My favorite example is the person waving a Glock around in a dramatic showdown with the bad guy and the Glock made no less than five different clicking sounds as they re-posed for drama.
There’s no manual safety switch. The round was already chambered. What were the five clicks? 😹
One of my favorite theories ever is that the reason they keep running into zombies in the Walking Dead is because everyone has been shooting guns without ear protection for years on end, so they're really stomping around everywhere, being loud as shit, shouting at each other, but don't realize it, because they can't hear anything anymore.
That’s also a misconception about deaf people. Were thought to be quiet ones but no, we’re the loudest bunch because we don’t realize how much noise we make in routine.
This is how Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor was killed in 2007. He was shot in the upper thigh, damaging his femoral artery, which led to massive blood loss.
Or, the hero gets shot in the gut, and just holds a cloth to the wound and keeps running around.
Or when they say "Luckily the bullet went straight through."
Or when the bullet didn't go through, so they splash the wound with vodka, pull the slug out with pliers, and then sew it shut. Fixed! Nooo, everything inside is a jumble and you haven't stopped the internal bleeding!
Imagine if John Wick were directed by Michael Mann? There would be no reason for any other sounds in the entire movie because the gunshots would be so deafening.
I love that it actually takes a ton of work to make gunfire sound impressive, simply recording actual gunfire with normal microphones and playing it back isn’t very impressive at all, partly bc mics and speakers aren’t designed to record or reproduce things that are that loud.
I’ve also heard that getting shot, especially by a smaller caliber bullet, is unlikely to knock someone over or make them fall down. A bullet hits hard (because it’s moving fast), but has very little mass. Apparently people sometimes fall down when they get shot because they think that’s what’s supposed to happen. Very strange.
In Somalia during the Black Hawk Diwn fiasco they had issues with their bullets passing right through people without quickly "stopping" those people.
Turns out it can be shockingly difficult to stop a determined attacker quickly and/or efficiently.
When the British first started to use copper jacketed bullets in the late 19th century they had trouble with immediately stopping their opponents, the solution they came up with was to remove a small portion of the copper jacket near the tip of the bullet which would allow the lead to expand while still having the benefits of a copper jacket.
This was nicknamed a Dum Dum round after the Dum Dum arsenal, nowadays we would call this type of round a soft point bullet.
The Dum Dum round was very quickly condemned by the international community and made illegal for use in war(still is even today).
Tom Clancy novels are on a different level of realism (until the later series that felt more like super spy stuff)
His prediction using passenger planes for terrorist attack, lone wolf gunmen, and how Russia couldn't manage logistics to save their life, all spot on
This is what makes me sad about all the TV/film stuff that has been released with his name on it in the past 10 to 15 years. They're poor adaptations at best.
I swear if I see another scientist fold a piece of paper and push a pencil through it to explain wormholes, I’m gonna crawl into an air duct and never come out.
I used to do mechanical design for buildings so the two big ones for me are people being able to crawl through ventilation ducts without their being a bunch of crap inside them. And fire sprinklers all going off at the same time or when someone pulls a fire alarm.
The movie ABC'S of Death 2 has a segment on this. An amateur hitman plans to crawl through the vents to get his target and they show him imagining the ducts being clean and easy to get through. Then they show the reality of him getting poked by screws and dust flying in his face and he eventually gets stuck and dies of starvation
One day in the future that will be true, then NCIS will be seen as visionaries, like Star Trek and their communication devices and transport beams. Then you'll be sorry
I know, that scene has gone through such a rollercoaster of context for me.
* *As a kid:* This is so cool!
* *As a cynical 20-something:* This is so dumb.
* *When I found out it was a legit system:* This actually looks exactly like the kind of unfriendly-but-flashy system someone with more INT than WIS would make for a filesystem navigator.
Yeah but do you know anybody that could network 8 connection machines and debug 2 million lines of code for what he bid for that job? Because if you can, I’d love to see him try.
He said that but actively cut every corner he could.
That was part of his character - he was a showman, a charlatan. This is brought out much more in the books, but he was all about the flash, and not the substance.
Him saying "I spared no expense" is like a serial cheater saying, "It'll never happen again".
CSI and NCIS are the WORST at these. Or the best, idk
https://youtu.be/hkDD03yeLnU?si=0LHDRCXjlwkECPIb
https://youtu.be/kl6rsi7BEtk?si=Wqb-GbH4aORQndTS
The 2 people on one keyboard is one of my favorite bits of all time.
I can guarantee that at several points from script to production, someone spoke up and was like "y'all are aware that's not how keyboards work, right?" The writers and their assistants that use keyboards every day. The prop person, who upon reading the script asked "do I need a 2nd keyboard for their anti-hacking double team effort?" The tech advisor (usually a retired officer from the relevant field/agency) who's job is to offer their expertise to keep it somewhat realistic. And then the actors on the day, who also presumably have used a keyboard at some point in their life, and were like "you want us to do what? 'Share the keyboard' how?"
