memes @lemmy.world

4mo ago

Drop your most "wtf that's not how the world works" from movies/tv shows.

I'm aware of the NCIS scenes, what else you guys got?

605 comments

If a girl doesn’t like you, but you just keep pursuing her, everything will eventually work out and you’ll be happy together.
- Being told this time and time and time again has really fucked the male psyche over the years.
  
  you don't say.....
- Next you'll be telling me that "So, how often do you flick the bean?" is not a great pickup line.
  
  What do you say I take you home and eat your pussy?
  -- Shark Attack 3
- 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.
  
  It was the boombox outside her window that got her, wasn't it? /s
  
  Kinda happened for me and I'm the girl in the situation! I had a guy who was creepily obsessed with me and would threaten to hurt himself all the time if he didn't get his way. He even showed up at my house uninvited once and he always kept insisting we were dating. I kept telling him we were just friends at best, that's it, but he'd freak out, insist we were lovers, and have a panic attack. Eventually he'd forget all about it and just pretend I never said anything.
  I didn't call the cops because I'm honestly afraid of the police more than him at this point. (The police in this town are as stupid as they are accusatory sadly)
  It has a weirdly happy ending. Eventually I just lost all patience and gave him the number for a therapist. He actually went, he realized I was afraid of him.
  My plan was to finally "Break up with him" for REAL this time after a therapist set him straight.
  He broke down in tears realizing that he was never really my boyfriend, at first he called me heartless saying that it wasn't fair that from his perspective I had punished him for seeking out therapy I told him to get.
  After he calmed down we hung out for a bit, but.. then we actually stared dating because it turned out that with his meds keeping him stable he's actually a wonderful person that I get along well with and I actually DO love him. My family has even pretty much accepted him as part of the fold with my mother saying that it's like she's gained a son all of a sudden.
  We just spent Halloween together and watched Fritz The Cat while high on shrooms and eating candy, being super lovey dovey with each other and talking about the 70's...
  Life is strange.
  I doubt it happens like this for most people.
  
  There's an entire genre of tiktok videos out there of women saying things like "So this guy I like asked me out, and I said no, and he was like okay bye and just walked away. What is with men not pursuing women anymore?"
  Hmm what was that hashtag popular a few years ago? #nomeanskeepgoing?
  "No means no" they said. Meanwhile in this very thread: "I'm actually in love with the guy that stalked me."
  If you want no to mean no, you have to say different things when you mean something other than no. If you want to play hard to get, A) don't, you suck at it and B) maybe let him know that's the game you're playing so he'll actually try hard to get you instead of just taking a flat rejection at face value; ie don't just say "no" say "You'll have to try harder than that" or something that indicates you are open to further attention. What saying "no" when you actually mean "try harder" accomplishes is you filter out the guys who take no for an answer leaving your dating pool only filled with the men who don't really care that much about consent.
  As for the "I turned him down becuase I wasn't interested in him, then we actually talked and turned out I actually like the guy" story...I guess maybe try actually talking to guys? Even if you don't cream your gusset at first sight?
- 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.
- It worked for a friend of mine. They were friends, he kept trying to get her to date him and after a year of pestering she caved. They're engaged now.
  
  not making any claims about your friend's situation, but i've seen this happen more than once also--pestering, caving, engagement-- and they ended very badly.
  getting engaged or even married does not necessarily mean "happy together"
  
  You just got to wear them down enough, break their willpower. They can learn to love in time.
- 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.
- Can recommend 'pop culture detective' on that one

I just fired a gun right next to your head, neither of us was wearing ear protection, and now we're having a conversation at normal volume and we can understand each other just fine.
Bonus points for grenades going off indoors, and nobody having a concussion after.
- mawp?
- I fired an assault rifle in the army without hearing protection once just so try how loud it was. No need to try that one again. I knew it's going to be loud but not that loud.
- I think there's a scene in The Other Guys where Will Ferrell and another guy temporarily get deafened by the loudness of gunshots. Might be thinking of a different movie but it was funny, like "Holy SHIT that was loud!" "Whaat?"
- I was in a play once where we were going to fire a blank onstage, in a fairly small black box theatre. There were two options, a .22 and a .45 caliber blank. The .22 made a sharp CRACK that really shocked you. The .45 made a VWOOM sound that filled up the entire room and left you with the feeling of a wave of violent energy having just passed through your entire body.
  We went with the .22.
- Hey, but it had a silencer on it, which is absolutely what it's called, and makes the shots super quiet so they won't be heard by people in the next room!
- Depends on the gun. 9mm would be a normal conversation, 50. cal by the being shot close to your head with no hearing protection hurts
  
  9mm would be a normal conversation
  Right after it being fired right next to your head? With no ear protection?
  
