Movie myths (1 Viewer)

[Lynda-Marie]

Another favorite myth from Hollywood is the unlimited capacity of REVOLVERS to fire with no need to reload, especially during a gunfight. I am not terribly well educated in regards to firearms, but there is nothing funnier than watching the hero firing twenty or more shots out of a six shooter.

For example, in The Mummy [1999 version], Jonathan is being menaced by one of the Medjai. One of the American characters sees his predicament, and proceeds, after already being in a fire fight with the Medjai and with no pause to reload, to fire about 20 shots out of what looks to be a Colt 45 [I am uncertain of the exact i.d. of the gun]. After blasting this Medjai to oblivion with all of these shots, it then shows the character FINALLY reloading his pistol.

In Tombstone, when Curly Bill shoots up the town before killing Fred White, he is armed with two six shooters. I counted 21 shots, with no pause for reloading. That was distinctly odd, since they seemed to be on target with accuracy up to that point.

 

[Bob Spears]

One caveat to this statement is that fine ventricular fibrillation can look like a flat line on the ecg so most will shock a flatline and medically treat a flatline like it is fine v-fib.

bob

 

[GeorgePaul]

Good one Lynda-Marie...that conceit goes waaaay back in the history of the Hollywood western. Sometimes, a big star can take that love of guns and carry it MUCH too far.

Take Clint Eastwood, for example. The year was 1977, and while every movie got overwhelmed by Star Wars that year, Clint veered off into his (IMHO) really dismal period by directing, right in my hometown no less, the dumbest action movie ever made: The Gauntlet.

Not only does this film abuse the cinematic cliche' of the hardboiled cop falling for the prostitute with a big secret (What did he EVER see in Sondra Locke???), and NOT ONLY does Clint do his 'Rambo' impression and miraculously avoid getting hit even ONCE as enough rounds of ammo are discharged into the house he's hiding in to make it completely COLLAPSE...BUT, in the film's climactic scene in which the bus Clint and Sondra drive is riddled with more than EIGHT THOUSAND bullets, SOMEHOW not ONE of the bullets manage to flatten even ONE of the bus's TEN TIRES!!!

I've never used this expression online before, but that whole movie deserves a big WTF?! Yes, Joe Karlosi, there were unacceptably illogical action films made BEFORE the 1980s. And The Gauntlet is as bad as any of them, if not worse.

 

[Yee-Ming]

How about most car chases? I don't know all that much about cars, but IIRC if an ordinary sedan really went flying over the hill as in most SF-based movies (since we're talking about Eastwood, reminded me of Dirty Harry), the axles would break on landing and the car would slide to an ignominous halt.

 

[Andrew Priest]

Good question; I had to think about that a bit. First off without air there can be no shockwaves. A chemical explosive works basically by rapidly expanding. Pressure against the air produces the shockwave. Without the air all the energy would instead be in the shrapnel.

Also, without air there would be no fire or smoke or dust. My guess is that a straight chemical bomb would be very unimpressive and almost invisible when it blew. Just a bunch of high speed shrapnel thrown off and that's it. Any fine particulate matter wouldn't have anything to suspend in and would just dissipate.

Nuclear devices are a bit different. Still no shockwave or fires, but instead enormous amounts of EM radiation and high energy particles. Not much 'push' though, so that a ship hit by such a blast would just fry along the exposed side but wouldn't get pushed away. Of course a conventional device generating lots of shrapnel would push things away as the shrapnel hit the objects.

Antimatter devices would also generate a very substantial flash but wouldn't be as impressive as the megaton numbers might suggest. That's because the matter/anti-matter reaction generates most of its energy in the form if very high energy EM radiation. Radiation that's not visible.

Also one note to the 'no fires' bit. Theoretically a ship might be punctured and leak air, and a fire could burn right at that leak. If so it would push out from that spot as the air rushes into space and is consumed by the fire.

 

[Tim Glover]

Cool thread Greg.

 

[Henry Gale]

A suspended ceiling will support the weight of a 200 lb. man.
All air vents have plenty of room to crawl through.
Even though the person shooting at you through the air vent/roof of bus/etc. can't see you, and you can't see them, jumping around will protect you.
All doors can be opened with a credit card or hairpin.
Everyone wakes up with styled hair and fresh breath.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

Actually, if you spread the weight around, some types of suspended ceilings will support the weight of a 185lb man. Don't ask me how I know (let's just say it involved a latenight software emergency and a locked testing lab door).:b

 

[MikeFR]

This isn't just limited to chases, but I can't stand the over use of screaching tires.

 

[rich_d]

Shooting the padlocks off.