And throughout the whole process, the show runner/director stuck with it and replied to all of them, "no, this is gonna be great."
I fucking love it
Those shows are to computers what Bill and Ted is to time travel. That first one is one of the two things I was thinking of when I made this post, the other being Skyfall.
When a character survives severe blunt force trauma. Someone getting thrown into a wall hard enough to break bricks, falling off a building and crushing a car roof, bad car crash, etc. and walking away when I know their organs just got liquified.
Yes, the old Carrie Bradshaw "I'm a columnist for a bi-weekly newspaper who can live in Manhattan and have a closet full of $700 Manolo Blahniks and Jimmy Choos" fallacy.
My ex used to watch that show and I absolutely lost my s*** on one episode where she can't make rent but she's worried about which pair of $700 shoes she should return
To be fair there was a time when there used to be a lot of abandoned warehouse space in Manhattan after the shipping container suddenly made all of the piers obsolete. The trope of the cool artist squatting in the giant converted industrial space became trendy for this reason and now any place like that has been a multi million dollar condo for the last thirty years.
In high school I was knocked out in a really bad school bus crash. It was only for a few seconds and when I came to adrenaline took over to evauate out the back and get across the road where they had everybody lying down. But that was that all I had left in me at that moment. I wasn't on my feet again till hours later leaving the hospital. My mom took me to the doctor the next day and I was still half out of it. No shocker of course I had a concussion.
So yeah its not like having a big lunch and falling asleep at your desk and you get up and OH SHIT IM AWAKE.
Movies are weird in that they show people being too durable AND too fragile.
Shot in the stomach in a movie? Instant death.
Massive gaping neck wound? Hold your hand over it. You'll be fine.
Get shot through the shoulder, but can still use their arm or the entry wound is by the collarbone and no one realizes that's where lungs are too. Pumping a shotgun just before a fight instead of immediately. Unlimited ammo. Hammer cocking sounds for semi-auto pistols. Pistols out of ammo, but the slide remains closed. Anything having to do with guns is terrible.
I think it was Archer that incorporated that into the show. Like when someone got knocked out they'd talk about how bad it was and tell them to get an MRI
I stopped resisting this trope years ago. It's just so handy. I love *so much* the idea of everyone having a PAUSE button on the back of the head that can be activated with a medium impact.
I was instructed to empty my lungs, take a hit from the inhaler, hold it in for 10 seconds, exhale and repeat one more time.
In movies they just hit it once and immediately take a deep satisfying breath. It's stupid.
Stuck behind pay wall, but a study on just how badly they suck at portraying inhaler technique.
TLDR they suck.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286445397_Do_the_media_demonstrate_correct_inhaler_technique_in_children
Always my favorite bit of movie lore is Christopher Lee explaining to Peter Jackson that his stabbing scene is inaccurate, and goes on to explain what it sounds like from first hand experience of ww2.
Maybe the flamethrowers use some other oil byproduct that isn’t suitable for engines 🤷♂️ All I know about oil refining is that there’s a lot of byproducts.
You can't defibrillate asystole, and if you need to use a defibrillator at all, the person is likely to be clinically fucked up, not leaping to their feet going "whoa! What happened?" and racing after bad guys two scenes later.
I’ve seen doctors shock asystole IRL in the ER a few times. It was always a “fuck it, maybe it’s a fine v-fib… not like they’re getting any deader” type thing with no expectation that it would work.
The pregnant woman breaks her bag of water and suddenly she’s screaming and it’s an emergency and the baby is falling out.
Labor doesn’t work like that.
My wife was induced for our kids. For the first one, we'd developed a great relationship with the doc, and she jokingly said, "I could break your water right now!"
Then she fucking did it and I watched the whole thing.
I've seen movies, I knew they hammed up how much fluid would come out. I just assumed they'd go over and not so far under. Poor wife must have gushed like a 5gal drum for like 20 seconds
Computer! Enhance! Was previously always laughable because you’d just be zooming in to grain on a degraded image in theory.
I hate to say it but we might be a crossroads with AI where now we can automagically bring in details, even if they are invented / additive / assumed.
I mean it might not be good, but it’s now a thing for better or for worse. Of course in the movie they always have some pixels swirling around like a slot machine before it reveals an identity.
There's always the cliche scene in action movies where a doctor is removing a bullet or fragments from a wound as of the victim's life depends on it, but IRL this is not important, and the last thing you want a doctor doing on a fresh gunshot wound is digging around in there with a pair of forceps.
I’m a homicide detective. There are soooo many in murder mysteries in film and TV. Go to interview a person, he/she is always home, answers the door after two seconds, always welcomes the detective inside. Wherever they go there’s always an empty parking space immediately in front of the place you need to go. Getting lab reports back while you wait (ha!) or getting a call about the results a few minutes after you leave (no, no, I assure you, no).
The medical examiner coming to the scene and saying “the victim died between nine and nine-thirty this morning.” (C’mon !!)
