's the audience. Thought: why don't they invest in a better dubbing process if subtitles are too difficult?

+ive Example 1: I know I'm probably letting myself in for a shocking letdown like always (I'm looking at you, AvP culprits), but I'm looking forward to two films, not that they're remakes per se. No 1 - The Thing, No 2 - Prometheus. Neither are remakes, but they're both supposedly designed to be 'canonical' to the originals, and able to partner the stories. Maybe these two could prove to break the hoodoo.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Speaking as a Scot (OK a Lowland Scot from an area that has occasionally been in England), I also prefer Rob Roy to Braveheart. The latter film kicks in on an emotional level, but if you have any knowledge of the period it falls seriously short. I'm not even sure why they took such liberties with history, as the real thing would still have made for good cinema.

Not as bad as The Patriot though.

If you want some seriously bad films about that period of our history try The Bruce or Chasing the Deer.

 

[CyBeR]

My favorite pet peeve with boneheaded mistakes in films has got to be the famous hydraulics failure bit. Without fail in most films someone's gonna shout "We've lost the hydraulics capt'n!' and then cut away to a big room that's rapidly filling with water, and which apparently housed...

You may remember such a famous bit in 2012.

And then we go for broke with the Transformers films where a small car, complete with interiors and luggage space, apparently turns into this hulking robot by complete disregard of anything relating to volumes.

 

[Metryq]

And then we go for broke with the Transformers films where a small car, complete with interiors and luggage space, apparently turns into this hulking robot by complete disregard of anything relating to volumes.

At least Terminator 2: Judgment Day was "realistic" on that point. The T-800 explained that the T-1000 could not emulate the chemicals and complex moving parts of guns, and was limited to objects of equal size.

I wouldn't defend any of the Transformers films, but computer animators often "break the laws of physics" in order to make the images "look right." Draco's wings in Dragonheart scaled up and down as they opened and closed. If the animators hadn't cheated that way, they found that Draco's folded wings would cover him like a tent, or look laughably inadequate when spread.

The rings of The Machine in Contact were not actually nested within each other. I tried such an animation on my own—mounting the spin axis of each nested ring inside another—and the resulting movement does look weird.

And the software package used for The Last Starfighter was programmed for rigid body dynamics (the way real, solid and weighted objects tumble and collide). I read that the animators eventually added invisible "ghost wings" onto the ships so that they'd bank and turn the way airplanes do. (I guess manual keyframing was not available at the time. Such a tool did not exist for Tron, where the animators used an Oxberry animation stand to calculate the frame-by-frame coordinates needed for moving objects.)

 

[mosaix]

I've given up being irritated by spaceships making noises as they fly through a vacuum - and explosions.

We've discussed this before on here, JunkMonkey and it may not be so daft after all. Spaceship engines (chemically driven ones anyway) and explosions are probably going to have one thing in common - an expanding gas cloud, and that's exactly the thing that is going to transmit sound. So, if you are close enough to either of those things, you'd probably hear them through the helmet of your spacesuit.

 

[williamjm]

I could never understand the popularity for Braveheart with the Scots. It's a story about a man who takes on more than he can cope with , gets betrayed by his own people and ends up being dissected. And to cap it all it's quite possible that he wasn't even Scottish!

Rob Roy on the other hand is about a true Scotsman who uses guile and skill with a sword to outwit and outfight his English counterpart, and ends up making the English look foolish.

Surely he should be a greater inspiration?

I agree that Rob Roy is the better film, but in terms of which story is more influential I don't think it's too surprising that Wallace's is since even ignoring the films Wallace was a more significant figure in Scottish history than Rob Roy was. Wallace's cause was eventually successful, even if it was after his death, and it's difficult to say for sure if Scotland would have regained its independence if Wallace (and Andrew Moray who was completely ignored in Braveheart) hadn't won the Battle of Stirling Bridge. I'm not sure why you're doubting his Scottishness, either, he might have had some Norman ancestry but as far as I know all the records show him being born in Scotland. Rob Roy's story is entertaining, but his cause isn't really as significant as Wallace's was and defeating one Englishman isn't as significant as defeating an army of them.

 

[JunkMonkey]

We've discussed this before on here, JunkMonkey and it may not be so daft after all. Spaceship engines (chemically driven ones anyway) and explosions are probably going to have one thing in common - an expanding gas cloud, and that's exactly the thing that is going to transmit sound. So, if you are close enough to either of those things, you'd probably hear them through the helmet of your spacesuit.

You know, I'd never thought of that; I'm almost convinced... Any idea where that thread is?

EDIT: Hang on. Wouldn't you have to be IN the expanding gas loud to hear it? Must deep space exploding I've witnessed in films has had the audiences POV (the camera and by implication the microphone) well away from the action. But then Movie Physics always cheats the sound of distant explosions so that the speed of sound and light are the same. One notible exception is in Robinson Crusoe on Mars. When our hero on the surface explodes his orbiting mother ship lest it be detected by aliens there is a significant on screen lag between the brief bright light in the sky that is the explosion and the sound reaching his ears a few seconds later. Must have been a hell of a bang.