  Permanent hearing loss aside, I'd probably have a few very harsh words for the idiot firing irresponsibly rather than a "normal conversation" 🙄
  
  I'll just add to this, 9mm, or any handgun really, is still very loud. The reason it doesn't seem as loud is because when most people are shooting there are two main things happening.
  They're behind the barrel, normally this doesn't matter much, but the sound is at least a little directional, so being in front of it is going to make it sound much louder because you're hearing the initial explosion, not an echo.
  Most people aren't shooting it in their house, they're at a gun range. The space in front of you at the range allows for the sound to travel and the pressure to spread through the room, slightly reducing the impact of the sound. Shoot one in a tiny room and it's going to be much worse for you.
  Again it's still really loud, but the context of where the sound is being made does make a difference. Obviously larger rounds will be louder, but that doesn't mean rounds like 9mm are safe for your ears at all.

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

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.
- The apartment in Friends is rent controlled and leased by Monica's dead grandma. She's been committing fraud for years to keep the apartment affordable.
  
  And the one across the hall with the unemployed actor and the waitress?
  
  Not completely dissimilar from the current season of Only Murders in the Building!
- 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."
- 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
  
  That kinda happens in Friends. Monica is living in her grandmother’s rent controlled apartment in the village. And still had a roommate!
- You're telling me a waitress in New York City can't afford a penthouse apartment and have a comedically unlimited food budget?
- The apartment in Big Daddy was awesome and I was like ain't no way Adam Sandler's character can afford that!
- 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.
- Hey, if you got the property mortgage-free from your parents, all you have to pay is taxes. The taxes/insurance on a property like that would still be high, but not unreasonable for someone working full time, especially if they don't have to worry about a mortgage.
- 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.

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.
- This guy sprinkles
- 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.
- Theoretically the water hammer effect might be able to break that glass, but I think it's unlikely.
  
  I don't think water hammer would apply because there's no abrupt cutoff or change in direction of the flow.
  
  You get a water hammer when you shut off the flow, not when you open it.
- There are sprinklers where this happens and the sprinklers look exactly the same. There’s a pressure switch on the sprinkler line that activates a deluge pump. This pump has enough pressure and flow capacity to break open the glass ampules of the remaining sprinklers in the circuit.

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.

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.

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
- Hack the planet!
- Only Mr Robot
  
  Hey now, War Games had pretty dang realistic hacking!
- exactly. running an nmap scan alone involves minutes on end of just sitting there, waiting for nmap to do its thing, and hoping that the network administrator doesn't notice your computer running the most obvious port scan of all time, barge into your borrowed cubicle, and say "what the hell are you doing"
- It's really simple, you just search the evil corporation's hard drive for a file named EVIDENCE.txt
- 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.
  I'm not exaggerating.
  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.
- To be fair, that's your personal thing, because you have knowledge about this topic. In movies and TV a crap ton of stuff is abbreviated to not bore the audience to death. Some shows portrait a certain domain more or less realistically but still take dramatic license with other things. After all, we watch this stuff to escape from reality.
- Realistic 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.

In movies when there's a huge explosion in space, there's always this ring that comes out from the explosion. No!
In space the blast wave would be spherical: it only looks like a 2d ring when observed from a telescope many many light years away, since the telescope can only pick up the outside edge of the blast.
Edit: fixed auto-incorrect
- I remember very vividly when they redid the special effects in the original Star Wars trilogy and added this dumbass ring coming out of the Death Star explosion. It completely broke immersion for me because I was like “wtf is that supposed to be?”
  
  You could make an argument that there was some kind of huge spinning gyroscope reaction wheel system on that axis which projected the explosion that way.
  But we all know there wasn't.
  
  That makes it look all Loony Toons :S
  
  I mean, it might have made sense if it lined up with the equatorial channel that the death star has. If the inside was exploding and that was the weakest area, material would be ejected out the ring first before the rest of the structure exploded. That might, indeed cause a ring effect. But in this scene the ring is going vertically, not horizontally. So yea, doesn't make much sense.
- Known as the Praxis Effect amongst movie nerds or, in the Homestar Runner universe, "those blast-wavey Saturn rings that have become so popular lately."
  
  Hell, in Star Trek VI, where the Praxis Effect originates, it's a horrifying industrial accident that blows up Praxis, so for all we know there might well have been some kind of moon-sized particle accelerator that blew up and did cause that ring shape. But it seems to show up in a lot of places where there's not as justifiable an excuse.

GI Joe movie where they blow up a sheet of ice on the ocean to make it sink down and destroy the base below.
- I had to read that 2-3 times before I could comprehend that the base was not on top of ice and falling through it.
  Yeah...
- That got me upset enough that when I read "GI Joe movie" in your comment, it was the first thing I thought of, before reading the rest of your comment.
- It was probably ice made from heavy water.
- Basically searched through the comments for this one. I knew it would be here. I know there's a lot of "movie logic" for hacking, space flight, how guns work, etc. but how do you fuck up elementary physics? Even kids know ice floats.
  
  The ice blocks had metal of the underwater villain lair duh
- Cartoon GI Joe or live action GI Joe? I'm inclined to cut cartoons in general a lot of slack in terms of physics abuse
  
  This was one of the live action ones

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.