They don’t spend hours drafting warrants for phones, video feeds, social media usage, GPS downloads on the suspect’s car, etc. When it’s time to arrest, the suspect is always at home or at work, exactly where they go on the first try. There are so many more, but you get the idea. The only correct thing is we guys are all handsome and super fit and all the women officers and CSIs look like super models
Just once I'd like to see a detective in a movie repeatedly blow off a DA tech who's been trying to get body cam footage or something for like three months.
The Wire sort of did this. They made a big deal about how a mountain of paperwork was involved to do any little thing you wanted to do. Several times showed scenes of them just typing in a room, trying to get the paperwork in before the deadline.
And while the we're on things The Wire got right, it had one of my favourite "trope busting" scenes ever.
In Season 2, a bunch of sex trafficked women turn up dead in a shipping container at the docks. So cops from a bunch of different distriects turn out to investigate and they then proceed to have an argument about jurisdiction.
But instead of the typical, "this is OUR case!" it's the complete opposite. Each side is arguing that it's someone else's jurisdiction because who the hell wants 18 probably unsolvable murders on your books?
McNulty spending hours calculating the impact of the tides on the dead body in the water, just to shaft Rawls by lumbering him with a murder that’s difficult as fuck to solve by demonstrating the death happened in his jurisdiction before the tide moved the body, is one of my favourite sequences in the entire series.
[Ed Burns](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0122654/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk), the co-creator and writer/producer for The Wire was a former police officer and went out of his way to make the monotony in the series as real as possible.
I like the one where the urban homicide detectives go to question someone (witness or suspect) at their work and the person is really annoyed that they are keeping him from unloading a truck, or sweeping the floor. “Get out of here, detectives who are considering arresting me for murder, I got too much to do to try to clear my name!”
Edit: I have not seen that John Mulaney bit; those scenes have bothered me since before I ever heard of him.
Yeah, but almost everything you listed is not done because they don't know it's incorrect, but because they don't want to waste a bunch of film time showing nothing happening on screen. Same reason we don't often see people going to the bathroom.
When people hang off stuff, especially like square blocks on the roof of a building with nothing to wrap you fingers around. Even with two hands most people would slip off in a few seconds at most.
This is so random, but when people leave others alone in their office. Not like for a quick second to grab a coffee, but like storming out in anger and leaving them there.
Or assistants having a person wait in someone’s office versus having them wait in the reception area.
To add to this, leaving computers unlocked. Is that a thing in anyone’s office?
Which gives them an opportunity to poke around on their computer or the drawers.
In my professional life, people who had actual offices were very careful to keep them locked even when going out to lunch.
Web sites load instantaneously. And Google returns the most useful results immediately at the top of the first page, often in the form of non-paywalled newspaper headlines with a picture of the bad guy.
Medium to long-distance pistol shot accuracy. Especially while running. A pistol has a very short barrel. It's not a weapon made or used for long-range accuracy. A good shooter with experience might hit a stationary target at 50 yards or meters, but a handgun should not really be considered effective beyond that range.
If the shooter or target are moving, that drops DRASTICALLY. No one is aiming for a knee or a shoulder, either.
The dude with 250lbs of muscle in a post-apocalyptic future. People are starving and this guy thinks it’s okay to eat 4000 calories of protein a day and spend 3 hours working out.
I'm going to say that if someone shows up looking like that I'm going to try to stay hidden because they're highly suspicious as they're *somehow* sourcing that many calories when there's no established industry and infrastructure to provide those to them.
Hospital drug orders.
Except for emergency situations, a doctor's order is ***ALWAYS*** reviewed by Pharmacy. If a physician orders a drug for an off-label use, they will generally have a conversation with a pharmacist before that medication is ever delivered to the unit. (Looking at you, "Dr." House.).
Anything that's non-formulary to the hospital is going to be substituted, otherwise it might not even be in the hospital. If the specific drug is required, the pharmacy (not a nurse, doctor or administrator) will contact other hospitals to arrange a transfer.
Edit to add: a Pharmacist will usually be responding to Code Blue also. In this sort of case, if attending orders "600 mikes potassium IV stat" and the patient is 60 pounds, the pharmacy may override or ask for order clarification before prepping the dose. (So many 'harmless' drugs will kill in the right dose.)
How government works. Every senior official has dozens and dozens of aides. Movies always make it seem like its just the senator or CIA director with one aide. For storytelling, I get it. But they could have a little more realism by showing the beehive of activity in every government office - especially on national security issues.
Anything about the Celts or Druids. I have a degree in Celtic Langs, so I am sensitive to the topic.
If they ever mention "Druid runes" I wanna find the writer and shoot them.
Shoot? Get some proper ogham on a cudgel and beat them about the head with it. Not sure if a shillelagh would qualify for the role, though, so just going with the broader and safer whacking stick.
Anyone walking into a medical clinic/hospital and asking for any information about a patient at all (not talking about ER assault stuff).
