Movie Inconsistency

I've seen some that make me go WTF. I wear glasses.

In movies such as the Rocky I and The Mummy. The female lead wears glasses (not reading glasses) Then they fall in love and the male lead wants to see what they look like without glasses and he takes the glasses off. Then you never ever see her wear the glasses again.

No mention of contacts is made. You never see her put them in and she makes no mention of wearing contacts or anything. If only love cured vision no girl would ever have to wear glasses again.

It's just the willing suspension of disbelief in action.

For example, when I saw 'Mr & Mrs Smith' in the cinema, everyone seemed to enjoy it. People cheered. People laughed. And it's been a while since I've heard a movie audience actually cheer & applaud!

But the plot made zero sense. Everyone KNEW it made no sense, but no-one cared .. they were too busy enjoying themselves.

If people hadn't been enjoying the story, though, the response would have been different.

Personally, I'm willing to accept that movie heros are stronger and better than mere mortals like me (I'd need an underwear change if I was in a movie-worth situation in real life) but I get annoyed by characters saying information that they had no way of knowing.

So in Transformers, I was willing to accept Giant Alien Robots who could break the laws of physics, but got thrown by Optimus Prime knowing what happened in an ice cavern when he wasn't there. (And a character mispronouncing 'Fourier Series')

Enjoy your film watching ..

Mac
(PS:

even though they have a big ass hole in their anatomy. Didn't someone catch this in the script before they shot the movie? I mean seriously...

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That sounds like my father as an art reviewer. "Did you see that Picasso painting!? He's got a big hole in his anatomy !? Didn't the artist notice that before he delivered it to the art gallery !??"

Yeah ... that's why its called Art & Entertainment rather than Reality.)

I love those movies where someone jumps/falls/gets thrown off the top of a 6 story building and always seem to hang on just long enough for the hero to get there and ask who did it. They're never splattered all over the sidewalk, in intense pain from compound and internal fractures, there's never any blood, they're just kind of sleepy before they whisper out the exposition then kick off.

It's called suspension of disbelief.

Some films require you to suspend it a little higher off the ground than others. The entire Spy Kids series is a classic example. A very rare few films from the vein of drop-dead seriousness have SoD requirements so miniscule that you could very much believe the story was real. But ALL films have SOME element of SoD to them, even those drop-dead serious ones.

Even the recent film Syriana required us to believe that Matt Damon's little boy would get oh-so-conveniently killed during Act 1 in the Saudi prince's swimming pool via a freak accident involving a shorted out underwater lamp. And yet without that one plot device, the whole story never could have happened.

"suspension of disbelief" - that's the term you're referring to. you use it for entertainment purposes only. have you seen the latest Diehard flick. the action was so thick and unbelieveable and that dude must have had nine lives... but who cares. it was all fun and games. and that's they way they want it because it's just entertainment. anyhoo - in real life most people would just stop after getting wacked one time. how boring is that.

"continuity" or inconsistencies as you call it and suspension of disbelief are two different things. there is a person who is supposed to check for continuity problems. ie - at a dinner table when two people are talking they start out with full drinks. then later in the conversation the drink goes down as usual. and then at the end of the conversation the drink is full again. these are mistakes. and they come from many sources: doing the scene over and over and over again, editing it, and patching different scenes together is usually the biggest reason for them. it has nothing to do with the writing.

at http://www.imdb.com - they have trivia for every movie with a section for continuity mistakes for your continued entertainment.

I've heard stories of ball lightning, spontaneous human combustion, super-human strength (as in a mother lifting a car off a crushed infant), dogs crossing the country to follow their owners; people speaking to spirits, moving objects with their minds, coming back from the dead; a universal consciousness, a repository of all human knowledge; faith healers; turning sunlight into life, quantum entanglement, cute little hummingbirds...

Heck, I can hardly believe that J.S. Bach wrote so much music of such high caliber! It defies understanding.

Nikee's right. They are two very different things. Either you accept them or you don't. Personally in my writing I strive to keep thsoe out of my script and work very hard that none of them slip in.

My protagonist in one script get's stabbed in the arm. That arm is useless for the rest of the action scene and is bandaged and taped to his side for the rest.

There is good SoD

and then there is really bad SoD.
My kids have become Power Ranger fans.
ugh. I can't stand to watch the stuff, or hear the stuff. Bad bad bad bad BAD!
That for me is like the rotten stuff in the bottom of the barrel.