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!
- The evaporation cools the remaining stuff down. And steam is not visible. What we consider visible "steam" is fine liquid water dropplets suspended in air, as the saturated air cooling down demands for some of the water to become liquid.
  So you can be steaming and freezing at the same time.
  
  I'm not smart but I believe this human.
  
  It'll cool you down a bit but I've never seen any evidence of freezing. There's been experiments on animals and also people have survived vacuum exposure before. According to this animals will survive 90 seconds of vacuum. No mentions of turning into ice like the movies.
- I think in Event Horizon they tell the guy about to get airlocked to take deep breaths and then let all the air out of his lungs... which I think is accurate if you want to live as long as possible in vacuum. But then he gets horribly disfigured by the decompression, so they might have only got some points for accuracy.

Stepping on a landmine doesn't make it explode instead it arms the mine with a noticible click sound then lifting up your foot is the thing that makes it explode.
- "sir, we've invented something that blows up when you step on it"
  "That's great, but where's your sense of drama?"
- God landmines are disgusting
- IIRC the whole thing about the land mines exploding when you step off of them is purely down to the Bouncing Betty or the German S-Mine, which saw widespread use and gained its infamy in WW2. They almost worked in the manner described, actually going off with a time delay rather than waiting until the hapless soldier removed his foot from the plunger. But they used a small lift charge to pop the main explosive up into the air a couple of feet and then went off, with the aim of shrapneling in a circle a whole group of soldiers passing by and not just whoever stepped on it. Obviously this wouldn't work so well if someone were standing on it at the time.
  The popular conception formed that they went off "after you stepped off of them," which was true in most cases (who was going to just stand there like a nincompoop after you'd just triggered it?) and then Hollywood writers of the era just assumed that most or all landmines worked that way and wouldn't let that misconception go. So now here we are.
- I just watched an episode of Justified where that trope happened. At least they claimed it was specially modified by a bomb-maker.
- Landmine engineer watched Saw and decided to add this completely unnecessary torture feature just for the sake of it.
- Ah, so obviously you gotta just take off your boot, brilliant!
- Apparently this actually happens, with a very specific type of mine meant for tank infantry. Stupid people just think "some mines work this way, therefore all do."
  Kinda like how a decade ago we had the Gluten-Free craze because somehow enough people heard "Some people can't have gluten" and interpreted that as "No one should have gluten"

Gotta be the "high noon duel" in western movies. That didn't happen much in the real wild west.
Citizens shooting at gangs during bank robberies? Yup.
Shootout at The OK Corral? Yup.
Lynching of accused criminals before a judge could come to town? Oh hell yes.
But that trope of lawman/outlaw facing off in the middle of the street for a prearranged gun duel just didn't really happen.
- Makes me wonder where the trope came from…
  People definitely used to do pistol duels at prearranged times, but maybe that fell out of favor in the West?
  
  Honestly almost all of it comes from a single duel Wild Bill Hicock had, and also a bunch of bullshit that a traveling huckster named Buffalo Bill Cody just sort of made up for fun in his touring wild west shows.
  
  Duels did happen from time to time in the 19th century. For example, California Senator David Broderick in 1859 became the only US Senator to die in a duel, and there's a difficult to validate tale of two French men in 1808 holding a gun duel in hot air balloons!
  
  Actually I have a history book about the history of ballooning called Aeronauts that I found at a thrift store. If I remember I'll see what that has to say about this tale because it does call out other largely fabricated tales as such
  But like most fictions, the fiction of Wild West duels contains some kernels of truth and certainly makes for great drama

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.
- As a parallel, I seem to recall that the surgery banter in MASH is actually pretty realistic.
  
  Nurse, can you close for me? No? Well, how about you open for me?
- 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."
  Dynamo Episode 5
- 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.
  
  Your company doesn't have a portal to hell in the basement?

L shaped blankets.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ModestyBedsheet
- You can't just leave a tvtropes link without a warning! Some never make it back.
- Hah, that's great. I'm going to be on the lookout now.

Person gets shot and they have to dig the bullet out to save them.
- But once the bullet is out, he's fine. The bullet was the problem all along.
  That's why they aren't hurt when the bullet goes straight through.
  
  Or they keep pressure on the wound without checking if there's an exit wound that is also leaking blood
- Don’t you need to get the bullet out before patching them up? I don’t remember ever seeing a movie where it’s implied that digging the bullet out is sufficient, only that it’s a necessary step.
  
  I think that digging the bullet out before you can patch up the wound would result in losing a lost of blood? I'm not sure but at least if you get stabbed or have an arrow shot into you, then you shouldn't remove it before you are in a place where you can receive proper medical care.