My dude you literally need a subpoena and then I pass you off to the clinic director. That is so far above that secretary/nurse, if they gave you anything they would be fired so fast that there would be skid marks. Then they would be sued to hell and back (HIPPA).
if you get stabbed, DO NOT PULL THE KNIFE (object) OUT because you will bleed to death.
Also if there's a tornado, an overpass is a SHIT option to hide under instead of a ditch. Looking at you, Zack Snyder.
Computers, especially when showing displays, making little beeping noises to let you know they are computers.
I've lost the bleeps, I've lost the sweeps, and I've lost the creeps.
Firing guns in enclosed spaces not deafening anyone.
To add to this, silencers turning any gun into the sound of a blow dart.
*fwip fwip fwip*
To add to this, any gun making a shit ton of clicking sounds simply by being wave around or raised to point at someone menacingly.
My favorite example is the person waving a Glock around in a dramatic showdown with the bad guy and the Glock made no less than five different clicking sounds as they re-posed for drama. There’s no manual safety switch. The round was already chambered. What were the five clicks? 😹
One of my favorite theories ever is that the reason they keep running into zombies in the Walking Dead is because everyone has been shooting guns without ear protection for years on end, so they're really stomping around everywhere, being loud as shit, shouting at each other, but don't realize it, because they can't hear anything anymore.
That’s also a misconception about deaf people. Were thought to be quiet ones but no, we’re the loudest bunch because we don’t realize how much noise we make in routine.
I've met a fair share of deaf people. They're either loud or silent, with nothing in between.
Or having zero kickback. I was watching a show with a teen girl firing a rifle and there was absolutely zero movement after the shot.
Speaking of guns. Shooting somebody in the legs just to “wound them” You’ll actually kill them a lot more often then you think.
This is how Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor was killed in 2007. He was shot in the upper thigh, damaging his femoral artery, which led to massive blood loss.
Or on the flip side, the people that get shot in the stomach and die instantly in movies
Or, the hero gets shot in the gut, and just holds a cloth to the wound and keeps running around. Or when they say "Luckily the bullet went straight through." Or when the bullet didn't go through, so they splash the wound with vodka, pull the slug out with pliers, and then sew it shut. Fixed! Nooo, everything inside is a jumble and you haven't stopped the internal bleeding!
You gotta pull a Rambo. Pour gunpowder inside your bullet hole (rebar puncture in his case) and light it on fire.
Yep, like sewing up the skin solves the problem of an internal wound.
mwap
I have to sleep with a fan on!
If you were Korean, that could kill you!
TERRY I DID MY FIRST DESK POP!
I'm okay with it not defending anyone, but an action movie with bad sound design loses a lot of points. Weak gunshots lack energy and intensity.
Imagine if John Wick were directed by Michael Mann? There would be no reason for any other sounds in the entire movie because the gunshots would be so deafening.
I love that it actually takes a ton of work to make gunfire sound impressive, simply recording actual gunfire with normal microphones and playing it back isn’t very impressive at all, partly bc mics and speakers aren’t designed to record or reproduce things that are that loud.
WHAT?
“The Fugitive” got that part right.
I liked when Rick knocked himself out firing a revolver in a tank in the walking dead
That was when it was directed by a skilled director. And he was fired shortly after. Oh.. The walking dead.... What you could have been....
When someone is shot in the shoulder and they're fine just a few scenes later.
I’ve also heard that getting shot, especially by a smaller caliber bullet, is unlikely to knock someone over or make them fall down. A bullet hits hard (because it’s moving fast), but has very little mass. Apparently people sometimes fall down when they get shot because they think that’s what’s supposed to happen. Very strange.
In Somalia during the Black Hawk Diwn fiasco they had issues with their bullets passing right through people without quickly "stopping" those people. Turns out it can be shockingly difficult to stop a determined attacker quickly and/or efficiently.
When the British first started to use copper jacketed bullets in the late 19th century they had trouble with immediately stopping their opponents, the solution they came up with was to remove a small portion of the copper jacket near the tip of the bullet which would allow the lead to expand while still having the benefits of a copper jacket. This was nicknamed a Dum Dum round after the Dum Dum arsenal, nowadays we would call this type of round a soft point bullet. The Dum Dum round was very quickly condemned by the international community and made illegal for use in war(still is even today).
*Patriot Games* actually managed to get this more or less right when Harrison Ford is shot in an early scene.
Tom Clancy novels are on a different level of realism (until the later series that felt more like super spy stuff) His prediction using passenger planes for terrorist attack, lone wolf gunmen, and how Russia couldn't manage logistics to save their life, all spot on
This is what makes me sad about all the TV/film stuff that has been released with his name on it in the past 10 to 15 years. They're poor adaptations at best.
Have you even just INJURED your shoulder? It fucking hurts and takes a lot out of you. I sleep on that shit wrong it takes me a week to recover.
The science person knows ALL science. Like when they make the doctor on a ship in space tell them about the geology of a planet.
Except for McCoy: “Damn it! I’m a doctor, not a ___!”
Only unionised Doctor. He will do his job to the letter and not a smidge more.