Then there are films like Starship Troopers.
They do stuff like the massive injuries and people live.
Eh, it's an over the top movie anyway and you aren't really supposed to take it all that seriously. Still, kind of stupid.

The T-Rex scene in Kong was totally unbelievable but still loads of fun.
We all know a normal human being couldn't have withstood THAT much fear, that much pounding and intensity. Had the girl lost consciousness and it was all about Kong it would have made the film more believable.

And then there are films like Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Mission Impossible where you know it's not possible BUT it's so much fun, and it's done BELIEVABLY so you don't care.

And THEN there are films like the Bourne series that make you wonder how much you really know about reality. Bourne and the other asassians have become almost super human. It's training and adrenline and a desperate desire to stay alive. That is very believable.


Regarding continuity.
Some of it is just people not paying attention, depending on the budget of the film. Other times it might be they were really worrying about something else, something more important and that funny thing got overlooked.

Regarding the glasses issue, I think there are some movies that expect the audience to come to a logical conclusion. You can't really waste time (or money) on a little scene of a woman putting in contacts. So the film makers leave it to the audience to assume the realistic change has been made.

Injuries DO INDEED change the course of a story and some people don't want or can't alter their idea enough to be realistic.
You see this loads of times in B movies. It really feels like they were rushing on to the next big action scene and couldn't be bothered with reality. Sometimes you see it in the more mainstream releases but it isn't always as blatant.

On the flip side, if you want to live bad enough, and you've got the guts to do it, you'll push through anything.

THAT is what makes someone a hero.

It seems that all the movies you are talking about with regards to incredible things happening that wouldn't happen in real life (ie. getting shot and walking away with not a care in the world) falls under Genre Expectations.

Action Movies can get away with more than a Drama because we expect our heroes to be almost super human. We expect that glasses are more cosmetic rather than function and we expect cars to leap over broken bridges and drive on. We expect guns to never run out of bullets.

In a screenplay, the writer (or producer/director) must way the reality of it against what would make better cinema or in the case of an action film, better action. Stopping to reload every six seconds would slow the action down. Having the hero go to the hospital for three weeks to recoup after a shootout would slow the story down considerably.

Sometimes, audience expectations, genre expectations and story mechanics outweighs reality. Sometimes the cheer from the crowd outways the logic center of the brain. Stormship Troopers is a bubble gum chewing action flick, why expect anything more? Just cheer along with the rest of the film goers and forget your troubles for two hours..

It doesn't have to be big dangerous stunts either.

A layman read my Eyes of Mara script recently and mentioned that a certain Indian food dish served wouldn't be appropriate for the scene (a campfire meal that served a tandoori dish that in reality requires a lot of cooking and pre-prep work), but I explained that the average person (movie goer) watching the film would at least recognize the name tandoori over other dishes that may be more appropriate for the scene.

I went with a more recognizable name over reality.

The suspension of disbelief for me has to be somewhat believable depending the movie. In some examples given like King Kong the T-Rex scene any normal person being whipped around like that would have died. But we allow it for the story because the story has taken us into this unknown world we are fascinated by.

The bugs scene in King Kong.. Impossible odds yet they still come through, all good and gross fun. Starship Troopers one of my favorite movies, people surviving limbs being clipped off. It's possible I suppose but not very likely in their situation. I think alot of it is just the setting the movie is putting you in. If it's Sci-Fi or Fantasy you're more likely to be flexible in what is believable and what's not then if it were a Drama. Depends on the genre of the movie.

Continuity is fun to watch for. Anyone know what type of gun Indiana Jones uses? I'll make it simple.. Revolver or Semi-Automatic?

Lets take a look back to Indiana Jones: Raiders to the bar scene where he goes to get the medallion for the staff from Marion. Toht and his crew show up first, tear the bar up, Indy intervenes, takes cover in a doorway. Fires some rounds from his revolver. Change camera view, fires some more rounds from a 45. and I think back to his revolver. Even in big production movies it happens. It's still fun but does take away from a little realism.

Okay. I'm now going to do something COMPLETELY the opposite of what I normally do here at AW.