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.
- Fire sprinklers have two requirements: to be able to turn on immediately if they're ever needed, and to dispense something capable of extinguishing a fire. In order to accomplish this, the pipes that feed them are constantly, 24/7, full of water, providing constant pressure on the sprinkler head to be ready to feed it with water in case it ever needs to go off. These water pipes are generally not used for anything else, so the water does not tend to circulate. In fact, there's usually a sensor in them that detects if the water is flowing (and thus if any sprinklers have been triggered, providing somewhere for it to go) and activates the building's fire alarm. When a fire sprinkler goes off, the water that comes out has been sitting in that pipe (an iron pipe if you're lucky, a lead pipe if you're not) basically since the building was built.
  That stuff is NAS-T.
- What's crazy is that, for all the poundage that a war bow requires to pull, it's still less powerful than a small-caliber bullet. A breastplate will easily stop a clothyard arrow with a hardened bodkin point, and a .38 Spl will blow right through. I tried doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations a while back, and IIRC a .22LR has more energy at the muzzle of a 14" rifle barrel than a 160# bow could put into an arrow. (Someone needs to double check my math on that though.)

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.

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.

So many.
Normal people get slammed into a wall by monster, explosion or whatever, stand up and walk away. Buddy, you don't walk that off. People die or need months of recovery from less.
Don't get me started on the speed force. You do some napkin math and see the Flash is taking on a 1000G running in circles close to mach 2 without blinking and then gets knocked unconscious with a single punch in the next scene. Flash is not the only one of course.
And the lone inventor developing a fully conscious AI in some mountain cabin on an old laptop. It was clear that would never work and reality now shown us AI companies looking into nuclear powered data centers to speed up things.
- But also worth remembering that kid who made a nuclear reactor in his shed. Ai wasn’t around back then, but if it had been then, maybe, juuuust maybe….
  
  It never actually worked. He never got further than spewing radiation.
- NGL, The Flash is only wtf until he realizes he's next to godly in power. IMHO, supes're best consumed when they're post-humanist.
- Somewhat related is iron man. The suit can't protect him from g-forces. He would just be pulpy human goo in a can.
  That said, I feel silly pointing out anything to do with super hero's because they're not intended to be realistic.
  
  It's more about good writing. It's often said you're allowed to have one cheat. You have to be consistent about it and the rest of the rules of the universe still apply. But often enough in fiction the writers start breaking any rule or law of physics when the plot requires it instead of fixing the plot to follow consistent world building. It's lazy writing and bad for immersion. A lot of the tension in a story is from the characters overcoming limitations, not having limitations disappear whenever convenient.

The ones that really get me are the way they show execs at companies. The "look, this character is so bad ass at being an exec!". They always come off as so unrealistic and cringy.
I've swam in that ocean, and that's not how that shit works. Engineering too. In reality, it's always a team of engineers that get something done... It is NEVER some rich smart guy inventing stuff on his or her own in their super fancy workshop.
- Every exec I've known was either a good people manager, a founding member, has asaloads of money, or some combination thereof.
  Some of them were geniuses, but that actually made them worse at their jobs.
  
  How does being smart make you worse at a job? I mean sure if you only THINK you're smart like Elon the Husky Musk sure... but yeah..
- yeah but a script that sucks the balls of an executive is far more likely to be greenlit.
- And subordinates rarely balk at obeying illegal orders - and if they do they fold when there's a threat of firing or a vague offer of compensation, as if either would instantly persuade a person to risk prison.

The first time I remember absolutely losing my suspension of disbelief was at the end of the first Mission Impossible reboot where Tom Cruise puts an explosive on a helicopter he's hanging on the outside of that's flying behind a train through a tunnel, and the explosion completely destroys the helicopter and flings him onto the back of the train. Yeah, that helicopter (which probably couldn't be flying through a train tunnel to begin with) was made of far tougher material than Tom Cruise. Any explosion that destroyed it, would have turned him into a stain on the wall of the tunnel.
- Action movies get a pass from me. I love them. If it's good it's good if it's bad it's hilarious.
  
  Agreed! A good, campy action movie is great. The problem with Mission Impossible is that it otherwise took itself entirely seriously.
- If a future sequel revealed that Cruise was, in fact, turned into a stain on the wall of the tunnel and an alien has been masquerading as him ever since, it would be less ludicrous to me than Jim Phelps turning out to be a mole. I read that Peter Graves, who played Phelps in the TV series, turned down an offer to reprise his role when he learned of that plot twist.

I love scenes where a character hotwires a car by:
reaching under the steering wheel and pulling a panel off. It isn't held on by fasteners or anything, it's just like wedged in place.
A bunch of loosely coiled wires tumbles out. In front are two thicker wires that are cut, stripped and tinned.
The character strikes these two wires against each other like attempting to strike a match, mostly to make sparks.
The sound of a car engine turning over plays.
Climb in, shut the door, put it in gear and drive off.

Electrical shocks applied to asystolic hearts to restart them is a classic.
The shock serves to stop fibrillation and to induce a rhythmic firing of the neves, that's why it's called defibrillation. Fibrillation is random firing of the nerves, asystole is no firing.
If I recall correctly my father told me you use an injection of adrenaline for asystolic hearts. Kind of like in Pulp Fiction. Though I think injecting directly into the heart isn't the preferred method anymore.
- I watched a show talking about adrenalin and injecting it into the heart, the doctor was saying how it would be the worst place to try and go first because damage but also because you'd be more likely to hit a rib or puncture a lung then actually make it through the heart.