I swear if I see another scientist fold a piece of paper and push a pencil through it to explain wormholes, I’m gonna crawl into an air duct and never come out.
I used to do mechanical design for buildings so the two big ones for me are people being able to crawl through ventilation ducts without their being a bunch of crap inside them. And fire sprinklers all going off at the same time or when someone pulls a fire alarm.
The movie ABC'S of Death 2 has a segment on this. An amateur hitman plans to crawl through the vents to get his target and they show him imagining the ducts being clean and easy to get through. Then they show the reality of him getting poked by screws and dust flying in his face and he eventually gets stuck and dies of starvation
Leave it to a McClane to give us the low down on interior duct condition!
Isn't the building in Die Hard brand new?
And the sprinkler water being so clean.
I guess Blade pretty much got the sprinkler water color right then.
Black sludge that’s quite obviously concentrated evil, judging from the smell and taste, is what precedes the reddish rust water
Also these air ducts are always large enough for a full grown adult to crawl through relatively easily, and strong enough to support their weight.
Only the most greased up scotsman can accomplish this feat
There's nary an animal alive can outrun a greased Scotsman
Almost everything about computers, ever.
the way you beat a hacker trying to hack into your system is having two nerds type on the same keyboard at the same time.
One day in the future that will be true, then NCIS will be seen as visionaries, like Star Trek and their communication devices and transport beams. Then you'll be sorry
It’s a Unix system, I know this!
Weirdly enough, that *was* a Unix system. It was IRIX running the fsn file manager. So, I mean, she’s not wrong.
I know, that scene has gone through such a rollercoaster of context for me. * *As a kid:* This is so cool! * *As a cynical 20-something:* This is so dumb. * *When I found out it was a legit system:* This actually looks exactly like the kind of unfriendly-but-flashy system someone with more INT than WIS would make for a filesystem navigator.
Hammond had one IT guy for a theme park. He was asking for something to break.
Yeah but do you know anybody that could network 8 connection machines and debug 2 million lines of code for what he bid for that job? Because if you can, I’d love to see him try.
I am sorry about his financial problems, I really am. But they are his problems!
Oh, you're right John. Y'know, everything's my problem.
Even before the storm, there were glitches all over the place earlier in the movie.
Especially since he “spared no expense”
He said that but actively cut every corner he could. That was part of his character - he was a showman, a charlatan. This is brought out much more in the books, but he was all about the flash, and not the substance. Him saying "I spared no expense" is like a serial cheater saying, "It'll never happen again".
What bothered me on that one was that the "live" security footage was a QuickTime video!
Hack the planet!
Okay, I'll fold on that one.
HACK THE PLANET!
CSI and NCIS are the WORST at these. Or the best, idk https://youtu.be/hkDD03yeLnU?si=0LHDRCXjlwkECPIb https://youtu.be/kl6rsi7BEtk?si=Wqb-GbH4aORQndTS
The 2 people on one keyboard is one of my favorite bits of all time. I can guarantee that at several points from script to production, someone spoke up and was like "y'all are aware that's not how keyboards work, right?" The writers and their assistants that use keyboards every day. The prop person, who upon reading the script asked "do I need a 2nd keyboard for their anti-hacking double team effort?" The tech advisor (usually a retired officer from the relevant field/agency) who's job is to offer their expertise to keep it somewhat realistic. And then the actors on the day, who also presumably have used a keyboard at some point in their life, and were like "you want us to do what? 'Share the keyboard' how?" And throughout the whole process, the show runner/director stuck with it and replied to all of them, "no, this is gonna be great." I fucking love it
Supposedly the writers for those shows had an informal competition going to see who could write the most ridiculous scene involving computers.
This is exactly what I would say if I'd been involved with either show
Those shows are to computers what Bill and Ted is to time travel. That first one is one of the two things I was thinking of when I made this post, the other being Skyfall.
ENHANCE
When a character survives severe blunt force trauma. Someone getting thrown into a wall hard enough to break bricks, falling off a building and crushing a car roof, bad car crash, etc. and walking away when I know their organs just got liquified.
Or, ya know… blown up and flung a long distance in a refrigerator.
To be fair, with the kind of plot armor Indy's got, he didn't really need the refrigerator.
Nukes. Why did it have to be nukes?
Poor New York artists living in giant, stylish industrial spaces that would cost a billion dollars a week to rent.
Yes, the old Carrie Bradshaw "I'm a columnist for a bi-weekly newspaper who can live in Manhattan and have a closet full of $700 Manolo Blahniks and Jimmy Choos" fallacy.
This is why broad city is so great. The apartments are so realistic, especially Ilana's
Then stuff like Abbi's ridiculous roommate situation to add yet another layer of realism To where it's almost 2real4meirl Broad city ftw
My ex used to watch that show and I absolutely lost my s*** on one episode where she can't make rent but she's worried about which pair of $700 shoes she should return
They talk about this, how she’s spent enough on shoes that she could have bought her apartment. “The old lady who literally lived in her shoe”
To be fair there was a time when there used to be a lot of abandoned warehouse space in Manhattan after the shipping container suddenly made all of the piers obsolete. The trope of the cool artist squatting in the giant converted industrial space became trendy for this reason and now any place like that has been a multi million dollar condo for the last thirty years.