I tend to slink my way into the non-movie forums here at AW (like the novel-writing forum, etc) and I offer responses to novel-oriented threads, and yet I include a movie-oriented twist to my replies. I usually apologize for my film-ish ways whenever making such respones. No one seems to have minded so far. And yet I do realize 90% of those people are novel writers.

But today I'm going to make a response here in this movie-oriented thread--here in the Scriptwriting Foum-- having to do with a novel.











When JRR Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, he engineered the entire saga (from the time Frodo left Hobbiton with Sam) to stretch itself out to something like 12 solid months, which is about 13 cycles of the moon. Tolkien was SO meticulous about the crafting of his grand sweeping saga that he incorporated ALL 13 FULL MOONS into the story. So there are some scenes in the book where Frodo and Sam, or Merry and Pippin, or whoever, are sneaking around somewhere in the night, and the moon is empty, so they are hidden by the darkness. But then there are other scenes where the moon is full, and they risk being seen. Tolkien PERFECTLY mapped out the timeline of his story to all 13 lunar cycles over that 12 month period to coinside with every last battle and meeting and recon mission and everything else.

Now THAT is some serious continuity work!

The thing with suspension of disbelief is that the film has to establish fairly early on what the rules of it's world are. That's what usually allows you to buy it or not.

In the opening of True Lies, when he snorkles under water to get to a party. And takes off a wet suit and has a tux underneath. And in the end in chased by men on snow mobiles -- the scene is there to say, 'welcome to a world of unlikely super spying, have a very good time'.

Someone mentioned Raiders below. The opening scene of that is the same thing. When the giant boulder starts to roll after him it's not just for action. It's to let the audience know that this is a world in which these things happen.

I only think the suspension of disbelief is a problem if the world is not properly established or the movie breaks the rules of it's own world. I think that may be more of what the original poster was complaining about. I could give you some examples of this but not without spoiling some movies. But the point is, many films break their own rules. You can't set up your movie as set in a hyper realistic environment and then have dinosaurs.

As a side note, good writers can work a proper injury into their story. See: Lethal Weapon (and the dislocating shoulder).

Joe Calabrese said:

A layman read my Eyes of Mara script recently and mentioned that a certain Indian food dish served wouldn't be appropriate for the scene (a campfire meal that served a tandoori dish that in reality requires a lot of cooking and pre-prep work), but I explained that the average person (movie goer) watching the film would at least recognize the name tandoori over other dishes that may be more appropriate for the scene.

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This is an instance of things that would ring fake even if they were real. In a recent blog entry by David Bordwell he is talking to director James Mangold about sound. Mangold points out that when someone hangs up on you in real life you don't hear anything. But in the movies you hear a dial tone to emphasize they've hung up. This does not happen in actual reality, but you'd be confused if it didn't happen in movie reality.

Total recall

At the end all the air is being sucked out and the people pass out. Arnie saves the day and gets new air into the world on Mars. Within a second the people jump to their feet full of energy. Reality this would take longer!

I loved it in Total Recall at the end when he goes out without a helmut or it breaks or something and his eyes bug out like they are going to explode, yet he still has 20/20 vision (and a functioning brain) after oxygen comes around.

I have to say I never laughed so hard. And that is why I didn't care.

Total Recall is absolutely the worst SF movie I ever made the mistake of watching (badgered by my 12-year-old to fork out the money to see it in a theater, so I was trapped).

caw

Definitely so Plot.

Tolkien was a master.
LOTR is an incredible work.

One of the things I hate THE MOST in films from a few years back was Matrix style fighting in a REAL world movie.
It worked in The Matrix because the story was about an alternate reality.

It DOESN'T work in Charlie's Angels because it is supposed to be real.

I don't care if it is just fun, if it isn't supposed to be serious.
IT'S DUMB, and it LOOKS dumb.

If you can't get real stunt doubles to do the fight scenes but have to get your girls up on wires...... well then it isn't real and I ain't buyin it.

Crouching Tiger, different story.
Bourne franchise, I wouldn't be surprised if Matt didn't come home with bruises all over him. It's SO real you feel each punch land.
BUT when Jason gets hurt he's really hurt, and the movie works around it.
In the Ultimatium, at the end, he's just sitting there in the apt all banged up, bleeding, and he just wants to quit. You know he could pass out right then and there IF he gave up. But he doesn't.
And yet it's real.