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.

I always think its funny how bullets never seem to penetrate anything in movies. Like, guy hiding behind a barrel? Nope, cant penetrate, even with a rifle. The newest Batman movie had me shaking my head as he shrugged off multiple rifle rounds to his armor.
Bullets are insanely dangerous and powerful. A .223 round can penetrate a solid brick wall pretty easily, and can destroy a cinderblock wall with some effort. Even if it doesnt penetrate, the amount of force applied is incredible. Plates designed to stop bullets have to be made in specific ways to make sure a bullet doesn't penetrate, but even with that plate, the sheer force of an impact can break bones.
- And notably, plates that do stop bullets often still only work once.
- Okay, so if we are going to give batman flack for having super-alloys, where do we stand on Tony Stark putting a reactor in his chest with no concernable heat sink. (He wears it without the suit)
  
  Simple, stark is a semi latent technomancer. His arc reactors might actually work, but the mini ones don't. They are effectively conductors for magic. They turn magic into electricity with zero heat output. This also explains the suits momentum damping capabilities, and why they can't be copied easily.
  
  What do you think the effective power generation and heat production is for whatever that reactor is producing, when not in a suit?
  If memory serves correctly, the entire outer shell is a round metal cylinder, so that's a fairly large surface area to transfer heat to the body. Tony might not need winter clothes if he's got a portable heater in the chest.
- So many movies show people getting into gun battles indoors, and they will jump behind a couch or flip over a coffee table and take shelter from a hail of bullets, like that thin furniture is going to stop anything.
  
  Just got reminded of the silencer gun battle scene in one of the John Wick movies. That was perhaps the most unrealistic thing I'd seen in those.
  
  It's can also be used to block the bad guy from seeing the good guy. If you don't know where to shoot, it's hard to hit your target.
- Also, among rifle calibers, .223/5.56 is quite weak on purpose. Many common rifles are far more powerful.
- Dirty Harry knew all about this when he shot the hijacker on the plane.
- Reminds me of a story I heard about a friend of a friend (so grain of salt and all) who worked as security at a nuke plant. They've got a well-stocked armory and he liked to borrow guns to shoot with in his back yard.
  He had brought a .50 cal rifle home and was shooting cans or something with a hill as a backdrop.
  Then the cops showed up. Turns out the bullets were going through his targets (assuming he was hitting them), then passing right through the hill and hitting a house on the other side whose occupants called the police because they thought someone was shooting at them from the hill.
  Not sure if anything came of it afterwards, though I remember he wasn't allowed to borrow guns from that armory anymore.
  
  then passing right through the hill
  unless it was a very small hill made mostly of weeds or some other vegetation, I strongly doubt it. sand/earth will stop bullets quite effectively.
  edit he may have shot over the hill though, perhaps? there's quite a high arc when shooting a bit further, which I assume he was doing with a .50 cal
- I recently watched Hunter-Killer, and one of the good guys was killed while swimming underwater and the bullets kept coming. They did it right at least in that sense
  
  Actually, MythBusters proved that one couldn't happen, unless the bullets were sub-sonic or low-powered and the diver was within 1 or 2 foot of the surface... water's just too dense and depletes the power. And something higher power just made a big splash and bits of shrapnel that didn't have much penetrating power.
- That last part is bullshit. If the force distributed across the plate were enough to break bones, then firing the rifle would dislocate the shoulder of the shooter.
  
  Just because a plate stopped a bullet, doesn't mean the plate then distributed that force evenly across it's whole surface. The bulge on the back side of an impacted plate doesn't form gently.
  
  The momentum is the same, the impulse (and therefore forces) are very different. The bullet is propelled down the barrel gradually - the force is spread through the entire time it takes the bullet to travel the length of the barrel, the reaction forces are applied to the stock gradually, and spread over the area of contact between the shooter and the gun.
  A bullet stopped by a vest/plate has a much larger impulse. The bullet needs to be stopped essentially immediately, rather than gradually slowed down over a length equivalent to a rifle barrel, otherwise it kills you. The force is also more concentrated, occuring over the cross-sectional area of the bullet, rather than over the entire contact surface with the rifle.
  
  Okay, neat. Fire a rifle with the stock held just in front of your floating ribs instead of welded to your shoulder and get back to us.

How night and day work above the Arctic Circle.
Movies and TV and stories talk about how there's 6 months of daylight and 6 months of darkness. That does not fucking happen. This is still part of storytelling to this day (I'm looking at you, Sweet Tooth season 3).
Days get stupidly long in the summer, and there's a while where the sun really doesn't go down. in the Winter days get stupidly short, and there's a while where it doesn't really come up all that much. But it's not 6 months of one and 6 months of the other.
(edited for clarity)
- The scientific movie 30 days of night lied to me????
  
