Inaccurate movie tropes that are so widespread and common that we just accept them

I've noticed in movies that there are a lot of things that (hopefully) most people know just literally aren't true but they are so often wrong that we just accept them for the sake of enjoying the movie. Some of these things include:

• Various legal plot devices, like "oh, you didn't read him his Miranda Rights? He gets to go free then!" which is completely horsecrap.
• What hypnosis can do. In movies it's tantamount to mind control, when in reality it's nothing even remotely like that.
• Various firearm tropes:
  • "Silencers" in movies which are basically fiction. Suppressors exist but they are nothing like the magical movie silencer that reduces the sound of a gunshot to a mere whisper

• • People getting blown off their feet, through windows, etc by gunfire. It sure looks cool though.
  • How much ammo a gun holds. This is almost never based on the reality of the firearm but rather the drama the story calls for.
  • Cars that explode when you shoot at the gas tank.
• Subliminal messaging. Specifically the idea that inserting single frames of certain images can influence people on a subconscious level. The whole idea was a hoax perpetrated by a guy names James Vicary as a marketing stunt, and he admitted it when nobody could reproduce his results. Interesting side note: Even though it's crap, the FCC still made it against regulations and anyone who tries it might lose their broadcast license. Their logic is that regardless of whether it works or not, it's "contrary to the public interest" so it's not allowed regardless.
• Pretty much anything that has anything to do with computers and hacking.
• The idea that you use a defibrillator to restart a stopped heart. That's literally not what they are for, but that's how they are used in nearly every movie and TV show. But goddamn if that scene in The Abyss wasn't one of the best movie scenes ever.

There are of course additional technical ones like "that's not how you pick a lock" or "that's not how you make a bomb" but obviously most movies aren't trying to teach you how to do those things so a little bit of in-authenticity isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Are there any ones that you can think of? Not minor technical or continuity gafs but something that fundamentally works differently in movies to how it works in real life.

-Byshop

About the silencer and guns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak-QH9x8Hcc

But otherwise I 100% agree with you, movies are fake and reality is a reality. Which was always fun to watch when Mythbusters took care of the movies except when they faked their result, to not piss off Cameron.

I know you mention hacking but I couldn't resist posting this. lol

@warmblur: I thought about posting that but I already had one video in the post...

-Byshop

Was that presented as a counterpoint? Because you followed it with "but".

-Byshop

That's absurd! They aren't even using a hammer and a chisel like real hackers.

I think even one person per film replicating the Willhelm Scream is overdoing it. Can anybody do the Willhelm Scream in real life?

Willhelm could...

-Byshop

Then there are times when cameras aren't in high security places and then conveniently are in others. I'm thinking of Venom, when the protagonist is unseen throughout his espionage of a high security experimental facility. But then the bad guys utilize cameras conveniently in another scene. Maybe this happens in other shows. I don't actually know. Just seems like it could be a trope.

Ooooh, yeah. Security systems. Everything uses infrared beams and cameras either pan or have blindspots. Real security systems don't work that way. Even my house is covered in motion sensors, which Catherine Zeta Jones can't suggestively slide her butt under.

-Byshop

Directors still seem to believe that bullets aren't slowed down at all by water also.

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff about ballistics in general. Bullets not slowing in water. Bullets getting stopped by whatever cover the hero hides behind regardless of how thin it is (car doors, wooden tables, drywall, slices of Swiss Cheese, etc), unless they make a particular point of showing that the bad guys are bringing out the "big guns" at which point they go through everything.

-Byshop

When the hero goes home at the end of the day after killing a bunch of people. Yeah maybe you can prove it was all in self-defense but so what? You'd spend at least one night locked up at the police station, then get court-ordered.

Yes exactly, you nailed it! I'm from UK, and even I know that stuff isn't right lol.

Yeah, I'd say that's a fair one. A lack of legal repercussions in general for the hero is pretty unrealistic but extremely common.

-Byshop

The good guys always win.

Lightweight females that can easily take out men twice their size in hand to hand combat.

Not that I can think of any movie to factor this too, but it's happened in a countless number of them...

When a villain has a weapon of ultimate destruction but they don't plan to use right away. Instead, they wait right until the heroes arrive which ultimately end up destroying that plan. Lol

I remember Mythbusters testing the exploding gas tank myth. Didn't they prove you could blow it up with a tracer round?

The Capitan's always pissed off, but ultimately bros, so in the end rather than fire his/their ass, he usually teams up with them at the end.

The Last Action Hero (for some reason not recognized widely as a masterpiece) got it perfect.

Speaking Of Last Action Hero, villain testing movie logic in reality. Brilliant scene.

Neverending fight scenes. I mean, realistically one or two good knocks to the head and a person would be stuffed. But all too often in movies you have big guys pummeling the absolute CRAP out of eachother and then one ends up dead or nearly dead and the winner is perfectly fine - not even a little bit dazed or confused.

I think any time someone who is not a serial killer psychopath kills someone, and then goes home at the end of the day like everything is fine. Like "Yeah I had to kill that person, and it was tough and I have to say that because I'm the good guy...OK let's go get some ice cream and talk about fun times"

I mean, in real life, we have trained soldiers coming home from war suffering remorse, PTSD, and all sorts of regret for killing people, and that's their job. But in movies we are supposed to believe that the hero is going to be OK despite killing numerous people? Nah...