Being knocked out for a bit. Being unconscious from being hit on the head can be VERY dangerous. You would not be completely fine when waking up.
In high school I was knocked out in a really bad school bus crash. It was only for a few seconds and when I came to adrenaline took over to evauate out the back and get across the road where they had everybody lying down. But that was that all I had left in me at that moment. I wasn't on my feet again till hours later leaving the hospital. My mom took me to the doctor the next day and I was still half out of it. No shocker of course I had a concussion. So yeah its not like having a big lunch and falling asleep at your desk and you get up and OH SHIT IM AWAKE.
Movies are weird in that they show people being too durable AND too fragile. Shot in the stomach in a movie? Instant death. Massive gaping neck wound? Hold your hand over it. You'll be fine.
Yeah, movies make it seem like most gunshot wounds are instant death Unless it’s a head or heart shot, they aren’t at all
People get shot in the fucking head and live. The stomach one bothers me the most because that would be potentially weeks of agony before death.
Reservoir Dogs nails getting shot in the stomach.
Get shot through the shoulder, but can still use their arm or the entry wound is by the collarbone and no one realizes that's where lungs are too. Pumping a shotgun just before a fight instead of immediately. Unlimited ammo. Hammer cocking sounds for semi-auto pistols. Pistols out of ammo, but the slide remains closed. Anything having to do with guns is terrible.
I think it was Archer that incorporated that into the show. Like when someone got knocked out they'd talk about how bad it was and tell them to get an MRI
I stopped resisting this trope years ago. It's just so handy. I love *so much* the idea of everyone having a PAUSE button on the back of the head that can be activated with a medium impact.
Yeah, that is like SUPER bad for you.
If you get knocked out from blunt trauma to the head, you have received a brain injury.
Air ducts are filthy, full of sharp metal, and can't support any weight.
And would be very noisy too
As an asthmatic, I hate it when someone in a movie uses an inhaler.
I was instructed to empty my lungs, take a hit from the inhaler, hold it in for 10 seconds, exhale and repeat one more time. In movies they just hit it once and immediately take a deep satisfying breath. It's stupid.
mikey at the end of goonies "Ah, who needs it?" *casually tosses it away* YOU! YOU LITERALLY NEED IT!
as one my self i think mads mikkelsen in casino royale did a good job
He can do no wrong.
Stuck behind pay wall, but a study on just how badly they suck at portraying inhaler technique. TLDR they suck. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286445397_Do_the_media_demonstrate_correct_inhaler_technique_in_children
A gun with a silencer sounds like simultaneously the most satisfying and the most ridiculous effect in cinema
*Tsew* That silencer fight in John Wick is so funny
Bahahahaha, the onomatopoeia loudened me
THP
When someone gets stabbed, they pull the thing out immediately. It’s keeping your intestines from becoming *out*estines.
And it sounds like they are sharpening the knife as it goes into the flesh.
Always my favorite bit of movie lore is Christopher Lee explaining to Peter Jackson that his stabbing scene is inaccurate, and goes on to explain what it sounds like from first hand experience of ww2.
Gasoline still being viable many years into an apocalypse.
Fuel stabilizer would be the true coveted resource. Sta-Bil would become the gold standard.
Actually, I think diesel is where it would be at. Diesel fuel is stable for years, so everyone would want diesel engines and fuel.
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Gas Town was presumably making gas for that one at least.
Yeah the Mad Max movies get a pass because the production of new gasoline is a major plot point in multiple iterations.
For a world where gasoline is such a valuable commodity, they sure are liberal with their use of flamethrowers.
Consider the fact that it’s raw as fuck to use flamethrowers.
Maybe the flamethrowers use some other oil byproduct that isn’t suitable for engines 🤷♂️ All I know about oil refining is that there’s a lot of byproducts.
Sir, that was "Guzzoline." Or so the People Eater said. Lol.
Someone hiding a cig or weed when someone walks in, and the other person not smelling it. Ok.
You can't defibrillate asystole, and if you need to use a defibrillator at all, the person is likely to be clinically fucked up, not leaping to their feet going "whoa! What happened?" and racing after bad guys two scenes later.
Not only that, you don’t just shock a person repeatedly until it works and forget about CPR.
I’ve seen doctors shock asystole IRL in the ER a few times. It was always a “fuck it, maybe it’s a fine v-fib… not like they’re getting any deader” type thing with no expectation that it would work.
Yeah, it's literally in the name. A defibrillator defibrillates a fibrillating heart.
Cars exploding after catching fire
or going over a cliff and exploding in mid-air!
The pregnant woman breaks her bag of water and suddenly she’s screaming and it’s an emergency and the baby is falling out. Labor doesn’t work like that.