 

[JunkMonkey]

My favorite pet peeve with boneheaded mistakes in films has got to be the famous hydraulics failure bit.

I would have loved to have seen your face while watching SST -Death Flight a TV movie which has an airliner's hydraulics fail in mid air when all the hydraulic fluid leaks out after an explosion. The crew repair the hydraulic system by diverting the water used for flushing the toilets into it. Honest! Mind you this is the same crew that has been making the plane pitch by getting all the passengers to run up and down the body of the plane and roll by pumping fuel from one wing tank to another. Doug McClure was involved.

 

[bedlamite]

Another thing that grinds my gears whenever I see it on screen:

The big climactic fight between our hero and the bad guy takes place (for some reason) in a deserted industrial space. During the melee, our hero is taking a battering and needs to buy some time; he releases steam into the villain's face, and whilst he is reeling improves his position/grabs a handy crowbar/gets to the forklift etc.

Now then, industrial steam. What good purpose would a valve serve that releases steam directly to the air - steam only does any good inside the pipe, not to mention that this mysterious piece of apparatus discharges directly at the operator. A safety valve to discharge extra pressure always discharges into another, larger diameter pipe. Not to mention the fact that the bad dude is merely incapacitated for a few moments, and back to the fray. A blast of steam from an industrial system would definitely remove flesh ie take the face off completely, and possibly at high presssures blow a hole through the body.

Also, aren't these factories disused / deserted? Why on earth is the dangerous and highly expensive to run steam line in operation?

 

[CyBeR]

I would have loved to have seen your face while watching SST -Death Flight a TV movie which has an airliner's hydraulics fail in mid air when all the hydraulic fluid leaks out after an explosion. The crew repair the hydraulic system by diverting the water used for flushing the toilets into it. Honest! Mind you this is the same crew that has been making the plane pitch by getting all the passengers to run up and down the body of the plane and roll by pumping fuel from one wing tank to another. Doug McClure was involved.

I think I'd just scream at the TV at that point. And I mean just senselessly scream at the screen. My mind can take a lot of absurdity in films (that's why they're films, I won't go anywhere expecting a realistic view on life cuz, frankly, that would be so boring) but with this...I really do think I'd scream.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

There are actual cases of pilots steering planes by pumping fuel from one wing tank to another when the flaps have failed. I'm not sure how many of them actually landed though. It's even become an accepted emergency steering system.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227035.000-airbus-invents-steerbyfuel-emergency-system.html

Cheers.

 

[Foxbat]

I think I'd just scream at the TV at that point. And I mean just senselessly scream at the screen.

I do that all the time. I thought it was normal

 

[JunkMonkey]

I just remembered another of my favourites. Mission to Mars a film that clocks up more than its fair share of 'duh wha?' moments (it could be argued the whole movie was a mistake but we won't go there).

In the film Val Kilmer has walked more than halfway around Mars*, fought off killer bugs, and a psycho robot, and bitter -50F ice storms, and all sorts of other perils to reach the site of an abandoned 30 year old Russian lander that failed to launch its return stage. If he can prize the lid off, empty the rocks out, hot wire the thing, and point it in the right direction he might JUST be able to rendezvous with the mother ship that only has something like 27 and a half turbo-minutes left on the clock before it has to fire the main engines and return to Earth.

Kilmer arrives at the site of the 30 year old piece of s**t Russian lander. He prizes off a panel and fires up the 30 year old Russian computer within. Clickity-click! Aha here it comes now up on the screen...
What?
The Russians not only helpfully labelled everything on the outside of their unmanned Mars lander in big letters for people to read (you know, Martians?), they also built in a 15 inch colour CRT monitor!?

Why?

Why would anyone spend god knows how many gazillion litregallonunits of rocket fuel first launching, and then gently landing, a computer monitor on Mars?



*did you see what I did there?

 

[Quokka]

The universal compatability is always a good one, even though I like a lot of apple products I don't use them because of the hassle of them freaking out if a non apple product gets within 10 feet but Jeff Goldblum's laptop syncs in with the alien mothership and he even gets a loading icon .

 

[Dozmonic]

The aliens just love the c++ virus - they thought it was a MothershipApp <3

 

[mosaix]

Hang on. Wouldn't you have to be IN the expanding gas loud to hear it?

Yep, you'd hear it just as it reached you and that may be before or after the associated debris.

 

[steve12553]

...then Movie Physics always cheats the sound of distant explosions so that the speed of sound and light are the same. One notible exception is in Robinson Crusoe on Mars. When our hero on the surface explodes his orbiting mother ship lest it be detected by aliens there is a significant on screen lag between the brief bright light in the sky that is the explosion and the sound reaching his ears a few seconds later. Must have been a hell of a bang.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars was a rare movie and a classic as far as i'm concerned. The sound in a vacuum thing has always bothered me. 2001 addressed it well, while it's sequel, 2010, although a decent film had rocket noises while orbitting Jupiter.