  The farther beyond the arctic/antarctic circle you go, the longer the period of continuous night and day. Just above the circle it's like one day where the sun is up at midnight, barely. At the pole, it's quite a while.
- There's a few movies that get it mostly right. Wasn't it the entire plot of the movie 30 days of darkness? I think it was still too light in those last days depicted before darkness fell.
  
  I long for the days where movies would tell you it's night time but still actually keep it light enough that you can, y'know watch the movie
- (I’m looking at you, Sweet Tooth season 3).
  Tell me about it. And sunsets aren't from a bright day to a dark night. During winter "days" are permanent twilight, the sun being very very low all the time it's above the horizon, and during the summer, "nights" are dim because the sun is never that far below the horizon.
  Sweet Tooth had pretty much a countdown iirc. And then it went from 100% daylight to complete darkness in seconds.
  edit also i'm annoyed when people don't wear hats in the cold but iirc in Sweet Tooth they had pretty good winterclothing most of the time idk.
- Half year day, half year night only really holds on the poles I guess. And it goes paired with a long twilight in between.

When the computer hacker character clicks 8 keystrokes and says, "I'm in!"

Kingsman
Training scene where they shove a shower hose down a toilet and use it to breathe...
There would be no air (or even sewer gas) to breath in that case. Toilets work by raising the water level in the bowl above the water level in the S-bend/siphon. Since the room was full of water, those toilets would have been flushing constantly, and the whole pipe would be full of water.
Better(ish) solution. Use the body bags that they each had to fill out and place in their trunk/locker to capture an air bubble. That would at least give you some time to attack the door, or figure out how to drain the room.

Hacking. Each and every time it is part of a movie or TV series.
- The matrix power plant hack was the exception. In the movie, it's just a screen of code flying past. If you slow it down, it's a legit hack.
  Trinity checks the software version, to see it hadn't been updated. She then implements a real hack that that version was vulnerable to. It resets the admin password to a default, letting her log in as admin.
- It was fine in Mr Robot.
  
  the director made the show because he was tired of hacking not being done correctly in shows
- Hacking is used in plot the same way that magic is. That shows how much they care about making any realism into hacking or IT.
  
  Yeah, there was a TV show once where the plot of the episode was the theft of some new, important classified tech.
  In the last scene the bad guy drops their suitcase and this important, secret tech falls out.
  The prop master used vanilla, recognizable RAM chips. It annoyed me so much.
- [click clickity click] "I'm in!"

The film Under Siege II has some of the best hacking scenes and dialog.
Even at a young age, the line "This is the guy that hacked into the Pentagon with a laptop" made me WTF because unless you're brute forcing encryption, the kind of computer you use to backdoor a system is irrelevant.
- There's only one example I can think of where this isnt the case. I don't remember the whole story but I saw a YT video about this kid who got arrested for hacking Rockstar games. He ended up getting arrested and while in federal custody in some hotel room, he successfully hacked them again with a fucking amazon fire stick. After that he told the judge that we had no intention of stopping. Being under the age of 18, I don't think he really had any harsh consequences but good for him, that legend.
  Edit: so he was 18 during the second hack.
  
  There's only one example I can think of where this isnt the case. I don't remember the whole story but I saw a YT video about this kid who got arrested for hacking Rockstar games. He ended up getting arrested and while in federal custody in some hotel room, he successfully hacked them again with a fucking amazon fire stick. After that he told the judge that we had no intention of stopping. Being under the age of 18, I don't think he really had any harsh consequences but good for him, that legend.
  Edit: so he was 18 during the second hack. And GOT A LIFE FUCKING SENTENCE?!?!?!
- I once crashed my universitys time share servera with a Nintendo DS Lite. I think that’s worth something, but generally I absolutely agree.
  
  You! It was you!
  Halt! We have you surrounded!
  University Server Admin
- I guess, it's the precursor of this meme:
- To be fair most real world hacking has nothing to do with processing power, usually you just trick someone into giving you low level access and then escalate privaliges from there because even pentagon employees are prone to leaving their passwords written down on word documents once your inside the thinnestl ayer of security.. Not even exagerating there, some kids went to jail for hacking the pentagon via a games company which they got access to via some credentials on a laptop left unnatended at a comic con.
  
  https://xkcd.com/538/

"We got their hard drive!" Holds up a power supply.
And even if it was a hard drive, what were you going to do with it? You went in there guns blazing with no warrant after you knocked on the wrong door. The evidentiary chain is well and truly broken at this point. Nothing from that scene would be able to be entered into evidence.

Pouring gas over everything and lighting it by tossing a lit cigarette into the puddle. It does not work that way.
- So you do it with an unlit cigarette? takes notes for doomed insurance fraud attempt
- That one seems intentional. Teaching idiots the wrong way to arson.
  
  You think somebody committed to burning their ex's house or something down will douse the thing in gas, then give up when their lit cigarette does not ignite it?
- Or tossing an entire Zippo lighter into a pool of gasoline. Do you have any idea how much a good Zippo costs?!
- How should I burn things properly? 🤔

Holy moly this thread got a lot of comments! Is Lemmy growing up? Are we big now?

