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.

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.

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.

When the computer hacker character clicks 8 keystrokes and says, “I’m in!”

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.

People driving straight on the highway need to move the wheel around at all times to stay straight. Also, the drivers can look away from the road for like 10 seconds without it being a huge issue that would otherwise be scary and dangerous.

Where in countless mystery/thriller stories bad guys arrange meets in huge open deserted buildings, to be uninterrupted. In the real world, the place will securely locked and gated, or multiple houseless people will have already moved in there.

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.

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

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

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.

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

One that annoys me is “Oh, you can’t pay for your food, you work for the restaurant now till you’re paid off!”

Getting past the absurd number of Labor Laws and Sanitation Regulations we’re violating with that set-up, in addition to how badly this is pissing off of the union if the restaurant happens to be unionized…

Most modern restaurants have dish washing machines minimizing the need for bus boys.

Additionally, there’s a little thing called job training that typically has to be done. You don’t just throw a mop at a guy and tell them to get to work, even if they’re experienced each place has their own way of doing things. It’s why it’s actually really hard to get fired in real life, laid off sure, but actually fired? Unless you’re just THAT incompetent… Cause these things take time and money.

And because you didn’t do any training, all your deadbeat patron has to do is cut his hand trying to dry off a knife and he’s not only paid off, but he’s gonna own the fucking joint when his lawyer hears about this shit.

So what DOES the establishment do? Well it depends, but the most common scenario I’ve heard is that they take some form of collateral until you come back another day to pay them, and that’s usually for a fancy restaurant. For most places though you’d pay before you even got your food making this a non-issue.

That’s the most common one, there are some that are less common but still get on my nerves.

It could make sense if it’s a long time ago when the population is much lower, there aren’t as many labor laws, but I think even by the 60’s this scenario would be bizarre if it actually happened. I could see it happening in modern day, but it’d have to be a very specific set of circumstances

1. Easy Sex Change - Now the name for this might be somewhat dated because no one refers to it as a “Sex Change Operation” anymore, but I can’t think of a better name for it. Basically there’s this idea in fiction that you can just go into any hospital looking like Fred Flintstone, and come out the same day looking like Pamela Anderson in her prime.

Medical Science does not work that way

The Transgender Healthcare standards wouldn’t let it happen that quickly as you need doctor’s notes (Hell I’m Post-Op for the better half of a decade and I’m still trying to get a note for a purely cosmetic boob job)

Doctors actually trained to do Genital Reconstruction Surgery are extremely rare, nearest one to me is three states away, and I’m not even sure he’s still alive because that was 8 years ago and he was older than dirt.

Genital Reconstruction only changes what you’ve got going on down there, and until very recently wasn’t covered by most insurance. All the other changes? You have to do estrogen for years and hope for the best.

The body can’t recover that quickly (I literally had to spend the better part of a morning learning how to walk again after being bedridden for two to three after that… till then my body was still healing and I was basically immobilized… also having to learn to pee was weird. Trust me you don’t wanna be in a situation where you really have to pee but literally don’t know how because the functionality of your genitals has been reversed.)

Admittedly I’m seeing it less and less as the idea of transpeople existing is mainstream now, but from the perspective of a transwoman like myself it’s the trans equivalent of someone asking a homosexual male how they know which man’s penis will open up to accept the other’s.

2. Ordering food at a doctor’s office - I’ve not seen this too often, but I have seen it more than once, which is enough to baffle me.

3. The Death Card - I just want a script writer to do a scene where someone draws Death, gets super scared, has it explained to them that the card isn’t that bad. As it refers to death in a spiritual sense, meaning not the cessation of existence, but rather the continuous cycle of rebirth… So it’s actually referring to change… And then immediately they draw the Inverted Tower (Which actually does mean that you’re in for a bad time). I’m just surprised I haven’t seen this joke done before…

Wait a second…

Simpsons did it - https://youtu.be/M-dButYcv14

Though to be fair, I think this is one everyone who isn’t in Hollywood knows at this point. But as someone who actually practices Tarot it is annoyed.

4. The movie Clerks 2 - Look I love Kevin Smith, I think he does great work, I’m even one of the only people who love Clerks 3… but… I can’t just point to one thing in this film. Pretty much everything about Clerks 2 requires a lot of suspension of disbelief as it’s obvious that Kevin Smith is too rich in 2006 to know how fast food joints work at the time.

The part where they close up to a Donkey Show definitely stands out, as chain franchised Fast Food restaurants are not only too busy for that to be plausible unlike a random gas station in the boonies (like in the first movie), but it’s 2006, while it’s not as common of a practice now, most McDonald’s/Taco Bells/Wendy’s of this era would have been 24 hours.

5. Video Games in general - If movies are to be believed, video games now are basically the same as they were in the 70’s. Atari sound effects, high scores, limited lives, games having “levels”… When in reality games have moved on, most games don’t really test the player’s skill so much as tell you a story through in an interactive medium. So your progress isn’t really based in how many points you’re getting, but rather how far in the story you’ve gotten. Lives aren’t really a thing anymore for the simple fact that if your streaming platform gave you an overly tough quiz half-way through the movie about things you saw in previous scenes, and punished you by making you re-watch the whole thing up until you got to the quiz again. No one would watch movies ever again.

Actually it’s become a bit of a problem for the market as too many gamers are becoming annoyed that games are too much like movies funnily enough…

Now Mobile games play more like classic arcade games, sure… but in movies they’re clearly playing consoles. Heck even re-releases of games that did have limited lives and a scoring system (Sonic Origins for example) took them out to modernize the experience. Which is kind of a good thing because older games were artificially difficult to prevent you from beating the game over the weekend as a method to discourage rental services.

In the early 2000’s, sure I guess I can buy that. Gaming was a niche hobby, good to dumb it down I guess. But nowdays it’s considered weirder to not play games than to play them, so I don’t know how this mistake keeps getting made.

I wouldn’t be surprised if my grandmother had a fucking Steam account to play TF2 Themed Solitaire on. Because the oldest guy in my writing group has one to play Civilization and he’s fucking 80.

6. Ditching a cop - In movies if you get in trouble and police are after you, just run away! You’ll ditch them and whatever you did will be forgotten about. In reality: Warrants for arrest exist, the charge for resisting arrest exists, and so do body cams… So, no, not really.

My final one is

The Monitor is the computer! The tower is just decoration! - But, this cliche has vanished thanks to computer use becoming more common.

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!

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.