Article created by: Viktorija Ošikaitė
We all know that unless we’re watching a particularly well-researched and historically accurate documentary that the things featured in films and TV shows simply aren’t real. The writers and directors have to take certain creative liberties to create drama and tension and move the story along.
However, once you know something to be factually false, it can take you out of the story. Redditor u/Eatar sparked an interesting discussion on r/movies when they asked everyone to use their technical knowledge to ‘ruin’ popular movie tropes for everyone else. Scroll down to see what they shared. But be warned, Pandas, you might not be able to look at fire alarms, chloroform, silencers, and courtroom drama the same ever again!
“Enhance!”
Anytime they take some grainy footage or picture then the tech specialist taps a few buttons, zooms in, and makes the license place of the car in the parking lot 2km away fully legible. Like pulling the pixels from thin air.
That’s not how that works, that’s not how any of that works.
My sister is an architect and absolutely hates the spy trope of maneuvering through the air vents. air vents are designed to hold air, not people. they’d certainly collapse under the weight of fully grown, muscular man.Plus, even if it didn't collapse, it would be like crawling through a drum kit. The bad guys would hear you two floors away.
The obligatory corset lacing scene in any period piece, particularly if the woman has to hold a bed post while she's being tight laced, PARTICULARLY if she's not wearing anything under the corset. These scenes are media shorthand for 'look how oppressed women were back back then' and perpetuate a lot of myths. For one, very few women tight-laced their corsets, only those who were extremely fashionable (on this note, you also shouldn't believe every antique photo of wasp-waisted women you come across - folks edited their photos back then too). For another, tight-lacing only even became possible part way thru the 1800's when metal grommets started being used for eyelets - in previous decades and centuries, these would be hand-stitched, and would rip if you even tried to tight-lace (here's looking at you, Pirates of the Caribbean). For a third, ALL women wore these garments for back and bust support, stomach support (when you spend a lifetime bearing kids, this comes in clutch), and garment support (wearing layers of petticoats, skirts, etc. would be extremely uncomfortable if hung directly off your waist). And finally, they were NEVER worn directly against your skin! They'd have been worn over a chemise, which would protect your skin from rubbing, and protect the corset from your body oils since it's a difficult item to wash.
Against popular opinion, an explosion will not “blow you to safety”. You are going to be dead, my dude. A shockwave can cause rupture of your lungs in an instant as well as where any gas pockets in the body live. Gut, sinus cavities, ears. Thermobaric shockwaves can leave a spider web of fractures in the skull. Long story short, if you’ve been thrown by a blast, you may not be dead now but you will be soon.
A ton of foley effects are basically just things we've been trained to expect earlier use in other movies. Swords don't make *shing* sounds when they're just being waved through the air (or even when pulled out of most types of scabbard), and even when hitting other swords they make more of a clacking sound most of the time. Punches are sometimes more realistic but a lot of movies use foley from smashing watermelons. Real eagles make sounds more like seagulls (the standard foley sound is a hawk). The MGM lion roar is actually a tiger sound. My favorite: a lot of animal sounds in movies are actually just Alan Tudyk.
Electricity has no idea what color wire it is flowing through. While there are standards colors for certain things (Black and red come to mind), trusting the mad bomber to follow any kind of color scheme is never done.
There are virtually never surprises in court, and 98% of the work is done before you ever get in front of a judge. Most court events other than trials are minutes long. Shout out to my homies who drive an hour or more to attend a five minute status conference.
Gun silencers don't magically make bullets completely quiet.
Chloroform takes ages to have an effect. You wouldn’t just touch a rag doused in it to their face and then they’re out … you’d be there a good 10 minutes.
Duct tape is ridiculously easy to remove from a mouth by pushing it outward with the tongue. Once it is removed, it is very hard to retape. Every hostage movie gets this wrong.
Rifle bullets go through the trunk, the backseat, the drivers seat, the driver/passenger, and out the front of the car(if they don’t hit something particularly chunky in the engine bay, like the engine block).
So when the good guys are in a car chase and their trunk has 700 bullet holes in it, the occupants of the vehicle are dead.
Typically, a cigarette thrown into a puddle of gasoline will simply go out rather than igniting the gasoline.
Babies are born with an umbilical cord attached. And healthy babies look purple for a few seconds.
The reactor is going critical.
A reactor loves being critical. It's running perfectly fine when it is critical and is probably the safest state it can be. Most of it's safety features are designed around it being critical.
A bullet wound to the shoulder isn’t just a flesh wound. Taking a bullet to the shoulder isn’t something you can “work through”. Something like that will have you rolling around in agony unable to focus, or you go into shock. Also bullets don’t always pass through, they can ricochet off bone and travel around the body. A bullet can enter your leg, run up the inside of the body and shread every organ it comes into contact with. They have previously found bullets in the brain that entered via the foot too.
Dart guns do not instantly incapacitate anyone. The chemicals used for immobilization take anywhere from 3 to 20 minutes to work.
Computer geek breaks into super protected mainframe trope. Hacking is social/psychological skill these days. Nerdy guy from mums basement can't “hack” into NASA mainframe. I would say that 95% of “hacking” is ordinary phishing.
Gasoline has a shelf life. If the apocalypse was a few years ago, the gas that is left isn't going to work so great anymore.
Not a mechanic, but those scenes/schemes where the villains cut the break lines and the hero only discovers this while driving down the highway at full speed or down a hill towards a crowded area?
Unless you're driving a manual, good luck trying to get out of your garage and getting into reverse or drive without your foot on the brake. Cutting the break line would pretty much brick your car these days and inconvenience you.
A firewall cannot be “87% down.”
Train brakes apply when there is an air hose separation. So if our hero cuts a train car full of bad guys from the train as soon as the air hose separates the train will have air brake trouble and brakes will apply or the train will have issues at the very least. Locomotives also have a dead man switch so if there’s no one behind the controls the train will apply brakes once it’s tripped.
