We all know that unless we’re watching a particularly well-researched and historically accurate documentary that the things featured in films and TV shows simply aren’t real. The writers and directors have to take certain creative liberties to create drama and tension and move the story along.
However, once you know something to be factually false, it can take you out of the story. Redditor u/Eatar sparked an interesting discussion on r/movies when they asked everyone to use their technical knowledge to ‘ruin’ popular movie tropes for everyone else. Scroll down to see what they shared. But be warned, Pandas, you might not be able to look at fire alarms, chloroform, silencers, and courtroom drama the same ever again!
#41
Car airbags never deploy.. the car chases are so extreme with multiple collisions, and not one airbag (that has been a required standard safety feature since 1998) ever goes off.
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87points
#42
A university professor says all their life’s research is in that one little thing that they must retrieve- um…try several drives, ethics committee paper trails, file cabinets, notebooks, grant applications, employee review paper trials, open science depositories, archives, and a bunch of publications perfectly available to the public.
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83points
#43
Microphones feeding back every time a speaker begins to talk on stage, in order to convey awkwardness. What it really conveys is someone at the mixer who doesn’t understand how to ring out a room.
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82points
#44
Space movies always have a scene flying around an asteroid field, like dodging thousands of giant rocks tumbling all over the place. In reality you'd need a telescope to even detect another asteroid. Space is so big that dodging stuff is the least of your worries, it's not missing stuff that's hard.
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79points
#45
Gun fights indoors without ear protection, everyone’s ears would be bleeding. I love how the cartoon show Archer actually makes fun of this consistently. Actually just bullet physics in general in movies.
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79points
#46
Not a mechanic, but those scenes/schemes where the villains cut the break lines and the hero only discovers this while driving down the highway at full speed or down a hill towards a crowded area?
Unless you're driving a manual, good luck trying to get out of your garage and getting into reverse or drive without your foot on the brake. Cutting the break line would pretty much brick your car these days and inconvenience you.
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76points
#47
Cars are really hard to make explode. You can burn them, they burn really big. But that don’t blow up often. The tires could explode because of the heat, that’s make loud bang. But movie level explosions don’t happen often. And shooting the fuel tank, or worse fuel door, isn’t going to cause a massive fireball. It’ll cause a fuel leak.
And speaking bullets then don’t spark when hitting pavement. Or really anything. And don’t shoot a lock. Chances are you either break the lock and make it even more of lock, or the bullet/fragments will splash back at your soft not made of steal body.
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74points
#48
You’ll regularly see someone who needs to hide push aside a ceiling panel and climb up, then have a well framed shot of their face up above while they slide the panel back over covering their escape.
You can’t do that. Those panels are fragile enough you can break them with one hand. The cheap ones are literally fiberglass insulation with a sheet of paper glued to the face. The scene from The Office with Angela’s cat is what would actually happen.
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70points
#50
Train brakes apply when there is an air hose separation. So if our hero cuts a train car full of bad guys from the train as soon as the air hose separates the train will have air brake trouble and brakes will apply or the train will have issues at the very least. Locomotives also have a dead man switch so if there’s no one behind the controls the train will apply brakes once it’s tripped.
62points