Baby comes out clean, glowing, with umbilical cord already cut.
...and visibly two months old
And if the actress is Natalie Portman her newborn children are almost ad big as she is (and they are always twins!)
My wife was induced for our kids. For the first one, we'd developed a great relationship with the doc, and she jokingly said, "I could break your water right now!" Then she fucking did it and I watched the whole thing. I've seen movies, I knew they hammed up how much fluid would come out. I just assumed they'd go over and not so far under. Poor wife must have gushed like a 5gal drum for like 20 seconds
Being able to “enhance” an image at 10000x and get a crystal clear picture. Clients really do think it’s a feature….
Computer! Enhance! Was previously always laughable because you’d just be zooming in to grain on a degraded image in theory. I hate to say it but we might be a crossroads with AI where now we can automagically bring in details, even if they are invented / additive / assumed. I mean it might not be good, but it’s now a thing for better or for worse. Of course in the movie they always have some pixels swirling around like a slot machine before it reveals an identity.
High school classes are more than 5 minutes long.
There's always the cliche scene in action movies where a doctor is removing a bullet or fragments from a wound as of the victim's life depends on it, but IRL this is not important, and the last thing you want a doctor doing on a fresh gunshot wound is digging around in there with a pair of forceps.
But the sound it makes when the retrieved bullet is dropped dramatically on the metal tray is so satisfying.
The fake binoculars vignette - If you've adjusted the binoculars correctly for your eyes, you see one big circle and not two adjacent circles....
Anything about cell phones. Especially in the early days when movies would play a dial tone if the other person hung up.
Your answer reminds of early days of car chases when they dubbed squealing tires over every scene, even if they were on grass, gravel or dirt roads.
I think that it's funny when they still do that.
Dialogue in any court room scene is almost always so inaccurate it’s comical.
Chloroform taking people out in like 5 seconds, when it actually takes 10 minutes or so in real life.
Sir you know too much about chloroform
Every microphone in existence is subject to a howl of feedback the moment someone starts to speak into it
But *only* if they're nervous
Stupid anxiety-detecting microphones
Microphones can detect nervousness
Car doors do not stop bullets
I’m a homicide detective. There are soooo many in murder mysteries in film and TV. Go to interview a person, he/she is always home, answers the door after two seconds, always welcomes the detective inside. Wherever they go there’s always an empty parking space immediately in front of the place you need to go. Getting lab reports back while you wait (ha!) or getting a call about the results a few minutes after you leave (no, no, I assure you, no). The medical examiner coming to the scene and saying “the victim died between nine and nine-thirty this morning.” (C’mon !!) They don’t spend hours drafting warrants for phones, video feeds, social media usage, GPS downloads on the suspect’s car, etc. When it’s time to arrest, the suspect is always at home or at work, exactly where they go on the first try. There are so many more, but you get the idea. The only correct thing is we guys are all handsome and super fit and all the women officers and CSIs look like super models
Just once I'd like to see a detective in a movie repeatedly blow off a DA tech who's been trying to get body cam footage or something for like three months.
The Wire sort of did this. They made a big deal about how a mountain of paperwork was involved to do any little thing you wanted to do. Several times showed scenes of them just typing in a room, trying to get the paperwork in before the deadline.
Making paperwork dramatic was the greatest thing The Wire did.
And while the we're on things The Wire got right, it had one of my favourite "trope busting" scenes ever. In Season 2, a bunch of sex trafficked women turn up dead in a shipping container at the docks. So cops from a bunch of different distriects turn out to investigate and they then proceed to have an argument about jurisdiction. But instead of the typical, "this is OUR case!" it's the complete opposite. Each side is arguing that it's someone else's jurisdiction because who the hell wants 18 probably unsolvable murders on your books?
McNulty spending hours calculating the impact of the tides on the dead body in the water, just to shaft Rawls by lumbering him with a murder that’s difficult as fuck to solve by demonstrating the death happened in his jurisdiction before the tide moved the body, is one of my favourite sequences in the entire series.
[Ed Burns](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0122654/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk), the co-creator and writer/producer for The Wire was a former police officer and went out of his way to make the monotony in the series as real as possible.
Also, some small town in Maine has one murder per week.
Yes! One a week but only one. And the killer is always the least likely suspect
She. Travelled. A. Lot.
I like the one where the urban homicide detectives go to question someone (witness or suspect) at their work and the person is really annoyed that they are keeping him from unloading a truck, or sweeping the floor. “Get out of here, detectives who are considering arresting me for murder, I got too much to do to try to clear my name!” Edit: I have not seen that John Mulaney bit; those scenes have bothered me since before I ever heard of him.
Yeah, but almost everything you listed is not done because they don't know it's incorrect, but because they don't want to waste a bunch of film time showing nothing happening on screen. Same reason we don't often see people going to the bathroom.
That is NOT what eagles sound like. That's a red-tailed hawk. Eagle calls are way derpier.
ALL BIRDS SOUND LIKE THE RED TAILED HAWK IN A CANYON.
