I’ll go first. Mine is the instant knockout drug. Like Dexter’s intramuscular injection that causes someone to immediately lose consciousness. Or in the movie Split where there’s the aerosol spray in your face that makes you instantly unconscious. Or pretty much any time someone uses chloroform.
Is that not how chloroform works?
5 minutes of inhalation
According to Quora it takes 5 minutes, with a willing participant.
Anaesthesia that’s injected right before an operation can knock you out in about 30 seconds (and until then you could still struggle, technically speaking), but that’s a thick-ass tube of drugs they’re pumping inside of you. Some vapours from a rag is going to do jack shit.
I have grown to really fucking hate deus ex machina in any form. Luck is always a factor, but c’mon. It usually comes down to lazy writing and they just couldn’t be assed to come up with an explanation.
I can tolerate it, if it was prefaced earlier.
People do tend to come to the aid of others when they’re needed the most - it happens.
But if a truck comes barrelling towards Jason Vorhees and knocks him into a train, allowing our characters to run away, that’s a hard no.
I don’t know if this is a trope or not but I hate it when movies fail to live up to their potential.
The new Beetlejuice movie is like that.
(I’ll try for no spoilers)
There’s a couple of events that are shown as really big ordeals, huge events that you could base the entire movie around, and then the movie rug pulls your expectations and just kind of brushes those huge issues aside like it’s nothing.
And part of me gets it that that’s like a Beetlejuice thing, not complying with your expectations, but in this case I feel like the movie was made much worse for it and they should have really reconsidered doing the things they did.
It just made the entire movie feel like there were no actual risks, nothing bad can possibly happen, there’s nothing scary or dangerous in the world.
It’s like everybody in the movie was bored of living in that universe. It was ridiculous.
I watch movies for escapism and I don’t want to see the people that I’m escaping from my life watching escaping from their lives in the same process, having everything handed to them without having to work for it, with no real risks and no real adventure and no real humanity in their story.
And I’m honestly kind of surprised at how many movies lately have failed to give real stakes, real risks to the main characters, real goals to achieve, a real character to operate with, or has attempted to elevate the genre in any way.
It’s all same same and it’s really sad.
More of a cliche at this point maybe?
The fat funny character.
The “I can fix them” love interest.
Any situation that could have been resolved with any modicum of healthy communication.
Superheroes that cause more damage to the place they’re trying to “save”.
When the driver of a car is looking more at the passenger they’re talking to than the road. Probably a dead giveaway that the scene is shot with green screen or the car being towed on the back of a truck.
I mean with the complexity of shooting in a moving car I have to wonder if it’s ever done now (in all but the most extreme necessity).
All they need to do to solve the problem is make sure to focus on the road. They don’t need to actually be driving, just act like they are driving by looking at the road more than their passenger.
Well that’s to solve the appearance, but I’m commenting with an actual physical car, on a closed road, being towed or not, etc. Don’t need the bother when you can green screen it.
Filmed in a real setting always looks less distracting than a green screen.
I agree, I’m just saying that I doubt many will go through the trouble unless it’s really necessary.
Indie movies and small budget movies, perhaps?
On any union tv show or movie in the United States, all driving sequences are either in a studio shot with a green screen or a virtual stage, or they are shot with a “process trailer” where somebody else pulls the car.
It is very much illegal to have an actor “act” while driving, though in the low budget indie world you might find productions or cast willing to risk it in some way.
I used to hate it when people kept wobbling the steering wheel around when driving in a clearly straight road but then Top Gear had an episode featuring some American cars from the 1980s and constantly correcting the steering was necessary because there was so much loose play in the system!
Leaf spring suspension probably doesn’t help either…
Yes, so much this, so hard to watch 😬 (And probablysetting a really bad example for the real world.)
My friend’s mom when I was a kid used to look at us in the back seat for minutes at a time while driving. She said she used the lines behind the car to stay in the lane. It scared the shit out of us, but somehow she never got into an accident. Granted, these were long, straight, country roads, not NYC streets.
What the hell 😳
For realz.
I’m glad there wasn’t any casualties. Right?
Nope. No accidents… somehow.
