Whether intentionally or not, what do movies depict or present wrong a lot of the time?
Your (US) military: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military–entertainment_complex
Yeah i’ve heard ab9utthat. Quite funny. I suppose there are some arguments to be made in favour of it
The relaxed position of mammalian eyelids leaves them open. Muscles must contract for the eyes to be shut. Dead creatures cannot contract their muscles so their eyes remain open after they die.
You cannot shut their eyes for them by closing their eyes with your hand. Morticians place contacts in cadaver’s eyes while preparing the body for a wake. Those contacts grip the inside of the eyelids so that they remain closed.
This is why some cultures have funerary traditions in which objects are placed over the eyes.
TL;DR: you and your loved ones won’t close their eyes when they die.
This is a really big one. I have to revise all of my heroic self insert fantasies where i cover up a dead person’s eyes
Like when you’re at the bank and a bank robber shoots a bunch of people and then you jump out from cover and start covering all the corpses eyes super fast.
I don’t remember well if it was NakedGun, Loaded Weapon or Hot Shots where the eyes of a body stayed open until it was hit in the face.
Loudness of gunshots. Every action hero would be deaf.
Archers being told to “hold”. Nobody’s holding a +100lbs warbow.
Sprinklers. In the vast majority of cases they react to heat - not smoke. They only go off individually rather than all at once and the water inside the pipes is black ink-like rust water sludge, not clear tap water.
Also another plumbing related: you don’t need a huge wrench under the sink and drains are not pressurized so there’s no water spraying anywhere when you mess with the p-trap.
Also archers being told to “fire”
as firing didn’t exist until gunpowder, the instruction wouldn’t make sense. Like telling a soldier now to “activate the positronic tacyons!” instead of “fire”
Loose!
Also they didn’t really do massive coordinated volleys
Sex and relationships in action movies.
The whole “hot chick gets horny for the hero after a traumatizing couple of hours” thing gives a pretty messed up view of relationship building.
Or as comedian Kyle Kincaid said, the idea that the action hero could still get it up.
This one definitely turned me off the first Terminator movie. I mean I know it’s critical to the plot but it still makes me roll my eyes.
The 80s and 90s were rife with that trope. I don’t know if modern action flicks are as bad.
I remember Speed made a joke about this at the end. A crack about “Relationships built on life threatening traumas don’t last” or something lol
And it was proven by Speed 2 I guess.
Cops being the good guys.
Imagine an evil terrorist organization coming into the picture, and it’s up to REAL COPS to stop them.
And like real cops, they end up taking a detour to Walmart, where a woman was accused of stealing so they pull out their guns and kill a baby.
Oh is this too real? My bad.
Honestly, watch any crime documentary and you realize how often cops are absolutely incompetent.
I like watching suspect interviews, all the cops follow the same script, if people would just shut up and ask for the lawyer far fewer crimes would be solved.
I tell my kids to treat cops like vampires, never let them in the house and sticking to your rights is garlic to them.
Cops are your friend (remember we’re talking to children here) up until the moment you are accused of a crime. If they think you’re involved in something, stop talking and ask for a lawyer!
Nah, cops are not your friend, I’m a 50 something white male, I have called the cops 3 times in my life.
When I was 15 I found a guitar in the woods, cop did everything he could to pin the theft on me, even searched my house.
Late 30s some kid stole my sons bike, we knew who did it but the cops just said well we didn’t see it happen so we can’t do anything.
At 50 a friend attempted suicide, I called an ambulance, cops got there first, walked right past my unconscious friend and started poking around the house.
I raised my kids to stay out of trouble and stay away from cops.
Fair enough. Keep the dogs in and the cops out!
Wow, that’s a pretty sweeping statement. I know some cops, and let me tell you, I don’t need to watch a documentary to know that they are incompetent.
I think they were basically as decent as possible in The Perfect Neighbor, unfortunately. I could be wrong, though.
Nah you’re probably not wrong haha. I’m sure there are good examples. But for the most part all I hear and watch is absolutely terrible detective and police work.
Hacking.
tap tap tap I’m in.
Honourable mention is NCIS Dual keyboard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQYears back, I remember watching the Wargames scene where the computer was trying to “guess a passcode”. Which it was doing remotely. Determining one digit at a time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGNBdjVO04Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7qOV8xonfY
I said, “This is completely ridiculous. That’s not how any kind of real world authentication system works.” Dramatic, yes. Realistic? No, never happen.
