Whether intentionally or not, what do movies depict or present wrong a lot of the time?
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 :(
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*
Explosion and gun sounds in spaaaaceeee!
Gun sounds in general. All those action heroes are deaf after that indoors shootout
MWOP
Ok, Archer!
“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
Pulling people out of a burning building. In reality the smoke and fire is so bad, you ain’t seeing shit, not like the clear visibility like they show in the movies. And I spoke to a firefighter who’d been doing it for 35 years. The guy was teaching fire safety at my workplace. He said he responded to thousands of burning buildings and the number of times anyone’s been saved out of a burning building? Exactly zero. That always stuck with me.
The heat alone is off the fucking charts, too. These are 1,100-1,500F. Like trying to walk through an oven only 3 or 4x hotter.
Though I fully agree with you i do recall this youtube video from a few years ago of a guy running back into his burning home to save his dog and he got him out alive.
If you know exactly where you’re going, and the path is not itself in flame, and the residual heat+smoke have not yet rendered both your path and your patient’s current location unsurvivable, then it is possible.
The movie trope of covering your mouth with a rag and walking through rooms which are actively on fire, trying to find someone who has been inside that same room getting asphyxiated and/or cooked for several minutes is most definitely not real.
Romantic relationships. Way too much stalking and abuse of power. Far too many very large age gaps. All that stuff.
The age gap thing is gross. We need to get some of these people in a cold shower.
Find me a romantic comedy that doesn’t depict either of the two leads being psychotic or felonious.
Suppressed weapons. Shit is still loud, anyone anywhere near it will hear it. Also, when a bullet hits a person or any other surface the impact sound is loud as well.
Hitting people with beer bottles. You take a beer bottle to the head and you’re probably done for.
It’s not as consistent as your point about the silencer but also people absolutely both can 1) keep going after being shot, getting hit once and instantly, silently, being down for the count isn’t that realistic and 2) a lot of people haven’t actually experienced real pain to understand how bad real pain is you don’t get shot and just suck air through your teeth tie a piece of fabric around it tightly then act totally normal, pain can be physically and mentally disabling, especially after a few minutes and the endorphins wear off. I understand shooting people to have them fall down and start screaming bloody murder while also trying to scramble to shoot you back isn’t necessarily good story telling but if it was part of story telling I think a lot of shootings would be skipped in plot lines
- a lot of people haven’t actually experienced real pain to understand how bad real pain is you don’t get shot and just suck air through your teeth tie a piece of fabric around it tightly then act totally normal
Tbh, it depends on the person. I’ve broken a finger before, and while it hurt like hell I didn’t scream in pain. I was silent while thinking oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck in my head while trying to get to safety.
That being said, once the adrenaline wore off I had signs of shock. I couldn’t stand for long before getting tunnel vision
I tore an Achilles tendon once, and for the first 20 minutes, I was still able to walk, but I was literally blacking out. I didn’t feel much pain, but my vision just kept getting dark. When I stopped walking, my vision returned. The pain came afterward 😶
I’ve had a double lung transplant with no epidural, I did physical therapy on ECMO, real pain is mentally disabling. I’ve broken both my arms, the first one I sat for 40 minutes before decoding I should go to urgent care, the other arm I drove myself there. Once you cross your personal threshold for pain you’re more animal than human.
Sounds like CF. I knew a chap who also had a lung transplant after spending a week on ECMO. I can’t even imagine what you both went through.
I think listening to your buddy dying all night in No Man’s Land is a staple of WW1 films.
Beer bottles not so much, I’ve been hit with a beer bottle and a wine bottle, hurt but adrenaline is a hell of a drug. I have seen a guy do the super cool break the bottle on a table to threaten a guy once, he needed 20 or so stitches when the neck of the bottle shattered in his fist. But it did stop the fight.
I’ve seen a guy take a ball bat to the head and kept fighting. Adrenaline exists for a reason.
Millennials/gen Z with their phone sound on. I get it’s to fill otherwise blank space in the sound, but we’re not texting with the click-click-click-click.
Early PCs didn’t play beep-boop sounds when you typed or when displaying a letter on the screen either, so join the crowd. I mean, people would have shoved a screwdriver through the speaker diaphragm if they had to listen to that all day.
If you go all the way back to teletypes, okay, there was an impact sound, and computer keyboards were significantly noisier up until membrane and rubber domes became popular, but that’s about as far as reality takes one.
How easy it is to twist someones neck to kill them.
Honestly an important reality check. I’d convinced myself it was super easy