There’s a scene in Spider-Man: No Way Home where Tom Holland is fighting the Green Goblin. Goblin grabs Spidey, jumps with him, and then they both smash through the 23rd or so floor of the apartment building they’re in and they land on the floor below.
Sure, they’re both super strong but neither of them used their strength to push through the floor. They just jumped and reached no more than like a foot off the floor, implying that gravity pulled them both through the floor. Okay, so the floor was built poorly, but then why did falling 10+ feet from the 23rd floor to the 22nd floor not make them smash through the 22nd floor?
That movie’s a lot of a fun but that scene makes me upset lol

Hacker shit. Some lone genius passing through systems intended to be secure for militaries and governments. It's not about details being stupid, that's to be expected. It's about the very fact of power imbalance.
Random characters challenging militaries and governments and just "quickly finding" some qualified assistance in doing that. And winning. You don't. You are an amateur and they are professionals. And if you want to do that, you are likely already under personalized surveillance.
That last thing is a trope from a free society where some people on the top are bad. And fighting them you can find help and learn, because in some sense you are protected, and guaranteed privacy and safety. There are no such free societies on our planet right now. The closest you can get is probably to join Hezbollah or some mafia, that is, well-established powerful organizations.
On the contrary, Luke Skywalker taking a lucky shot at a vulnerability that a team of engineers and military men, all of which were high-level Imperial defectors, with support from many planets of what is the Star Wars alternative of Western Europe and North America, had found by analyzing space station's stolen blueprints, using computers and what not, is realistic. Similarly to the Empire (at that moment with kinda democratic Senate and all) being fine with anyone on the way being murdered trying to contain such high-value corpus of information.
Again, I love Star Wars so much. A lot of the materials written in AotC and RotS time describe very well, in my modest opinion, how the real world oppression really works and how you can't really escape evil or defeat it. The best you can do is survive till that evil dies on its own, but the realistic best is planting the seeds for that time.
In general everything showing fighting your enemy as something easy, impressing upon audience that if it didn't work out in a month, then you just give up and do something more pleasant, deceiving yourself.
At the same time the sheer extent to which personal brilliance and hard work and persistence can change the world is often downplayed in movies. Drastic changes made by characters are attributed to magic or being in some unlikely situation. But the whole reason for previously described power imbalance is that professionals perpetuate their knowledge and understanding every day, and if one's persistent, one can beat them.
Yes, I like fiction about justice and fighting evil.
- In Criminal Minds, there's a super hacker that can basically infiltrate any system at will and do impossible things (like simultaneously scanning every street cam to find a specific license plate). Government supercomputers with elite security are no match for her.
  Okay, I get it. This is a work of fiction and she's basically a mechanism to speed up the plot.
  In one episode they find some kid's password protected laptop. The super hacker goes "oh no, I can't hack that. It's running Anti-Hack OS! We need the password". The password ends up being plain text password that a brute force dictionary attack could break in seconds.
  I've never facepalmed so hard.
  
  I was thinking of the Bothan pilot in Wraith Squadron books (SW again, the less consistent part of it). 12 X-Wings drop out of hyperspace approaching a planet. One of the pilots is able to spend no more than 5 minutes to find out some pretty specific shit from governmental archives of that planet, listen to encrypted communications of the Imperials, whatever.
  It's worse than the Elder Wand in HP.
  In one episode they find some kid’s password protected laptop. The super hacker goes “oh no, I can’t hack that. It’s running Anti-Hack OS! We need the password”. The password ends up being plain text password that a brute force dictionary attack could break in seconds.
  Well, that's right. Thinking to install Anti-Hack OS is something only that kid can do. The govt is too stoopid.
- On the contrary, Luke Skywalker taking a lucky shot
  Man that's like the ONE THING that I totally give star wars a pass for. It wasn't a lucky shot. The design flaw was there, yes, but the targeting computer was never going to work. Red leader had a lock and it still didn't work. Wedge Antilles, the best non-Jedi starfighter pilot in the galaxy, expressed strong doubt at least two or three times. Luke had to use the force to destroy it, there was no other way. If you can suspend your disbelief to accept the existence of the force, it makes perfect sense in the context of the story. Fucking masterpiece!
  
  It would make sense even without the Force, because yes, we've seen that the targeting computer doesn't work.
  This is what's good with Star Wars too, the Force can be replaced with something like stoic philosophy without the rest of the story imploding.
- Luke Skywalker taking a lucky shot at a vulnerability that a team of engineers and military men, all of which were high-level Imperial defectors, with support from many planets of what is the Star Wars alternative of Western Europe and North America, had found by analyzing space station’s stolen blueprints, using computers and what not, is realistic.
  I'm guessing you haven't seen Rogue One. The architect of the death star was sympathetic to the rebellion and deliberately created the vulnerability of the reactor that needs only a single hit with a blaster to blow up the entire megastructure, sent a message to the rebellion explaining said flaw and instructing them to aquire the designs of the death star to identify where the reactor is so that they can exploit the flaw.
  Having been involved in large (software) projects this seems quite plausible that someone near the top could intentionally leave a backdoor in there and have it go unnoticed into live testing, especially with the mix of disciplines needed in constructing such a megastructure
  
  Disney stuff doesn't count for me.
  The "Death Star" novel does.
- Opinion on V For Vendetta?
  