Total Recall was pretty good right up there till the end and then yeah, they blew it. No way to explain how that dramatic an effect on the tissue could just be undone. Stupid.
Haven't read the script BUT if it was in there I think somebody SHOULD have caught it and changed it.
I for one would have liked to have sat there in silence wondering if the two had really survived. Thinking maybe they had died by saving the world. The hoping would have been great.

So yeah, a great deal of it has to do with the rules of the world and the genre.

Slightly off topic, but Total Recall is a great film to learn from - there is an early script available on the web, and it's great to compare it to the final movie.

They made a LOT of changes ... and they all made it a better movie.

(The ending in the original one was a total non-event. People stood around and talked. Then they talked some more. Then they decided that it was all OK)

Mac
(BTW, ignoring the overly dramatic effect they showed with him in a vacuum, the tests NASA did on monkeys showed that a human should survive with in a vacuum for about 30 seconds to a minute - with no permanent damage.)

Ohhh.... suck on that, haters.

I liked that movie. The worst sci-fi movie ever? Have we forgotten The 6th Day?

No, I liked that one too, even with the bad writing and acting (It's got Michael Rapaport, man! Come on!)

Worst sci-fi movie ever... I'll get back to you. I'm thinking of something along the lines of AvP, or Ultraviolet.

Worst Sci-fi ever

no, it's not Total Recall.
BUT that one ending scene is pretty bad.

Mac doesn't say if the Monkey's eyes bugged out clear out of their skulls almost to bursting.
It doesn't surprise me that we can survive in a vacumn for thrity seconds to a minute.

I think in the TR scene there were other gases as well, not just a lack of clean air.

Anyway, it went beyond belief.

Arnie tearing that super-ball out of his nose was what got me. I'm not inclined to wince, but Goddamn!

Mac H. said:

Mac
(BTW, ignoring the overly dramatic effect they showed with him in a vacuum, the tests NASA did on monkeys showed that a human should survive with in a vacuum for about 30 seconds to a minute - with no permanent damage.)

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I just saw this: Can You Survive in Space Without a Spacesuit?

http://www.slate.com/id/2171522/?GT1=10346

Nicole

888seed888 said:

I was just wondering if anyone has an answer as to why inconsistencies in movies are so acceptable. I saw three movies, just in the past week that made me want to start a thread like this.

Basically the same thing happened in all of these films. One of the characters gets some massive injury, that would undoubtedly dehabilitate anyone for months, or even a year or more. However they always wrap the wound up or something, (in one movies case not even) and in the next scene they're walking around (or even smiling and conversing) like everythings normal, even though they have a big ass hole in their anatomy. Didn't someone catch this in the script before they shot the movie? I mean seriously...

So I guess where i'm going with this is... name some of the biggest inconsistencies in movies that you have seen. Not necessarily injuries. Just stuff that made you think and say "what the fuck?!" Tell me, do you think the writer just thought we wouldn't notice? Or maybe they just overlooked it, and it slipped through ALL of the many cracks? This will also double as a decent "don't let this happen in your script" thread.

Another one that comes to mind is this guy is completely strung out on drugs, (like he could barely talk or walk right) but in the next scene he's jumping motorcycles and running from the cops and pulling tight corners like he was born riding a bike. I really wish I could remember the name of that movie.

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The one I love is in Terminator (the original) when the guy from the future arrives (John) and suddenly people know his name. It looks like they cut a couple of lines and continuity failed to spot it. Huge gaff, but still an awesome film.

Film's all make-believe: there are movie conventions for believability just as there were for theatre more than 400 years ago. Nothing's really changed except the audience now gets to sit down...

Have a look at the movie Gladiator.
In the scene where the two infantries clash, some of the Romans and Germanians can be seen hugging and laughing, right in the front of the battle.
It's so obvious, that I often wonder if this was left in as a gimmick, of sorts.
Unlike many other films, whereby the oversights seem minor.
My dad would always pick many of the older films to pieces.
He would point out the magical changes of clothing, drinks refilling/evapourating, cigarettes being replaces without the actor/actress's aid/ planes flying over in westerns, or period films.
Sometimes I didn't mind, though some times I would say "Hey dad! Please I want to watch this, thank you".
I imagine if we sat there looking for these oversights, no matter which film we choose, there would be ample fodder.
Though, it would take the enjoyment out of the viewing experience.
Daniel.