Hearing the exact wrong part of the conversation, and then making a horrific assumption and spinning off into zany misunderstandings instead of, just, “Hey, what did I just hear?”
“Wait! I can explain. Just hear me out!”
“Never!”
*runs out of the room and then actively hides from the character until it’s convenient for the plot that they finally listen
Such stupid writing
Lazy villain characterization. Someone dresses in black or snarls a lot or is albino or has some physical marker that makes them different from others, therefore they are the villain.
It is almost impossible for a character in a Hollywood film to speak with a Slavic accent and smoke a cigarette without also being some sort of asshole.
I want villains with understandable goals. Evil for evil’s sake has struck me as stupid since adulthood.
Meh, there are plenty of people in the real world who just want power and money for themselves, who will shit on anybody and anything to get it and teach others to hate on people for just being different in order to gain power. I don’t think it’s at all implausible that absurdly nasty and selfish people exist.
Thanos was a great villain by this standard. He had lived through the suffering and collapse of his homeworld due to overpopulation, so his motivations actually made sense.
His plan was childishly idiotic which ruined any good will his motivation had
Idiotic, yeah, but at least it’s more thought out than “because fuck you, that’s why” which is all we get a lot of the time.
I would prefer an honest fuck you then an idea that doesn’t actually make sense and is pretty obviously flawed.
That’s not the taking into account hours much effort it took to pull off
Funnily enough I watched Avengers yesterday and was reminded of the sheer stupidity of Thanos’ plan.
Kill half the living beings. Great. After a traumatic event, people typically nstart banging like bunnies and you’ll get a great amount of offspring and within 30 years things will be worse than before because of what you did.
Instead, bring the miracle of contraception and improve living standards for everyone and watch a miracle unfold with so much less resources required than maintaining huge armies to cause suffering
He could have just made half the people born ever again sterile
Omg the Thanos thing drives me CRAZY and I don’t know why everyone else just gives it a pass.
There was no attempt at diplomacy with Thanos. If they just had a few diplomats talk about their needs, Thanos would have realized pretty quick that killing half of the humans wouldn’t be the best way to obtain his goal.
Here’s the proposition: how about you snap your fingers and make 99% of the population of overpopulated species sterile?
It would be wayyy more effective at meeting Thanos’ goal (of reducing suffering caused by overpopulation) and literally nobody has to die!
That can be tricky, though. Done well and you get a villain like Gul Dukat. Done slightly less well, such as with Killmonger and the villains from both Incredibles movies, and you have to make them at least resort to “for the evulz” methods to prevent the audience from sympathizing with them, and even then you may be left with a broken Aesop at the end.
When a story starts to bring in prophecy as part of the writing. As soon as a character does something “because the prophecy speaks of…”, I feel that the writers ran out of plausible ideas and use that as a cheap crutch.
Battlestar Galactica was a great show, but they should’ve skipped that part.
The Matrix is probably the only movie I’ve seen where this didn’t bother me.
Since prophecy was such a core part of BSG, I feel it was done quite well
Nonsensical or thoroughly debunked technobabble. The most annoying for me is faster than light communication via quantum entangled particles. Yes entangled particles will change each other’s state faster than light but this effect CANNOT be used to send information of any kind. At all. Ever. This has been known since engagement was first discovered but Hollywood is always like “I’m just going to ignore that second part.” I don’t even have anything against ftl comms or any other physics breaking things, just use an explanation that isn’t literally impossible and well known why it’s impossible for God’s sake.
Why?
Better yet, don’t use an explanation at all!
If you establish something as just being part of your setting that is accepted by the characters in it like it’s no big deal, you can just move on with the actual plot. If it’s not actually going to be relevant to anything plot wise, don’t waste time with useless technobabble!
Slap a “Zephyr FTL Communications” logo on the side of the terminal and call it a day. The audience doesn’t always need to know how, just what. And show, don’t tell.
You can have a character exposition dump about a piece of tech that should be as normal to the other characters as a telephone (so why would anyone talk about it existing casually outside of very specific circumstances), or just… have the character use the damn thing and add a little splash screen on the device “Thank you for using Cisco Intergalactic FTL calls”.