  I don't remember much. When I watched it, the movie seemed stupid. That's all I remember.
  Maybe I'll re-watch it
- Wasnt there some 17 year old kid that hacked the FBI some decade ago?
  Professional IT security is fairly new.
  
  3 things should match for this to happen like in the movies:
  occasion, ability and need.
  Two of these can happen at the same time, all three - I dunno.

I think a good common one is explosions that throw people at least 10 feet without killing them. If the shockwave is strong enough to do that, isn’t it strong enough to tenderize and completely disable all of your internal organs as well?

I don't have a particular scene, but a here's a funny conversation I had with an acquaintance:
Huh, this thing takes just 12 volts. Could run it in a car.
Wait, a car's electricals are just 12 volts?
Yeah. The battery and most wiring around a car is 12 volts.
Wait.. then what about those scenes in movies where they torture people with car batteries?
Yeah, those are fake.
looking into the distance as the realization dawns on him Those movie directors deserve jail time.

Recently, I've been mindful of how long fights are in movies.
Sword fight? Fanning at each other, crossing and smacking swords. Maybe even walking around each other. I don't think that's how a real sword fight would look.
Fights where it's mostly talking. Talking and talking. Nobody would fight like that.
Fist fights without a smack and dead. It's fancy movement - only because of the shaky camera and cuts of course. Give me back Jackie Chan or smack them once and they fall over.
I also dislike noticing the wire-guided movements. Fast acceleration and you can see them balancing in the air lifted by wires. Wires removed after-the-fact, but it's such unnatural movement.
And of course, the classic gunfight where nobody hits anything.
Or any monster chase or fight. If a giant monster chases you it's faster and instant-kills you. But not in movies.
It's certainly prevalent.

In action films, serious injuries heal with just a few hours’ sleep, no recovery needed.

Two people are fighting and one gets control of the other. He then throws the person across the room instead of killing him.

The Iron fist show had me livid when the MC gets "voted" out by the board of the company the MC OWNS A MAJORITY OF!!

Basically any time someone playing a chef or cook on TV picks up a knife I fly into a rage.

Keanu Reeves with a sword, standing in the middle of a pile of bodies. Bad guy enters the room carrying a gun. Bad guy sees him and rather than shooting him from a safe distance, chooses to run towards him, still holding the gun out in front of him, shouting at him rather than shooting at him.
- The longer the bullet travels, the more bullet time you give him
- To be fair, in that world body armor seems to be both commonplace and extremely effective.

We just watched "The Trap" last night. There was a major pop concert that ended in time for family dinner time during daylight. In the concert, they were depicted having time to make multiple trips to the merch tables and concessions, and in one of those trips, they talked like it was an intermission to change the stage set between songs.

I hate to say it because so much of this show was actually really excellent and accurate but in the Chernobyl miniseries they totally did the "radiation is contagious" thing and it is just not true.
Things and people that are irradiated/hit by radiation in a situation like a reactor failure or contact with radioactive waste do not become radioactive. They can have radioactive particles on their clothing/skin or inside their body if they have ingested/inhaled radioactive material, but they are not emitting radiation themselves. Furthermore, a thin sheet of paper or cloth will stop the kind of radioactivity that would be emitted by such material, if it is on the outside of a person's body.
Anyways the point is that the woman whose husband was dying of radiation poisoning and then she went in and spent time with him did not lose her baby because she spent time with him. That's just not how it works.
Lots of environmental contamination-related stuff in movies is inaccurate but that one is the most recent I can think of.

When a character wakes up in the hospital.
They've been out for three days. They're obviously in real bad shape, every time they move they grunt.
Then they just rip out the IV and pulse monitor. But not any of the ekg wires. And then just leave.
Good luck getting down the hallway in that shape.

Quiet conversations on airplanes and dance floors as if there's no background noise.

or when someone runs through airport security in seconds to catch a flight. In real life, security lines, tickets, and checkpoints would definitely slow that down

About 9/10 court scenes a lawyer walks around the well and doesn't get beaten with a baton, really annoys me.
- I’ve heard this said, can you verify for me where the lawyer stands?
  If his position is truly still behind his table, what if the witness/jurors are hard of hearing?
  
  you just don't enter the well without asking permission. it's all behind the desk. it's one of the most rampant tv law tropes that just isn't realistic
  
  Then the lawyer asks permission before going anywhere. But if a witness or juror is hard of hearing, they'll have aids/accomodations provided.
  
  They get a microphone. In the old timey days and some low funding courts the lawyers have to be very good and loud speakers.

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