Some years later, there was a severe remote exploit for the filesharing feature for Windows 95 and 98 systems. Not only had the Microsoft person who designed the thing stored the password to a share in plaintext instead of hashing it, which would have precluded this from working, but there was also a bug where the server’s authentication system could be sent a malformed message and only validated as many bytes of the password as had been specified in the authentication message. Someone promptly went out and wrote an exploit to brute-force access to a share by just asking it to only validate the first byte, try each, get in in at most 256 tries. I look at that and say “yeah, but it also exposes the next byte of the password itself, and those probably persist even after the thing is patched, not to mention the potential for credentials reuse for other things”. I go modify Samba’s smbclient to iterate through the thing, extract the password one byte at a time. I message a buddy who has a Windows 98 machine on the network, “hey, can I break into your machine for a sec?” He comes up “Uh, okay. What are you up to, tal?”
I fire it up and we’re sitting there watching his password be printed on my Linux box’s screen, one letter at a time. I said, “This is exactly like that scene in Wargames that I said could never, ever happen in real life, was just Hollywood. Guess that showed me.” He says, “fucking Microsoft”.
Honourable mention is NCIS Dual keyboard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQTop hacking scene of all time!
I somehow didn’t see that episode. But now that I’ve seen that scene, it is certainly one of the all time UNIXest of Systems
There’s something called FSN for file systems, and this here is a guide to make it work like the IRIX system in the movie. https://github.com/unixmonkey/fsn_jurassic_park
I think that’s just WAY too cool. :D
That’s the gold standard for hacking, by far. But this also deserves a mention for pushing the bounds of technology, way ahead of it’s time: https://youtu.be/fQGbXmkSArs
Thank you for this nugget of GLORIOUS stupidity!
You may enjoy the full 30 min movie: https://youtu.be/bS5P_LAqiVg
It’s a goldmine of insanity!
I belive I might just!
Thank you again
FYI the ?is= part of the yt link is extra tracking data for google. You can drop it and the link still works
Righto, fixed it. Thanks!
Cute Asian girl with green hair and a side ponytail: “I’m in!”
Six keystrokes later: “Ok I pulled up the floor plans to the building, disabled the cameras and unlocked all the doors.”
that’s a lot of cuts
Not as many as what’s his face jumping a fence in one of the Taken films.
what’s his face
Leapin’ Neeson!
One man’s Linux is another man’s OS/2.
Telephone etiquette. They just start yapping and then hang up without saying goodbye.
There’s a common theme in movies — since you can only hear one side of a phone conversation — of a character repeating a lot of what the other person said for the audience’s benefit. I’ve seen some example conversations written out showing both sides that show how ludicrous such a conversation would have to be.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RepeatingSoTheAudienceCanHear
Yeah, Ice Cream.
phone rings, main character picks it up
“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.” - MC
“Uhh, I’m just calling about your extended car warranty…” - poor bastard
My mother’s husband does that shit though. Never says goodbye, just hangs up the phone and I’m left annoyed again.
Most dishonest about? Hard to say, since movies are dishonest about virtually everything. (As escapism, that’s what we want.) But a big one that comes to mind is proceedings in courts of law.
In real life, a court case is excruciatingly procedural, spread out over months of correspondence and brief hearings, and the vast majority of them never go to trial. And for the few that do go to trial, there are never any intense, witness-stand confrontations, or inspiring speechifying by the plaintiff or defendant. No attorneys shouting, “OBJECTION!”, across the room.
I know of two friends of a friend, one of whom signed a reverse mortgage on his house with some scammers who promised that he could live the rest of his life there, but then who turned around and filed to evict him. Clearly influenced by dramatic courtroom scenes in TV and movies, he seemed to think that “court” meant that he would be able to show up and give the judge a moving soliloquy about being a righteous, disabled veteran, and prevail. The judge did his level best to help the guy out by almost insisting on appointing a guardian ad litem (free attorney!), but he refused. (Sadly, he died before it went to trial, and the scammers kept the house.)
The other one got sued by a credit card company over a charge that was obviously bogus (i.e. from a swimming pool contractor in eastern Europe, which is just who you’d call in the midwestern U.S.), but they had the same mental script: Show up in the courtroom and speechify to the judge. They didn’t even respond to the summons and complaint, and the company won by default judgement.
It’s maddening.
I sat on the jury for a murder trial last year (maybe 2). It was impressive how inept both the defence and prosecution seemed and how flat out sloppy it all felt.