In most cases firing a bullet at a padlock (any kind of lock) will expand the material thus causing the mechanism to jam - not open.

Yet we continue to see guys taking three shots at the lock (the magic number) and the lock giving way. Nonsense.

 

[Ben_@]

What about computer hackers and their exceptionally splashy hacking? Half the time it looks like a video game screen. It seems to turn hacking into a matter of hand eye coordination rather than rediculous amounts of reading and learning (which is what serious hackers do).

Most hacking is and looks really really dull. Not surprisingly the movie Hackers took this goofy graphic overload to the extreme.

Love this thread!

 

[Greg_S_H]

Remember in D.A.R.Y.L. when Daryl was able to use a standard ATM interface to hack a million dollars into his adoptive dad's account? Like even a robot boy could do that. And, even if he could, I don't think the bank would be let it stand.

Also, Daryl was able to make Pole Position go into ultra speed mode just because he had fast reflexes.

Still, a fun movie.

 

[D. Scott MacDonald]

I'm not disagreeing with this, but wasn't the Orion project proposing space travel using a very large blast shield and a steady stream of nuclear explosions? I know that orion was never actually built, but I'd be surprised if so many scientist got it completely wrong.

 

[Anthony Connor]

I can't think of the movie right now, but I remember seeing this in a movie. The actors had to be exposed to space and had to exhale all their breath before they went out into "Space"

 

[TheLongshot]

So THAT is what that film is! I saw the ending one day on one of the cable channels recently. Man, talk about overkill!

Jason

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Project Orion involved detonating small bombs close to the ship, where the expansion of the bomb material would push against a large graphite-coated steel plate. In order to enhance the efficiency of this process the bombs were supposed to be packed in polyetheylene plastic, which would vaporise and provide an additional "kick". The laws of thermodynamics, by the way, keep a A-bomb in the Earth's atmosphere from radiating away its energy until it cools down into the visible range; in the absence of such a constraint the fireball would be much less impressive [although it would still pack just as much radiation power, which would appear mostly as gamma rays, and would severely burn or vaporise anything close by]. Intriguingly, as the people of Honolulu learned one night in 1959 or thereabouts, a hydrogen bomb detonated above the atmosphere creates a geomagnetic disturbance, and the light emitted by the charged particles makes the whole sky bright enough to read by for hundreds of miles in every direction. This is a good thing, because the associated electromagnetic pulse [of a kind which cannot occur at ground level, although other phenomena do] opened every circuit breaker in Hawai'i! This was during a test of the Ballistic Missile Defense system, I think it was a Nike-Zeus or possibly a Shrike launched from Johnson Island a thousand miles away.

 

[Jeff Jacobson]

My brother had a friend who really hates it when manhole covers are too light in movies. He says that real manhole covers are very heavy and take more than one person to lift. Yet in movies they seem to be as light as a garbage can lid.

 

[Greg_S_H]

I saw a manhole cover on TV yesterday that looked very heavy--very thick and substantial--but only one guy lifted it. Of course, the one guy was Herman Munster, so I believed it.

 

[Jacinto]

A lock can be picked manually in under five seconds.

In my teens I worked a summer with a locksmith, and let me tell you, picking a lock manually is no easy task. A lock that hasn't been picked before will sometimes take between five and ten minutes to pick. The entire summer I managed to pick two locks in under three minutes, but once in a while you come across tumblers that just luckily fall into place a little faster than most. Picking that same lock shortly after that can be done in under a minute -- I think it has to do with the tumblers being all loose from the first pick job that they slide around a lot easier. My boss could do some locks in 30 to 45 seconds, but most took him between 1 and 2 minutes. The longest I saw him spend on a lock was about 5 minutes. Let me state that this is someone who does nothing but work on locks for a living. I always groan when I see a cop on TV or in a movie that kneels down in front of the door with a lock pick set and opens the door immediately. An automatic lock picking gun can pull it off in under twenty seconds, or sometimes they won't work at all, but you rarely see those used on screen.

 

[George See]

How about Real Men where Belushi picks the lock in like 2 seconds by picking up a fork and bending the prongs

Blind people can drive almost everywhere at high speeds provided they have someone telling them to turn left/right etc.

How about the lack of injurys that come from crashing through a hollywood window?

You can survive almost any fall with no injurys provided there's either a hotel pool or a cloth awning to land on.

Every videogame ever made has the sound effects from pacman. For that matter you can eat the family truckster just by plugging a joystick into your mapping software.

On a somewhat related note I loved how Last Action hero made fun of this stuff with Arnolds transportation to the real world from the movie world.