As long as they pull a /r/VXJunkies:
Looking for a double-helix transistor to magnify your oblidisk? Want to discuss ballooning algorithms or Dormison’s Paradox? Ever wondered about Swedish teutonic logic commands, the Hans-Rodenheim Law of Vectoral Momentum, Fankel readings, Mornington axions, the Armistan Codex, Envels, or the newest breakthroughs in ion insulate module technology?
Or this Technobabble, I’m OK with it.
Video is a classic.
The comments going along with it as so good.
The super badass guy. Just seems so lame.
Those guys definitely exist irl.
Whooshing rocket noise in space, people outrunning explosions, “hero”'s every shot a kill while “baddies” hit nothing.
Not quite a pet peeve, but close. The whole “We’re not in a (movie/show/game/whatever)!” type of dialogue.
That, or cliffhangers that will never be resolved due to the show/movie either being cancelled, discontinued, whatever. Looking at you, Sliders season 5 ending!
I see Sliders mentioned, I cry.
The expert who somehow knows all things science and engineering, like they’re all just basically the same. Just once I’d like to hear, “I’m an astrophysicist, not a cybersecurity expert. I don’t have the first clue where to begin hacking any computer, let alone an alien one that I’ve never seen before.”
Bonus points if the characters have to look for a different solution due to their lack of on-hand expertise in a particular area.
I’m a doctor not an astrophysicist!
My friend’s dad somehow seems to know everything about everything. He’s wicked smart though, and basically spends all of his time learning and doing stuff.
I just saw that in WandaVision. Darcy is an Astrophysicist but was also hacking through various firewalls to get at some secret data.
I think monster should have rules. Zombies aren’t fast, there’s just so many they over take you. Dracula dies from a stake through the heart, and the Wolfman dies from a silver bullet
I’m okay with fast zombies as long as they are short-lived.
Like they should tear their own bodies apart and consume their own internal resources to be fast zombies until the point where they physically shut down and cannot operate anymore.
I have seen that in 28 Weeks later?
Funny, I just responded a similar response with 28 Days Later as an example and didn’t notice yours.
Interesting that you like the tropes. I like the fact that there’s some variation depending on your preference.
I like zombies that are infected and not reanimated. They’re fast but die from normal damage. 28 Days Later is one of my favorites and it’s a major point of emphasis.
The Walking Dead on the other hand is hard to take seriously sometimes because of the contrivances from slow moving zombies, and the fact that 10 year old zombies are still around bothers me. Although the idea of having a normal running society, but the dead reanimate is a very interesting concept that I would love to see explored.
I can get behind fast zombies that are infected, I’m with you there. But I can’t suspend disbelief if a rotting corpse out of the ground can run like Usain bolt. Side note I would like to see monster stories that follow traditional folklore that isn’t well known. Werewolves can revert to human through their true love and vampires can’t be seen in mirrors only because silver was used to make mirrors but not anymore so we should be able to see vampire reflections in some mirrors. I think that would be cool if made plot relevant
Van Helsing did the mirror thing which was cool. I think Dracula Dead and Loving It did too.
Side thought. I loved in From Dusk Til Dawn when they’re trying to think of all the folklore that they could remember. Like whether silver was supposed to hurt vampires too or just werewolves.
Another side thought, I love when they know about the monsters like in Shaun of the Dead. It always bothers me when it’s an alternate universe that’s never heard of Zombies before.
The Walking Dead (tv series at least) is a great example of inconsistency undermining the overall rules for their world. Instead of the danger of the dead overrunning everything from outside, the danger of the recently deceased causing an outbreak in any sizeable community was a far more interesting threat in that setting. But they only did that for a little bit and went back to the overwhelming masses of dead and ‘people are the real monsters’ over and over.
Zombies in the George Romero tradition are basically just animated through magic. Otherwise it would be a World War Z (book) situation where the zombies would eventually just decompose entirely.
Although the idea of having a normal running society, but the dead reanimate is a very interesting concept that I would love to see explored.
Not a show, but check out the Newsflesh trilogy by Mira Grant, that’s the exact concept the series is based on. Awesome read.
when they try to make you sympathize with an unredeemably evil character. like the mirror universe giorgieu in startrek discovery, who was literally “worse than hitler” but they decided they wanted upstanding dogooder characters to love her for some reason