I had the same observation on an assault case.
The story Foxfire, Esq on Royal Road is written by a lawyer, and goes into all kinds of detail about the processes they go through, and just how long things take.
Also goes into a little detail about what kind of legal adjustments the system makes for superheroes, because it’s a superhero legal drama :p
Never heard of it, but it sounds interesting. Thanks!
It’s amazing just how stupid people are
How big a house an average person can afford.
Another version of this - how big an apartment/house an artist can afford.
Not if you presume they have rich parents.
Yes, and how nice it is, and how ckean it is, and how littke their csr breaks down and how sparkly and well maintained or their workplsce is, or how brilliant their job is despite being an “average, underdog hero”
How big a house an average person can afford doesn’t necessarily precisely track how big a house the average person actually purchases, mind.
I’m so very sorry I set off your well technically trigger.
Hacking.
That’s probably just a fancy gui skin over a boring port scanner and a bash script testing some 0 days.
$ apt show hollywood Package: hollywood Version: 1.21-1.1 Priority: optional Section: games Maintainer: Dustin Kirkland <kirkland@ubuntu.com> Installed-Size: 2,418 kB Depends: byobu, tmux Recommends: apg, atop, bmon, bsdextrautils, ccze, cmatrix, htop, jp2a, plocate | locate, moreutils, openssh-client, speedometer, tree Homepage: https://hollywood.computer/ Download-Size: 2,288 kB APT-Sources: http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian trixie/main amd64 Packages Description: fill your console with Hollywood melodrama technobabble This utility will split your console into a multiple panes of genuine technobabble, perfectly suitable for any Hollywood geek melodrama. It is particularly suitable on any number of computer consoles in the background of any excellent schlock technothriller.
I want a realistic hacking movie, and I know how it should be done:
In plot, it needs to be an ensemble cast heist movie a la Ocean’s Eleven. But it should have a “this isn’t serious” tone similar to Down Periscope. Because it’s about a penetration testing company. They’re hired to do a full physical and digital security audit on some large company, so then we follow the crew of law abiding computer nerds and burglars as they plan and perpetrate a series of hacks and attacks on this company.
The stakes if they get caught are they hand a letter of authorization to the security team, say “good job” and report to the company that hired them that their security in that department is good, so even though they’re taking their job seriously there isn’t really any tension and they maintain a goofy sense of humor.
And you’re in luck, Jayson Street and Deviant Ollam have already pretty much entirely written this, just watch their defcon talks. Get those two guys on either side of a coffee table with a bottle of fine whiskey and you’ll have your screenplay before the bottle’s empty.
It’ll never get made though because Master Lock would sue you for even trying. You couldn’t make it without completely obliterating Master Lock.
Distances in space.
Everything is further away that you can possibly imagine.
Warp 9 to the nearest wormhole.
The Voyagers, by some measures, haven’t even left the solar system, and they’ve been going for decades
It’s amazing that it hasn’t collided with anything severe enough to end its research all these years…
That’s because the space between things is enormous.
Most of the universe is just hydrogen gas, really small particles really far apart.
Something big enough to make a difference hitting Voyager would be a staggeringly rate event.
We assume all of that.
We really don’t know how common objects are between stars. We’ve observed a couple of interstellar visitors passing through our system, old asteroids from origins unknown. But we can only track the really large ones. We can see mid sized objects when they come very close to earth, but we can’t track small objects at all, we literally have no idea how much of that exists in deep space. (Or for the most part, in our own solar system)
Still, you can see just from the evidence that our deep space probes have never really (hit) anything, that it would in fact be a quite rare event. It’s just hard to say how rare.
Like a single grain of dust should be enough at those speeds
aaaaand that’s why we will NEVER reach 99% c
Dust at that speed would be CATASTROPHIC.
I like Alistair Reynolds’ Revelation Dpace take on it.
Massive ice shields, long thin ships to minimize cross section.
Occasionally ships just go poof.
That’s why I don’t believe space travel will ever be as easy as depicted in shows like Star Trek. I cannot believe the human body can withstand such speeds. But I could be wrong. A lot of current technology, I would have said was impossible a few decades ago
The human body can stand very fast speeds, but it can’t cope with acceleration. To reach high speed you have to accelerate HARD. Otherwise it’s weeks and months just to get moving quickly. And don’t get me started on slowing down when you get there…
And speed is relative to point of view. If you look at an airplane from the ground it moves pretty fast but for the people on board their reference is the plane itself and they’re pretty much stationary. And, similarily to airplane, when craft speed or direction changes the force required affects to people on board too and that’s where limits of the human body come up pretty quickly.