I also think the whole "brother from another mother" thing is a trope. Like you got these two friends, best friends, but the one friend does something horrible, but the other friend is like "Nah man, you're my bro, I'll follow you to hell and back. I'd never betray you, let's go bury the body". If my best friend killed someone or committed a hit and run or something terrible, I'd be like "here is all my cash, now go. You have exactly one minute before I call the cops". I love my best friend like a brother ,I truly do, but you do something horrible you gotta pay. I'll come visit him in prison tell him everything is OK but I won't apologize for sending him there.

@uninspiredcup:

I would chalk that one up to good or bad fight choreography. A smaller person can take out a bigger person if they know how to fight better than the bigger person, but whether that's convincing or not in a movie is up to the fight choreography. The choreography in a crap movie like Peppermint doesn't show this convincingly, but compare that to the fight scenes in Atomic Blonde that come off as brutally realistic.

A trope thought that this reminds me of is knocking people unconscious. The hero strikes a blow to the back of the neck or head and the opponent is unconscious for as long as it narratively necessary. In reality knocking or choking someone out only lasts for about a minute or so unless you've done some pretty serious damage to them. Archer even makes a point of this in an episode where Archer knocks out Ray.

Yeah, there are the more narrative traps where an overconfident villain behaves stupidly, too.

Yup. Shooting a natural gas canister to make it blow up was pretty thoroughly debunked by Mythbusters unless you're using tracer/incendiary rounds. It shouldn't really be a big surprise that they are specifically designed to not explode when damaged.

Yeah, that's more of a narrative element that's often repeated. It's not exactly what I was going for but it's absolutely a trope. Last Action Hero lampooned this pretty well, but I thought "So I Married An Axe Murder" really nailed it with the meta-aspect of Anthony Lapaglia's character expressing disappointment with his captain because he's too nice and not like what he expected from the movies and tv shows, and Alan Arkin's extremely nice and accommodating captain trying to intentionally behave like the stereotypical cop show captain just to please his officer.

Yeah, I get that. I'd say the idea that the main character takes tons and tons of damage with little to no visible damage because they can't afford to screw up the main character's face.

-Byshop

Movies usually have a group of heroes versus a singular antagonist, or a main antagonist with a bunch of underlings that have no character but exist to give the illusion of the bad guy having the upper-hand.

Infinite ammo.

@Byshop: just watch jay and silent bob strike back hahaha!

Maybe they used the infinite ammo cheat.

God, I forgot Lord Tywin was in that movie. Sure, it's a stale turd of a film, but goddamn Charles Dance can chew some scenery.

Oh, I got another one. Not Guilty by reason of insanity. It's complete nonsense in real life. Lawyers try insanity pleas in fewer than 1% of cases, probably because they are only successful like 25% of the time. Even then, the sentence you get from being considered insane gets you sent to a mental institution which on average tends to be for twice as long as the prison sentence would have been.

-Byshop

Holy shit IT IS Lord Tywin!!! How did I miss that?! I feel like I've seen Last Action Hero since Game of Thrones was out.

His voice got deep with age!

What a trip

I think one of mine might be "the police chief who lets the killer go free because he ignores all evidence because he doesn't want to be proven wrong." Or like, variations of that.

I'm not saying that that kind of thing never happens, but it's enough of a movie cliche that it can kind of get annoying. Like, that happened in Fargo Season 1 (not a movie, but I think it still counts). It was handled well, despite being a cliche. It's established that the police chief was unexpectedly put into a position that he didn't want and that he's incapable of handling, and that he's such a simple-minded person that he CAN'T accept the true version of events because doing so would shatter his view of people and the world. I could buy that.

Then they freaking do the same thing in Season 3, only this time the chief can't accept reality because he's an authoritarian asshole who just plain likes to think that he's right all of the time.

Again, not that that's necessarily even implausible. But I can't help but feel like a lot of times the only reason that trope gets used is because the writers can't come up with a way to fill the time slot without having the cops get stone-walled by the bosses who are supposed to be valuing their work.

Yeah, that's a reasonably common trope and not just in "law enforcement" stories and it's used often. I was going more for examples where "this literally isn't a thing that ever happens because law/physics/reality but it happens all the time in movies and tv shows anyway and we just accept it" versus instances where characters behave badly. No matter how dumb someone might act (even someone in authority) in a story, it's never outside the realm of possibility because human stupidity as a concept has no bounds. Silencers on guns that reduce a gunshot to a whisper however literally don't exist, and the ability to fire "silent" gunshots indoors and not alert guards is an extremely common narrative crutch that many, many action films rely on even though it has no basis in reality. In the opening scene in Inception Leo runs around silently dispatching guards with his silenced pistol with his hand over the ejection port to catch the shell casing, and then he runs up and catches the dead guards before they collapse. The implication there is that the shell casing hitting the floor or the guard falling down would make enough noise to alert the other guards.

The scene is cool AF, but it's also utter nonsense because even with a .22 a "silenced" gunshot is still over 100 decibels. Still, it's cooler if silencers were really a thing and you could do neat stuff like this so generally people just take it for granted and go with it.

-Byshop

I wanted to mention another one:

The enemy taking their sweet ass time chasing you and the victim still being stupid as hell to not take that as advantage for themselves.