"That Was It For Me": People Share 40 Ridiculous Movie Moments That Ruined It For Them

Writer Christopher, aka u/xwhy, told us about the inspiration behind the thread. "I wanted to start a discussion, and I was curious if anyone else was as picky as I can be about details. As I told someone else on the thread, superheroes, aliens, and magic are the price of admission. That's what I'm paying for with the movie. After that, everything else should be relatable," he explained that even in fantastical settings, large parts of the story need to be grounded and believable.

He explained to Bored Panda how this works. "There can be a dragon. The dragon can swear, smoke cigars, and drink whiskey if it wants to. But if it starts talking about cigars and whiskey and gets basic facts (which are easily found) wrong, someone's going to notice, and that will pull them out of the moment. The audience will willingly accept the big stuff or they wouldn't watch the movie. It's the small stuff that's distracting, and sometimes you wonder if they could've avoided it."

The author of the thread told us that he, like many other people, can ignore quite a lot. "But every now and then, I find myself focusing on something that just takes me out of it."

In his post on Reddit, he gave an example of the New York City subways. "Information is readily available. I would rather that the movie makers created a fictitious train, such as the T line, than use a real line and have it go where it doesn't belong (and no one has a problem with this)," he said.

"Using Vancouver or Toronto for Brooklyn is fine. I accept that. Using Hoyt–Schermerhorn as a stand-in for City Hall is fine, too." Christopher suggested that the best remedy for this is for movie creators to do some basic fact-checking.

"They'll never get all of it, especially the specialized stuff," he pointed out that, in his thread, some commenters were extremely well-versed in "medicine and guns, among other topics." Nobody's asking for perfection; but the basics, at least, should be gotten right.

"Say, putting the 4 train on the Brighton line will leave a lot of New Yorkers scratching their hands more than King Kong or Godzilla on the Boardwalk." If you're interested in flash fiction, you can take a peek at Christopher's book 'In A Flash 2020' here and here. Meanwhile, you'll find his fun webcomic right over here.

Let’s put it this way. We’re completely fine with there being wizards and dragons in the stories we read and watch. However, they still need to behave more or less like wizards and dragons. If dragons can teleport around the world instead of, you know, actually flying to places, we’re going to start asking questions. Similarly, if their strength, resilience, and the power of their breath all vary wildly from scene to scene because the plot demands it, we’re going to sigh and say, “C’mon!”

The same can be said about character motivations. Yes, people grow, adapt, and change their minds. However, you can’t expect the audience to get emotionally invested in the characters themselves if they change their minds about what’s right and wrong from scene to scene and episode to episode. There needs to be consistency and logic! Some recent TV shows are absolutely great at destroying the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief.

Things that low-key irk us include characters teleporting around Middle Earth seemingly in an instant in The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power. It’s also hard to stay invested in the story when it’s hard to grasp the timeframe. And don’t even get us started on how low-quality some of the costumes were… Look, if you’re doing something related to The Lords of the Rings, you have to get the details right. 

In a similar fashion, as much as we enjoyed House of the Dragon, we had a hard time actually liking some of the characters just because of how often their motivations and personalities flip-flopped. However, watching the show got us to read George R. R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood about the entire Targaryen dynasty, so we still call that a win. There’s far more consistency to be found in the pages of the book than in the show, but we’re still eagerly waiting for season 2. (Maybe they've heard the feedback from fans and they'll fix the lighting in some scenes! The stories are dark, but the scenes don't have to mirror that in an all-too-literal sense; we want to see what's going on.)

At the end of the day, there will always be particular decisions that storytellers make that will upset us (and us specifically), and we either have to actively ignore them or move on to a better film/show/book. One small ‘mistake’ probably won’t prevent us from immersing ourselves in the story. But these errors in continuity and logic can quickly add up.

The best thing that moviemakers can do is to try and find realistic (again, realistic in the context of their world) solutions to their narrative problems, instead of going for lazy solutions. If we wanted to watch a low-budget film or read a poorly-written piece of fan fiction, we would’ve chosen to do that instead.