How easy it is to twist someones neck to kill them.
Defibrillators. They don't start a heart that is stopped. They stop arrhytmias and give the body a chance to return to a normal rhythm.
One I read about once.
Bonking people over the head to knock them out.
If you manage to hit them hard enough to actually put them out like that, they are likely bleeding internally and going to die without immidiate hospital care. Maybe even die anyway.
Gear changes in cars. Any car racing or high speed chase these cars are always accelerating and changing through endless gears despite being on a long straight.
Except Ronin, Ronin does it well since the chase is in the city and they're always slowing to avoid objects turn down alleyways etc so going through the gears over and over actually makes sense!
Coffee cups and suitcases.
A whack to the head just puts people to sleep for a few minutes and then they carry on like normal.
Cars explode after an accident.
Passwords can be guessed.
Up and Down exists in outer space.
People getting shot or killed. In reality, they don’t die instantly. They will act more surprised, then the panic sets in as they realise what happened and the pain sets in. They will cry for help as they slowly bleed out. It will take minutes. But that doesn’t look good on the screen. Some movies did parody this.
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
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!
How long things take.
People drinking in situations where nobody would be drinking.
And, obviously, running faster than explosions.
A lot of explosions in movies are, as I understand it, gasoline explosions (which produce a deflagration). Those are impressive and very visible and orangy and don't actually create all that much pressure, so damage from the pressure wave or shrapnel isn't so much a thing. You can do the stoic walk out of an explosion thing.
I think that the video of the Beirut explosion, which is large and filmed from a distance, so you can see the shockwave traveling over time, drives home how there is a lot of force going on in the air.
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.
This one definitely turned me off the first Terminator movie
Or as comedian Kyle Kincaid said, the idea that the action hero could still get it up.
Any time a car or other vehicle is involved in an accident, it erupts in a massive explosion or fireball. If every car did that IRL, the fire department would never be out of a job knowing how they hand out licenses like candy.
Telephone etiquette. They just start yapping and then hang up without saying goodbye.
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
There's a common theme in movies
since you can only hear one side
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
Hacking.
tap tap tap I'm in.
Honourable mention is NCIS Dual keyboard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ
Years back, I remembered 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, 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".
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.
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!
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.
I think familial relationships are often romanticized in movies. I always see siblings act like they are best friends with each other and in my reality my brother and I are just two people. We like each other but I wouldn’t say he’s my best friend and I don’t think he would say it either.
My brother and I are bffs but we don't refer to each other as bro or sis. I hate that trope.
It's not an absolute rule but plenty of families are like this.
On the other hand, my brother and sister are two of the best people in the world, and we get together as a big family with all the kids absolutely every school holiday. Some families are close. We don't always agree on everything, but we always get along well.
Nobody has that much time in the morning, or they go to bed at 8PM.
I want to see celebrities walking around sweaty in a hot day. Show us the sweat takes!
Bad cell phone reception is also depicted wrong. But I’m not an expert.
Smashing your phone does not reliably disable it. Odds are the data is completely recoverable, and the device may not have even powered down.
Also ghosts. As far as we know ghosts are not real. Yet there’s an entire genre of movies about ghosts with varying rules.
The amount of trauma the human body can absorb is a bathtub curve based on your morality.
NYC should only ever be depicted with giant piles of trash everywhere.
Smashing your phone does not reliably disable it.
Similarly, shooting the computer monitor won't do anything but make it so you can't see things!
(I liked how it flipped in Into the Spider-Verse - Miles takes off with the computer and monitor, and Peter catches up to him while they flee, and says "Good news! We don't need this" and chucks the monitor behind them)
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.
I'm pretty sure it's negative numbers actually, I saw this video once on YouTube where firefighters were carrying people up ladders and putting them inside the burning buildings
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