Acceleration at one gravity is 9.81ms-1 which is about 35km/h per second. That would take about a year to reach close to the speed of light.
You’d then need to spend the same amount of time slowing down.
So to get to our nearest stellar neighbour (alpha centaurii 4.3 LY distant) you still need to coast for about 2.3 years in the middle of the journey.
This is all assuming you can provide that much thrust constantly for two years.
We just need to discover astrophage.
See The Expanse if you want to see this in action at speeds significantly less than c.
Edit: Even for just getting around in the solar system, they had to magic up some chemicals to allow the human body to withstand deceleratory g-forces strong enough to keep travel times short enough to not completely wreck the narrative.
Isn’t that what “inertial dampeners” supposedly address?
I wish they expanded on that in the Halo lore. They have these “orbital drop pods” that contain one soldier and are launched at ridiculous speeds towards the ground for quick battlefield insertion. They never address the sudden decrease in velocity, not a single line of dialogue mentions something like an “inertial dampener”. It’s odd because other systems are typically introduced or hinted at in dialogue, so as to ground the story I guess. (slipspace most notably being their version of FTL travel)
They do slow down after a bit:
Once nearing the ground, drop pods activate a drag chute (more formally termed a “Drogue Panel”[10]) formed from the upper-most panels. The chute deploys and begins to slow down the pod’s descent. Once about 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) from the ground, a series of computer-controlled retrothrusters engage and rapidly decelerate the pod such that it can impact safely.
Also most (not all) drop pod deployments are used by specialized troop like ODST or spartans:
Of these, the UNSC are particularly reliant on the use of drop pods thanks to the aptly-named Orbital Drop Shock Troopers; specialised shock troops who specialise in the use of drop pods to insert behind enemy lines and conduct special missions.[7][8] Although the ODSTs are the primary users of drop pod insertions in the UNSC, both Spartans and regular Marine forces may also use them.[9]
Right, but the way they’re depicted in the games doesn’t seem nearly enough of a slowdown not to crush the pilot… they would have to slow down to… what, 10m/s to be safe ?
I see your point, but to give that particular game scene plenty of benefit of the doubt: that pod transports a spartan. It is possible that he intensionally disabled the slow deceleration, because he can handle the impact.
Yea spartans are supposed to be quite sturdy I reckon. I haven’t read the books but I heard they regularly do crazy shit in them
Well their way around it in Star Trek is to say that the ships aren’t moving at fantastic ftl speeds. They’re warping space to make the distances between those points shorter, and then traveling at a reasonable speed across that (briefly) shorter distance. So they don’t need to expose humans to extreme g forces.
Warp drives are loosely based on a real theory, an Alcubierre drive, but as far as I know, while the idea is mathematically sound, it’s practically quite impossible. They would require some unfathomable amounts of energy to operate as well as matter with negative mass (which is not a thing).
One of my favorite sci-fi books has the main character going through the thousands of paper files stored in his space ship.
But computers still work with our current understanding of physics, I’m far from being an expert but without magic I don’t see a way for faster then light or time travel to work.
Movies and shows about legal disputes rarely show how long and dragged out they usually are
Imagine being stuck in a theater for 6 years
I have a coworker whose divorce proceedings have been dragging for years now :(
the classic : no cleanup after sex
Also how everyone is like wrapping their entire body up in sheets to get up from the bed. As if they weren’t literally just fucking lol
Yes and i think this would be a healthy thing to show.
Absolutely.
characters awkwardly rolling up toilet paper and changing the bedsheets for 10 minutes
This made one scene in the Fallout TV series very effective.
Explosion and gun sounds in spaaaaceeee!
Gun sounds in general. All those action heroes are deaf after that indoors shootout
MWOP
Ok, Archer!
mawp… mawp…
“Would you like me to wait while you answer that?”
–Steve Carell as Agent Maxwell Smart, after having a training pistol shot right next to his ear in a prior scene.
(Goofily enough, that scene features a slow motion CGI bullet flying through the air… With the casing still on lmao)
Bruce Willis would agree
Running over a cliff and only start to fall once realizing that you just ran over a cliff.
That’s not real, you fall immediately.
Have you ever tried?? I think it could be real
*points a finger at Loony Tunes for starting it*