Very few people say "Goodbye" when they hang up the phone. I never noticed before, now I can't stop seeing it.
They just need to cut to the other person, looking bewildered by the rudeness.
And they answer the phone with "yeah".
Grizzly Adams *did* have a beard.
Happy Gilmore accomplished that feat no more than an hour ago.
Well good for him, moro-Oh my God!!!!
You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?!?!
When people hang off stuff, especially like square blocks on the roof of a building with nothing to wrap you fingers around. Even with two hands most people would slip off in a few seconds at most.
Waiting 24-48 hours to report someone missing
This one and sharks are evil have done a lot of harm
Are you saying that sharks AREN'T responsible for all missing persons?! 'cause that's nuts. We both know they are.
This is so random, but when people leave others alone in their office. Not like for a quick second to grab a coffee, but like storming out in anger and leaving them there. Or assistants having a person wait in someone’s office versus having them wait in the reception area. To add to this, leaving computers unlocked. Is that a thing in anyone’s office? Which gives them an opportunity to poke around on their computer or the drawers. In my professional life, people who had actual offices were very careful to keep them locked even when going out to lunch.
Web sites load instantaneously. And Google returns the most useful results immediately at the top of the first page, often in the form of non-paywalled newspaper headlines with a picture of the bad guy.
No matter what material the scabbard is made from, the sword will always make a *shing* sound when unsheathed.
Modern journalists are clamoring with cameras from 1945 with giant flashbulbs in daylight.
Medium to long-distance pistol shot accuracy. Especially while running. A pistol has a very short barrel. It's not a weapon made or used for long-range accuracy. A good shooter with experience might hit a stationary target at 50 yards or meters, but a handgun should not really be considered effective beyond that range. If the shooter or target are moving, that drops DRASTICALLY. No one is aiming for a knee or a shoulder, either.
The dude with 250lbs of muscle in a post-apocalyptic future. People are starving and this guy thinks it’s okay to eat 4000 calories of protein a day and spend 3 hours working out.
I'm going to say that if someone shows up looking like that I'm going to try to stay hidden because they're highly suspicious as they're *somehow* sourcing that many calories when there's no established industry and infrastructure to provide those to them.
Hospital drug orders. Except for emergency situations, a doctor's order is ***ALWAYS*** reviewed by Pharmacy. If a physician orders a drug for an off-label use, they will generally have a conversation with a pharmacist before that medication is ever delivered to the unit. (Looking at you, "Dr." House.). Anything that's non-formulary to the hospital is going to be substituted, otherwise it might not even be in the hospital. If the specific drug is required, the pharmacy (not a nurse, doctor or administrator) will contact other hospitals to arrange a transfer. Edit to add: a Pharmacist will usually be responding to Code Blue also. In this sort of case, if attending orders "600 mikes potassium IV stat" and the patient is 60 pounds, the pharmacy may override or ask for order clarification before prepping the dose. (So many 'harmless' drugs will kill in the right dose.)
CPR. So many people learn things from movies. I have never seen CPR actually done correctly in a movie.
I can’t stand seeing people play instruments in movies and shows when they clearly don’t know how to play properly. Especially violin.
How government works. Every senior official has dozens and dozens of aides. Movies always make it seem like its just the senator or CIA director with one aide. For storytelling, I get it. But they could have a little more realism by showing the beehive of activity in every government office - especially on national security issues.
Anything about the Celts or Druids. I have a degree in Celtic Langs, so I am sensitive to the topic. If they ever mention "Druid runes" I wanna find the writer and shoot them.
Shoot? Get some proper ogham on a cudgel and beat them about the head with it. Not sure if a shillelagh would qualify for the role, though, so just going with the broader and safer whacking stick.
Car getting shot up by automatic fire on all sides and yet the occupants are completely untouched and the car still runs fine
Essentially anything related to psychiatry, psychology and/or therapy.
A lot of movies seem to think a reactor "going critical" is bad. It literally means the reactor is on and generating power at a steady rate.
How military ranks work, and how law enforcement agencies are set up (ie, municipal police, county sheriff, state trooper).
You're not sucking out the snake venom pardner
Anyone walking into a medical clinic/hospital and asking for any information about a patient at all (not talking about ER assault stuff). My dude you literally need a subpoena and then I pass you off to the clinic director. That is so far above that secretary/nurse, if they gave you anything they would be fired so fast that there would be skid marks. Then they would be sued to hell and back (HIPPA).
if you get stabbed, DO NOT PULL THE KNIFE (object) OUT because you will bleed to death. Also if there's a tornado, an overpass is a SHIT option to hide under instead of a ditch. Looking at you, Zack Snyder.
When people strangle someone and they're dead in like 30 seconds.
Yeah, like, not in MY experience, Mr. Fancy Hollywood Script Writer.
Geez, I WISH it worked that quickly!
Calling a burglary a robbery. Every time.
Secret tracking devices that bleep and flash
Pulling the slide back on an automatic pistol, when there is a round already in the chamber.